Лексикологія англійської мови

1. English as a global language. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics, studying words. The word as the basic object of lexicology. Types of lexical units.

English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language", the lingua franca of the modern era, and while it is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language. It is, by international treaty, the official language for aeronautical and maritime communications. English is one of the official languages of the United Nations and many other international organisations, including the International Olympic Committee. This increasing use of the English language globally has had a large impact on many other languages, leading to language shift and even language death, and to claims of linguistic imperialism. English itself has become more open to language shift as multiple regional varieties feed back into the language as a whole.

Lexicology(L) is a branch of linguistics, studying words. What the words are, what the types of words are in language, what the origin of the word is, how the words are founded, meaning and how they’re handled in dictionaries and other handbooks. The main objects of lex. are: words, lexemes, idioms etc. L presents a wide area of knowledge:

• Historical L. (historical changes of the word);

• Comparative L (relations between close relating languages);

• Contrastive L (studying facts of similarity and differences between both related and unrelated languages);

• Descriptive L (current state of lexical plane of lang.);

• Applied L (covers terminology and lexicography);

• Computational L (deals with corpuses)

• Ethymology (origin of words).

Aspects of L:

• Semantic;

• Structural;

• functional

Word – is a meaningful unit of communication. There’re different types of words and we should distinguish word from phrases and forms of the word (grammatical). It’s the main lexical unit of a language resulting from association of a group of sounds with the meaning. It has internal (IS) and external (ES) structure. By ES we mean its morphological structure (S). Also it’s a typical word-building patterns. IS is commonly reffered to as the word’s semantic S. Words can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to their mean-ings, and it is most unfortunate when this fact is ignored by some contemporary scholars who, in their obsession with the fetish of structure tend to condemn as irrelevant anything that eludes mathematical analysis.

Also word has an external (formal) and semantic union.

The word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterised by formal and semantic unity.

Types of lexical units are:

• Words;

• Parts of words;

• Phrasal verbs;

• Polywords ( by the way);

• Collocations;

• Idioms.

2. Semasiology as a branch of lexicology. The problem of meaning. Types of meaning.

Semasiology is the branch of lexicology which studies the meaning of lexical units. Diachronically, semasiology studies the change in meaning which words undergo in the process of their historical development. Synchronically, semasiology approaches semantic structures typical of the given language instead of studying the meanings of individual words.

The objects are: types of meaning, semantic development of words, causes and results of semantic change, polysemy, homonymy, and various kinds of semantic relations inside the English vocabulary system.

Meaning is one of the most controversial terms in the theory of language. The two approaches that are most commonly applied to its study are referential and functional.

The referential approach seeks to formulate the essence of meaning by establishing the interdependence between words and the extra linguistic things or concepts they denote. The functional approach studies the word meaning through the word’s syntagmatic relations, i.e. through the word’s relations to other linguistic units in its immediate distributional environment in the sentence. In other words, we understand the exact meaning of words through their syntactical functions.

There are two main types of meaning distinguished in English lexicology: lexical and grammatical, and one secondary type: functional or part-of-speech meaning. Grammatical meaning is defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. E.g. asked, walked, and thought are different words with the same grammatical meaning of the simple past tense or girl’s, night’s, man’s are united by the common possessive case meaning.

The component that is, though, much more important for Lexicology and for human communication as a whole is the lexical meaning, which is usually defined as the realization of the notion by means of language.

Lexical meaning consists of two important parts: denotative meaning (also called referential or extensional) and connotative meaning (also referred to as emotional, intentional or expressive).

The denotative meaning expresses the notional content of the word, i.e. it gives a name to the actually existing object, and may be of two types according to the word’s function in speech: significative and identifying or demonstrative.