Words_about_words_An_introduction_to_Eng

FOREWORD

This book developed out of the course in English lexicology that I have taught at the University of Timişoara over the past few years. Its primary target audience are students of English (as a foreign language).

The book focuses on main matters concerning the vocabulary of English, is descriptive in nature and is written in a reader-friendly manner, with both the specific terminology introduced and the approach to the issues discussed not exceeding an average level of difficulty. The material is organized in seven chapters which should, ideally, be read in numerical sequence, but may be consulted in any other order that the readers find suitable.

It opens with a chapter that focuses on what lexicology is, attempts at defining its object of study - the word - from various perspectives and briefly talks about the branches of lexicology and its relationship with other areas of linguistics.

The second chapter provides information about the sources of the English vocabulary. After a brief look at its evolution - since the fifth century, through the Middle and the Early Modern stages, on to the Modern period - and at its main features during these intervals, the focus switches to where the current lexical stock of English comes from. Native words are discussed alongside words borrowed from Latin, Greek, French, Scandinavian and other European and non-European languages. The adaptation of the loan words to the recipient language is also touched upon.

The overview of the sources of the English vocabulary is completed, in chapter three, with details about word formation processes that lead to the enrichment of the language, starting from elements available on its own territory. The means by which new words come into being – derivation, compounding and conversion are enlarged upon, but minor ways of word formation such as clipping, contraction, back-formation, folk-etymology, deflection, change of accent, abbreviation, etc are also given their fair share of attention.

Chapter four builds on a semantic approach to words. Basic theories of the linguistic sign – Saussure’s double-sided view of it, Ogden and Richard’s ‘Semiotic Triangle’ and Bühler’s ‘Organon Model’ – lead the way to the discussion of aspects connected to denotation, sense, connotation and markedness. A lengthy part of this chapter is dedicated to sense relations between words – synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, homonymy and polysemy. The details about them are followed by those about semantic change, extra-linguistic and linguistic causes of this phenomenon and its results – extension, narrowing, elevation and degradation of meaning – being the matters under scrutiny. Considerations about the transfer of meaning based on similarity, whose result is metaphor, and about that based on contiguity, whose result is metonymy, round off the fourth chapter.

Multi-word lexical units – collocations, idioms, multi-word verbs, binominals and proverbs – are talked about in chapter five, special emphasis being laid on their classification and characteristics.

Lexical strata of English are approached in chapter six, from a diachronic as well as a synchronic perspective. Archaisms and neologisms are examined to illustrate the diachronic perspective, while geographical, ethnic, social, written and oral varieties are enlarged upon from a synchronic one. Thus, the way English

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Words about Words

varies according to the part of the world where it is used is discussed in terms of Kachru’s theory of inner, outer and expanding circles. Inner circle varieties of English are exemplified by describing the most obvious features of American English, outer circle varieties are illustrated by speaking about Indian English, while varieties belonging to the expanding circle are tackled with reference to English used in Romania as the most important foreign language, to the effects its having this status has had on Romanian itself and to the adaptation of the English loan words to our language. The approach of lexical strata of English from an ethnic viewpoint prompted the discussion, in short, of African American Vernacular English and of Chicano English, while viewing the matter from a social angle brought forward details about Standard English and slang. Some remarks on written and spoken English, with an emphasis on how electronic communication has influenced the once clearly cut distinction between the two, close chapter six.

The last chapter of this book is dedicated to lexicography. After types of dictionaries are introduced, the history of their making in Britain and America is focused on, special attention being paid to landmark English monolingual lexicographic works printed here. In the last part, general bilingual (English – Romanian and Romanian – English) dictionaries and dictionaries for specific lexical elements are brought to the fore. In order to illustrate the evolution of the former, a comparison is drawn between two editions of (initially) the same general dictionary, printed half a century apart, while two dictionaries of collocations are referred to in more detail so as to demonstrate the usefulness of such instruments not only for learners of English as a foreign language, but also for translators and various categories of linguists.

