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

            

   The term “lexicon” is known in English from the early 17^th century, when it was used in reference to a book containing a selection of the words of a language and meanings, arranged in alphabetical order. The term itself comes from Greek lexis, designating “word”, phrase ‘lexikos’ denoting “of/for words”. It is used today in this word-book meaning, but it has also taken on a more abstract sense, especially within linguistics, referring to the total stock of meaningful units in a language – not only the words and idioms, but also parts of words that express meaning, such as prefixes and suffixes.

   There are three terms that nominate the total word-stock of a given language:  vocabulary, lexis and lexicon. A comparison of the words will show that the three items may be considered more or less synonymous. However, it must be added that some scholars, Jackson and Ze Amvela in particular, regard the first one as more colloquial, the third more learned and technical, and the second as situated half-way between the other two [ Jackson 2007 : 2].

   To study the lexicon of English, accordingly, is to study all aspects of the vocabulary of the language, i.e. how words are formed, how they have developed over time, how they are used now, in what ways they relate in meaning to each other, and how they are handled in dictionaries and other word books. It is a study which is carried out within the framework of lexicology – a branch of linguistics studying words. As is apparent from this working definition, the notion of ‘word’ is central to the study of lexicology, although the term ‘word’ itself, as has already been shown, is by no means a straightforward one and we will be looking at it in a little more detail later in the book.           

 Lexicology presents a wide area of knowledge. Within its scope we find historical lexicology, which traces historical changes of words in the course of language development; comparative lexicology, studying closely related languages from the point of view of correlations between related languages; contrastive lexicology, which aims at establishing facts of typological similarities  and differences between both related and unrelated languages; descriptive lexicology, analyzing the current state of the lexical plane of language in all its entirety; applied lexicology, covering terminology and lexicography; computational lexicology, dealing with the computational study of dictionaries and their contents, and some other disciplines dealing with word studies. Adjacent fields of linguistic inquiry are onomasiology, terminology, semantics, phraseology, etc. The relation of lexicology to linguistic semantics is still a matter for debate, as is it to word-formation, which many schools include in lexicology (it is an approach that is also taken by the present book). Linguistic semantics is closest in its focus to lexicology, but it studies issues in more depth, while lexicology is broader in the scope of problems it addresses. Descriptive lexicology can make different things its primary object of study depending on your theoretical frame of reference. It can be (a) semasiology-oriented, in which case it aims at a comprehensive study of various aspects of words’ meanings; (b) onomasiology-oriented and address issues of word designation, ways of nomination and questions of motivatedness behind designations; (c) semiotics-oriented, which means it explores words as a function of signs; (d) sociology-oriented, which focuses on social stratification of vocabulary, its variation (social and regional) and language change; and, finally (d) functional, which looks at how lexical units function in actual speech and writing [Selivanova, 2006 : 281].

Present-day lexicology makes use of a wide range of methods of linguistic inquiry, most notably contrastive, distributional, componential, oppositional, transformational analysis, etymological analysis, lexico-semantic analysis, cognitive-onomasiological analysis, semantic structure analysis, conceptual analysis, all kinds of statistical methods etc.

Lexicology as a separate field of linguistic inquiry did not take shape until structural linguistics became firmly established on the linguistic scene in the early 20^th century. It has to be pointed out, however, that the term “lexicology” itself was introduced as early as 1765 by D.Diderot and J.D’Alambert, who viewed lexicology as one of the branches of linguistics alongside syntax. The first attempts to make sense of and systematize the word-stock of language were made by the scholars of the Prague Linguistic Circle as well as German linguists working in the Neo-Humboldt tradition, notably L.Weisherber, J.Trier, H.Ipsen, V.Porzig and others. It must be noted, however, that even before them, these questions were given considerable attention by the Ukrainian linguist O.Potebnia and Russian semasiologist M.Pokrovsky.