TURKISH LOANWORDS AND THEIR IMPACT IN THE ALBANIAN HOMONYMOUS LEXICAL ITEMS CORPUS

In principle, the line separating polysemy from homonymy is clear, but in practice the criteria for identifying distinct senses can be problematic. It is not always easy to decide at which point two meanings of one polysemic word merit separate entries in the dictionary. The central problem lexicologists need to tackle is precisely how to identify homonymy in particular cases and how to distinguish meanings that are close together from those that are far apart. Homonymy as a process represents one of the most controversial issues in modern lexicological and semantic studies because of the complexity of single lexical forms being associated with multiple distant senses. Among the most productive sources of homonymy such as disintegration (split of polysemy) and the convergent sound development we intentionally selected a very interesting way of obtaining perfectly new lexical items accidentally having the same outer form, as a result of a pure coincidence between a native word and a borrowed one. Exploiting the abundant number of borrowings from Turkish we found out that the adoption and the assimilation of these loanwords has contributed in the process of enlarging the Albanian language lexicon and at the same has influenced in the enrichment of the homonymous lexical items corpus due to early contacts and as a consequence of historical, social and cultural relations between two language communities. Analyzing Albanian and Turkish homonymous lexical items we found out many reliable means of backing up the claims we made and sustain our arguments that constant and frequent interactions between the given languages have contributed in sense relation and meaning development processes as well.

TURKISH LOANWORDS AND THEIR IMPACT IN THE ALBANIAN HOMONYMOUS LEXICAL ITEMS CORPUS

In principle, the line separating polysemy from homonymy is clear, but in practice the criteria for identifying distinct senses can be problematic. It is not always easy to decide at which point two meanings of one polysemic word merit separate entries in the dictionary. The central problem lexicologists need to tackle is precisely how to identify homonymy in particular cases and how to distinguish meanings that are close together from those that are far apart. Homonymy as a process represents one of the most controversial issues in modern lexicological and semantic studies because of the complexity of single lexical forms being associated with multiple distant senses. Among the most productive sources of homonymy such as disintegration (split of polysemy) and the convergent sound development we intentionally selected a very interesting way of obtaining perfectly new lexical items accidentally having the same outer form, as a result of a pure coincidence between a native word and a borrowed one. Exploiting the abundant number of borrowings from Turkish we found out that the adoption and the assimilation of these loanwords has contributed in the process of enlarging the Albanian language lexicon and at the same has influenced in the enrichment of the homonymous lexical items corpus due to early contacts and as a consequence of historical, social and cultural relations between two language communities. Analyzing Albanian and Turkish homonymous lexical items we found out many reliable means of backing up the claims we made and sustain our arguments that constant and frequent interactions between the given languages have contributed in sense relation and meaning development processes as well.

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