Linguistics is the scientific study of language

1. THE OBJECT OF LEXICOLOGY

 

Linguistics is the scientific study of language

1. The object of Lexicology. Definition of the term "vocabulary". Theoretical and practical value of English Lexicology.

The term lexicology is of Greek origin (from lexis ‘word’ and logos ‘learning, science’). Lexicology is the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of the language and the properties of words as the main units of language. In other words, its basic task is a study and systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development, meaning and current use. The term vocabulary is used to denote the sуstem formed by the sum total of all the words and word equivalents that the language possesses. By word-equivalents we are going to mean morphemes, word-combinations and phraseological units.

Modern English Lexicology investigates the problems of word-structure and word-formation in Modern English, the semantic structure of English words, the main principles underlying the classification of vocabulary units into various groups, the laws governing the replenishment of the vocabulary with new vocabulary units. It also studies the relations existing between various lexical layers of the English vocabulary and the specific laws and regulations that govern development at the present time.

Distinction is naturally made between General Lexicology and Special Lexicology. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language, is known as general lexicology. General lexicology studies properties common to all languages. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language. It goes without saying that every special lexicology is based on the principles of general lexicology, and the latter forms a part of general linguistics.

There are two principal approaches, two basically different ways in which language may be viewed, the historical or diachronic (Gr dia ‘through’ and chronos ‘time’) and the descriptive or synchronic (Gr syn ‘together’, ‘with’). The distinction between a synchronic and a diachronic approach is due to the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).

With regard to Special Lexicology the synchronic approach is concerned with the vocabulary of a language as it exists at a given time, for instance, at the present time. It is special Descriptive Lexicology that deals with the vocabulary and vocabulary units of a particular language at a certain time. A Course in Modern English Lexicology is therefore a course in Special Descriptive Lexicology, its object of study being the English vocabulary as it exists at the present time.

Historical or diachronic approach in terms of Special Lexicology deals with the changes and the development of vocabulary in the course of time. It is special Historical Lexicology that deals with the evolution of the vocabulary units of a language as time goes by. An English Historical Lexicology would be concerned, therefore, with the origin of English vocabulary units, their change and development, the linguistic and extralinguistic factors modifying their structure, meaning and usage within the history of the English language.

It should be emphatically stressed that the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic study is merely a difference of approach separating for the purposes of investigation what in real language is inseparable. The two approaches should not be contrasted, or set one against the other; in fact, they are intrinsically interconnected and interdependent: every linguistic structure and system actually exists in a state of constant development so that the synchronic state of a language system is a result of a long process of linguistic evolution, of its historical development.

Another discipline which finds its place within the framework of lexicological studies is etymology or historical lexicology. The object of historical lexicology or etymology is the evolution of any vocabulary, as well as of its single elements. This branch of linguistics discusses the origin of various words, their change and development and investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic forces modifying their structure, meaning and usage. We speak about extralinguistic forces, because language develops together with the development of the society. Etymology has been criticized for its atomistic approach – for treating every word a an individual isolated unit.

Closely connected with Historical Lexicology is Contrastive and Comparative Lexicology whose aims are to study the correlation between the vocabularies of two or more languages, and find out the correspondences between the vocabulary units of the languages under comparison. It aims to provide a theoretical basis on which the vocabularies of different languages can be compared and described.

The theoretical and practical value of English Lexicology. The Course of Modern English Lexicology is of great practical importance. The language learner will obtain much valuable information concerning the English word-stock and the laws and regulations governing the formation and usage of English words and word-groups.

The importance of English lexicology is based not on the size of its vocabulary, however big it is, but on the fact that at present it is the world's most widely used language. It is spoken as a native language by nearly three hundred million people in Britain, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and some other countries. The knowledge of English is widely spread geographically — it is in fact used in all continents. It is also spoken in many countries as a second language and used in official and business activities there. This is the case in India, Pakistan and many other former British colonies. English is also one of the working languages of the United Nations and the universal language of international aviation. More than a half world's scientific literature is published in English and 60% of the world's radio broadcasts are in English. For all these reasons it is widely studied all over the world as a foreign language.