The author’s hope is that the topics covered in the seven chapters of this introductory course will arouse its readers’ interest in lexicology matters, will stir their curiosity to find out more in the field, and, ultimately, will equip them with information that may help them use English not only correctly, but also creatively.

Loredana Frăţilă

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I. LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS

1.1. Lexicology

As its name shows (the term lexicology comes from the combination of the Greek words lexis, meaning “word” and logos, meaning “science”), lexicology is, broadly speaking, the science of words. Starting from this very simple definition, attempts have been made at providing others, enlarging upon various aspects connected either with its “word” part or with its “science” part. Thus, some of the definitions of lexicology found in general dictionaries of English include the following:

•“… the study of the form, meaning and behaviour of words” (The New Oxford Dictionary of English, 2005);

•“… a branch of linguistics concerned with the signification and application of words” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2003);

•“… the branch of linguistics that deals with the lexical component of language” (American Heritage College Dictionary, 2002). Numerous linguists have also provided definitions of lexicology in

their books. For Bejan and Asandei (1981: 110), lexicology is “the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of words as the main units of language.” Mc Arthur (1992: 5) defines lexicology as “an area of language study concerned with the nature, meaning, history and use of words and word elements and often also with the critical description of lexicography”, while Jackson and Amvela (2007) suggest that it represents “the study of lexis, understood as the stock of words in a given language, i.e. its vocabulary or lexicon (from Greek lexis, “word”, lexikos “of / for words”)”.

Once we have seen that there is general agreement upon the fact that words represent the object of study of lexicology, it would be useful to answer the question of what words themselves are.

1.2. The word

Unlike lexicology, the word has not been given very clear definitions, the lack of clarity being due to the multitude of angles from which it has been approached. Things have got more and more complicated since Bloomfield suggested in 1926 that the word is “a minimum free form”, meaning that it is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used independently to convey meaning. For example, child is a word that cannot be divided into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand alone; if we contrast it with the word childish, we notice that the latter is

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made up of the independent meaningful word child and the particle –ish, which no speaker of English recognizes as capable of conveying some meaning when used in isolation (though, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means something like ”having the qualities of”).

One of the endeavors to shed some light upon what is understood by a word belongs to Katamba (2005), who bases his explanations on recognizing a number of different senses in which the term “word” may be used. Before proceeding with the explanations proper, he usefully introduces the term “word-form”, “the physical form which realizes or represents a word in speech or writing” (Katamba 2005: 11).

1.2.1. Orthographic words

The easiest way to recognize a word is to consider it the strings of letters (and orthographic signs) occurring between two blank spaces in written language. Seen from this perspective, the word may be considered an orthographic word.

However, as simple as this approach may seem, it is not universally valid. There is a degree of flexibility in the way words are written down. Being or not being separated by a space may in itself not be a sure sign of words status. Attention should be drawn upon the fact that, if, for example, compound words, either solid or hyphenated (e.g. blackboard, schoolboy, bedroom or mother-in-law, forget-me-not) may be correctly identified as single units of the vocabulary on the basis of the orthographic criterion, what are known in linguistics as clitic groups may not. A clitic group is made up of a host word and the clitic itself. There are two classes of clitics in English: the class 1 clitic – the ‘s genitive, and the class 2 clitics – the reduced auxiliaries ‘ll, ‘re, ‘m, ‘d coming from shall / will, are, am, had / would and the contracted negation n’t for not. All of these clitics are appended to full words, the host words, but do not function as words themselves (although the full lexical items whose reduced forms they are do so). One more reason for which clitics do not qualify for word status is of a phonological nature – in order for a group of sounds to qualify for a word in English, there must be a vowel among them. The requirement that words must contain vowels not being met, clitics cannot function as independent words.

1.2.2. Phonological words

Words as physical objects exist not only in writing, but also in speech. Seen from this perspective, they are known as phonological words.

