Лекции по "Лексикологии"

I. The noun is the name of a tool or implement, verb denotes an action performed by the tool: to hammer, to nail, to pin, to brush, to comb, to pencil.

II. The noun is the name of an animal, the verb denotes an action or aspect of behaviour considered typical of this animal: to dog, to wolf, to monkey, to ape, to fox, to rat. Yet, to fish does not mean "to behave like a fish" but "to try to catch fish". The same meaning of hunting activities is conveyed by the verb to whale and one of the meanings of to raC the other is "to turn informer, squeal" (si.).

III. The name of a part of the human body - an action performed by it: to hand, to leg (si.), to eye, to elbow, to shoulder, 10 nose, to mouth. However, to face does not imply doing something by or even with one's, face but turning it in a certain direction. To back means either "to move backwards" or, in the figurative sense, "to support somebody or something".

IV. The name of a profession or occupation - an activity typical of it: to nurse, to cook, to maul, to groom..

V. The name of jrplace- the process of occupying the place or of putting smth./smb. in it, (to room, k> house, to place, to table, to cage).

VI. The name of a container — the act of putting smth. within the container {to can, to bottle, to pocket).

VII. The name of a meal - the process of taking it (to lunch, to supper).

Composition

This type of word-building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems, is one of the three most productive types in Modern English; the other' two are conversion and affixation.

There are at least three aspects of composition that present special interest.

At the first is the structural aspect. Compounds are not homogeneous in structure. Traditionally three types are distinguished: neutral, morphological syntactic.

I. In neutral compounds the process of compounding is realized without any clinking elements, by a mere juxtaposition of two stems, as in blackbird, shop-window, sunflower, bedroom, tallboy, etc. There ate three subtypes of neutral compounds depending on the structure of the constituent stems.

The examples above represent the subtype which may be described as simple neutral compounds: they consist of simple affixless stems.

Compounds which have affixes in their structure are called derived or derivational compounds. E. g. Absent-mindedness, blue-eyed, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, lady-killer, film-goer.

The Third subtype of neutral compounds is called contracted compounds. These words have a shortened (contracted) stem in their structure: TV-set (-program, -show, -canal, etc.), V-day (Victory day), G-man (Government man "FBI agent"), H-bag (handbag), T-shirt, etc.

II. Morphological compounds are few in number. This type is non-productive. It is represented by words in which two compounding stems are combined, by a linking vowel or consonant, e. g. Anglo-Saxon, Franko-Prussian, handiwork, handicraft, spokesman, statesman.

III. In syntactic compounds (the term is arbitrary) we once more find a feature of specifically English word-structure. These words are formed from segments of speech, preserving in their structure numerous traces of syntagmatic relations typical of speech: articles, prepositions, adverbs as in the nouns lily-of-the-va!ley, Jack-of-all-trades, mother-in-law, sit-at-home, go-between, get-together.

The last word (meaning "a detective story") was obviously coined from the ungrammatical variant of the word-group who (has) done it.

Focus of interest is the semantic aspect of words can the meaning of a compound word be regarded as the sum of its constituent meanings?

There are roughly 3 groups of compounds.

The suggested subdivision into three groups is based on the degree of semantic cohesion 'of the constituent parts,

a)   The first group consists of non-idiomatic compounds: their meanings are the sum of their constituent meanings. Ex.: Classroom, bedroom, working-man, evening-gown, dining-room, sleeping-car, leading-loom, dancing-hall.

b)   The shift of meaning becomes much more pronounced in the second group of examples. Blackboard, blackbird, football, lady-killer, pickpocket, good-for-nothing, lazybones, etc., where the meaning of the whole word can not be defined as the sum of the constituent meanings.

c)   In the third group of compounds the process of deducing the meaning of the whole from those of the constituents is impossible: ladybirds not a bird, but an insect, tallboy not a boy but a piece of furniture, bluestocking, on the contrary, is a person whereas bluebottle may denote both a flower and an insect but never a bottle, man-of-war ("warship"), merry-go-round ("carousel"), mother-of-pearl ("ir The Germanic element represents words of roots common to all or most Germanic languages. Some of the main groups of Germanic words are the same as in the Indo-European element.

I. Parts of the human body: head, hand, arm, finger, bone.

II. Animals: bear, fox, calf.

III. Plants: oak, fir, grass.

IV. Natural phenomena: ram, frost.

V. Seasons of the year: winter, spring, summer.

VI. Landscape features: sea, land.

VII. Human dwellings and furniture house, room, bench.

VIII. Sea-going vessels: boat, ship.

I.. Adjectives: green, blue, grey, white, small, thick-high, old, good. X Verbs: sec, hear, speak, fell, say, answer, make, give, drink.

The English proper element is opposed to the first two groups. Not only can it be approximately dated, but these words {being specifically English) have no cognates in other languages where as for Indo-European and Germanic words such cognates can always be found, as for instance, for the following, words of the Indo-European group.

