- •1. The subject of lexicological investigation
- •2. Types of vocabulary units
- •3. The position of lexicology in the language hierarchy. Links with other linguistic sciences
- •2.The theory of a word (mid 50s, professor Smirnitsky)
- •3.The morphemic structure of a word.
- •2.The notion of a word-building pattern (wbp) as a two-facet linguistic unit
- •3.Productivity (pr) of word-building patterns
- •4.The basic types of word-building in present day English
- •1. Language meaning: lexical (lm) and grammatical meaning (gm)
- •2. The definition of lm according to the referential approach
- •4. Development of new meanings Causes:
- •1. The nature of polysemy
- •2. A lexico-semantic variant (lsv), its notion
- •1. The definition of synonyms
- •4. The dominant synonym.
- •2. Causes of phraseological units.
- •1. General Characteristics of „the English Language in Different Parts of the English-Speaking World
- •2. Lexical Differences of Territorial Variants
- •3. Local Dialects in the British Isles
- •4. Local Dialects in the usa
- •1) Comment on the terms:
- •2.Explain the basis for the following jokes:
- •3. Specify lexical and grammatical meaning of the following words:
- •4.1Dentify the denotative and connotative elements of the meanings in the following pairs of words:
- •5.Define the type of transference which has taken place:
- •2.Write out from a dictionary all the meanings of the following words. Comment on the semantic structure of the words:
- •3.Single out the denotative and connotative components of meaning of the synonyms in the following examples:
- •4.Using the semantic criterion prove that the rows of words are synonyms:
- •5.Find the dominant synonym in the following groups of synonyms:
- •7.Find antonyms for the words given below:
- •8.Change the sentences so that they express the contrary meaning by using antonyms. State whether they are absolute or derivational:
- •9.Find antonyms in the proverbs. Translate them into Russian:
- •6. Give Russian equivalents of the phraseological units. Memorize them and use them in speech:.
- •7.Give the English equivalents for the following Russian proverbs:
- •8.Complete the following sentences, using the phraseological units given in the list below. Translate them into Russian.
- •12.Complete the paired phraseological units in the sentences below. Choose from the following:
- •7.The italicized words and word-groups in the following extracts belong to informal style. Describe the stylistic peculiarities of each extract in general. Look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary:
- •8.Compose the following brief situations. Your language and style should suit both the subject and the situation:
- •2.Find:
- •3.Јxplain the differences in the meanings of the following words in American and British English:
- •4.1Dentify the etymology of the following words:
- •5.Say which of the two words is American and which is British. Translate the sentences into Russian:
- •6.Translate into English giving two variants - British and American:
- •7. Translate the following sentences:
УДК 42
0 35
Овчинникова Н.Д. Лексикология
английского языка: Учебное пособие. - М.:
МИИТ, 2009. -78с.
Учебное пособие предназначено для подготовки к экзамену по лексикологии английского языка и включает разделы: предмет и задачи курса, этимологический состав и стилевые слои словарного состава английского языка, словообразование, семантология, фразеология, синонимия, антонимия и омонимия современного английского языка. Тезисно изложенный теоретический материал увязан с материалом для практической
самостоятельной и аудиторной работы.
Рецензенты: ст. преподаватель каф. «Лингвистика»
Николаева Е.В. (МИИТ) к.ф.н., доц. каф. «Лексики английского языка»
Сачкова Е.В. (МПГУ)
© Московский государственный университет путей сообщения (МИИТ), 2009
Part I: Theoretical aspects of English lexicology
Lexicology as a branch of linguistics
1. The subject of lexicological investigation
Linguistics in its totality deals with the study of human language as the subject of its investigation. Being an extremely
complicated phenomenon it is decomposed into relatively independent spheres to be studied by phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, history of the language, stylistics, etc. The vocabulary of a language, the word-stock is studied by lexicology whose main task is to present the vocabulary as a system. Unlike grammar and phonetics which are closed systems vocabulary is an open one, not a mathematically organized collection of elements which are interdependent and derive then significance from the system as a whole.
2. Types of vocabulary units
The lexical units are two-facet elements possessing form and meaning. These are morphemes, words and set-expressions. In Russian linguistics a word is taken for the basic vocabulary unit.