The recognition of spoken words seems to be a more difficult task than their recognition in writing, primarily due to the fact that the readily identifiable breaks at the boundaries of a written word are no longer present in speech. When spoken, words are not separated distinctly from

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Lexicology – The Science of Words

each other, they come in a torrent, they overlap. Yet, even if individual words do not stand out discretely in the flow of speech, separated by a pause that could be equated to a space in writing, speakers are able to identify them. There are hundreds of pages written on speech recognition but, for the purpose of this book, it will suffice to say that the process of the identification of a spoken word begins with the phonetic stage, when the listener hears a number of noises. S he then goes through the phonological stage, when s/he identifies what sound a particular noise represents and then, on the basis of his / her linguistic competence (s he is unlikely to be conscious of), the relevance of the sounds uttered for the actual context in which they are produced and the syntactic-semantic environment of those sounds, s he is able to instantaneously retrieve a word with the appropriate meaning from the tens of thousands of vocabulary items stored in his / her mental lexicon.

1.2.3. Words as vocabulary items

Lexicology distinguishes between words as word-forms and words as lexical items or lexemes. The lexeme is an abstract entity with different variants that is found in dictionaries and that has a particular meaning. Word-forms are the concrete objects that we write (orthographic words) or utter (phonological words), whenever we use language. The relationship between a lexeme and its word-forms is, according to Katamba (2002: 20) one of realization, representation or manifestation. For example, the lexeme ring occurs in dictionaries as such and may be represented when language is actually used by one of the following wordforms: ring, rang, rung, rings, ringing. The lexeme good may manifest itself in actual speaking or writing as good, better, the best. The lexeme child may be realized as child or children, etc.

The distinction between word-forms and lexemes is not difficult to understand. It is a matter we, as language users, are aware of even at a very early age and it is the distinction on which word-play in puns and in intentional ambiguity in everyday life depends. In their Ladybird Book of Jokes and Rhymes, the Youngs (1981) suggest the following joke, illustrative in a very clear way of the difference between words as lexical items and words as word-forms:

‘Waiter, do you serve shrimps?’

‘We serve anyone, sir. We don’t mind what size you are!’

The humor lies in recognizing that the word-form shrimp can belong to two different lexemes with unrelated senses: one meaning “an edible, long, slender crustacean” and the other meaning, in colloquial English, “tiny person”. The word serve may also be given two interpretations: “to dish up food” and “to wait upon a person at table”. If we

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combine meanings 1 and 2 of each of these words, we get completely different meanings of the short conversation. Thus, word-play exploits the lexical ambiguity arising from the fact that the same word-form represents two distinct lexemes with very distinct meanings.

1.2.4. Grammatical words

Seen from a grammatical perspective, words play an essential role in syntax, since sentences contain strings of words. A word as a lexical item with a particular meaning and certain morphological and syntactic characteristics is referred to as a grammatical word.

The same word-form of a lexeme may be used as different grammatical words, a phenomenon known in linguistics as syncretism. If we consider sentences (1) and (2) below:

(1)She paid the telephone bill yesterday.

(2)She has paid the telephone bill.,

we notice that the verb pay is realized by the same word-form, namely “paid” in both sentences, although in sentence (1), “paid”, as a grammatical word, indicates that the action took place at a definite moment in the past, while, in sentence (2), it indicates that the action has been completed recently. In sentence (1), “paid” is described grammatically as the past tense of the verb “pay”, in sentence (2), it is described as the past participle of the same verb.

Syncretism does not characterize verbs only. It may be the attribute of other word classes as well. Sentences (3) and (4) below illustrate the phenomenon of syncretism in the case of nouns:

(1)I saw a sheep and a deer.

(2)She saw two sheep and two deer.

Although the word-forms “sheep” and “deer” belong to the same lexemes and are unchanged in form in both sentences, in sentence (3), they realize the words with the grammatical properties [+noun, +singular], while in sentence (4), they represent the plurals of the same nouns.

According to Katamba (2002), grammatical words are characterized by positional mobility on the one hand, and by stability or internal cohesion on the other. By positional mobility, the author means that words can be shifted around in a sentence, without affecting its global grammatical meaning, but with giving it a somewhat different emphasis, as it can be seen from the sentences below that contain the same words, but have different word orders and slightly different grammatical features:

(5a) The Roman army started the war, unfortunately.

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