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

   Of all the different aspects of lexicology the most important are the semantic, structural and functional ones. These aspects are closely interrelated, as they cover all characteristics of words and contribute to the same idea – the meaningful use of words in speech.

   Semantics usually involved in lexicological work is called lexical semantics, which is somewhat different from other linguistic types of semantics as the latter take the notion of meaning in a much broader sense. These include phrase semantics, which is concerned with the meaning of items within an idiomatic phrase, semantics of the sentence, which handles the meaning of sentences as well as the meaning relations between sentences, and, finally, text semantics, which focuses on the meaning that the entire text generates and analyzes what linguistic levels contribute to that and how. In addition to these, some linguists quite appropriately identify pragmatic semantics, which studies the meaning of utterances in context [Jackson, 6]. Lexical semantics, alongside with word-formation (morphology), etymology, and lexicography coupled with corpus data, makes up all the basic areas of concern for today’s lexicologists.  At the same time, however, it is – quite appropriately – referred to as the central branch of lexicology. The importance of meaning in linguistic analysis follows in a straightforward fashion from the primacy of semantics in virtually all theoretical frameworks of linguistic inquiry: cognitive, and even structuralist and generativist linguistics. Semantic structural relations of lexical entities can usually be discussed in three different ways: from the point of view of (1) their semantic similarity, (2) lexical relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy, and, finally, (3) syntagmatic lexical relations. The central problem of lexical semantics is the problem of meaning of individual words and that of groups of words, as well as its ontology and basic properties. The scope of the word’s meaning as well as the change and development of meaning is taken in a broad sense in lexical semantics. In this overview, it might be useful to introduce two terms which may seem more relevant to sentence semantics, and syntax in general, but which reveal a lot about lexical meaning, so we will briefly examine them here. They are acceptability and meaningfulness. Although related, these concepts are quite distinct. They are important for our discussion of meaning because we may have utterances that are meaningless but acceptable, while others may be meaningful but unacceptable. Consider the following:

I saw a 70-year-old child.

That woman is a man.

These two sentences may well be seen as nonsensical in that what they state is at odds with our knowledge of the world: there are hardly cultures in the world in which people above twenty are considered children, let alone people so much older. Being a child and being seventy are things that seem to cancel each other out. Similarly, a human being cannot be both a man and a woman at the same time. Nevertheless, we feel that way about these sentences only until we find that it is possible to conceive of contexts in which situations described above are acceptable. For instance, a seventy-year-old child referred to in the first utterance may well be a victim of progeria, a rare genetic condition whereby patients age prematurely so that a ten-year-old child resembles someone considerably advanced in years. In the case of the second utterance, a character may be a man biologically and play the role of a woman. Sentences like these may initially sound meaningless, but a closer look at their immediate context of use reveals that they make perfect sense and are, therefore, quite acceptable. There are other types of ‘meaningless’ utterances that may be acceptable for various reasons, e.g. they may involve different figures of speech intended to create a wide range of rhetorical effects: Long Day’s Journey into Night (title of a play by Eugene O’Neill), Do not go gentle into that good night (a poem by Dylan Thomas) or poetic lines in Ukrainian «…одна із пелюсток розсуне стіни» (from a poem by К.Moskalets’). Metaphoric, metonymic, oxymoronic etc. utterances tend to give an initial impression of meaninglessness by virtue of their defying common sense, as it were, but they operate according to their own rules and within respective genres and there is never a question as to their acceptability.

As opposed to utterances that are meaningless but acceptable, the ones that are unacceptable include assertions that are false because they stand in contrast to what we know about the world and, therefore, contradict ordinary logic. For example, on the face of it, the sentence The basket ate the vegetables may be seen as syntactically meaningful. It won’t take long, however, to realize that even syntactically, – let alone ontologically¹ and semantically – this sentence is seen as an error in predication, which means that the nouns for subject and/or object are not compatible with the verb. Hence the subject basket is syntactically unsuitable to the predicate verb ate – the grammatical meaning of the verb eat presupposes a subject that is an animate being. This sentence is unacceptable because what it describes cannot be: baskets do not eat vegetables and there is no other way around it (unless we deal with certain genres where there is suspension of disbelief, like fantasy, folk or fairy tales etc.). Such examples only point to the fact that semantics, syntax and lexicology as aspects of linguistic analysis are inextricably intertwined: the questions of lexical semantics go beyond the level of the word, and syntax is invariably bound up with words’ meanings.

   The questions of word structure and dynamic word formation in English are addressed by lexical morphology, which covers the problems of classification of morphemes, morphemic types of words as well as lexical vs. syntactic derivation.  Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units which constitute words. They are ‘smallest’ or ‘minimal’ in the sense that they cannot be broken down further in terms of meaning. According to Katamba, ‘morphemes are the atoms with which words are built’ [Katamba 1994:32]. They are ‘meaningful’ because we can specify the kind of relationship they have with the non-linguistic world.   

