Lexicology (Fundamentals)

Plan

1. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics.

2. Word as the basic lexical unit of language.

Literature:

1. Антрушина Г.Б., Афанасьева О.В., Морозова Н.Н. Лексикология английского языка: Учеб. пособие для студентов. – М.: Дрофа, 1999. – 288 с.

2. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка: Учеб. для ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. – М.: ВШ, 1986. – 295 с.

3. Гвишиани Н.Б. Современный английский язык: Лексикология (новый курс для филологических факультетов университетов). – М.: МГУ, 2000. – 221 с.

4. Дубенец Э.М. Современный английский язык. Лексикология: Пособие для студентов гуманитарных вузов. – М. / СПб.: ГЛОССА / КАРО, 2004. – 192 с.

1. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics.

The term ‘lexicology’ is of Greek origin, from lexis – word and logos – science. Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words. Its basic task is a systematic description of the vocabulary of some particular language in respect to its origin, development and current use.

Lexicology presents a wide area of knowledge and includes the following branches: a) historical lexicology or etymology. Historical lexicology or etymology studies the development of the vocabulary, the origin of words and word-groups, their semantic relations and the development of their sound forms and meaning.

b) descriptive lexicology. Descriptive lexicology studies the vocabulary at a definite stage of its development.

c) semantic or semasiology. Semantic or semasiology specialises in the studies of the meaning of words.

d) comparative or contrastive lexicology. Comparative or contrastive lexicology establishes facts of similarities and differences between languages.

e) applied lexicology. Applied lexicology covers terminology, lexicography, translation, linguodidactics.

It is also possible to speak about general lexicology and special lexicology. General lexicology studies words irrespective of the specific features of any particular language. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language. So, lexicology of the English language is special lexicology. Every special lexicology is based on the principles of general lexicology. General lexicology is at the very beginning of its formation yet.

Lexicology connects with phonetics, stylistics and grammar. The ties between lexicology and phonetics are based on the assumption that a word is a combination of a group of sounds with a meaning. So, window is one word and widow is another. Discrimination between words may be based upon stress: import is a noun and import ia a verb.

Meaning is necessary to phonemic analysis. To establish the phonemic difference between [ou] and [o] it is sufficient to know that hope means something different from hop.

Many problems treated in lexicology are studied in stylistics but from a different angle. These are problems of meaning, connotations, synonymy, functional differentiation of vocabulary.

Lexicology is connected with grammar. Each word belongs to some part of speech and have lexico-grammatical characteristics of this part of speech. Words seldom occur in isolation. They are arranged in some patterns. So, alongside with their lexical meaning they possess grammatical meaning. For example: I am going is different from I am going to do. Verbs when used with human nouns and with object nouns may change their meanings. For example: The girls gave him a strange smile and The new teeth gave him a strange smile. The ties between lexicology and grammar are very strong in the field of word-formation. Many linguists consider word-formation a part of grammar not lexicology.

Lexicology as a linguistic discipline was introduced in works by V.V. Vinogradov, G.O. Vinokur, L.V. Scherba, A.I. Smirnitsky, O.S. Ahmanova and others.

No corresponding discipline is officially distinguished in Western European or American linguistics. A prominent linguist Uriel Weinreich once wrote: ‘To an American observer, the strangest thing about Soviet lexicology is that it exist’. Another well-known British lexicographer says: ‘...over the last thirty years, vocabulary and vocabulary teaching have been unduly neglected by linguists, applied linguists and language teachers alike. This may well be true of Western Europe and the United States where, as they argue, the dominance of syntactic models of language has, until recently, relegated the study of vocabulary to the periphery of linguistic scholarship. This criticism is, however, demonstrably not applicable to the study of language in the Soviet Union, where lexicography in general, and pedagogical lexicography, in particular, has never ceased to be a major subject of interest to Soviet linguists and language teachers’.

2. Word as the basic lexical unit.

The main unit of the lexical system of a language is a word. The word is used for the purposes of human communication. Everybody knows that when people are travelling they do not carry grammar books with them, they carry dictionaries. In conversations a word can hurt, excite, decide a case, lead to conflicts.

The word materially represents a group of sounds: wall – well, cat – court, house – mouse.

The word can be used in different grammatical forms Remember, for example the following proverb: Don’t trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.

The word is the smallest unit of a language which can stand alone as a sentence, for example: Go! Stop!

The word possesses a structure. We must distinguish between the external and the internal structures of the word. The external structure of the word is its morphological structure. For example, in the word post-impressionists there are the following morphemes: the prefixes post-, im -, the root press, the suffixes -ion, -ist,-s. All these morphemes constitute the external structure of the word post-impressionists. The internal structure of the word is its meaning or its semantic structure.

The word possesses unity: both external and semantic unity. The external unity of the word is also called the formal unity. The formal unity of the word can be illustrated by comparing a word and a word-group with identical constituents, for example the word blackbird and the word-group black bird. We say that the word blackbird is characterized by the formal unity because grammatically this word changes as a whole thing: blackbird – blackbirds, not as blacksbirds. In the word-group a black bird each constituent can have its own grammatical forms: the blackest birds I have ever seen. Or we may introduce other words between the components of the word-group: a black night bird. So, the word-group black bird has no formal unity.

The semantic unity of the word may be shown with the help of the same word blackbird and the same word-group black bird. The word blackbird conveys only one concept: the type of bird. In the word-group black bird each component conveys a separate concept: bird – a kind of living creature, black – a colour.

So, the word may be defined as the basic lexical unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, grammatically changeable and characterized by formal and semantic unity.

The term word is not a well-established element in the British linguistic tradition. British scientists such as D. Crystal and M.A.K. Halliday agree that intuitively all speakers know what is meant by a word, all speakers recognise words. But as a term it is extremely vague. Therefore British scientists suggest that the term word should be replaced by the terms lexical item, lexeme. The term lexical item has three meanings:

1. lexical item (лексема) is a unit conventionally listed in dictionaries as a separate entry. For example: such pairs as discover – discovery, announce – announcement are the same lexical items.

2. lexical item (cложный эквивалент слова). Many lexical items are words but some of them are not. For example: turn off is one item but two words.

3. lexical item (знаменательное слово). Sentences consist of words. Some of them are lexical items and some are grammatical items. For example: in the sentence We are at the lecture there are lexical items We, lecture and grammatical items are, at, the.

It follows that lexical item is a broader term than word. When we speak about a lexical item and a word we speak about different things.

Other lexical units of language.

The basic unit of the vocabulary is a word. Other units are morphemes and word groups.

Morphemes are parts of words into which words may be divided. Word groups are groups of words into which words are combined. Unlike words morphemes cannot be divided into smaller meaningful elements. They function only as parts of words. The meaning of morphemes is rather abstract and general. Morphemes are less autonomous than words. Though many American linguists such as Ch. Hockett, Z. Harris regard a morpheme not a word as the main unit of the vocabulary. They segment utterance into morphemes ignoring words.

Word groups are ready-made combinations of words with a specialized meaning of the whole that is not a sum total of the meanings of the elements. For example: lady-killer – дамский угодник, to cut smb down to size – сбить спесь с кого-либо, поставить на место.

Discussing the problem of lexical units one should remember that the boundaries separating words, morphemes and word groups are fluid. The vocabulary of a language is constantly changing.

Lecture # 2

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