HOMONYMY IN ENGLISH MONOLINGUAL GENERAL-PURPOSE DICTIONARIES
The focus of this paper is the treatment of homonymy in selected monolingual general-purpose dictionaries of English. The aim of the analysis presented in this paper is to reveal the perception of homonymy and its lexicographic significance in the analyzed dictionaries, which involves the answer to the question whether these dictionaries mark homonymy at all, and then, if yes, the determination of the criterion used for the identification of homonymy, as well as the definition of the overall lexicographic strategy adopted by the given dictionaries in their treatment of homonymy. The results of the analysis have shown that the analyzed dictionaries do use homonymy as an organizational principle in their macrostructure. Furthermore, all these dictionaries use the semantic criterion based on mutual relatedness of senses in their identification of homonymy. However, the application of this criterion does not always produce the same outcome in the given dictionaries due to the gradient nature of semantic relatedness and various interpretations it is subject to. It has also been observed that the analyzed dictionaries do not consistently mark semantic homonymy at any cost since their gen- eral strategy in the treatment of homonymy can be defined as balancing between adequate language description and user-friendliness.