Question

This is a question in Linguistic, i just placed it under Psychology since there is no option for Linguistic.

3. Consider the following sentences:
(1) Sarah is always able to counter the arguments of her opponents.
(2) I volunteered to be a vote counter in the upcoming election.
a. In the first sentence, counter can be defined as ‘speak or act in opposition to’. In the second
sentence, counter can be defined as ‘a person who counts something’. Are these two definitions for
counter an example of homophony, or polysemy?

b. Provide morphological evidence for your answer above. (Think about the structure of counter in (1)
compared to the structure of counter in (2).) The answer should also talk about the word structure.

Answer 1

HOMOPHONY:

The words that have the same phonetic sounds. The word "counter' in both the sentences is split in to syllables as 'coun - ter' and phonetically pronounced as "coun-ter"

POLYSEMY:

Same words having different meaning in different sentence or phrase. In the first sentence counter means, speak or oppose to, in the second sentence counter means, the person who counts.

Thus, the word 'counter' in both sentence 1 and sentence 2 fulfils the criteria of Homophony and Polysemy.

On analyzing the word 'counter' using morphology, the word 'count' is interpreted as a free morpheme because it can convey a meaning on its own and the word 'er' is interpreted as a bound morpheme because it cannot convey a meaning on its own when seperated from the free morpheme.

On considering the word structure of the word 'counter' in sentence 1, the free morpheme (count) does not make sense and fails the convey the actual meaning of the sentence, ' Sarah is always able to count the arguements of her opponenets'

Whereas in sentence 2, the free morpheme (count) can make a complete sentence and convey the intended meaning as, "I volunteered to count the vote in the upcoming election."