Лексикология английского языка. Учебно-методическое пособие

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4.The three major sources of borrowing in the English vocabulary: Latin, Scandinavian, French.

5.Assimilation of borrowings, types and degrees of assimilation. Borrowings proper and translation loans.

6.Etymological doublets. Etymological hybrids. Lexical suppletivity. International words. Folk etymology.

Literature:

1.Arnold I.V. The English Word. M., 1999.

2.Antrushina G.B., Afanasyeva O.V., Morozova N.N. English Lexicology. –

М.: Дрофа, 2000

3.Кульгавова Л.В. Учебно-практические материалы по дисциплине «Лек-

сикология английского языка. – Иркутск: ИГЛУ, 2005. – 587 с.

4.Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь / гл.ред. В.Н. Ярцева. –

М.: Сов. энциклопедия, 1990. – 685 с.

5.The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology /Ed. by R.K. Barnhart. – Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. – 916 p.

Basic terminology:

Etymology is a brunch of linguistics which is concerned with the origin of the words. The vocabulary of the language is not a closed system, but it is an openended one, liable to change and development. Comprehensive study of the vocabulary suggests both synchronic and diachronic approaches.

The native element (the native or basic word-stock) plays the most vital role in the language. The etymological layers of the native word-stock: words of the general Indo-European origin; words of the common Germanic origin; English words proper.

Borrowing words is one of the most important sources of enriching of the vocabulary. The main sources of borrowings in English are Latin, Scandinavian, and French.

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Assimilation of borrowings is the process and the result of the adaptation of borrowings to the standards of the target language, to its phonetic, lexical and grammatical norms. Types of assimilation: phonetic, grammatical, lexical, graphical.

Etymological doublets have the same origin but the source or the time of borrowing is different. For instance, the Latin word discus (круг) was borrowed into English several times. In the Old English period it was borrowed as disc and then changed into dish (блюдо). In the Middle English period the word desc was borrowed from the Medieval Latin, later it changed into desk (конторка). In the 17th century this word was borrowed from classical Latin again in the form disc (диск). Etymological doublets have different forms and meanings.

Lexical suppletivity – a pair of words, a noun and a corresponding adjective. This phenomenon is called by analogy with Grammatical suppletivity when the forms of a word come from different roots.

Etymological hybrids are words with morphemes originated from different languages. For example, in the word beautiful the root is French by its origin and the suffix is native English.

Folk or popular etymology is an attempt to find a motivation to foreign words. It is the process of restructuring a word whose structure is opaque into something seemingly more transparent. A good example is bridegroom. English once had a word guma, meaning “man”, and this was compounded with bryd

“bride” to give brydguma – literally, “brideman”. With time, however, the word guma dropped out of the language, and bridegoom came to seem mysterious. As a result, the puzzling second element was altered to groom (a groom was a servant, though today the word normally just means somebody who looks after horses).

International words sound equally in the English and the Russian languages, their meaning is also close in both languages. For instance, antenna and антен-

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на, antibiotic and антибиотик. There are pseudointernational words, the meaning if which is different despite the likeness of the form in both languages. For instance, bandit and бандит, academic and академик.

Practical Assignment

1. Prove the following words belong to the native word-stock and state the layer they belong to (refer to German or Latin dictionaries if necessary):

Father, brother, mother, dog, cat, sheep, wolf, house, life, earth, man, apple, bread, go, give, begin, come, quick, strong, to, for, from, with, and, if, he, I, you, we, three, four, much, little, heart, light, water, summer, winter, weather, book, night, nose, girl, hope, boy, sit, make, black, bird, do, hear, have, two, new.

2.State from what languages the following words and expressions are borrowed: Kindergarten, persona non grata, beau monde, pizza, prima donna, coup d'etat, Blitzkrieg, bon mot, piano, machine, wigwam, gorilla, dollar, sky, skirt, devil, chocolate, candle, etc., e.g., a.m.

3.Try to explain the origin of the names of the towns:

Chester, Lincoln, Manchester, Derby, Exeter, Suffolk, Sussex, London, Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Leicester, Norfolk, Essex, Aberdeen.

4. Give native nouns to correspond to the following adjectives of Latin origin. Why this phenomenon is called lexical suppletivity?

Oval, nasal, labial, oral, marine, urban, solar, juvenile.

5. What is the difference between the words in the following pairs?

nightly – nocturnal, yearly – annual, cloudy – nebulous, womanly – feminine, brotherly – fraternal, friendly – benevolent.

6. Compare the meaning of the etymological doublets: acute – cute, amend – mend, fantasy – fancy, attend – tend, defense – fence, history – story.

7. Pick out the words which have undergone the process of folk etymology: Periwig, cutlet, walnut, mushroom, table, nightmare, sparrowgrass, crayfish, earth, buttery.

