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However, a study of this kind may deal with the words and vocabularies irrespective of a particular language. In this case this theory shall be named general lexicology. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the words and vocabulary of some given language: as an example there is modern English lexicology. Historical lexicology, sometimes also called etymology or etymological theory, is a separate branch of linguistics, which studies the origin of different words and the ways in which the semantic structure of such words changes in the course of time. Descriptive lexicology deals with the vocabulary of the given language at a given stage of its development. Descriptive lexicology is also named synchronic lexicology.
For example, the word youth distinguishes all in all three of its lexico-grammatical variants: 1) an abstract uncountable noun, having no plural form (юность); 2) a countable personal noun, possessing both the singular and the plural forms (молодой человек); 3) a collective noun denoting a group of people and typically devoid of its plural form (молодежь).
There are mainly two types of lexical meaning, distinguished by the majority of scholars: 1) direct, 2) figurative. The direct meaning is usually conveied with the help of a minimum context. It is attached to the word, even when this word is taken in isolation. The figurative meaning is perceived when the object is not only named, but also characterized through its comparison to some other object. The figurative meaning of words is only created by means of context or situation and appears that is manifests itself in the same.
Other oppositions pointed out by linguists in the meaningful structures of words are concrete meaning – abstract, main (primary) – secondary, central – peripheral, narrow – extended, general – special, etc.
A living language is an everchanging entity. These changes are stimulated by the dynamic character of the life conditions of the speaking community. Generally every principal comparison between the new and the older meanings of the semantic structure of words is based upon the historical aspect of the language. In this case we speak about the out-of-date and present-date meanings of the given word.
The study of the semantic change of words is not only directed backwards that is within the historical parameters of the word, but may also be added by a forecast for the future changes, which are based on the previous semasiological experience. French scholar Michel Breal was the first to emphasize the fact that many lexemes pass a standard way from their general usage into a special or specialized sphere of communication. On this way the word as a rule is subject to the process of specialization of meaning, otherwise named the semantic narrowing. E.g. the word case has a general meaning of circumstances in which someone or something finds him/her/itself. This is, however, only the general meaning of the lexeme and this meaning is narrowed in a law (дело), grammar (падеж), medicine (случай).
At the same time it should be realized that the general meaning, unlike the specialized or narrowed one, is normally perceived without the help of the context, while the narrowed meanings need a minimum context or situation to be realized as such. E.g. the Possessive Case is the minimum context for case in grammar.
The word cell denotes different meanings for biologists (клетка), electrician (элемент), nun (келья), prisoner (камера). These meanings create the semantic paradigm. It is also important that the semantic paradigm embraces only the meanings and meaning shades which are interconnected, and these should be perceived synchronically. Hence the word case meaning портфель stands beyond the boundaries of the basic semantic paradigm, although historically it shows its connection with the same.
The phenomenon of specialization of meaning may be viewed both as a final result and a dynamic process. The result is manifested through a more or less developed paradigm, while the process is in fact a diachronic development of the above paradigm.
Some examples of diachronic specialization of meaning are:
1. Reds and mice and such small deer (W. Shakespeare). In OE (old English) deer meant any wild animal.
2. OE mete meant any food, but was modified in ME (modern English) meat, which means edible flesh that is a particular sort of food.
3. OE fuзol (compare Germal Vogel), was modified in ME fowl meaning domestic birds only.
In the above examples the new meaning superseded all the possible old ones. However, there are cases, when both meanings, general and narrow, coexist within the semantic structure of one word, which is this time polysemantic. E.g. ME token came into being from OE tacen (compare to German Zeichen), but later the word sign appeared in the English language, and both these forms were brought into mutual competition. As a result token in its use became restricted to only few cases, manifesting themselves in only fixed contexts, e.g. a token of love, a token of respect, a token payment, a token vote, etc. Thus in ME token means something small, unimportant or cheap, which represents something big, important, valuable and perhaps spiritual.
Other vivid examples of this type are room, the old meaning being “space” and the new one being “комната”, though both coexist nowadays. Corn has old meaning of any grain, new maize in American English (as the corn was found in America, raised by Indians, and colonists called it corn, as they thought it was a special kind of corn).
Above shown were the cases of specialization of meaning, which takes place within the boundaries of one national language that is modern English. But there also is an alike process, though possessing its own specific features, which may take place between two different languages, when a lexical form is borrowed by one language from another. In this latter case the semantic change may be much deeper and reach the level of complete modification and alteration of the original meaning.
