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Н. А. Тарасевич

LEXICOLOGY FOR UPDATERS

ЛЕКСИКОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ ПРАКТИКУМ для слушателей системы повышения квалификации и переподготовки руководящих работников и специалистов

В двух частях

ЧАСТЬ 2

БРЕСТ

БрГУ имени А.С. Пушкина

2009

УДК 811.111+81’373(07)

ББК 81.2Англ.-3

Т 19

Лексикологический практикум разработан с целью формирования и развития семантико-аналитических навыков на материале лексикона современного английского языка. Содержит краткое изложение теоретического материала, сопровождающееся вопросами по ключевым проблемам курса, а также серией практических заданий, которые могут использоваться для аудиторной и самостоятельной работы.

Адресуется слушателям системы повышения квалификации и переподготовки руководящих работников и специалистов на базе высшего образования, а также факультетам и отделениям, осуществляющих обучение английскому языку как основной, так и дополнительной специальности.

Редактор И.Л. Ильичёва

Компьютерная вёрстка А.Ж. Куликова

Contents

2 Morphology……………………………………………………………………4

2.1 English morphemes, their types and classifications…………………………6

2.2 Specific groups of morphemes……………...……………………………….9

2.3 Word-derivation…………………………………........................................13

2.4 Composition………………………………………………………..............22

2.5 Conversion………………………….………………………………………28

2.6 Sources of replenishment of the English vocabulary………………………34

Practical assignments…………………………………………………...............37

Literature…………………………………………………………….......55

2 Morphology

Lexicology studies the language at morphological level. Morphemes are two-faceted units that possess both form and meaning. Morphemes are divided into two main classes: lexical morphemes and grammatical (functional) morphemes. Lexical morphemes are able of producing new words while grammatical ones build word-forms. Lexicology deals with lexical morphemes that can influence or change the lexical meaning of the word. Such grammatical morphemes as inflections (to take – takes; to work – worked), infixes (to stand – stood – stood) do not belong to the domain of Lexicology.

Being the smallest meaningful units of the language, morphemes display definite types of meanings and forms. In the word-cluster please, pleasing, pleasure, pleasant the root-morpheme is represented by different phonemic shape though the lexical meaning is the same. In such cases we say that the phonemic shapes of the word stand in complementary distribution or alternation with each other. All the representatives of the given morpheme that manifest alteration are called allomorphs or morpheme variants.

Semantically morphemes reveal lexical, functional, differential and distributional meaning. Lexical meaning can easily be found in one-morpheme words of the English language. The lexical meaning of the word boy, for example, is very much the same as the lexical meaning of the root-morpheme boy- in such lexemes as boyhood, boyish. Just as in words lexical meaning in morphemes may also be divided into denotational and connotational components. The connotational component of meaning may be found not only in root-morphemes but in affixational morphemes as well. Endearing and diminutive suffixes, e.g., –ette (kitchenette), -ie(y) (dearie, girlyie), -ling (duckling) clearly bear a heavy emotive charge. Morphemes of the same denotational meaning may differ in connotation only. The morphemes –ly, -like, -ish have the denotational meaning of similarity (womanly, womanlike, womanish). The connotational component, however, ranges from the positive evaluation in womanly to the derogatory in womanish. The lexical meaning in morphemes is, as a rule, of more generalized character. The suffix –er, e.g., carries the meaning ‘the agent, the doer of the action’; the suffix –less denotes lack or absence of something.

Functional (part-of-speech) meaning may be expressed in morphemes to a various extent. The morphemes –er, -less clearly dispose both lexical and part-of-speech meaning. In the morphemes –ment, -ous the functional meaning prevails while the lexical meaning is but vaguely felt. In some cases the part-of-speech meaning predominates. The morpheme –ice in the word justice serves principally to transfer the morpheme just- into another class and namely that of noun. It follows that some morphemes possess only the functional meaning.

Differential meaning is the semantic component that serves to distinguish one word from all others containing identical morphemes. In words consisting of two or more morphemes one of the components always has a differential meaning. E.g. in the word bookshelf, the morpheme –shelf serves to distinguish the word from other lexemes containing the morpheme book- (bookcase, book-counter). In the word notebook the morpheme note- distinguishes notebook from exercise-book, copybook. The differential meaning and the denotational meaning do not either coincide or exclude each other. When the denotational meaning is not clear enough it the differential meaning only that serves as a distinguishing means between lexemes allowing no confusion, e.g. deduce, reduce, induce, produce, etc.

Distributional meaning is the meaning of the order and arrangement of morphemes making up the word. It is found in all lexemes containing more than one morpheme. The word singer is composed of two morphemes sing-and –er both of which possess the denotational meaning (to make musical sounds and the doer of the action). The definite arrangement of the component morphemes enables the correct understanding of the meaning of the word and at the same time serves as a means of singling out a meaningful string of signs in actual speech. Any other order of arrangement brings about a senseless combination of sounds.

As morphemes are the component parts of lexemes all English words can be divided into two large classes depending on their ability to be segmented into morphemes. Segmentable lexemes allow of dividing into morphemes, e.g. agreement, information, fearless, quickly, door-handle. Non-segmentable lexemes cannot be divided into morphemes, e.g. house, girl, husband, carry, nice, busy.

The operation of breaking a segmentable word into constituent morphemes is referred to as the analysis of word-structure on the morphemic level. The morphemic analysis aims at splitting a segmentable word into its constituent morphemes and to determine their number and type.