The theoretical value of lexicology becomes obvious if we realize that it forms the study of one of the three main aspects of language, i.e. its vocabulary, the other two being its grammar and sound system. Lexicology studies the meaning of words. The theory of meaning was originally developed within the limits of philosophical science. The relationship between the name and the thing named has in the course of history constituted one of the key questions in gnostic theories.

 

2. Word as the basic unit of language. Word / word-combination / morpheme. Types of lexical units (words, lexical morphemes, set expressions). = the size-of-unit problem.

 

Types of lexical units. The term unit means one of the elements into which a whole may be divided or analyzed and which possesses the basic properties of this whole. The units of a vocabulary or lexical units are two-facet elements possessing form (sound) and meaning.

The basic unit forming the bulk of the vocabulary is the word. Being the central element of any language system, the word is a sort of focus for all levels of linguistic analysis - phonology, lexicology, syntax, etc.

Other units are lexical morphemes, that is parts of words, into which words may be analyzed, and set expressions or groups of words into which words may be combined. Wогds are the central elements of language system, they face both ways: they are the biggest units of morphology and the smallest of syntax.

The word has many different aspects. It has a sound form because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes; it has its morphological structure, being also a certain arrangement of morphemes; when used in actual speech it may occur in different word forms, different syntactic functions and signal various meanings.

The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language which unites a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment. A word therefore is simultaneously a semantic, phonological and grammatical unit. For example, in the word “boy” the group of sounds is associated with the meaning  “a male child up to the age of 17 or 18” and with a definite grammatical employment – a noun which has a plural form ‘boys’…

The words thus are to be kept distinct from morphemes, on the one hand, and from word-combinations, on the other.

Unlike words, morphemes cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units. Besides, they function in speech only as constituent parts of words. Morphemes cannot be used as separate utterances. Words can be separated in an utterance by other such units and can be used in isolation.

Words are thought of as representing a concept, feeling or action or as having a single referent. The meaning of morphemes is more abstract and more general than that of words and at the same time they are less autonomous.

In difference to a morpheme, the word is a unity of both lexical and grammatical meaning, while morpheme can possess either lexical or grammatical meaning. Morphemes of the first kind are called lexical, of the second type – grammatical.

We mean that the word has a unified grammatical shape for all its constituents (whole-formedness). The application of the criterion can be illustrated in the following way. The word “sun” has both the lexical meaning expressed by the stem “sun-” (the star that shines in the sky during the day) and the categorial meaning of the noun, the part of speech it belongs to. Otherwise stated, it is grammatically formed.

Let's compare it with 'sun' in sunflower or sunstroke. It doesn't carry any grammatical meaning and in this respect differs from the word 'sun'.

The most general description of the word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterized by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity

The integrity is manifest in its indivisibility – when we deal with a compound it is impossible to insert another word or word-combination between its elements. (for example sunlight – we can only insert a word between the article and the noun – the bright sunlight – it is a separate word).

To illustrate “positional mobility” and “uninterruptability” we segment into morphemes the following sentence:

the - boy - s - walk - ed - slow - ly - up - the - hill

The sentence may be regarded as a sequence of ten morphemes, which occur in a particular order relative to one another. There are several possible changes in this order which yield an acceptable English sentence: slow - ly - the - boy - s - walk - ed - up - the – hill / up - the - hill - slow - ly - walk - ed - the - boy - s

Yet under all the permutations certain groups of morphemes behave as ‘blocks’  — they occur always together, and in the same order relative to one another. There is no possibility of the sequence s - the - boy, ly - slow, ed - walk. “One of the characteristics of the word is that it tends to be internally stable (in terms of the order of the component morphemes), but positionally mobile”

 

Set expressions are word groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integrated so that they are introduced in speech, so to say, ready-made as units with a specialized meaning of the whole that is not understood as a mere sum total of the meanings of the elements. ((a group of words which exists in he language as a ready-made unit and has the unity of meaning and unity of syntactic function)). Word equivalents are divided in spelling but are in all other respects equivalent to words.