Star:Germ.. Stem, Lat. Stella, Gr. aster .                         .

Sad:Germ. satt, Lat. satis. R сыт, Snscr. sa- 
Stand:Germ stehen  Lat stare. R стоять

Here are some examples of English proper These words stand quite alone in the vocabulary systems of Indo-European languages bird, boy, girl, lord, lady, woman.

Prof. A I Smirnitsky suggest the following approach to the problem of the etymology of the English language to consider as «native» all the words which may have existed in the English word stock of the VII^th century, relying on the earliest available manuscripts.

The term «native»  will be applied to the word-stock as it existed in the VII^th century and the term «borrowed» - or «loan-words» to the words introduced into English at a later date. At the same time we should distinguish between a) fully assimilated words whose foreign origin is discoverable only by etymological research, for example, to beg, interesting, judge, charm, mariner, courage, etc. and b) partially assimilated words, still felt as not native due to structural and semantic peculiarities, for example, chamois, picturesque, chateau, champagne,huge, etc.

horse-marine ("a person who is unsuitable for his job or position"), butter-fingers ("clumsy person; one who is apt to drop things"), wall-flower("a girl who is not invited to dance at a party"), whodunit ("detective story"). The last 2 groups are idiomatic compounds.

The following joke rather vividly shows what happens if an idiomatic compound is misunderstood as non-idiomatic.

Patient They tell me, doctor, you are a perfect lady-killer.

Doctor: Oh, no, no! I assure you, my dear madam, I make no distinction between the sexes.

A further theoretical aspect of composition is the criteria for distinguishing between a compound and a word-combination.

1. In this case the graphic criterion of distinguishing between a word and a word-group is rather convincing,

2. The phonetic criterion for compounds may be treated as that of a single stress.

3. Morphological and syntactic criteria can also be applied to compound words in order to distinguish them from word-groups.

The word-group a lull boy each of the constituents is independently open to grammatical changes peculiar to its own category as a part of speech: They were the tallest boys in their form.

Between the constituent parts of the word-group other words can be inserted: a lull handsome boy. ,    The compound tallboy-and, in actual fact, any other compound - is not subject to such changes. The first component is grammatically invariable; the plural form ending is added to the whole unit: tallboys. No word can be inserted between the components, even with the compounds which have a traditional separate graphic form.

Shortening (Contraction)

This comparatively new way of word-building has achieved a high degree of productivity nowadays, especially in American English.

Shortenings (or contracted words) are produced in two different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable of the original word. The first may lose its beginning (as in phone made from telephone, fence from defence), its ending (as in hols from holidays, vac from vacation, pops from properties, ad from advertise-mentor both the beginning and ending.

The second way of shortening is to make a new word.

Letters of a word group: U. N. O. from the United Nations Organization, B. B. C. From the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Here are some more examples of informal shortenings. Movie (from moving-picture), gene (from gentleman), specs (from spectacles), circs (from circumstances, e. g. under the circs), I. 0. U. (a written acknowledgement of debt; made from I owe you), lib (from liberty, as in May 1 take the lib of saying something to you?), cert (from certainly, as in This enterprise is a cert if you have a bit of .capital), metrop (from metropoly, e. g. Paris is a gay metrop), exhibish (from exhibition), posish (from position).

Undergraduates' informal speech abounds in words of the type: exam, lab, prof, vac, hoi, co-ed(& girl student at a coeducational school or college).

Some of the Minor Types of Modem Word-Building

1. Sound-imitation. Wolds are made by imitating different kinds of sound: crow: cuckoo, etc.

2. Reduplication. New words are made by doubling a stem, either without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye (coil, for good-bye) or with a variation of the root-vowel 'or consonant as in ping-pong, chit-chat (this second type is "called gradational reduplication).

3. Back-Formation (Reversion).The earliest examples of this type of wold-building are the verb to beg that was made from the French, borrowing beggar, to burgle from burglar, to cobble from horn cobbler. In all these cases the verb was made from the noun by subtracting what was mistakenly associated with the English suffix -er. So, in the case of the verbs to beg, to burgle, to cobble the process was reversed: instead of a noun made from a verb by affixation (as in poorer from to paint), a verb was produced from a noun by subtraction. That is why this type

of word-building received the name of back-formation or reversion.

Later examples of back-formation are to butle from butler, to baby-sit from baby-sitter, to force-land from forced landing, to blood-transfuse from blood-transfusion, to fingerprint from finger printings

The principles of classification of a vocabulary

The vocabulary or a language covers completely the whole reality of human experience, and thus becomes, a systems. In this general system we find smaller, less general systems, such as, for example, the-system of the concept «boy» in English and «мальчик» in Russian.