3. The position of lexicology in the language hierarchy. Links with other linguistic sciences
The word is studied in several branches of linguistics and not in lexicology only and the latter, in its turn, is closely connected with general linguistics, history of the language, phonetics, stylistics. grammar, etc.
Lexicology and phonetics: phonemes participate in signification.
Lexicology and grammar: words belong to some part of speech and have some lexico-grammatical characteristics of the word class to which they belong, the grammatical form and function of the word aftect its lexical meaning:
Lexicology and stylistics: stylistics studies the problems of meaning, connotations, synonymy, functional styles and other issues.
4. Branches of lexicology: general, special, contrastive, historical lexicology or etymology, descriptive, sociolinguistics, semaciology, phraseology.
A word as the basic unit of lexicology
l.The definition of a word and its basic characteristics
To give a definition of a word is one of the most difficult tasks in linguistics, because the simplest word has many different aspects: a sound form, different word forms, different syntactic functions and meanings. A word possesses some characteristics: indivisibility, positional mobility, uninterruptability which affect its definition.
2.The theory of a word (mid 50s, professor Smirnitsky)
The essence of the issue is summed up in 2 problems: the size of unit problem, the identity of unit problem. Smirnitsky compared the 3 types of vocabulary units (a morpheme, word, phrase) to select the one to meet two criteria: nominative and communicative functions. By comparison he isolated a word as the basic unit. Within the second problem the following types of word variation are singled out: phonetic, morphemic/ word-building, morphological and lexico-semantic variants.
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3.The morphemic structure of a word.
Morphemes are subdivided into 1) root-morphemes and affixational
morphemes (prefixes, suffixes and infixes); 2)free, bound. There are also semi-affixes and pseudo-morphemes.
English Etymology
Etymology (etymol - true, logos -learning) reveals word origin and through it represents all language sources of the studied tongue, explains many peculiarities in the structure of vocabulary, ways of its development, etc.
The Etymological Structure of English Vocabulary
TheNE(30%) |
The BE (70%) |
I Indo-European element (1-Е E) II Germanic element (GE) III English Proper element (no earlier than 5th с A.D.) (EPE) |
I Celtic (5th-6th с A.D.) II Latin 1 group: 1st с B.C. 2 group: 7th с A.D. 3 group: the Renaissance period III Scandinavian (8th |
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-llthc.A.D.) IV French Norman borrowings (11th -13th с A.D.) Parisian borrowings (Renaissance) V Greek (Renaissance) VI Italian (Renaissance and later) VII Spanish (Renaissance and later) VIII German IX Indian X Russian (and some other groups) |
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* semantically leading * high polysemy * morphemically simple words * high derivational potential * stylistic neutrality * free lexical collocability * unlimited syntactic behaviour |
Problems of borrowings:
Causes: social/ historical (contact of nations - wars, invasions or conquests, peaceful periods); linguistic (a word is borrowed: to fill a gap in the vocabulary; to supply a new shade of meaning or a different emotional colouring; a group of accidental or blind borrowings). Borrowings enter the
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language in two ways: through oral speech (by immediate contact between the peoples) and through written speech (by indirect contact through books, etc.).
Criteria: the pronunciation of the word (strange sounds, sound combinations, position of stress, etc.), its spelling; the morphological structure of the word and its grammatical forms; the lexical meaning of the word.
Types: transliteration, transcription, translation-loans, semantic loans, etymological doublets/ triplets, international words, hybrid words.
Assimilation as a result of the pressure of the Native Core.
Assimilation is the process of a word adjustment to the new environment, i.e. its adaptation to the norms of the recipient language in 3 main areas: the phonetic, the grammatical and the semantic. Thus, we speak of phonetic assimilation, grammatical assimilation and semantic assimilation.
The degree of assimilation depends upon the time of borrowing, the frequency of usage, the way in which the borrowing was taken over into the language.
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Word-building in Modern English l.The origin of word-building (wb) as a means of secondary nomination
Limited retentive capacities of human memory brought into operation the powerful psychologic instrument - thinking which worked out a wise economical way of naming ever changing reality. For language it meant to make use of the existing language material by combining the old, known and long established meanings in certain patterned ways. These patterns reveal and repeat the subjective relations between real things. The mechanism of associations makes the semantic basis of word-building, being a means of secondary nomination. So, word-building is the process of creating words from the material available in the language after certain structural and semantic formulas and patterns.