To show the difference between the word and the word-combination we can compare two sequences: place-name and the name of the place. It does not require a close examination to see that they are identical in terms of their lexical meaning, they denote basically the same thing. But grammatically they are different. In the word place-name both elements form one global whole, and together possess the categories of case and number, whereas in the word-combination each component is grammatically independent, i.e. names of places.

If we deal with syncategorematic words we have to use the criterion of residual separability. To state that the definite article 'the' is not a morpheme but an independent word it is necessary to compare it with 'the place', 'the name', 'the sun'. If we put aside these independent words, what we are left with are not parts of the words but separate words of their own. In a way, this is a negative separability.

 

3. Lexical variation of the word. Phonetic variants. Morphological variants. Lexical-semantic variants. Stylistic variants. = The identity-of-unit problem.

FLOWER

object   referent

mind   notion

sign   word “flower”  has meaning (content) and form (expression)

It is often implied that the word is a 'sign' - pure and simple - and has two planes: the expression plane and the content plane. While the expression plane may be the same [boy and бой], the content plane is very different. Or vice versa with the same content [часы] has two expression planes in English watch and clock, the meaning of which is slightly different. The identity of a word requires that in every concrete case the plane of content should be in 1-to-1 correspondence with the plane of expression. This is also called the law of the sign. In reality this law is hardly ever observed in natural human language. For example we will discuss polysemy - different words which are identical in their expression planes - or synonymy - when words have nothing in common as far as their expression is concerned, but the meaning of which can be almost the same.

Thus, we are going to dwell on types of variations as violations of the law of the sign.

 

First comes phonetic variation which is of 3 kinds:

- automatic,- accentual, - emic.

1) Automatic variation comprises the phonetic variants due to assimilative processes on word-boundaries. For example, [now and then] or [bread and butter]. This kind of variation depends on tempo and immediate phonetic context. This kind of variation is most frequently observed in the case of syncategorematic words. They are prone to vary their expression plane under the influence of their immediate phonetic environment. This doesn’t destroy their lexical and semantic globality.

2) The second type is found in the case of several co-existent accentual patterns of the same word = different stresses. Sometimes different stresses are attributed to the difference between British and American variants of pronunciation, like in ['dictionary - dictio'nary] or ['necessary - nece'ssary].

It can be used in poetry. And sometimes even within British English a word can be stressed differently. For example of particular interest in this connection is the fact that in English there exist even-stressed words like upstairs, blue-eyed, Chinese. In the flow of speech this stress is influenced by the environment. Can you speak Chi’nese? This is a ‘Chinese grammar.

3) Emic variation depends on the co-existence of several emic versions of the word. The word –emic means belonging to the system. For example, direct [di'rekt], [dai'rekt] or usage ['ju:zidg], ['ju:sidg], expression [eks] and [iks]

 

Next comes morphological variation. By morphological variant we mean those cases in which one of the morphemes within a word becomes meaningless, that is does not carry the meaning which is normally assumed to belong to it. Smirnitsky distinguishes two kinds of morph. variation:

1) Grammatical morphological. Examples: learn - learned / learnt, bandit - banditi / bandits.

2) Lexical morphological. Examples: pairs in - ic / ical = stylistic / stylistical, mathematic / tical, romantic/ical, anabasnyj / ananasovyi.

To reiterate, in the case of morphological variation we are confronted with the situation when generally a bilateral unit becomes unilateral (no content, only expression plane) and the difference between words ceases to be morphological. In these examples the suffix –ic carries no meaning of its own as compared with pairs: economic- economical. As a result we can no longer regard these units as separate words and must treat them as morphological variants of one and the same word while economic-economical are synonyms.

