Lexicology and its subject matter. Areas of lexicological research chapter overview

   1. “What’s in a name?” – arbitrariness in language.

   2. Problems inherent in the term word.

   3.  Lexicon and Lexicology.    Lexicology as a branch of linguistics studying words.         

   4. Areas of concern for lexicology: semantics, morphology, etymology, lexicography and corpus linguistics.

   5. Lexicology as a level of analysis.

5.1.   Lexicology vs. Phonology.

5.2.   Lexicology vs. Syntax.

   6. Related fields.

6.1. Lexicology and Pragmatics.

6.2. Lexicology and Sociolinguistics.

6.3. Lexicology vs. Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Studies.

   7. History of lexicology.

7.1. Early studies in India, China, the Islamic World, and Europe.

7.2. Origins of Lexicological Research in the West.

7.3. Lexicological Studies in Russia and the Soviet Union.

7.4. Contribution of Ukrainian linguists to lexicological studies.

When all things began the Word already was. The Word dwelt with

                               God, and what God was, the Word was.

                           [Book of Jesus, Vol. I, Ch. 20]

1. “What’s in a name?” – arbitrariness in language.

     “We may not attribute the same degree of mystical significance to the words as we find in the opening lines of the Gospel according to St. John (in the New English Bible version). But compared to grammar, there is a special relation between us and the world, founded on the mystery that a name calls up an entity in the world around us, and vice versa.”

                                                                                      [Quick and Stein 1990 : 136].

      An important part of this intellectual adventure that this book undoubtedly is will be to understand that most basic question: What are words and why are they important?

Words evoke images and ideas in our mind, thus giving us a key to the outside world. Words are crucial, because they provide a commonly shared medium for conveying meaning in a message. Words have evolved through the ages in lockstep with humankind. Perhaps more than any other factor, it is the mastery of language that sets us apart from the animal world. But words are slippery things. We often hear statements such as “those are only words.” It is well-known that they can be used to deceive as well as to illuminate. In any debate, similar language is used by both sides to present completely opposite views [David L. Brown, p.1].

       It is only natural that for many years scholars and students of language should have speculated on the phenomenon called “language”, but many questions around it still remain unanswered. We cannot yet answer the question where language comes from, how some words are made up, and how meaning is generated. We know little about the mechanism by which a speaker’s mental process is converted into sound groups called “words”. We are not yet aware of the reverse mechanism – how the listener’s mind converts the acoustic phenomena into notions and ideas and what provides the basis for establishing understanding in a two-way process of communication. The nature of the lexicon, therefore, was and still remains an area of great interest to both scholars and lay public.

              Since ancient and medieval times people have sought to understand the mechanism of relations between the word and the object (phenomenon, quality, action) it denotes. It is logical to assume that there is a direct relation between the word and the referent, but we do not know what is primary and what is secondary. This, in turn, gives rise to a question: why is the same object (referent) in different languages called differently (e. g. книжка (Ukr.), книга (Rus.), ksiezka (Pol), a book (Eng.), das Buch (Ger.), le libre (Fr.) etc.? Different words for the same referent in different languages clearly point to a lack of logical or natural connection between the meaning of a word or phrase and the spoken sounds or written form which represent that meaning. This suggests that  the relation between the word and the object or referent is arbitrary, i.e. linguistic signs and the meanings they represent do not neatly match each other. Not only do we find different words for the same concepts in different languages, but what additionally bears out the idea of arbitrariness is the fact that different languages have a different number of words designating the same objects and phenomena. For example, whereas the Eskimos have countless words for snow and ice, Germanic, Romance, Slavic and other language groups have only a few words to designate different kinds of snow (e.g. packed snow, powder in English). So, too, does the indigenous language in Hawaii, Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, abound in wave nomenclature, which is lacking in most other languages. The reasons for these discrepancies between languages are self-explanatory: coming in contact with certain phenomena in their environment, speakers of a language are compelled to find designations for them. The English to love can be either «любити»  or «кохати» when we translate it into Ukrainian. To illustrate the point further, the Dutch slak could be either snail or slug when translated into English. The English blue can mean two different colors in Ukrainian. And in some indigenous languages of Australia, the word that seemingly designates “father” is, in fact, a term that refers not just to one’s biological father, but rather to a range of male relatives, including the father’s brothers, parallel cousins and even certain great-grandsons.

   A famous quotation from Shakespeare is an apt illustration of this, largely random, relation between the word and what it stands for:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose    By any other name would smell as sweet…

(W. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2)

   To speak of arbitrariness in language is not only to say that one concept in one language can become two in another, or that two can be collapsed into one. More importantly, languages often see the world differently. They divide reality up differently, they focus on different criteria, they structure experience in different ways. In the case of kinship terms that we have discussed above, English highlights biological relationships, whereas Australian Aboriginal languages focus on social structure. As a result, a word which English speakers might expect to refer to a unique individual refers, in fact, to a group of people who share a similar social place or role in the community [Halliday, 2007, p.59]. All of this means that in designating objects and phenomena in a language, it is crucial to look to the structures and systems that language itself generates and embodies. So if one wants to understand the kinship terms that are used informally in, say, Western Ukraine (зять, свекруха, швагро, стрий, вуйна etc.), one should not attempt, as Halliday warns, to “set up some universal transcendental framework, but rather try to get inside the language itself” [Ibid.]. If there are words that look as though they mean “uncle”, e.g. вуйко and стрий, but are clearly different and evidently neither provides a neat match for the English counterpart, the questions to ask here are: how do these two terms contrast in meaning with each other? What are the extra meanings that one possesses and the other doesn’t? What are the other kinship terms that are used alongside these in Western Ukraine? How do they appear in discourse? What kind of systems and structures do they enter into?

   All these meanings may be arbitrary in the sense that there is no predetermined framework that says all languages must make this or that distinction (e.g. the difference between a brother on the mother’s side and a brother on the father’s side has to be accommodated, i.e. there have to be different words to denote them, like вуйко and стрий in the region of Ukraine mentioned above), but they are certainly not arbitrary in the sense that individuals can play freely and randomly with the language. While there is scope for creative “departures” in the language – whether in the colorful turn of phrase of a poet or writer or in the entertaining zaniness of a comedian – what holds a language together and makes it work as a language, is the social convention or agreement that underpins it. A word means what it means because that is what people here and now in this community take it to mean. Fundamentally, language rests on social convention.