Section VII stylistic layers of the english vocabulary. Terminology

The main stylistic layers of the English vocabulary: neutral, literary-bookish, colloquial. Stylistically neutral words vs stylistically coloured words.

The vocabulary of a scientific text: words of the general language, words belonging to scientific prose, terms. Terminology as the sum total of terms for a specific branch of science, technology, industry etc. forming a special layer in the word-stock of the language. A term as a word or a word-combination created or borrowed to express concepts specific for that science. Definability as the main criterion to divide terms from the rest of the vocabulary. Monolexemic terms formed by derivation or compounding; polylexemic terms formed by terminological isolation of a word-combination. Polysemy and synonymy of terms. The descriptor as the term selected as the basic one. Criteria for selecting the descriptor: definability, lucidity of semantic structure, derivational ability, frequency of occurence.

Archaic and obsolete words. Historisms as words denoting objects and phenomena which are things of the past and no longer exist.

Colloquial words: literary colloquial, familiar colloquial, low colloquial words. Slang. Dialect words.

Stylistic differentiation of the vocabulary and the language-learning process. The importance of choosing stylistically suitable words for each particular speech situation. Mistakes originating from the ambiguousness of the term “colloquial”. The reason for not including slang and dialect words in the students’ functional vocabulary.

The sociolinguistic aspect of vocabulary changes. Words and word-combinations coined to name new objects and new concepts. Neologisms as a historical category. Occasional words as individual innovations created for special occasions. The most productive word-building patterns according to which new words are coined (affixation, compounding, shortening, blending, reduplication).

Working Definitions of Principal Concepts

Terminology	the sum total of terms for a specific branch of science, technology, etc., forming a special layer in the word-stock of a language
Term	a word or a word-combination which is created or borrowed to express the definite concepts specific for a particular science
Archaisms	words which are partly or fully out of circulation
Historisms	words denoting objects and phenomena which no longer exist
Colloquialisms	informal words which are used in everyday conversational speech
Slang	language of a highly colloquial style, considered as below the level of educated speech, and consisting of current words whose meanings have been metaphorically shifted
Dialect	a regional form of the language
Sociolinguistics	a branch of linguistics studying the relations between language and the life of the speech community
Neologism	a word or a word-combination which is coined to name a new object or to express a new concept
Occasional word (nonce-word)	an individual innovation created for a special occasion

1. Read the text. Use the examples in the text 1) to explain how lexical growth is connected with the life of the speech community, 2) to describe the most productive word-building patterns according to which new words are coined.

Less then three years ago there probably was not an English speaker anywhere in the world to whom expressions such as ‘a woopie receiving a golden goodbye’ and ‘infection with electronic virus’ would have been anything other than gobbledegook. Yet today there are some, at least, for whom they present no more difficulty in understanding than ‘the cat sat on the mat’…

But the process of lexical growth and establishment doesn’t happen in a uniform way; not every new item leaps to immediate currency. … Several of the items slipped unobtrusively onto the stage in the 1970s, the 1960s, or even earlier, but have only in the last two or three years had the spotlight turned full on them, becoming in some cases buzz words of the late 1980s (airmiss, for example, synergy, and value-added). Often, significant changes in meaning or application or even in legal status will have brought an established word to wider attention (agony aunt, Amerasian, compliance, enterprise, McGuffin, refusenik). And in a few instances real veterans, which had seemed to be put firmly out to grass decades or centuries ago, have made an unexpected comeback (memorious, velocious)…

In the early 1980s talk was of technical aspects of economic management, monetarism and PSBRs. But by the middle of the decade the scope had widened, encompassing an attempt to remould society fundamentally: the learned helplessness of yesterday’s dependency culture is to be swept away, and replaced with an enterprise culture, in which can-do shareowners with gold cards make loadsamoney, thereby revitalizing the nation at large. Heritage takes the place of history, and lifestyle threatens to oust life. And on the subject of lifestyles, the fload of yuppie-lookalike terms, already evident on the pages of Longman Guardian New Words (Longman, 1986), shows no sign of being stemmed: buppies and Yuppies, dockneys and Mockneys, pippies and yeepies, crinklies, crumblies, and wrinklies continue to be spawned with remarkable fertility...

On the wider international scene it has been the era of perestroika. The two key Russian terms in this area have already developed wider metaphorical meanings in English and grown English adjectival endings (glastnostian and perestroikan), and other Russian borrowings are following in their wake (khozraschot, pryzhok).

Reflecting the continuing vigour, the financial sector remains a prodigal coiner of neologisms, both sober and fanciful. The lay person trying to navigate the City’s treacherous waters has had a Sargasso sea of new jargon to cope with: circuit breaking, dead-cat bounces, dysergy, fan clubs, tin parachutes, and white squires pepper the financial pages, scaring off outsiders. There has been a modest market, too, in new slang terms for amounts of money: Archer has been best publicized, but we have also had Hawaii, Placido, Jack, Seymour.

Not half behind wealth as a word-creator comes computing. A particular linguistic growth area here has been the deliberate damaging of software by introducing destructive rogue programs; this rather sick practice has produced bogusware, electronic virus, phantom bug, Trojan horse, etc.

The verbal turnover in the pop scene is as frenetic as ever, with acid house, beach music, Bhangra, goth, House, shag, speed-metal, etc. putting in appearances of unpredictable duration.

The spending of money becomes insidiously easier in the cashless society, with its ATM’s, cardswipes, eft/pos, home banking, and smart cards. Compassion fatigue may have set in in some quarters, but conscience investment, corporate welfare, and volunteerism help to alleviate hardship.

The bread-and-butter routs to the formation of new words in English are compounding and the addition of prefixes and suffixes, but among the more eye-catching methods the most productive over the last two or three years seems to have been blending. So affluence and influenza have given us affluenza; fertilize and irrigation produce fertigation; and magazine and catalogue to form magalog. With boundless ingenuity, speakers of English have come up with dockominiums, gazwelchers, geeps, gennakers, swaptions and zootiques.

Next in popularity to blends is the omnipresent acronym. The successors to the yuppie – the dinky, the glam, the lombard.

Conversion continues vigorously, producing mainly verbs, from nouns and adjectives (feeder, flan, gender, rear-end, silicone, stiff, Velcro, wide) but also transforming verbs into nouns (spend).

Currently thriving suffixes and prefixes include –aholic (clothesaholic, milkaholic), -ati (jazzerati, numerati), cross- (cross-marketing, cross-selling, cross-training), -cred (forcecred), -eur (arbitrageur), -ie (Cuppie, deccie, winie, yottie), -ism/-ist (alphabetism, fattyism, genderist), loadsa- (loadsamoney), must- (must-buy, must-see), and –nomics (Reaganomics). Words coined by removing an affix or similar element from an existing word (back-formation) include accreditate, bezzle, cathart, explete, go-get, gram, stand-off, and tack [16].