METHODS OF LEXICOLOGICAL RESEARCH

To study a word one must know the way to analyse it. There are some methods of Lexicological analysis important for teachers of English. Here are the methods put in the order of importance for future teachers: contrastive analysis, statistical methods of analyses, Immediate Constituents (IC) analysis, distributional, transformational, and componential analyses.

Contrastive analysis implies a detailed comparison of the structure of a native and a target language. One of the major problems in the learning of the second language is the interference caused by the difference between the mother tongue of the learner and the target language. This method of analysis is based on the assumption that the categories, elements are valid on different levels (semantic, syntactic...) so it can be carried out at three linguistic levels: phonology, grammar and vocabulary. In lexicology contrastive analysis is applied to reveal the features of sameness and difference in different languages.

It should be borne in mind that though objective reality exists outside human beings and irrespective of the language they speak, every language classifies reality in its own way by means of vocabulary units. In English the word foot is used to denote the extremity of the leg. In Russian there is no exact equivalent for foot. The word нога denotes the whole leg including the foot. We are often inclined to make mistakes when speaking a foreign language as we are used to our native language experience to make structures. We find it natural to use a single word to refer to all devices that tell us what time it is (часы); yet in English they are divided into tow semantic classes (watch and clock). The very real danger for the Russian language learner of English lies in the field of polysemantic words:

The meaning of any word depends on the place it occupies in the set of semantically related words: its synonyms, other members of the word-family, its lexical field. For ex.: an English man has in his vocabulary the following words for evaluating mental aptitude: apt, bright, brilliant, clever, cunning, intelligent, shrewd, sly, dull, stupid, slow, foolish, silly. Each of these words has a definite meaning for him, he attaches a value judgment in a certain situation. The corresponding Russian semantic field of mental aptitude is different (способный, хитрый, умный, глупый, тупой и т.д.) What Russian speaker can describe as хитрый, might be described by English speaker as either cunning or sly depending on situation. Difference in the lexical meaning of correlated words accounts for the difference in their collocaility in different languages. Thus the English adjective new and the Russian adjective новый when taken in isolation are felt as correlated words (a new dress - новое платье, New Year - Новый год), but in collocation with other nouns there is some difference (new potatoes - молодая картошка, new bread - свежий хлеб; to fill a lamp - заправлять лампу, to fill a truck - загружать машину, to fill a gap - заполнять пробел; тонкая книга - a thin book, тонкая ирония - subtle irony, тонкая талия - slim waist). Contrastive analysis on the level of grammatical meaning reveals that correlated words may differ in the grammatical component of their meaning (her hair is black - ее волосы черные, that news is important - те новости важные; man is honest - этот человек честен, the man is honest - люди честны) or in the structural way (он медленно усваивает - he learns slowly/ he is a poor learner/ he is slow to learn). One more contrastive analyses deals with the situational use of the words and verbal units (Простите! - I beg your pardon/ Excuse me/ I’m sorry; Ничего, пожалуйста. - It’s (that’s) all right/ Don’t mention it/ It was nothing/ My pleasure/ You’re welcome).

Statistical analysis is a means of verification and a reliable criterion for the selection of lexical items is available. It studies the frequency of a word usage. Very few people know more than 10% of the words of their mother tongue. Out of about 500.000 words listed in the Oxford English Dictionary the passive vocabulary of an educated Englishmen comprises no more than 30.000 words and of those 4.000-5.000 are presumed to be sufficient for the daily needs of an average Englishman. Sometimes the frequency of usage differs in the field of different word-meanings. Room in the meaning «part of the house» makes up 83% of all occurrences of the word and should be included in the list of meanings to be learned be the beginners, whereas the meaning «suite, lodging» is not essential and makes only 2% of all occurrences of this word.

Immediate Constituents analysis determines the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. Thus the word-group a black dress in severe style makes up a structure represented as a black dress /in severe style. Fat mayor’s wife may mean that either «the mayor is fat» or «his wife is fat» according to someone’s intuition. Immediate Constituents analysis is used mainly to discover the derivation structure of a word. For example, the verb denationalize has both a prefix de- and a suffix -ize. To decide whether this word is a prefixal or a suffixal derivative we apply binary segmentation and find out that denation, denational cannot be considered independent sequences so the only possible segmentation is de-nationalize, there for we may conclude that the verb is a prefixal derivative.

The aim of distributional analysis is to state the position which lexical units occupy or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech. The term distribution means the aptness of a word in one of its meanings to collocate or to co-occur with a certain group, or a certain groups of words having some common semantic component.In the sentence The boy ___ home the missing word is easily identified as a verb - went, came, ran so we are interested not in the lexical meaning of the words but in the part-of-speech mining of the word under analysis. In a number of cases words have different meanings in different distribution patterns (to treat smb well - to treat smb to ice-cream; ill look, ill health - fall ill, be ill). Not only words but also whole word-groups may acquire a certain meaning due to certain distributional pattern to which this habitual meaning is attached (that happened a day/month/year ago - that happened a grief ago/three cigarettes ago). The same set of lexical items can mean different things in different syntactic arrangements (John thought he had left Mary alone/ Mary alone thought that he had left John). Distribution of stems in a compound makes part of the lexical meaning of the compound word (cage-bird - bird-cage).

Transformational analysis is a re-pattering of various distributional structures in order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of particular identical distributional patterns. If we compare two compounds a dogfight and a dogcart they may seem to be similar and we understand them as a kind of fight and a kind of cart, but semantic relation shown by means of a transformational analysis is different so the lexical meaning is different too: a dogfight is a fight between dogs, a dogcart is not a cart between dogs but a cart drawn by dogs). Word-groups of identical distributional structure when re-patterned also show that the semantic relationship between words and consequently the meaning of the word-groups can be different (his cat, his mistake, his arrest, his cleverness - he has a cat, he made a mistake, he was arrested, he is clever- A possesses B, A performs B, A is the goal of the action of B, B is the quality of A).

Componential analysis is the analysis of the meaning of the word attempting to describe the semantic ways in which words are alike or unlike. We can observe that words which cluster together to form lexical fields have certain features or attributes in common. Thus spaniels, terries, and pekinese not only have in common that they are domesticated pets, but that they are canine ones (separating from cats). But cats and dogs share the attribute of being mammals, of being non-human ones, of being animate (unlike hammers or benches) and so on. These features or attributes enable us to organise our field in terms of what the entities within it have in common and what distinguishes them from one another. A spaniels and terries have in common that they are domesticated and canine; according to M.McCarthy (1995) we can express these as semantic markers. Both also have in common their use as sporting or hunting dogs, and other possible features, but they also have distinguishing features (spaniels have large, droopy ears, silky coat, spotting retriever; terries have small ears, they are hairy, burrowing when hunting).

As an aspect of the study of vocabulary, CA is not without its problems. You may have found your analysis different from other people’s as our lexical competence is highly variable, is dynamic, in constant change and development, or you may have found it difficult to put into words just precisely what distinguishes a wallet from a purse.

Основы английской лексикологии: Учебное пособие по английскому языку для студентов третьего курса факультета «Иностранные языки»: 2 –е издание, испр. и доп./

Ольга Алексеевна Костиникова

кандидат психологических наук, доцент, зав. Кафедрой английского языка СГУТиКД

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