A Study of Difference and Identification between Homonymy and Polysemy

Lexical ambiguity is an essential problem in practical and applied language processing, but a few relatively information is available about what causes and effect the problem of lexical ambiguity. After many linguistic and professional researched lexical relations for a long time, people found that homonymy and polysemy are two well-known semantic problems. This paper mainly discusses the homonymy and polysemy from the definition, cause of formation, the principles of distinction and semantic ambiguity. At the same time, some methods of distinguishing homonymous and polysemous words are offered in one part of thesis. It is valuable reference for English learning, English teaching and cross-cultural communication.