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ГОС_1 / Lexicology / Lecture2 / The volume of the English vocabulary and its use. The changes in the vocabulary and their causes

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The Volume of the English Vocabulary and its Use. The Changes in the Vocabulary and their Causes.

The vocabulary of the modern English language may be characterized as great in volume, comprehensive and heterogeneous in character, i.e. it contains a great number of words, embraces a great many branches of human activity and includes words from various sources. The vocabulary of modern English is immense. It contains more than half a million words and set expressions. The individual vocabulary of an educated English speaker comprises about 30000 words. Of these not all the words are equally important. An average member of the speech community uses about 4000 or 5000 of most frequently occurring words. The choice of words in the individual vocabulary depends on one’s education, occupation, experience, cultural background, age, gender (social sex), situation and so on. How many words one should know to learn English vocabulary – schools leavers 80000 words and idioms.

The exact number of vocabulary units in modern English can not be stated for a member of reasons. The principle one among them is the constant change, growth of the English vocabulary. The enormous growth in the number of words is one of the best known facts in the History of the English vocabulary. It is estimated that the words found in the extant literature of the old English period do not exceed 30000 while the New Oxford Dictionary contains over 400000 words (12 томов). Language as a product of human society changes with the change of society. It’s in a constant state of evolution.

The vocabulary of a language is most sensitive to changes and never remains stable. The changes in the vocabulary are due both to linguistic and extralinguistic causes or to a combination of both.

The extralinguistic causes are determined by the social nature of the language. By extralinguistic causes we mean historical events and changes in the life of society: social, economic, political, cultural. They are inevitably reflected in the vocabulary of the language spoken by that society.

By linguistic causes we mean different relations between the words of the vocabulary, rearrangements of this relations and so on. The main changes that take place in the vocabulary of a language under the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic causes:

  1. New words may be formed in the language (the so-called neologisms), e.g. sexism, ageism (-ism means discrimination)

  2. New words may be borrowed from other languages, e.g. perestroika

  3. Some words may grow obsolete and drop out of the language. They become archaic like thou (you), vernal (spring), brine (sea). Other words become historical words like cataphrat (кольчуга), hoop-skirt (кринолин) because the notions they express are no longer related to the life of the people.

  4. Some words drop out of the language because they are ousted by their synonyms, which may be borrowed from another language or created in the English language, e.g. OE verb niman - to take (Scand).

  5. Some words may develop their semantic structure and become polysemantic, e.g. in the course of the historical development the word “Earth” (land) which had acquired the new meaning “planet” due to the development of astronomy. (Boy scout = naïve politician)

  6. The semantic structure of other words may split and as a result more homonyms may appear in the language, e.g. as a result of split of polysemy of the word “board” the following homonym appeared – board (стол, еда/board and lodgings); (committee, group of people); box (коробка) - box (ложа в театре)