Now we should turn to the last type of lexical variation - the semantic one. So far we have dealt with the expression plane. Semantic variants are modifications of the content plane. Basically we are confronted with polysemy.

To illustrate semantic variation let's consider the following examples: 1) Do you like your tea sweet? 2) What a very sweet name.

Sweet1 means 'tasting like sugar or honey' while sweet2 means 'pleasant or attractive'. Both variants are registered by dictionaries as belonging to the same entry. Although there is a slight semantic difference between the 2 variants it is not big enough to split up the word into 2 lexical units.

Note that there is a correspondence between semantic and prosodic variants. The difference in the expression plane is emphasized by the opposition of prosody: What a very sweet (slowly) name.

The pastry melted in the mouth. // my heart melted as I sorted him out.

Allo- -emic principle underlying the whole science. –Emes are constant entities, invariants and allos being variants, variable entities.

Thus lexical morphology is  morphic and  semic

Grammatical morphology is  allomorphic and  sememic

The suffix –emic means belonging to the system, seme – carrier of some concrete meaning.

Allomorphes are variants of morpheme. For example [s] and [z] are the allomorphs of the morpheme of the 3d person singular when attached to a verbal stem taken in isolation [s] and [z] don’t convey a distinct grammatical meaning, for it becomes clear only against the background of the entire system of grammatical opposition.

With lexical morphemes the situation is quite different. The suffix –less, for example, is morphemic because there are no variants, no allomorphs. On the other hand its meaning is understood as such without recourse to the emic level. They are understood very much in the same way as words are. Lexical morphemes therefore are described as semic.

 

Etymology.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the vocabulary of any language is never stable,   never  static, but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The changes in the vocabulary of a language are due both to linguistic and extralinguistic causes or to a combination of both. The extralinguistic causes are determined by the social nature of the language. In this respect there is a tremendous difference between Lexicology, on the one hand, and Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, on the other. Words, to a far greater degree than sounds, grammatical forms, or syntactical arrangements, are subject to change, for the word-stock of a language directly and immediately reacts to changes in social life, to whatever happens in the life of the speech community in question,

The part played by borrowings in the vocabulary of a language depends upon the history of each given language, being conditioned by direct linguistic contacts and political, economic and cultural relationships between nations. English history contains innumerable occasions for all types of such contacts. It is the vocabulary system of each language that is particularly responsive to every change in the life of the speaking community. Nowhere, perhaps, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consist of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due to specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific features marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

 

As far as the origin of the word is concerned, the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A native word is a word which belongs to the original English stock as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. The native words are further subdivided into those of the Indo-European stock and those of common Germanic origin. Words of Indo-European stock form the oldest layer and readily fall into definite semantic groups (kinship: father, daughter, nature: wind, water, animals, parts of the human body, some of the most often used verbs – sit, stand, some numerals – two, three).

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch. Together with the words of the common I-E stock they form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words.

Words from the native word-stock are for most part characterized by a wide range of valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy, often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch<OE waeccan is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sentence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and combined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean ‘the act of watching’, ‘the guard’ (on ships), ‘a period of duty for part of the ship’s crew’, ‘a period of wake-fulness’, ‘close observation’, ‘a time-piece’, etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are: be on the watch, watch one’s step, keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb The watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying.

 

A loan (or a borrowed word) is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

Alongside loan words proper, we distinguish loan translation and semantic loans. Translation loans (кальки) are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in British, but according to patterns taken from another language, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme or word-for-word translation. (goes without saying = va sans dire, wonder child = Wunderkind). In this case the notion is borrowed from a foreign language but is expressed by native lexical units: collective farm (Russian) – колхоз. Some translation loans appeared in English from Latin  already in the Old English period, e.g. Sunday – solis dies.