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Contents

PART I. THEORY OF THE WORD …………………………………….		7
SECTION I	LEXICOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF LINGUISTICS. GENERAL PROBLEMS OF THE THEORY OF THE WORD …….	7
SECTION II	ETYMOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE ENGLISH WORD-STOCK	9
SECTION III	MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF THE ENGLISH WORD. WORD-FORMATION ………………………………………………	12
SECTION IV	LEXICAL MEANING AS A LINGUISTIC CATEGORY. SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF WORDS. POLYSEMY AND HOMONYMY ……………………………………………………….	16
SECTION V	SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION OF WORDS. SYNONYMY …….	20
SECTION VI	LEXICAL-PHRASEOLOGICAL COMBINABILITY OF WORDS. PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS ……………………………………….	23
SECTION VII	STYLISTIC LAYERS OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY. TERMINOLOGY ……………………………………………………..	25
SECTION VIII	REGIONAL VARIETIES OF THE VOCABULARY. VOCABULARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH ……………………..	28
SECTION IX	LEXICOGRAPHY …………………………………………………..	30
PART II. WORD ANALYSIS ……………………………………………		32
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION ……………………………………………..		44
REFERENCES …………………………………………………………….		45

От авторов

Вначале было слово… Человеческий язык – это язык слов… Слова, слова, слова… Прошу слова… Слово не воробей… Слов нет…

В Библии, в художественной литературе, в пословицах и в быту понятие “слово” фактически отождествляется с языком. Слово – основная единица языка. Мы живем в мире слов. Мы их произносим, читаем, слышим, мы ими мыслим. Но для того, чтобы быть способным еще и учить словам, необходимо осмыслить словарный состав языка с позиции научных знаний. Именно эта задача ставится в курсе лексикологии английского языка.

Настоящее пособие по лексикологии базируется на научной школе А.И.Смирницкого и О.С.Ахмановой. Оно включает результаты научных исследователей ученых, следующих традициям этой школы – Н.Б.Гвишиани, Э.М.Медниковой, Л.В.Минаевой, С.Г.Тер-Минасовой. Основные научные понятия, раскрываемые в пособии, трактуются на базе Словаря лингвистических терминов О.С.Ахмановой (М.: Советская энциклопедия, 1966) и учебного пособия по лексикологии Э.М.Медниковой (М.: Высшая школа, 1978).

Пособие включает в себя две части. Первая часть (Theory of the Word) фактически представляет собой развернутую программу курса: все основные раздела лексикологии представлены в виде перечня изучаемых вопросов, содержание каждого вопроса раскрывается в виде тезиса, а каждый термин сопровождается его научным определением. Кроме того, в разделы этой части включены отдельные фрагменты теоретических трудов по лексикологии. Они предваряются заданиями и вопросами, которые помогут студентам не только лучше усвоить достаточно сложные аспекты данной науки, но и приобрести навыки чтения научной литературы по филологической тематике. Источники, из которых заимствованы тексты, указываются в разделе References. Основные вопросы курса названы в разделе Topics for Discussion. Студенты могут ориентироваться на список этих вопросов при подготовке к экзамену по лексикологии.

Вторая часть (Word Analysis) включает задания, которые позволяют применить полученные знания в практике лексикологического анализа и, таким образом, лучше понять основные категории лексикологии, проверить, насколько они действительно усвоены. В составлении этих заданий принимали участие преподаватели кафедры английского языка, осуществляющие программу по лексикологии: Е.В.Гусева, М.С.Чернова, В.Б.Гудкова. Авторы выражают своим коллегам искреннюю признательность за ценный вклад в подготовку данного раздела.

Пособие в течение ряда лет апробировалось на отделении английского языка Самарского государственного педагогического университета. Для студентов этого отделения пособие является в буквальном смысле настольной книгой: оно позволяет избежать трудностей, связанных с конспектированием лекций на иностранном языке и значительно облегчает самостоятельную работу по предмету.

Part I. THEORY OF THE WORD

Section 1

LEXICOLOGY AS A BRANCH OF LINGUISTICS.

GENERAL PROBLEMS OF THE THEORY OF THE WORD

The term “lexicology”. Vocabulary of the language as the object of lexicology.

The domain of lexicology: semantic structure of the word, morphological structure of the word, the vocabulary of a language as a system, phraseology, differentiation of words with respect to time axis, etymology of the words, regional varieties of the vocabulary.

General lexicology and special lexicology. Historical lexicology and descriptive lexicology. Comparative lexicology. Lexicography.

The connection of lexicology with phonetics (the study of the sound form of the word), grammar (the study of grammatical meanings of words and grammatical relations between them), stylistics (the study of words in different linguistic situations).

Theoretical significance of lexicology. The importance of lexicological research for lexicography, literary criticism, machine translation, foreign language study, training teachers.

The word as the basic unit of the language. Lexical units of the language: words, morphemes, phraseological units.

The word as the unity of expression (sound form) and content (meaning). Linguistic meaning as the reverberation in the human consciousness of objective reality that constitutes the inner structure of linguistic units with respect to which their expression is the outer structure. Meaning as distinct from notion.

Lexical (material) meaning and grammatical (categorial) meaning. The slovoform (word-form).

The word as characterised by the qualities of separability and separateness. The size-of-unit problem. The criterion of grammatical formedness in distinguishing the word from the morpheme. The word as distinct from the word-combination.

The identity-of-unit problem. Variants of the expression plane of the word and variants of the content plane of the word. Phonetic, grammatical morphological, lexical morphological, semantic variants of the word.

