Two Approaches to Language Study.

There are two fundamental approaches in linguistic science to the study of language material: synchronic (from Greek syn - «together with» and chronos - «time») and the diachronic (from Greek dia - «through» and chronos - «time»).

We should also distinguish historical lexicology or etymology (which aims at origin of various words, their change and development and investigates the linguistic and extra-linguistic forces modifying their structure, meaning and usage) and descriptive or modern language lexicology (which deals with the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development).

The former approach can be referred to as diachronic. The latter can be referred to as synchronic.

Thus historical or diachronic lexicology makes a study of the vocabulary in its development; descriptive or synchronic lexicology describes one conventional historical stage in the development of language

Lecture 2. Ways of Enriching Vocabulary. Word-building.

1. The New Lexical Units Appearance

One of the main tasks of lexicology is to define the main ways of enriching the vocabulary of a given language, to point out which of the ways are most characteristic of the language in general and at some definite periods of the history of the language.

The new lexical units appear in the language in the following ways:

• by means of word-building,

• by means of changing the meaning of words,

• by means of forming phraseological units,

• by means of borrowing new words from other languages.

Of all the aspects of the language, the vocabulary is the most flexible. New words enter it every day as they are needed to express new concepts and ideas, while words representing concepts no longer present in social life drop out of use. A new concept may be expressed by adapting an existing word for purpose, with either a transfer or extension of meaning. A suitable word may also be borrowed from another language. Finally an entirely new word may be formed from parts already existing in the language. All the existing newly formed and borrowed words in English as in any other languages are made to conform to the existing word-building patterns. The branch of lexicology that studies these patterns is known as word-building or word-formation.

Several different methods or types of word-formation are recognized in linguistics. They could be classified into the morphological and syntactic-morphological types. To the morphological type belong: affixation, word-composition or compounding, shortening or clipping of words, abbreviation, acronymy, blending, root-creation and some others. Sound and stress interchange, sound imitation and reduplication could be included into this class or classified separately as phonetic or morpho-phonetic types of word-formation. Conversion is usually classified separately as a syntactic or syntactic-morphological method of word-formation. Finally, transfer and extension of meaning, especially the so-called the divergence of meaning, when an existing word splits into two or several homonyms, is sometimes regarded as a separate semantic type of word-formation, but this view is open to doubt, since there are no regular patterns in English according to which new meanings could appear in existing words, and it is usually very difficult to tell between one word with several widely divergent meanings, and two or more homonymous words. Sometimes both affixation and conversion are classified under derivation, to distinguish it from word-composition, while sound- and stress-interchange, abbreviation, acronymy and so on, are considered separately as minor ways of word-formation.