L'omonimia nel lessico italiano

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed analysis of Italian homonyms based on HOMO, a database that I compiled by manually checking all the inflectional forms of the lexemes registered in the most comprehensive Italian dictionary, the Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso (Gradit). While in Gradit only 14,537 lexemes (about 9% of the total number of lemmas) are homonymous in their citation form, HOMO includes 112,344 forms of 35,557 lexemes (about 14% of Gradit lemmas). Data show that the development of homonymy is strongly related to both inflectional richness and morphological structure of lexemes: verbs give rise to the highest number of homonyms (54% of HOMO forms) and the percentage of homonymous forms is much greater in those lexemes that constitute the basic vocabulary – high-frequency lexemes which tend to be shorter and structurally simple. As for the distinction between homonymy and polysemy, data confirm that it should be thought of as gradual rather than clear-cut, since the criterion usually invoked in this respect, irrelatedness of etymology, applies only to 50% of homonymous forms. The distinction between absolute and partial homonyms is also best seen as a scale where the highest level is represented by forms that have all the definitory properties of absolute homonyms (i.e. being forms of distinct lexems, phonetically and graphically identical and etymologically irrelated, that belong to the same lexical category and whose paradigm includes the same set of forms).