The principles of classification of a vocabulary are:

1)   Part-of-speech classification, i. e. lexico-grammatical classification;

2)   contextual classification;

3)   logical classification;

1)   Parts of speech pre special classes of words characterized by

a)   common grammatical properties, i. e. grammatical shaping of the words, their syntactical functions, anrl

b)   common lexical properties, 1. e. the general meaning of the whole class, which is manifested through the grammatical properties. Grammer singles out some general meaning and passes in on to lexics. To exemplify:

book- the name of an object

classification - the name of an action or the development of an action

(the) use — the name of an action

Another subdivision in Verbs is that of transitive and intransitive verbs. Here again this division is not decisive. The meaning of the verb is historically devoid of transitiveness or intran-sitiveness. This is a secondary element superimposed upon the general meaning. For instance, the verb run was historically not transitive. In the course of the development of the language - it acquired that additional meaning: to run a company.

Other parts of speech are also very scantily subdivided. The noun is the only class of words with a more or less thoroughly defined subdivision.

2)   Another semantic classification is the one which is connected with the combinability of words. There are words with a wide combinational capacity and those whose combinational capacity extremely limited. For instance, the adjectives good, bad, big, etc. combine with a great number of nouns.

The adjective aquiline has a still more limited combinatory "valence". It is connected with appearance

only (and human appearance at that): aquiline nose.

3)  Another type of classification is the logical classification, called so for want of a better term. Here we find the following subdivisions:

a) logical groups, comprising the general and the particular, e. g. animal, dog, cat, etc,, plant tree, bush, grass.

b) synonymic groups (series), which can be further classified into groups-of stylistic synonyms (horse, steed; begin, commence), ideographic synonyms (house, building etc.) and expressive synonyms (big man and huge man differ not only ideographically, but also by our subjective approach to size and by the emotional coloring of the adjectives big and huge.)

c) arntonymic series (groups) are yet another subdivision of logical classification. Antonyms are words of opposite meanings, such as give - take, come - go, short - long. Antonyms should not be confused with correlative pairs, which arc related through one property only, as day - night, father-son, father - mother

d) Homonyms are words which are identical in sound and spelling or at least, in one of these aspects but different in their meaning.

bank n - 'a shore'

bank n - 'an institution for receiving, lending, exchanging and safeguarding money

  ball n - 'any spherical body

ball n - 'a large dancing party'.

If synonyms and antonyms are regarded as the language expressive resourses, homonyms are not. In the process of communication they can lead to confusion and misunderstanding. Yet it is this very characteristic which makes them one of the most important sources of popular humour. The pun (KaiiaM6yp) is a joke based upon the play on words of similar form but different meanings {i.e. homonyms): - 'Waiter!'

-‘Yes, sir’.

-'What's this?¹

- 'It's bean soup, sir.'

- 'Never mind what it has been. I want to know what it is now!'

'Bean' (n-бобы) and 'been¹ (past participle) of 'to be' are homonym, the same in sound but different in spelling. There are three groups of homonyms:

• which are the same in sound and spelling (homonyms proper - bank, ball, etc.).
• which are the same in sound but different in spelling (homophones - bean - been),
• which are the same in spelling but different in sound (homographs)

LECTURE 5

Meaning and its Types.

Grammatical meaning. Lexical meaning. Part of speech meaning. Denotational and connotational meaning. Emotive charge and stylistic reference. Word meaning and meaning in morphemes.

Meaning is not homogeneous. It consists of some components, which are usually described as types of meaning. The main types to be found in words and word-forms are the grammatical and lexical meaning.

If we take different words (asked, formed, etc.) we shall see that they al! have something in common: the grammatical meaning of the tense. According to the functional approach grammatical meaning can be identified through its relations to other words in a sentence (by its distribution). Different words (likes, runs, etc.) have one and the same grammatical meaning because of their identical distribution (subject, adverb, object).

Besides grammatical meaning there exists another type of meaning, which is the same in different word-forms of one and the same word: to run (runs, ran, running, run). They have the identical semantic components (the process of moving), but different grammatical meaning.

Thus, by lexical meaning we understand the meaning proper (свойственный) to the given linguistic unit, which is the same in all its forms and distributions. Grammatical meaning isms meaning proper to sets of word-forms, common to all the words of a certain class. These two types of meaning cannot exist without each other, as both make up the word meaning.

According to part of speech meaning, the meaning of lexical units can be classified into two word classes: major: nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives; minor:articles, prepositions, conjunctions, particles.

Words of the first class have the lexical component of part of speech meaning. All the nouns have the meaning "thingness" or "substantiality" (предметность). All the verbs have the meaning "process" all the adjectives have the meaning "quality".

Words belonging to the second class differ from the words of major classes. The former (minor) class comprises closed set of units to which new units are never added and they are not numerous. The latter (major) class comprises open sets because new units are constantly added to them and they are endless in number.

The interconnection and interdependence of the lexical and grammatical meanings vary in different word classes, in different groups of words within the class. The lexical meaning of major word classes is more important than its grammatical meaning. In minor word classes the grammatical meaning is more important than the lexical meaning. But there are some words in the major word classes where grammatical meaning prevails and instead of "to be" we use "to turn, to get, to become + adj., to grow".