Homonymy in the Light of Phonology

Abstract

This paper is dedicated for the study of homonymy in the light of phonology. In this paper, a group of some words of (homonymy and pun) are attempted to be explained from phonological and trace model perspectives, not semantic.

The content of the paper consists of an introduction, two parts, conclusions, and the abstract in English and Arabic Languages. The first part is allocated for theory and hypothesis. In the second part, it is demonstrated that the process of homophony is more related to phonology (stress, ton/pith, accent), such as that (stress, high, and low) of the syllabic sounds are not alike in the homophonic words. In other words, the homophonic group of words require different forms for themselves, hence, they are not homophones.

The explanations are based on the theory of structuralism and generative grammar. The data and examples are taken from daily spoken language (Kurdish language- Central Kurdish Dialect) and some poetry lines. For the sake of explaining the examples more in detail, with the Kurdish (phoneme- alphabet), the IPA phonetic alphabet is also used.