A process reverse to specialization is named by the scholars generalization of meaning or widening of such. Here the scope of new notions becomes much greater than the scope within the original form. The regularity is such that generalization is combined with a much higher degree of abstraction of the original notion, e.g.:
1. ME ready meaning prepared (for practically anything) was a derivative of OE redan which in its term was a derivative of ridan meaning to ride a horse, so initially ready meant ready for a horse ride.
2. The word fly originally meant to move through the air with the help of wings only, but these days it means any movement through the air.
3. The word person is another vivid example here. It was borrowed into Middle English from old French, where it was persone, where it came from Latin persona meaning the mask used by an actor and, at the same time, metonymycally the actor himself, who wears that mask and plays that part, that is the character in a play. The mask was called persona, per meaning “through” and sonare meaning “to sound”, so the mask was used as a special instrument amplifying the actor’s voice. The term was first metonymycally transferred to the charater and then, due to the generalization of meaning, attached to any human being without any reference to the theatrical terminology.
Thus the word person belongs to the category of generic terms, that is non-specific words, applicable to a greater class of members of some larger group.
The two other types of the regular transfer of the name from one object to another are metaphor, based on the association of similarity or contiguity, and metonymysation based on the partial character of objects in metonymy.
Examples of metaphors are: a lioness (woman), a cat (nice guy).
Examples of metonymy: a skirt (woman (in a skirt)), a white collar (clerk).
There are also non-stylystic language metaphors: a foot of a mountain, an eye of a needle, the teeth of a saw, the back of a book (cover), the stone of a fruit, etc.
Examples of anthropomorphic metaphors: the head of an army, the arms and the mouth of a river, the tongue of a bell, etc.
Such a metaphoric transition may also include proper names and thus form cases of antonomasia, like a don juan (less rude for womanizer), an adonis (self-loving person), a jesebel (shameless woman, from the femitian wife of biblician Ahab), hunns, etc.
An important linguistic cause is differentiation of synonyms within the language. This differentiation is often based on the assimilation of loanwords. E.g. the words time and tide used to be synonyms in English and later tide began to denote shifting waters, and the word time is still used in its general sense. The word beast was borrowed into English from Latin (bestia) and displaced the English word deer, but it was later in its term displaced by another Latin loanword animal (animus), so as a result of a double-borrowing the two earlier words deer and beast, narrowed their meanings.
Another linguistic phenomenon, responsible for the semantic change, is ellipsis, which takes place in case of the most frequently used phrases: cut-price sale turned into sale, mass media is often used as media, ice may mean icecream. The word starve (compare to German sterben) once meant “to die”, but it is now used in the meaning “to be dying\ of hunger”.
These causes are much more numerous and versatile than the linguistic ones and they are also better studied. The point here is that any language is powerfully affected by social, political, economic, cultural, and technical changes in people’s lives. The influence of these factors upon linguistic phenomena is studied by sociolinguistics. Life may influence not only the vocabularly, but also the inner language structure. For example, terms being words of science in quite a number of cases behave differently from the words of everyday communication.
The extra-linguistic change of meaning often occurs in the course of history. For example, the OE eorde meant “ground under people’s feet” and “the world of men” as opposed to heaven, inhabited by Gods. But with the progress of science it began to denote “the third planet from the Sun”, and with the discovery of electricity “a connection of a conductor with the earth”. The process of conversion brought forth the verb to earth meaning «заземлять».
Another technical term is chain reaction, in which the word chain is used metaphorically. Sometimes we may face a reverse process, when terms start to be used in everyday life in their non-terminological meaning. E.g. to be going full steam ahead, to be governized into action.
A morpheme is an association of a definite meaning, at times rather abstract with a definite sound pattern. All morphemes fall under quite a limited number of models, so morphemes are patterned language units. However, the same is true in the description of words. The difference between these two types of units is that a morpheme is never autonomous in speech, while the word is. A morpheme cannot be a sentence, a single word can. A morpheme is never a finished utterance. It can only be used with other morphemes, thus forming words.
There are many cases, when one morpheme can make one word or a word can consist of one morpheme. This happens with root morphemes, but this is a case of coincidence, when one and the same form acquires two different functions. E.g. the word housing consists of two morphemes: “house” + “ing”. The “ing” morpheme can never function separately, but the morpheme “house” can neither function separately. Every time we have the form house in speech, it changes its function, stops being a morpheme and starts being a word. As a result, there are no cases, where morphemes can be confused with words.
From out of all units having meanings, morphemes are the smallest. There have been many attempts to classify morphemes into various functional groups. The first subdivision states, that morphemes may be bound, that is never used in isolation as words, and on the other hand free, that is homonymous to words.
