Lecture 1
Lexicology as a linguistic discipline.
Lexicology as a brunch of linguistics. Types of Lexicology.
The connection of lexicology with other linguistic disciplines. Methods of lexicological research.
General problems of the theory of the Word.
1.Lexicology as a brunch of linguistics. Types of Lexicology.
The term „lexicology” is of Greek origin / from „lexis” - „word” and „logos” - „science”/. Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words and word-groups.
The term „vocabulary” is used to denote the system of words and word-groups that the language possesses.
The term „word” denotes the main lexical unit of a language resulting from the association of a group of sounds with a meaning. This unit is used in grammatical functions characteristic of it. It is the smallest unit of a language which can stand alone as a complete utterance.
The term „word-group” denotes a group of words which exists in the language as a ready-made unit, has the unity of meaning, the unity of syntactical function, e.g. the word-group „as loose as a goose” means „clumsy” and is used in a sentence as a predicative / He is as loose as a goose/.
Lexicology can study the development of the vocabulary, the origin of words and word-groups, their semantic relations and the development of their sound form and meaning. In this case it is called historical lexicology.
Another branch of lexicology is called descriptive and studies the vocabulary at a definite stage of its development.
The main lexical problems:
word structure and formation
semasiology and the semantic classification of words
variants and dialects of ME vocabulary
etymological survey of the E wordstock
ways if enrichment of ME wordstock
The notion of the linguistic sign.
Central
in our representation of the linguistic coding system is the notion
of the linguistic
sign.
This represents the connection between a content
(meaning) and an expression
(form,
code), e.g. our mental representation of what a dog is (content) and
the word dog
(or 
;
either italics or phonemic transcription will be used to represent
the expression side of the linguistic sign).
Figure 1. The linguistic sign.
The linguistic sign is conventional in the sense that the speakers of a language must use the same expression to represent the same content (otherwise the receiver's decoding would not recover the content encoded by the sender, and we would not understand each other).
At the same time we can say that the particuar expression we connect with a particular content is in the vast majority of cases arbirary: as long as the members of a speech community agree on what expression to use, it makes no difference exactly what that expression is. Consider, in this connection, the words meaning 'dog' in a few languages: Norwegian bokmål/nynorsk hund, trøndersk dialect hoinn, German Hund, French chien, Czech pes, Russian sobaka, Bulgarian kuche, Swahili mbwa. This principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is to some extent contradicted by the fact that all languages have words that imitate non-lingustic sounds: the whisper of the wind, the babbling of a brook, the growling of a dog, etc. But note that different languages represent the same non-linguistic sound in different ways, so that we find a certain arbitrariness at work here as well: the crowing of a cock is represented as cock-a-doodle-doo in English, as kykkeliky in Norwegian and as kikeriki in German.
A
simple
linguistic sign
such as
is usually referred to as a morpheme.
It is a unit which cannot be further subdivided (if we consider the
sounds /d/, /
/
and /g/ separately, we lose the connection with the content and we
are thus no longer dealing with the morpheme).
A morpheme like is called a free morpheme: it can be used as a word on its own (She saw a dog). A morpheme like -s (meaning 'more than one') is a bound morpheme (more specifically, a suffix), since it must be combined with a free morpheme to form a word (She saw two dogs).