Homonymy and Polysemy in Arabic Language

Homonymy, along with synonymy and contraries, is an important semantic discussion that has been studied and variously defined by linguists in the past. The contemporary linguists believe that in studying homonymy, one should differentiate between the two terms of “polysemy” and “homonymy”. In homonymy, two lexical words may accidentally come to have a unified conjugational structure; they have similar pronunciation and written form, but each of them maintains its different meaning and has no semantic relationship with the other one. For instance, the word "al-Khal" has three meanings, namely mole, maternal uncle, and hill. In other cases, there is no relationship between the roots of the two words. For example, the word "Qānic" has two meanings, namely satisfied and beggar, where the former is taken from " Qaniăn" and the latter from " Qunūăn". Conversely, in the polysemy phenomenon, one language unit comes to entail several meanings after it undergoes meaning changes over time. An example is the word "Sayyārah", which was used as caravan in the past, but today is used as car. This article intends to investigate and analyze these two phenomena. Moreover, it examines the differences between homonymy and polysemy, the ways to distinguish them, and the manner of their advent into the Arabic language.