By their essential characteristics morphemes are divided into two large groups: roots and affixes. Affixes in their term are split into prefixes, suffixes and infixes in accordance with their position in the word structure.
Another subdivision of all affixes is functional, and here affixes may be derivational and functional (in English also named endings, don’t mix with Russian term “окончание”).
*** Besides we should single out a stem, which is the part of the word always staying unchanged throughout the whole grammatical word paradigm. So a stem may not be limited to the root. E.g. in the paradigm heart, hearts and heart’s the stem is “heart”, it’s unchangeable. In another case hearty, heartier, the heartiest the stem is “hearty”. An example of a bound stem is in the word cordial, where “cordi-“ cannot be used in isolation (compare to “hearty”, which is a derived stem, able of being used in isolation.
If we view the problem from the standpoint of etymology of words, then we may see that bound stems are especially characteristc of loanwords (заимствованные слова), which have English affixes. E.g. arrogance, where “arrog-“ is a bound stem. Another example is charity, the stem “char-“ is bound. Coward – “cow-“, distort – “tor-“, involve – “volv-“.
A root is the element common for quite a number of words, which all make a word family. Thus, if we take the example of heart, being a root word, we may derive the following from it:
1) to hearten смягчать, to dishearten разочаровывать, heartily, heartless, hearty, heartiness – all these examples show the single process of affixational derivation;
2) sweetheart, heartshaped, heartbroken, etc. – this being the process of word compounding;
3) kind-hearted – the combination of derivation and compounding.
Roots which are capable of producing new words are named productive roots.
A suffix is a derivational morpheme following the stem (which may include suffixes too).
A prefix is another derivational morpheme, placed before the root and modifying the basic meaning of the word, sometimes turning that meaning into the opposite one.
An infix is placed withing the word structure. This type of affixes shows an extremely low productivity in modern English. E.g. in the word stand the infix is “n” (of course, it’s a historicam morpheme, these days being a root).
The historically viewed process of word building may be schematically shown as follows:
Step 1. Separate words start to be regularly used together with some other words and at fixed positions. In the course of time they become free morphemes, united in one word. E.g. policeman, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, etc. “Man” and “berry” are not roots, they are almost suffixes, or at least semi-affixes.
Step 2. They stop being used autonomously and become morphemes, however, still preserving their initial meaning.
Step 3. They are now never used separately, partially or totally lose their initial meaning and can be determined as morphemes by etymologists only.
Functional affixes serve to convey grammatical meaning, because they create different forms of the same word. An example can be found in any grammatical paradigm, e.g. near [zero affix], nearer [-er- affix], nearest [-est- affix]. Son [zero], sons [-s-], son’s [-‘s], sons’ [-s’].
Derivational affixes are used to supply the stem with components of lexical and lexico-grammatical meaning. Derivational affixes, unlike functional ones, create different words representing different parts of speech. E.g. stone, stony. However, one and the same affix may have one grammatical meaning, but different lexical ones, e.g. “-y-“: cloudy means full of something (e.g. clouds), stony means heaving the quality of or composed of some material (stone), baggy means resembling something (bag), hairy means covered with something (hair), bossy means boss + emotional component.
The above said two types of affixes differ not only semantically, but also positionally, thus a functional affix marks the word boundary, as it may only follow the root or the affix of derivation in the stem. A functional affix may only come last in the word and make any further derivation of that word completely impossible. That is why Eugen Nider calls functional affixes outerformatives, while derivational affixes are called by him innerformatives.
Another problem is that of valency of affixes and the derivational patterns in which the affixes occur. A good example is negative prefixes. We have vocabularly fixed forms unhappy, untrue, unattractive, though similar *unsad, *unfalse, *unpretty do not exist.
The possibility of a particular stem to take a particular affix may also depend on such outer factors as the formal morphological structure of the given word. E.g. the suffix “-ance-/-ence-” may only occur after letters b, t, d, v, l, r: disturbance, insistance, independence, etc. But this suffix can never occur after z or s: condensation, organization, etc.
The whole system of valency of morphemes is a complex problem which should be studied separately and given special concern. The term a word-building patter or a derivational patter denotes a meaningful combination of stems and affixes which regularly occur to indicate:
Thus all the words with the negative prefix “un-“ form the following four patterns:
The last pattern is comparatively rare in modern English.
Affixes can be classified according to their origin, the part of speech they serve, the frequency of usage and the productivity. Within parts of speech they may be subdivided semantically, e.g. there are noun forming, adjectival, numeral, verb and adverb forming suffixes (auntie, nighty, etc.). The same approach can take place in the relation of prefixes.