Working Definitions of Principal Concepts

Language	a semiological system serving as the main and basic means of human communication
Vocabulary	the totality of words in the language
Diachrony	historical development of the system of language as the object of linguistic investigation
Diachronic	historical
Synchrony	a conventional isolation of a certain stage in the development of language as the object of linguistic investigation
Synchronic	representing one historical stage in the development of language
Speech	the activity of man using language to communicate with other men, i.e. the use of different linguistic means to convey certain content

Word	the basic unit of language, the unity of expression (sound form) and content (meaning). It corresponds to the object of thought (referent) and by referring to it names the thing meant
Lexical meaning	the concrete material meaning of a word, which reflects the concept the given word expresses
Grammatical meaning	the categorial meaning, which is of a more abstract character, because it can be understood only against the background of certain oppositions
Paradigm	the system of grammatical forms of a word
Lexeme	a word in all its meanings and forms

1. Read the following and answer the questions. What is meant by “separability” and “separateness” of a word? What criteria are applied to single out categorematic and syncategorematic words?

It has been proved that to a greater or less degree, all lexical units possess the qualities of both “separability” and “separateness”.

As has been conclusively shown by A.I.Smirnitsky, words are separable because they are monolithic global units, possessing the so-called ‘grammatical whole-formedness’ (‘cel’nooformlennost’). Thus, for instance, the noun fox (Common Case, Singular Number) seems to be identical with the stem fox- in slovoforms fox-‘s , fox-es, fox-es’ and compound words fox-hole, fox-hound, fox-hunt. But the word fox has both the lexical meaning of the stem fox- and the categorial meaning of the noun. Besides, the noun fox possesses the grammatical meanings of Common Case and Singular Number. The stem fox- is devoid of these features. Thus, the word, in contrast with the morheme, is characterized by grammatical whole-formedness.

If categorematic words possess direct separability, syncategorematic words are negatively separable because they are left when everything else has been “taken out” of a sentence. To establish the status of syncategorematic words, we must take into consideration those words with which the word under analysis is combined in speech. For instance, we know that ‘startle’, ‘amuse’ are full-fledged words which possess direct separability because of their grammatical whole-formedness. It follows, that in ‘Mr.Smith was startled and amused by this absence of tie’ the word ‘and’ is separable indirectly or negatively [1].

2. Read the passage. Answer the questions: What is meant by the ‘identity-of-unit problem’? What are the three types of variants of the word? Which of them deal with 1) the expression plane of the word? 2) the content plane of the word?

The term ‘identity-of-unit problem’ corresponds to the Russian ‘problema tozhdestva slova’ which was first introduced by V.V.Vinogradov.

It is often implied, if not actually asserted, that the word is a ‘sign’ pure and simple because its expression plane is in one-to-one correspondence with its content. But in actual fact the ‘law of the sign’ is hardly ever observed in natural human language. Among the most widely recognized instances of the violation of the ‘law of the sign’ in the lexis of a language are polysemy – non-uniqueness of the content plane with singleness of expression, homonymy – different words identical in their expression planes, synonymy – words which have nothing in common as far as their expression is concerned but the content of which may be shown to be nearly the same.

Various ‘departures’ from the one-to-one correspondence of expression and content may be within the same word. They are described in terms of variants of the word: phonetic, morphological and semantic ones.

Phonetic variation is of three kinds: 1) automatic, 2) accentual, 3) emic.

Automatic variation comprises phonetic variants which are due to assimilative processes on word-boundaries. This kind of variation is most frequently observed in the case of syncategorematic words: they vary their expression plane under the influence of their immediate phonetic environment. This does not, however, destroy their lexical and semantic globality.

The second kind of phonetic variation is found in the case of several co-existent accentual patterns of the same word: ‘necessary-neces’sary, ‘contrary-cont’rary, ‘territory-terri’tory, ‘dictionary-dictio’nary, etc.

The third type of phonetic variation depends on the co-existence of several ‘emic’ versions of the sound-caul in question, which are characteristic of words as vocabulary units, for example:

Asian [ei n, -si n, -zi n, -z n]

begin [bi’gin, b ‘gin]

ceramic [si’r mic, s ‘r mick, ki’r mik, k ‘r mik]

direct [di’rekt, d ‘r-, dai’r-]

explain [ik’splein, ek’splein].

Next comes morphological variation. By morphological variant we mean those cases in which one of the morphemes within a word becomes meaningless, i.e. it does not carry the meaning which is normally assumed to belong to it. A.I.Smirnitsky distinguishes two kinds of morphological variation: grammatical morphological and lexical morphological. Thus, learn-learnt, learn-learned, bandit-banditi, bandit-bandits are examples of grammatical morphological variation, while pairs in -ic, -ical, such as stylistic-stylistical, mathematic-mathematical, etc. are examples of lexical morphological variation. In these examples the suffix -al carries no meaning of its own. As a result we can no longer regard units of this kind as separate words and must treat them as morphological variants of one and the same words.

Another kind of lexical variation is the semantic one. Semantic variants are modifications of the content plane of a word. What is described as semantic variants is much better known by the name of polysemy. The notion of semantic variation implies the globality of the word when used in different meanings. To illustrate semantic variation let us consider the following examples: Do you like your tea sweet? What a very sweet name. Sweet1 means “tasting like sugar or honey” while sweet2 is “pleasant or attractive”. Both variants are registered by all the dictionaries as belonging to the same entry. Although there is a slight semantic difference between the two variants it is not big enough to split the word into two lexical units [2].