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8. Explain why these words are called etymological hybrids.

beautiful, relationship, undrinkable, shortage, painless, television, avidly. 9. State the type and degree of assimilation:

euphemism, psychology, physics, champagne, machine, police, unique, cliché,

elite, regime, garage, zinc, zigzag, umbrella, soprano, pasta

10. Group these words into a) international words, b) pseudointernational words.

Actual, ammunition, antenna, antibiotic, artillery, artist, billet, cabin, catholic, club, cocktail, conductor, conservatory, extravagant, film, football, hospital, idiom, instructive, magazine, match, navigator, opera, Parliament, piano, pilot, plaster, pullover, relict, sputnik, tennis, trolley-bus, virtuous.

11. Make a careful study of the following pairs of words and explain the difference in the pragmatic aspect of their meanings (stylistic, emotional, evaluative).

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NOMINATION AND MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF

ENGLISH WORDS. WORD-FORMATION

Points for Discussion:

1.Language and its nominative function. Act of nomination and its structure.

2.Units of nomination. The sentence and the word-combination as units of nomination.

3.Types of nomination.

4.The morphological structure of the word. Types of morphemes (semantic and structural classifications of morphemes).

5.Morphemic analysis vs. word-formation analysis.

6.Affixation. The classification of affixes.

Literature:

1.Antrushina G.B., Afanasyeva O.V., Morozova N.N. English Lexicology. –

М.: Дрофа, 2000. – P. 78-86.

2.Современный английский язык (слово и предложение) / отв. ред. Л.М.

Ковалева. – Иркутск, 1997

3.Кульгавова Л.В. Учебно-практические материалы по дисциплине «Лек-

сикология английского языка. – Иркутск: ИГЛУ, 2005. – 587 с.

4.Arnold I.V. The English Word. M., 1999. – P. 81-87, 104-106, 116-118.

5.The Issues in English Philology (Study Manual). – Irkutsk, 1998. – P. 30-33, 33-37.

6.Ginzburg R.S., Khidekel S.S., Knyazeva G.Y., Sankin A.A. A Course in Modem English Lexicology. M.: Higher School Publishing House, 1966. – P. 120-130.

Basic terminology:

Nomination is naming things and phenomena. In the process of nomination the sound-form of the linguistic sign is connected with our concept of the thing which it denotes and through it with the referent.

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Act of nomination is a speech-cognitive process of choosing a ready name for the thing from the available linguistic units or coining a new name for it.

Primary nomination takes place when the referent is nominated directly and the meaning of the linguistic unit can be understood without the help of a context, in isolation (mouth “a part of a head”).

Secondary nomination is the use of existing linguistic unit in a new function, with a new meaning (the mouth of a river, the mouth of a cave).

Morpheme is one of the fundamental language units, a minimum sign which is an association of a given meaning with a given form (phonetic and orthographic). The difference between a phoneme and a morpheme is that a phoneme has no meaning of its own. Unlike a word, a morpheme is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme (if it is a root). Nor are they divisible into smaller meaningful units.

Root is a lexical nucleus of a word. It remains after the removal of all functional and derivational affixes and does not admit any further analysis (needless, pre- cook).

Prefix is a derivational affix standing before the stem and modifying its meaning (insensitive, exminister).

Suffix is a derivational affix following the stem and forming a new derivative in a different part of speech (actor, washable, sharpen) or in a different word class within the same part of speech (kingdom, booklet, gangster).

Inflection is a functional affix. Inflections carry only the grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms, whereas derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. Thus suffixes perform the word-building function (play, player, playful, playfully, playfulness), while the function of inflections is form-changing (play, plays, played, playing).

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Stem is a part of a word which remains when a derivational or a functional affix is stripped from the word. It expresses the lexical and the part-of-speech meanings. It is the part of the word that remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. For example, the stem of a paradigm hearty – heartier – the heartiest is hear-

ty.

Morphemic analysis is the analysis limited to stating the number and the type of morphemes that make up a word. Types of morphemes: lexical, grammatical. Lexical morphemes are roots and derivational morphemes; they carry lexical meaning. Grammatical morphemes carry grammatical meaning.

Pseudo-morpheme is a morpheme which has a differential meaning and a distributional meaning but does not possess any lexical or functional (part-of- speech) meaning. For instance, in the words retain, detain, contain or receive, deceive, conceive, the clusters re-, de-, con- (having nothing in common with the phonetically identical prefixes re-, de-, in the words rewrite, decode) and - tain, -ceive have no lexical meaning.

Free morphemes are morphemes which coincide with a word-form of an independently functioning word. Free morphemes can be found only among roots, e.g. hero- in the word heroism.

Bound morpheme is a morpheme which does not coincide with a separate word-form. Bound morphemes include all affixes (the prefix de- in the word decode; the suffix -less in the word fearless) and some root-morphemes (docu- in the word document; horr- in horrible).

