Lexicology as a Branch of Linguistics
1. The object and tasks of lexicology.
2. Connection of Lexicology with Other Parts of Linguistics.
3. Branches of Lexicology.
4. The Basic Units of the Lexical System of the Language.
5. Methods of lexicological research.
Key words: lexicology, vocabulary, word, word-group, lexeme, general lexicology, special lexicology, historical lexicology, descriptive lexicology, synchronic approach, diachronic approach.
Recommended Literature:
1. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка / И.В. Арнольд; на англ. яз. – 3-е изд. – М.: Высш. шк., 1986. – C. 9–26.
2. Лексикология английского языка / Р.З. Гинзбург [и др.]; на англ. яз. – 2-е изд., испр. и доп. – М.: Высш. шк., 1979. – C. 7 – 12.
3. Rayevska N.M. English Lexicology. – Kyiv: Vysĉa Škola, Publishers, 1979. – P. 7 – 36.
Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of
the closest study. (Aldous Huxley, an English writer)
1. The object and tasks of lexicology.
Lexicology (from Greek “lexis” “word” and “logos” – “learning”) is a branch of linguistics which studies the vocabulary of the language and characteristic features of words and word-groups. Lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. The term was introduced by Benjamin Lee Whorf in 1938. Thus in the sentence Mary has a lot of disks and she gave me her favourite disk yesterday the words disk and disks are perceived as two words but actually these are the grammatical variants of one lexeme.
The term “vocabulary” (other terms are lexicon, word-stock) is used to denote the system of words and word-groups that the language possesses. To study the lexicon of English is to study all aspects of the vocabulary of language – how words are formed, how they have developed, how they are used, how they relate in meaning to each other, and how they are handled in dictionaries.
Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims and methods of scientific research, its basic task is a study and systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development and current use. Lexicology is concerned with words, word-groups, phraseological units, and with morphemes which make up words. It investigates very important problems of lexicon, such as word-meaning, word formation, principles of classification of vocabulary units and many others.
Subdivision of lexicology as a science
Distinction is generally made between General Lexicology and Special Lexicology. General lexicology is the general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language. Special Lexicology studies the description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a particular language (e.g., English, Ukrainian).
The evolution of any vocabulary, as well as of its single elements, forms the object of historical lexicology or etymology. This branch of linguistics discusses the origin of various words, their change and development, and investigates the linguistic (relations between language units) and extra-linguistic (political, economic, historical, geographic) factors modifying their structure, meaning and usage.
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 (e.g., a study on the basis of English, German and Ukrainian).
Descriptive lexicology deals with the lexical system of a language as it exists at the present time. It studies the functions of words and their morphological and semantical structures, investigating the interdependence between these two aspects.
Vocabulary of any language can be approached in two basically different ways – 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).
A happy example illustrating the difference between these approaches and their interrelation are the words to beg and beggar . Synchronically the word beggar is perceived as derived from to beg by analogy with such cases as to sing > singer, to teach > teacher, etc. But using the diachronic approach we discover that the word beggar was borrowed from Old French beghard, and to beg originated from beggar by backformation (the formation of a word from the stem (base) of another word, i.e. by means of cutting off suffixes (prefixes) from the source word. See also the formation of the words: to burgle from the word burglar; to enthuse from enthusiasm, to legislate from legislator). A similar example is the Russian word зонтик, which synchronically is considered a suffixal derivative of зонт. But the diachronic approach proves that the word зонтик was borrowed from Dutch zonnedeck, and зонт was coined later by backformation.
2.Connection of lexicology with other parts of linguistics.
As the word is studied in other parts of linguistics, lexicology is closely connected with other branches of linguistics: Phonetics, Grammar, Stylistics and the History of the Language. Phonetics, for example, investigates the phonetic structure of language and is concerned with the study of the outer sound-form of the word. If we change some sounds in the word, we receive the word with a different meaning (read –rod; ship – sheep; cow – bow etc.).
Grammar is the study of the grammatical structure of the language which deals with various means of expressing grammatical relations between words as well as with patterns of combining words into word-groups and sentences. Words belong to some part of speech and have some lexico-grammatical characteristics of the word class to which they belong. When the grammatical form of the word is changed, the meaning is changed as well (picture – pictures; work – works; colour – colours (прапор); look – looks; arm – arms etc.) lexicalization of a grammatical form. In all these words the suffix -s signals a new word with a new meaning. The part of speech can be changed too: pocket – to pocket; name – to name; plot – to plot; suit – to suit etc.
There is also a close relationship between lexicology and stylistics which is concerned with a study of a nature, functions and styles of languages. Both lexicology and stylistics study the problems of meaning, synonymy, functional differentiation of vocabulary according to the sphere of communication and some other issues.
Lexicology is connected with the history of the language which studies historical changes, means of enlargening the vocabulary borrowings from different languages. Thus, in old English the word “stool” meant any kind of seat. Later on the French borrowing – word “chair” came and the word “stool” changed its meaning. Now “stool” means the seat without a back. The word “readen” lost its inflexion. (That is why due to these changes English vocabulary has very many homonymous forms).
Lexicology is bound up with sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics investigates the extralinguistic or social causes of the changes in the vocabulary of a language. The wordstock of a language directly and immediately reacts to changes in social life. The intense development of science and technology, which is a social, i.e. an extralinguistic factor, has lately given birth to a great number of new words, e.g.: CDROM (‘compact disc readonly memory: a CD on which large quantities of information can be stored to be used by a computer, etc.’), email (‘a system that allows you to send and receive messages by computer’), SMS (‘technical short message service: a method of sending a text message to a mobile phone’).
