Лексикология английского языка

1. The subject-matter, theoretical and practical significance of the course of Lexicology. The connection of Lexicology and other disciplines of language study. The main units of lexicon (2 h.)

OUTLINE

1. Basic notions

2. Lexicology and other language studies

3. The notion of the main units of lexicon 

1. Basic Notions

Lexicology is a part of linguistics, the science of language. It studies the lexicon, or the vocabulary.

General lexicology studies vocabulary irrespective of specific, particular features of a certain language.

Historical Lexicology studies vocabulary in its development (diachronically).

Contrastive Lexicology carries out comparative studies of the lexicon of different languages.

Special Lexicology is the study of the vocabulary of a particular language, e.g. English, Russian.

The basic task of English Lexicology is the study of the lexicon of English, that is, the study of all aspects of the vocabulary of English – how units of meaning are formed, how they have developed over time, how they are used now, how they are related in meaning to each other and how they are handled in dictionaries.

Each human language, and especially its lexicon is said to provide its own set of “pigeon-holes” by which the universe of the speaking nation is interpreted and reduced to order. Differences between the world-view of speakers of different languages may be far-reaching. Not only classifications of natural phenomena but abstract relations such as time and space may be represented in a very different manner.

The most extreme variant of this relativistic view, according to which each language forces its speakers into its peculiar mental straitjacket, have received the name “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, after two American anthropological linguists.

This hypothesis makes it hard to understand why it is possible to translate into one language from another or why one and the same language often have alternative conceptualizations of the same phenomenon. E.g. in English human beings can be categorized by age into “children”, “adolescents” and “adults” or alternatively, into “majors” and “miners”.

Another extreme version in the debate about the relationship between language, thought and the outside world is the view that language is basically an innate or genetically inherited capability and that languages share the same basic conceptual framework. There is a universal set of semantic categories (animate/inanimate, human/non-human, concrete/abstract, etc) from which each language draws its own subset of categories and it is only in the choice of this subset that languages differ.

The question whether there are universal concepts existing independently of language or whether language imposes a conceptual framework on human thinking is still disputable.

Nowadays, a fashionable view that is taking an upper hand is that language is one of the most productive means of coding cultural attitudes, peculiar ethnic features of world-view.    Lexicon as the nominating stock of language is particularly transparent as a means of translating culturally and nationally significant meanings.

3. The notion of the basic units of lexicon

Lexicon contains units of meaning, or lexemes (lexical items, lexical units); w3hich is the object of study of Lexicology.

                                                                                                                                                   Lexical units are elements, possessing form and meaning.

The smallest meaningful unit is the morpheme usually defined as the smallest meaningful unit into which a word can be divided.  The basic unit of the vocabulary is the word. It is central not only for the lexicon, and consequently, to Lexicology, but to the language system as a whole. It is the main tool of the human language in categorization the phenomena of the world.

Idioms, such as rain cats and dogs, catch red-handed, kick the bucket, where the meaning of the whole phrase is different from the combined meanings of the constituent words are also lexical items.

The sets of these three main lexical items are not divided by hard and fast boundaries. The sets overlap. There are units, for example, which can hardly be called words, because they themselves consist of words, but which are indivisible syntactically (that is, the constituents cannot be separated and cannot perform a syntactical function in a sentence), or they are indivisible semantically, or both.

Ex: as well as, in spite of, such as, because of, instead of, ahead of, in accordance with

Put up with, make-believe, run down, take after or even such combinations as take a walk, give a glance, cast a look present a semantic unity (that is the corresponding meanings are expressed by the combinations as a whole, not by their parts) as well as syntactic unity (combinations within the sentence perform a single syntactic function, e.g. that of the predicate or object)

Again, NATO, UNO, FBI, and KGB also present a problem, for they function like words, but originally are phrases.

I.V.Arnold calls lexemes like that word-equivalents; David Crystal prefers the term lexemes. The former also suggests that ready-made sentences, semantically indivisible and syntactically non-variable, such as all right, How do you do, Never mind can also be regarded as word- equivalents.