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LEXICOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
SOCHI STATE UNIVERSITY FOR TOURISM AND RECREATION
BASIC COURSE
IN THE LEXICOLOGY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
(for the third-year students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages)
Sochi, 2003
Основы лексикологии английского языка: Учебное пособие по английскому языку для студентов третьего курса факультета иностранных языков: 2 –е издание, испр. и доп./ к. психол. н, доцент
О.А.Костиникова, - Сочи, СГУТиКД, 2003. - 75 с.
Рецензенты: д.ф.н., професор Волошин Ю.К.,
К.п.н., доцент Чекулаева Н.Я.
© О.А Костиникова, 2003
Lesson 1.
LEXICOLOGY AS A SCIENCE.
Lexicology is a branch of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of words as the main units of the language. Vocabulary is the system formed by the sum total of all the words that the language possesses.
Despite many recent data, lexicology as a separate branch of linguistics is still in its early stage. In American and West European practice of studying a language lexicology hasn’t been distinguished from grammar recently.
Lexicology as a science has several subdivisions. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language is known as general lexicology. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language. The evolution of any vocabulary - the origin of various words, their change and development - forms the object of historical lexicology. Descriptive lexicology deals with the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development. These subdivisions are based on the difference of two principle approaches in the study of language material differentiated by Ferdinand de Saussure - diachronic and synchronic. Traditionally linguistics had studied the historical development of a language and compared the processes of some languages development. Ferdinand de Saussure was the first who proved the necessity to turn his attention to the analysis of the language synchrony, i.e., to the structure of a given language at a given stage of development.
A good example illustrating the distinction between the approaches is furnished by the words to beg and beggar. Synchronically, the word beggar being the derived member of the pair, for the derivative correlation between the two is the same as in to sing - singer, to teach – teacher, diachronically, we learn that the word beggar was borrowed from Old French and only presumed to have been derived from a shorter word, namely the verb to beg.
We know that the vocabulary of any language is constantly changing being influenced by the combination of both linguistic and extra-linguistic causes. Words, to a far greater degree than sounds, grammatical forms, or syntactical arrangements, are subject to change, for the word-stock of any language directly and immediately reacts to changes in social life. The intense development of science gave birth to a great number of new words (computer, radar, sputnik, psycholinguistics), the factor of a social need also manifests itself in word-formation (tweedy means not only made of tweed as in woolly, silky, but sports style or a social group of people going in for country sports).
It was said that Lexicology studies various lexical units: morphemes, words, phraseological units. Words are considered basic units of the language system and each unit constituting the vocabulary possesses a certain number of characteristic features variously combined and making each separate word into a special sign different from some other words.
Linguistic relationships between words can be classified into syntagmatic and paradigmatic.
Syntagma is the succession of two or more language units connected by a certain type of boundaries. Syntagmatic relationships between words are based on the influence of the context that is defined as the minimum stretch of speech necessary and sufficient to determine which of the possible meanings of a polysemantic word is used (blue eyes - feel blue). In some cases micro-context (a sentence or a syntagm) is not sufficient and a macro-context is necessary (Blue inns and Buff inns, Blue shops and Buff shops - in Dickens’s Pickwick Club the symbols of Tories and Liberals).
Paradigm is the system of changing word-forms. It can also be viewed as a class of language unites having a certain common feature but opposed to one another, e.g., morphological paradigm, word-formation paradigm, etc. Paradigmatic linguistic relationships are based on the interdependence of words within the vocabulary.
Synchronically, the vocabulary as a system has various possible groupings, based on some common feature with respect to which words may be regarded as equivalents: word-families, for instance, have a common root (a dog, dog-house, dogged, doggish) as their bases, synonymic series - a common denotational meaning, stylistic layers - a common sphere of usage, thematic group - a common sphere of reference.
Diachronically the interdependence of words within the lexical subsystems may be seen by observing shifts in the meaning of existing words when a new word is introduced into their semantic sphere (the native OE hэrvest - ME harvest originally meant not only gathering of grain but also the season of reaping. When in the 14th century the Roman word autumne was borrowed, the second meaning of the word harvest was lost in the native language and transferred to the word autumn.
The word is a many-sided unit thus it is viewed and studied in Lexicology from different angels. The branch of Lexicology that studies words’ meanings is called Semantics. It also concerns with the study of polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, homonymy. The part of Lexicology dealing with the ways words are formed is called Word formation. The origin of words as well as the history and development of meaning and form, is the subject of Etymology. Phraseology studies stable combinations of words. Lexicology includes an auxiliary branch dealing with the principles of dictionary compilation - Lexicography.
So the main trends of the course of the Lexicology of the English language are: the treatment of the English word as a structure and the treatment of the English vocabulary as a system.
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