INK PINS & STICKIN' PENS

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:34 PM -0500 2/15/02, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>In a message dated 2/15/2002 10:53:30 AM, db.list at PMPKN.NET writes:
>
><< So, just from personal experience, and given that "pin" and "pen" are both
>fairly common household-implement-type objects, i'd have to say that i tend
>to think they aren't as free from the possibility of ambiguity, even given
>context, as someone without experience with the merger might think. >>
>
>Being common, short words, PIN and PEN are  occur in spelling lessons when I
>was a child. I remember the teacher reading out the list and students asking,
>"Ma'am, do you mean INK PEN or STICKIN' PIN?
>
>I don't remember anything like "BOY JIM or RING GEM?", though. Or even
>"NUMBER TEN OR SOUP-CAN TIN"!

Those are like the "ink pen or pig pen" example I mentioned
earlier--the chance of encountering a context needing such
disambiguations (as opposed to the "straight pin or ink pen" ones) is
vanishingly small.  Work done on homonymy avoidance, especially in
the 1930s and 1940s (the best compilation I know of is Edna Rees
Williams's _The Conflict of Homonyms in English_, Yale U. Press,
1944) stresses the inverse correlation between the functional
difficulty a given pair of homonyms is likely to cause (cf. let
'allow' vs. let 'hinder', an ear 'hearing organ' vs. a nere 'kidney')
and the degree of tolerance the lexicon will have for maintaining
both homonyms (cf. cape 'cloak' vs. cape 'outjutting body of land' or
to/too/two, where no confusion is likely to arise).  An analogous
situation prevails here with respect to how likely disambiguators are
to be used either on-line or through conventionalization ("ink pen",
"lightweight")--or how unlikely (as with proper names vs. minerals,
or numbers vs. metal objects).

larry