   If we consider the following words: back, son, with, reinstitutionalization, irredeemable in terms of their structure, we will find that some of them cannot be analyzed further into meaningful units (back, son and with) while others can (re+institute+ion+al+iz(e)+ation, ir+re+deem+able).  The items back, son, with, re-, institute, -ion, -al, -iz(e), -ation, ir-, re-, deem, - able are all morphemes. From this follows that some are simple words while others are only parts of words, even though all of them meet the definition of a morpheme. On the one hand, they are minimal, since they cannot be broken down any further into meaningful units; on the other hand, they are meaningful, because we can easily identify a relationship between them and what they stand for in the non-linguistic world of our experience.

   Morphemes that can occur on their own are referred to as ‘free’ morphemes. Those that can occur only alongside others are known as ‘bound’ morphemes. As is evident, a discussion of the construction of words, and the distinction between different types of words is hardly possible without morphological analysis.

   Studying the meaning of words and their semantic relations, lexicology is often interested in the history of the word or even in the history of the vocabulary or lexicon. Etymology is the study of the history of words – when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time [Wikipedia]. The term goes back to the Stoics, a group of Greek philosophers and logicians who lived in the early fourth century BC. The Stoics noticed an incongruity between the form of the words in the language and the things that these forms stood for. Since they were convinced that language should be regularly related to its content, they undertook the study of the original forms of words, called etyma (roots) in order to establish the regular correspondence between language and reality. This kind of study later became known as etymology. Apart from providing useful information about origins of words, etymological analysis can establish relationships between words and also identify cognates (words related in form) in other languages. For all its advantages and indisputable value, however, etymological research can often fall short of its goals. This happens because, firstly, some words are not etymologically related to ancient forms, which makes it difficult to trace their origins. As a result, the forms from which such words are said to derive can only be produced by analogy. Secondly, while it is often possible to establish the exact time when some terms entered the language, it is clearly impossible to say exactly when a form went out of use, especially because words disappear in a very gradual process that can span years, decades and, indeed, centuries. But the most crucial difficulty that etymological analysis is fraught with is that there can be no single ‘true’ or ‘original’ meaning, since human language stretches too far back in history and words’ meanings are fluid: they can erode or, conversely, give rise to or branch off into new ones. Many words in a language have a ‘checkered history’, i.e. in the course of their evolution they have had their meanings replaced by new ones until they have reached their current meaning. Halliday specifically stresses the need to be cautious about the idea of ‘original meaning’ [Halliday, 2007 : 41]. Sometimes we can identify the origin of a word – as, for instance, with the word boycott, which is believed to have come from the name of a land agent in nineteenth-century Ireland, who was ‘boycotted’ by tenants. But in many cases, there is no justification for calling an earlier meaning ‘original’. The adjective nice provides a good illustration of exactly this kind of situation. A study of the history of the word reveals that it once meant ‘silly’, but before that it must have been related to ne (‘not’) and se (most probably meaning ‘cut’). But even if we get this far in the analysis, we will still be left with the Latin items ne and se, the origins of which we will not be able to unearth. In other words, no matter how far back one goes in history, one cannot expect to reach the beginning of time.

   All of this suggests that a study of the historical development of a word has relevance only with respect to the word’s form, but not its meaning. It is possible, by means of etymological analysis, to establish the original form of the word or the word’s cognates, and to determine whether similar-sounding and similarly spelt words constitute a case of polysemy or homonymy. It is, however, impossible to tie the current meaning of the word to its original one, as this will deny the social reality of linguistic change. To illustrate this point, Warburg tells the story of a lawyer who disputed a witness’s use of the word hysterical (Warburg 1968 : 351-352). The witness had described a young man’s condition as ‘hysterical’. But, the lawyer pointed out, this word was derived from the Greek hystera, meaning ‘uterus’ or ‘womb’. The young man didn’t have a uterus, so, the lawyer claimed, he couldn’t possibly be ‘hysterical’.

   Would a good lawyer really expect to score a point by this kind of appeal to etymology? Few of us are likely to be persuaded to change our view of the current meaning of the word hysterical. It is true that the word is based on the Greek for ‘uterus’ – incidentally, the Greek element appears in that sense in English medical terms such as hysterectomy and hysteroscopy. But what is more important is that words often change their meaning and the modern meaning of hysterical has more to do with uncontrolled emotional behavior, by men and women alike, than with the uterus as a bodily organ. So, as is obvious, invoking etymology to determine a word’s meaning may often prove to be a futile exercise.

In addition, one should always bear in mind the possibility of what has come to be known as ‘folk etymology’, a process whereby an erroneous origin becomes enshrined in the language and in which the pronunciation or spelling of a word is modified on a false analogy. The word bridegroom, for example, has no historical connection with the groom employed to take care of horses. The OE word that present-day bridegroom goes back to is brydguma, where guma was a word denoting ‘man’. The word ought to have become bridegoom in modern English, but as the word guma fell out of use, the word goom was popularly reinterpreted as groom. Some folk etymologies are more complex. For example, in the case of the verb depart, its use was initially restricted to wedding contexts, where it meant ‘separate’ in the expression “till death us depart”. With time, this meaning became obsolete and, as a consequence, was reinterpreted as do and part, hence the corresponding modern English expression “till death do us part”. It must be noted, however, that although some other examples can be given to illustrate folk-etymological origins of English words, folk etymology is not a very productive process in modern English and has accounted for comparatively few coinages.