The term allomorph originated from two Greek elements: allo (“other”) + morph (“form”). Allomorphs are variations of one and the same morpheme, which do not differ in meaning or function, but show a slight difference in either spelling, or sometimes pronunciation, depending on the final phoneme of the preceding stems. Such are the forms “ion”, “sion”, “tion”, “ation”, “ssion”, which are not different suffixes, but a single suffix, manifesting itself in a number of allomorphs. Allomorphs are also defined as positional variants of the same morpheme, occuring in a specific environment. E.g. the stems ending in consonants typically take the “ation” suffix (liberation), the stems ending in p typically only take “tion” (corruption, where the final t becomes fused with the suffix).
A compound word is a unit consisting of at leat two stems, both of them occuring in speech as free forms. In a sentence any compound word functions as a separate lexical unit. There’s a definite set of the formal features by which English compounds can be distinguished and separated from other lexical units:
1) solid or hyphenated spelling;
2) unity of stress, always falling on the first element or syllable (a `green `house – a `greenhouse);
3) semantic unity;
4) the unity of morphological and syntactical functioning of a compound word.
Among the most importan features of compounds is their indivisibility, which can be treated as the impossibility to make any insertions between the two components. Thus if we wish to characterize the word sunbeam we can only say a bright sunbeam and never put bright after sun. The components of a compound word are usually named a determinant, which occupies the left or the initial position, and a determinator, occupying the final position. This opposition is due to the synactical nature of compounds, because in the English sentence determinants usually precede the determined element.
The subdivision of compounds in determinants and determinators was first introduced by English scholar Henry Marchant, who said that the determinator is the basic stem in both grammatical and semantic respects. This is the element taking all possible inflections, e.g. sunbeams.
From the viewpoint of their semantic nature, all compounds can be subdivided into non-idiomatic compounds (also named transparent units) and idiomatic ones. The meanings of the transparent compounds can be easily understood through the meanings of their components, thus a seaman is a man who works at sea, a spaceship is a metaphorical naming of a vehicle travelling through outer space. One can we even create such words with accordance with a pattern without including them in the dictionary and introducing into the living vocabulary.
The meaning of idiomatic compounds may be misleading for those who don’t know the language. E.g. a blackboard may not be black. A wheelchair is a chair for invalids which has wheels, but a pushchair is a special chair for the infants who cannot walk yet, and the trick here is that not every chair which has wheels is for invalids.
The relations between the two elements also prove to be different. This fact may be easily proved by the example of several compounds all based upon one and the same determinant ear: earache (an ache in the ear), earmark (a mark on an animal’s ear), earlobe (a lower part of the ear), eardrops (drops for ears), earring (a ring for the ear). The English language knows quite a large number of tautological compounds, which consists of the elements whose semantic structures partially overlap, e.g. a troutfish, an egineerman, a tumblerglass. An important fact that even in these latter cases the first element specifies the meaning of the second one.
Another approach to studying the semantic structure of compounds is the relation between the compound word on the one hand and the phrases consisting of their elements on the other. E.g. we may draw comparison between an ashtray and a tray for ashes or a hairbrush, a brush for hair, a paperknife and a knife for paper. These relations make scholars think of the existence of definite grammatical patterns of compound words which may be quite unexpectedly violated and broken, thus a bookseller is a person who sells books, a bookbinder is he who binds books, but a bookmaker is not the one who makes books, but who makes his living by taking bets at horse races. These days it also a business term.
The criteria of compounds separating them from the other words of the language are another important problem in modern linguistics. In fact, it is not a question of private interest concerned with the spelling standards of the language, but the problem of the word as a linguistic unit in general.
How can a compound word like a broadsword be distinguished from two separate words a broad sword in fluent speech? Different linguists proposed different approaches to this question which were phonological, morphological, syntactical and graphical criteria. The least scientific of these all is, of course, the last one, because it is natural that those two stems which are written down together or through a hyphen should form one word. The objections to the graphical criterion may be:
The phonological criterion. It is true that all English compounds are stressed on the first syllable. However, this rule loses its validity with the compound adjectives which have two equal stresses, e.g. grey-green, newborn, easy-going, deep-purple, etc. Besides the forestress may occur with those combinations of words in which the second element is repeated in a single utterance, e.g. it was a dining table, not a writing table is pronounced as if there are two compound words. Here the neglection of the word table shows the contrast between the two determining elements – dining and writing.
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