Contronyms, Heteronyms, Idioms, Oh my!

English is an extremely complex language. Before a student can be considered truly proficient, he/she must not only master a variety of tenses and irregular verbs, sentence structure and parts of speech, but he/she must also work to understand and master lexical and structural ambiguities.

Lexical ambiguities are very common and have a variety of names and definitions depending on the level of ambiguity.

Homonyms are words that have the same spelling, but two or more meanings. An example of this is: mean. Is it describing an unkind person? Is it an average? Is someone talking about the definition of a word?

Another type of lexical ambiguity is the heteronym. These are words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings and pronunciations. An example of this would be ‘dove’. This could refer to a type of bird, or it could be describing the action of jumping.

Contronyms, a very difficult form of lexical ambiguity, are words that are spelled the same and pronounced the same but have two completely opposite meanings. ‘Anxious’ is a good example of a contronym. Is the person excited and eagerly looking forward to an event or are they experiencing mental distress because of a perceived danger or misfortune?

Learning and understanding these words and their usages can be extremely confusing for an English learner and also very challenging because they must often understand the rest of the sentence in order to determine the meaning of a single word.

Lexical ambiguities can also exist in phrases, and not just single words. One of the most common forms of lexical ambiguity are idioms.

Idioms are common expressions that have acquired a meaning that differ from their literal meaning. For example, if someone were to tell another person that ‘You are driving me up a wall!’ They do not mean they are literally seated in a vehicle that is being driven perpendicularly up a wall. They are actually saying that they are becoming frustrated or irritated with the other person.

In order for an English learner to understand the meaning of this phrase or sentence, they must also look at the context in which it has been said. If they were to break down the phrase into its base components, it would not make any sense and could lead to a great deal of confusion or misunderstanding.

Structural ambiguities are also very common in the English language and can present a challenge to an English learner. A structural ambiguity occurs when the sentence is arranged in such a way that it has more than one possible meaning. For example, in the sentence “The turkey is ready to eat”, this could mean that either the turkey has been cooked and is ready to be eaten, or it could mean that the turkey is hungry and would like to eat. Oftentimes, the speaker does not even realize their sentence has an ambiguous meaning, as they know the meaning they intend to convey. In these situations, often the whole context of the conversation must be taken into consideration before the true meaning of the phrase or sentence can be understood.

In the English language there are many lexical and structural ambiguities that native English speakers take for granted, but can be very challenging for non-native speakers to understand and use correctly.

Michelle Gipson