Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 242

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As a first step in the separation of homographs, components
belonging to different parts of speech can be distinguished:
filar, noun (plur. offil ‘file’), and filar, verb (pres. offila ‘(to)
file’), are separated, and so are muttrar ‘screw-nuts’ and
muttrar ‘(he) mutters’. This presupposes a definition of the
parts of speech. In the present case a flow-chart grammar
that distributes the units among the parts of speech has been
worked out. It is based on selected and ordered criteria, in
the first place from syntax, in the second place from mor-
phology and graphemic and phonemic form.
A second step is the isolation of components belonging to
different lemmas. A lemma is defined as a group of forms
within a part of speech which are assignable either to one
and the same series of inflexion (in the case of indeclinable
words comprising only one form) or to several series of in-
flexion that converge in speech and/or writing, the divergences
of which show purely facultative variation (free variation).
A series of inflexion is of the type fil, fils, filen, filens, filar, filars,
filarna, filarnas ‘file, of a file, the file, etc.’, where grammatical
constants of a very generic character are added. A flow chart
determining the lemmatic status of series of inflexion is given
in Figure 3. Homograph components distinguished at this
stage are, e.g., fil (plur. fiilar ‘files’) and fil (plur. filer ‘rows’),
nit (plur. nitar ‘rivets’) and nit (plur. nitarlniter ‘blanks’). On
the other hand, a case like svan (plur. svanarjsvanor ‘swans’) is
found to be one lemma. It should be pointed out that supple-
mentary inflexion is not accepted. No one can tell whether,
for instance, várre in the expression en várre situation ‘a worse
situation’ is the comparative of svar or besvárlig or vansklig
or kránglig, etc., whereas probably any Swedish speaker can
tell that it is not the comparative of ond, which is the tradi-
tional analysis. The series in question is therefore: —, várre,
várst. The kind of homography discussed so far I call external
homography, i.e., homography between members of different
lemmas.
There is also a kind of homography that can be called