Lecture 2 general characteristics of english vocabulary

1. The Volume of English Vocabulary and Its Use

English vocabulary is remarkable for its richness and variety of the means of expression. The number of words has increased by more than 10 times since the Old English period: from 30.000 words used in OE manuscripts to about 417.000 words entered in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). But the actual word-stock of English is much greater, as the OED does not include special terms, latest neologisms, dialectisms and some other categories of words. According to certain data, English vocabulary has about 490.000 words, not counting 300.000 special technical terms. The famous American lexicographer Stuart Flexner suggests that since Shakespeare English vocabulary has increased four-fold and now contains 600.000 words (not counting terms). In other words, about 450.000 words have been added up since that time. But the number of words in actual use is rather limited. So, the minimum everyday vocabulary is about 500 words, the functional (active) vocabulary of an educated person is 4 – 5 thousand words; the recognition (passive) vocabulary of an educated person is 30 to 40 thousand words. S. Flexner claims that Americans use in their speech 10 to 20 thousand words. By the way, the functional vocabulary of a foreign languages department graduate must be 4.500 words.

The word stock in actual use differs from speaker to speaker in accordance with their education, age, social standing, occupation; the same speaker uses different words in different situations of communication, e.g., in a talk with a friend, with a baby, with a superior official, a colleague, etc.).

2. Characteristic Features of English Vocabulary

Like any other developed language, English has a vocabulary suited to satisfy all the needs of expression, communication and cognition. Like other languages, it has words to name objects (e.g., student, chalk), to express notions (e.g., to win, beauty) and emotions (e.g., dear, darling, damn you), attitudes (e.g., coward, hero) and relations (e.g., here, before). A lot of words express emotions, attitudes and concepts simultaneously (e.g., What a sight!). These features are characteristic of all languages.

But English word-stock has certain peculiarities of its own. It is marked by:

• Abundance of borrowed words (70-75 % of the general word-stock), e.g., mill, street, wine, consume, cup, death, sport, etc.

• Rich synonymic resources with synonyms of different origin, e.g., hearty – cordial, freedom – liberty, rise – mount – ascend, kill – slay – assassinate – murder.

• Mono- and disyllabic root words as the prevailing structural type, e.g., love, work, active, become.

• Highly developed polysemy. The first thousand of most frequent English words expresses about 20 or 25 thousand meanings, e.g., go has 31 meanings, make – 28, take – 18; the noun set has 58 uses, the verb set has 128 uses. According to N. McWhirler, set is the most overused word in English.

• Abnormal growth of homonymy, especially among words of different parts of speech, e.g., silence (n) – silence (v); try (v) – try (n); dry (adj) – dry (v).

• Abundance of phrasal verbs, e.g., give up, tell off, look out, bear out, and give in.

• A greater role of context in rendering precise meanings in English as compared, e.g., with Russian (Cf. to wash one's face, hands, clothes, dishes – умыть, вымыть, постирать, помыть; to come – прийти, приехать, прилететь, приплыть).