This paper is an attempt to describe and to discuss phenomenon of homonymy in Brazilian Portuguese as an ambiguity present in a natural language, by means of a theoretical revisitation to several authors and in confrontation with polisemy. It is also intended, besides conceptually redefining homonymy, to propose distinctive semantic criteria for this linguistic phenomenon, such as the semic analysis, the field lexicon, the use of crystallized expressions and the occurrence of specify features.
Ambiguity; Homonymy; Polisemy; Semantic criteria