   Etymology is routinely used to clarify some questionable meanings, so it is also a matter of lexicography – the science and art of dictionary compiling, which is concerned with the problems of defining words, especially words with multiple meanings, decisions concerning entry words, labeling lexical items and the like. Lexicography, therefore, is the theory and practice of composing dictionaries. Sometimes lexicography is even considered to be a part or a branch of lexicology, but the two disciplines should not be mistaken: lexicographers are the people who write dictionaries, they are at the same time lexicologists too, but not all lexicologists are dictionary-makers. It is often said that lexicography is the practical lexicology, while the pure lexicology is mainly theoretical. By practical lexicology we mean applied lexicology, which is practically oriented though it has its own theory. In its widest sense, lexicography may also refer to the principles that underlie the process of compiling and editing dictionaries. Some of those principles are clearly lexical or lexicological in nature, while others, according to Jackson, stem from the specific domain of book production and marketing [Jackson 2007:9]. Some linguists believe that lexicographical compilation may be considered as derived from lexicological theory [Jackson 1988:248]. However, it should be acknowledged that it is only in recent years that the link between lexicography and linguistics has been clearly established. For example, the accuracy and consistency in the transcription of words or the adoption of a descriptive as opposed to a ‘prescriptive’ approach to lexicography are direct applications of linguistic principles. It may be argued that initially lexicography developed its own principles and traditions independently of linguistic research; but this is no longer the case. In fact, since current dictionaries are put together mainly by lexicographers who have been trained in linguistics, we are seeing an ever more substantial input from lexicology. For its part, lexicographical practice provides a useful input for lexicological research. Lexicographers have done much in the way of categorizing semantic relations – Egan’s taxonomy of antonyms is a case in point – and the products of their work have inspired much of the lexicological research. It has to be pointed out that the value that contemporary dictionaries – by virtue of huge corpora generated by electronic data banks they draw on – now have on present-day lexicological research cannot be overestimated. The ready availability of huge banks of electronic data have provided hitherto unobtainable evidence of language use, indicating subtle discriminations only suspected before. In other words, now that lexicographers have made it possible to track thousands of occurrences of words and phrases in their real settings, lexicologists have begun to appreciate how important a record of use in context can be for determining the real meaning of a word. For example, many dictionaries of English have defined (and still define) the word big in terms of large and vice versa. The evidence from concordances of occurrences of these adjectives in extensive modern text archives, however, demonstrates convincingly that although they do overlap in some contexts, they are differentiated systematically in many others and the reason for these differentiations lies in different collocational patterns [Hartmann and James, 1998 : x]. Additionally, the compilation of large-scale corpora can enable the recording and documentation of language change in progress – an area of concern for lexicologists, as we will see later on. For example, the language of computing has given us backformations such as input and output as verbs. According to one of the corpora (compiled by James et al., 1994), verbal usage of these forms constitutes about five per cent of the total occurrences of input and output. However, the evidence is that there is variability in the formation of the past tenses: input/output vs. inputted/outputted. Nevertheless, according to the same source, the weight is still toward input/output, rather than their  inflected (weak verb) counterparts [Ibid.]. On the other hand, the use of input/output as the past form can cause confusion, since their usage as noun modifiers can have two conflicting senses: e.g. input data as “data to be input” or “data that has been input”. It is thus evident that a certain linguistic instability occurs when a new form conflicts with the language system, according to which most new verbal formations follow the morphological pattern of weak verbs (-ed). This example demonstrates how informative are the data from large corpora, in this case concordances, for lexicological analysis. On the one hand, they provide accurate information on how words behave and how their forms (and meanings) develop (in our example, variation of input/output and inputted/outputted) and, therefore, make it easier to monitor language change. On the other, they allow to detect subtle differentiations in the use of input/output vs. inputted/outputted, which would be difficult to establish otherwise. Besides, they increase the potential to develop new theories with greater observational power than scholars ever had before and linguists can develop more probabilistic or mathematical understandings of language than was possible before.

   It should be pointed out, however, that lexicology is not the only branch of linguistics which provides an input to lexicography. Clearly, morphology, syntax and phonology also do. And sociolinguistics, too, contributes, not only in the study and selection of the language variety to be included in the dictionary, but also in the inclusion of information on style, dialects and registers.

   Lexicology also draws on phraseology for its data and analysis. The latter studies compound meanings of two or more words, as in to be down for the count or throw the monkey wrench into the works. Because the entire meaning of these phrases is not immediately retrievable from the meaning of the words making them up, “phraseology examines how and why such meanings come in everyday use and what possibly are the laws governing these word combinations” [Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicology]. One of the key questions of phraseology, therefore, is the question of lexical motivation of idioms, i.e. whether the combined lexical meaning of an idiom is deducible from the meanings of its constituent components. The data provided by phraseological study helps to shed light on the limits of the word’s meaning and define the limits of cohesiveness between words following each other in context.