3. Branches of lexicology.
Lexicology can be subdivided into the following branches: etymology, word-building, semantics, phraseology, lexicography etc., each of which has its own aim of study, its own object of investigation, its own methods of linguistic research.
• Etymology is a specific branch of lexicology, the goal of which is the discovery of the origin of words and their primary meanings.
• Wordbuilding studies the formation of new words with the help of various word-building means.
• Onomasiology (Gr. onomasia ‘name’ and ‘logos’ – ‘learning’) is the study of means and ways of naming the elements of reality. It also received the name of Theory of Nomination. This science shows how the objects receive their names and what features are chosen to represent them. It is oriented at the speaker who chooses the form for the concept. For example, Juliet chooses the form rose for the concept of a flower.
• Semantics (semasiology) (Gr. sēmasia – meaning) studies the meanings of lexical units. It is oriented at the addressee (listener, reader) who perceives the form and correlates it with the concept. We, the readers, perceive the sound or graphical form of the word and imagine the flower of a red colour with a pleasant smell.
• Phraseology studies special lexical units (idioms, set-phrases, etc.)
• Lexicography – an applied branch which deals with the science of compiling dictionaries.
4. The Basic Units of the Lexical System of the Language.
The definition of the word is one of the most difficult in linguistics because the word has many aspects. It has a sound form because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes; it has its morphological structure, being a certain arrangement of morphemes; it is used in different word-forms and various meanings in speech. The phoneme, morpheme and sentence have their fixed place in the language system, whereas the word belongs both to the morphological and to the syntactical and lexical planes. The word is a bridge between morphology and syntax. The place of these basic units in the language system can be represented in the following way:
In the course of the development of Lexicology as a science there have been made many attempts to define the term "word". It has been defined syntactically (Henry Sweet, Leonard Bloomfield), semantically (Stephan Ullmann), phonologically (Charles Hockett) and by combining various approaches (E. Sapir, John Lyon etc). But so far no exhaustive definition of the word has been given by linguists. A description seems to be more appropriate than the definition. We stick to the definition of Russian scholars Viktor Vladimirovich Vinogradov, Aleksandr Ivanovich Smirnitskiy, Olga Sergeevna Ahmanova:
1) The word is a dialectal unity of form and content;
2) The word is a structural and semantic entity within a language system, which exists within the latter as a system and unity of all its forms and variants;
3) The word is the basic unit of language syste, the largest on the morphological and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis.
The word as the central lexical unit (LU) is characterized by the following peculiarities:
1) it is easily distinguished by native speakers;
2) it is autonomous. It is the smallest unit of a language which can stand alone as a complete utterance (Flowers!);
3) it has grammatical forms and a certain function in the sentence (noun in the plural+names the oblect of the outer world);
4) it could form a sentence (Flowers!);
5) it could be broken down into smaller parts (flower+s).
The vocabulary units wall, taxi, flowers are words denoting various objects of the outer world.
The morpheme is the smallest lexical unit (e.g., root, affix, prefix)
1) it is not autonomous;
2) it can function only as a part of word;
3) it doesn’t possess grammatical categories or any function in the sentence;
4) it can’t be broken down into meaningful parts. In can be broken down only into phonemes.
5. Methods of Lexicological Research.
The science is said to be formed when it has at its disposal certain methods of investigation.
1. Statistical analysis
Linguists using the statistical method are interested in the frequency of different structural types of words, affixes, the vocabularies of great writers and poets. Statistical regularities can be observed only if the phenomena under analysis are sufficiently numerous. Thus, the first requirement of any statistic investigation is the size of the sample. Statistical analysis presupposes the usage of different mathematical formulae.
2. Componential analysis
In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes or semes. e. g. in the lexical item woman several sememes may be singled out, such as human, not an animal, female, adult.
The analysis of the word girl will show the following sememes: human, female, young. The last component of the two words differentiates them and makes impossible to mix up the words in the process of communication. The formalized representation of meaning helps to find out different semantic components which influence collocability of words (during the day but not during the stairs, down the stairs but not down the day).
3. Immediate constituents analysis was introduced as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are related to one another. The fundamental aim of immediate constituents analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into two maximally independent sequences called immediate constituents, e. g. in the word-group a black jacket in casual style a structure may be represented as a black jacket and in casual style. The further segmentation of immediate constituents results in ultimate constituents, whose further segmentation is impossible as no meaning can be found, e. g. the ultimate constituents of the phrase given are: a, black, jacket, in, casual, style.
4. Distributional analysis in its various forms is commonly used nowadays. By the term distribution we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit in relation to other lexical units of the same levels: words to words, morpheme to morphemes etc. In other words, by this term we understand the position which a lexical unit occupies or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech.
In the sentence: The boy__________ home the missing word is easily identified as a verb. It may be came, ran, went, goes, but not as an adverb or a noun, or an adjective.
5.Transformational analysis may be defined as repatterning (representing, reorganization) of various structures in order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of practically identical patterns. Word-groups of identical structure when repatterned show that the semantic relations between words and consequently the meaning may be different, e.g. a pattern possessive pronoun+noun (his car, his failure, his arrest, his kindness). According to transformational analysis the meaning of each word-group may be represented as: he has a car, he failed, he was arrested, he is kind. In each of the cases different meaning is revealed: possession, action, passive action, quality. The rules of transformation are rather strict and shouldn’t be identified with paraphrasing in the usual sense of the term.