3. Etymological survey of the English lexicon.

Etymology – a branch of linguistics, which deals with the facts of origin & primary meaning of the word.

As for English language many scientist consider the foreign influence to be the most important factor in the development of the Eng. language. There are more borrowed words in English than in any other European language. So we speak of the mixed character of the English vocabulary. It contains the native element and the borrowed elements. The number of native words is rather small, about 30%. About 70% of words are borrowed. The native element include Indo-European, Germanic and English proper words. Indo-European words: day, night, mother, father, son, daughter, moon, sun. Germanic words have cognates in modern Germanic languages. EG: parts of human body: hand, head, arm, bone. Animals: fox, bear. English proper words (words which were not borrowed from other languages): lord, lady, boy, girl.

Borrowings

The number of borrowings from different languages is different. Latin (butter, plum), Spanish (potato, tomato), French, Russian etc. Special types of borrowings: translation-loans, doublets, international words.

Assimilation. Borrowings can be completely (butter, husband), partially (machine, sombrero) and non-asssimilated (radio, television, coffee).

4. Types of word meaning. Word meaning and motivation.

Lexical - is the mean­ing proper to the given lin­guistic unit in all its forms and distributions. L. meaning is the realiza­tion of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. L. meaning is the same in different gram­matical forms of the same word (Listen, listening, listener). Two components of lexical meaning: Denotative - part of meaning gives objective information about an object, it is the con­ceptual content of a word. Connotative - part of the lexical meaning is what the word con­veys about the speaker's atti­tude to different situations. Types of connotative meaning: Stylistic - connotation is what the word conveys about the speaker's usage of a certain functional style, situation, re­lationships between speakers, purpose of commu­nication; Emotional - connotation is what the word conveys about the speaker's emotions: cold weather - beastly weather; Intensifying - connotation ex-presses degree or intensity of lexical meaning: splendid vs gorgeous, magnificent; Grammatical - meaning is ab­stract and generalized, it is recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. Lexico-grammatical meaning is common for all the mean­ings of words belonging to a lexico-grammatical class of words, it is the feature ac­cording to which they are grouped together (the words 'team, crew, staff, brigade' have common meaning of 'group'). Direct - meaning nominates the referent in isolation, without certain context; Figurative - meaning nominates the referent giving some addi­tional characteristics. Primary /main - meaning stands first; Secondary / de­rived - meaning is formed from the primary.

Motivation is the suggestion of the meaning of the word by the lexical form of the word.

1. Morphological motivation implies a direct connection between the lexical meaning of the component morphemes, the pattern of their arrangement and the meaning of the word. (The words finger-ring and ring-finger, e.g., contain two morphemes, the combined lexical meaning of which is the same; the difference in the meaning of these words can be accounted for by the difference in the arrangement of the component morphemes).

2. Phonetical motivation implies a direct connection between the phonetic structure of the word and its meaning.

3. Semantic motivation implies a direct connection between the central and marginal meanings of the word. This connection may be regarded as a metaphoric extension of the central meaning based on the similarity of different classes of referents denoted by the word. (For example, a woman who has given birth is called a mother + mother country, mother tongue, etc)