Semi-bound / semi-free morphemes (semi-affixes) are morphemes that stand midway between roots and affixes. A semi-bound morpheme can function as an affix and at the same time as an independent full meaning word (cf.: ill-fed, ill- dressed, ill-bred – to speak ill of somebody).

Derivational (or word-formation) analysis studies the structural patterns and rules on which words are built. It studies how the word is built. The method ap-

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plied on the derivational level of analysis is the Immediate Constituents analysis. It is based on a binary principle. It is a step by step procedure with the two member cut at each step.

Word-formation is coining of new words from the material available in the language on certain formulas and patterns.

Affixation (or progressive derivation) – prefixation and suffixation – is the formation of words by adding derivational affixes (i.e. prefixes and suffixes) to stems. Affixes can be classified according to their origin, to the degree of their productivity, to the valency, to their convertive power to change the part of speech meaning of the stem, to their lexical meaning, to their stylistic reference.

Practical Assignment

1. Analyse the morphemic structure of the following words. In poly-morphemic words state the number of morphemes, types of morphemes. Pick out words with pseudo-morphemes.

Boxes, theory, half-length, cupboard, marvelously, indifferent, goodhumouredly, notwithstanding, anxious, perceive, self-centeredness, ill-fitted, strawberry, psychologist, semi-smiling, ashamedly.

2. Which unit does not belong to the set from the morphological point of view?

1.ringlet, leaflet, booklet, hamlet

2.cranberry, elderberry, waxberry.

3.locket, pocket, hogget, lionet.

4.telegraph, telephone, telethon, telegram.

3. Carry out the morphemic analysis and the word-formation analysis of the underlined words.

1. …the silent fury of the stream and the awful blackness maddened me…

(R.Stout).

2. Warm a tablespoonful of honey over the gas fire and pour it into my hand, but be sure it is not too hot (W. Saroyan).

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3.Bread is the world’s most widely-eaten food (Bright Ideas Calendar).

4.Clearly it was impossible to get him away without making a scene, which was unthinkable (R. Stout).

5.She was a rich woman enjoying her riches (D.H. Lawrence).

6.On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s

(K. Mansfield).

7. Whatever happened to me, I could not wholeheartedly regret this adventure (Ph. Carr).

4. Which of the following words are a) primary, b) derived: disappear – disappoint, mistake – misunderstand, ignorance – disturbance, disclose – discuss, toothsome – handsome, spider – worker, befriend – bewilder, deposit – defrost.

5. Which unit is the odd one out in each of the following sets?

Set I.

1.(a noun-forming suffixes) -or, -ive, -hood, -ism

2.(adjective-forming suffixes) -able, -less, -ous, -ty

3.(verb-forming suffixes) -ize, -ify, -ful, -ise

Set II.

1.(suffixes denoting the agent of an action) -er, -or, -ist, -ment

2.(suffixes denoting nationality) -tion, -ian, -ese, -ish

3.(suffixes denoting diminutiveness) -ie, -kin, -ock, -ster

4.(suffixes denoting feminine gender) -ess, -age, -ine, -ette

5.(suffixes having derogatory meaning) -ard, -ster, -ist, -ton Set III.

1.(suffixes of native origin) -ful, -less, -able, -dom, -ish, -ship

2.(suffixes of Romanic origin) -ment, -en, -eer, -age, -ance

3.(suffixes of Greek origin) -ist, -ism, -ite, -nik Set IV.

1.(prefixes of negative meaning) in-, non-, en-, un-

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2.(prefixes denoting repetition or reversal action) re-, pre-, dis-, de-

3.(prefixes denoting space) sub-, inter-, trans-, mis-

4.(prefixes denoting time and order) im-, fore-, pre-, post-

OTHER WAYS OF WORD-FORMATION

IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Points for Discussion:

1.Conversion. Semantic classification of denominal verbs and deverbal nouns.

2.Different conceptions of the problem of conversion.

3.Word-composition. Compound words: diagnostic criteria for compounds; classification of compounds.

4.The problem of distinguishing a compound from a free word-combination.

5.Shortening. Its definition and types.

6.Reversion (back-formation).

7.Postpositivation.

8.Minor ways of word-formation in modern English.

Literature:

1.Antrushina G.B., Afanasyeva O.V., Morozova N.N. English Lexicology. –

М.: Дрофа, 2000. – P. 86-119.

2.Современный английский язык (слово и предложение) / отв. ред. Л.М.

Ковалева. – Иркутск, 1997

3.Кульгавова Л.В. Учебно-практические материалы по дисциплине «Лек-

сикология английского языка. – Иркутск: ИГЛУ, 2005. – 587 с.

4.Arnold I.V. The English Word. M., 1999. – P. 108-152.

5.The Issues in English Philology (Study Manual). – Irkutsk, 1998. – P. 37-47.