24. Semantic analysis of words.

Источник -лекция

A number of meanings a given word is used in are commonly discussed under the name of lexical-semantic variants.

- English happens to be not only a language with immense and powerful literary tradition, but it is also used internationally by an enormous number of people.

- Hence (таким образом) the polysemantic nature of its irregularity but of working out a reliable pattern of semantic analysis.

The overall meaning of the word is approached, according to ad. Vinogradov, in terms of nominative, nominative-derivative, colligationally and collocationally conditioned and phraseologically bound meanings (Vinogradov, 1975)

The nominative meaning- i.e. the basic meaning of the word which refers objects of extralinguistic reality in a direct and straightforward way, reflecting their actual relations- can be correlated with referential/ denotative / factual objective meaning in Crystals's frame of reference. (Table)

The nominative meaning' also has the following 'free' authentic equivalent in English: essential, central, domain, primary, focal, pivotal, common, usual. But this line of synonyms is mostly used to avoid repetition in speech and not as technical terms.

- The core or prototypical meaning is believed to be readily translatable, into other languages as distinct from the word's peripheral meanings which are least translatable. (Mc. Carthy, 1990).

2) The nominative-derivative meaning comes into being when the word is 'stretched out' semantically to cover new facts and phenomena of extralinguistic reality (table- таблица)

- By association the speaker uses the word metaphorically, thus extending its content. A new fragment of the outer world is incorporated into the word's semantic structure by virtue of certain similarities between things being observed by the speaker and consciously made use of.

- A case in point is, for example, sweet in the nominative-derivative meaning of pleasant, attractive: sweet face, voice, singer, little boy.

- We can speak here of semantic variation which is caused by the polysemy of the word. Semantic variation implies that the identity of the word remains intact (целостный) as it is used in different meanings.

- In Do you like your tea sweet? and What a very sweet name! the different between the lexical-semantic variants of the word (its direct nominative and nominative-derivative meanings) is not great enough to split it up into two different units.

There is a marked difference between the basic nominative meaning of the. Word and its derived figurative or transferred meanings. It is quite natural that speakers use words metaphorically- the outer words in infinite whereas the resources of even the richest languages are limited.

- Such uses are then registered in dictionaries if they are apprehended as habitual, frequent, regularly occurring.

- for example, cool, chilly, frozen, hot-denoting grades of temperature (the nominative meanings are easily transferred to acquire emotive connotations (the nominative-derivative meaning) : Her gaze was decidedly cool; The speech was met with a chilly reception; I was frozen with terror; The Watergate investigation eventually became too hot to handle.

The nominative-derivative meaning finds no exact equivalent in the classification presented by D. Chrystal, except, probably, fir the term 'connotative meaning' which is used with the reference to the emotional associations which are part of the meaning of a lexical item. (Chrystal, 1985)

3) colligationally and collocationally conditioned meanings are not free but bound ones in the sense that they are determined by morpho-syntactic nod lexical-phraseologically combinability of words respectively.

Thus, the verb to tell when used in a passive construction displays its colligationally conditioned meaning to order, to direct: You must do what you are told. He was told to start at once.

Too. I like it too. It was too much.

Фразовые глаголы- морфосинтаксическая сочетаемость

There are meanings which depends on the word's association with other lexical units (collocation= lexical phraseological). Here again we come across the idiom principle because the co-occurrence range of the word is determined not only by its meaning, but also, to a great extent by the conventions of its use:

- for example, milk is never rancid but sour. A word does depend for the realization of its meaning on its syntagmatics, or the so-called collocability.

Сильный дождь, сильный ветер, сильный снег- heavy rain, strong wind, heavy snow.

Thick, tense- плотный, густой (thick hair)

- As McCarthy puts it collocation "is a marriage contract between words, and some words are more firmly married to each other than others" (1990).

To come to grief, make a contribution, put smb off

Cats and dogs,

That's a horse of different color- это совсем не то- почти that's another pair of shoes. Better to be a live dog than a dead lion. To separate the sheep from the goats. To go to the dogs- испортиться. Somebody in the know- кто-то кто в курсе чего-то.

Idioms are word-combinations or multi-word units (the term in the British tradition) which reveal in their semantic and syntactic structure the specific and peculiar properties of a given language.