Thematic groups

As we see, the lexico-grammatical groupings are rather numerous and large by the number of the included members. That is why they had to be further subdivided into thematic subgroups, such as

• terms of kinship,

• names for the parts of the human body,

• color terms, military terms,

and many others.

The basis for such subdivision is not only linguistic but also extralinguistic. First and foremost because the things named are closely connected with each other in reality. To better understand the general idea of thematic groups we should take one such example which may be adjectives. On the first stage all the adjectives are divided according to the lexico-grammatical principle into qualitative and relative adjectives. The qualitative adjectives can be further split into those characterizing size, shape, color, speed, other physical qualities, mental qualities for persons, etc. Out of all these formations we may only choose the group of color terms. The basic or starting color name system comprises only four words, which are the main colors defined by physics and covering the spectrum: red, green, blue, yellow. These colors serve as dominants for other synonymic groups, e.g. red is a dominant for several subsystems, which can be subdivided into a number of degrees based on the criterion of their closeness to the dominant. First-degree color names are scarlet, orange, crimson, rose; second-degree names are wine-red, cherry, coral, copper-red, etc., where a definite color is color is compared to a definite object.

Words belonging to different subsystems also show difference in a number of features, which are:

1. frequency of their use in speech,

2. motivation,

3. type of the word structure, which may be simple or compound,

4. stylistic coloring,

5. valency or the combining power.

The relations between the units of different levels are those of hypernymic character. The units of the upper level are considered hypernyms, while those of the lower levels are hyponyms. Thus the word scarlet is a hyponym to the word red which is its hypernym.

… …in the process of making a thematic subdivision of another level. In this latter case we shall have new groups which will be called ideographical lexical groups. A group of this kind may embrace nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, which are all notional words within the grammatical system of the language. E.g. an ideographic group may include words like light (n), bright (adj), shine (v) only because all the three words are combined by the general notion of light. At this point we come close to the well-known and much-discussed theory of semantic fields. Jost Trier, a German linguist of the 20^th century, wrote: “Fields are linguistic realities existing between single words and the total vocabulary. They are parts of a larger hole and resemble words in the fact that they combine into some higher units. They also resemble the vocabulary in that they resolve themselves into smaller units.”

One semantic field may include such words as dog, bark and kennel; blind and see; right and left, etc.

From out of all previously named semantic groups the last one that is the semantic field is most commonly used in modern linguistics.