8. Describe the English word stock

The English word-stock develops together with the development of human society. The frequency distribution singles out two classes, all the words of the language fall into: the so-called notional words, the largest class, having a low frequency of occurrence in comparison with a numerically small group of the so-called form or function words. Form words in terms of absolute figures make a specific group of about 150 units. Notional words constitute the bulk of the existing word-stock; according to the recent counts given for the first 1000 most frequently occurring words they make 93% of the total number.

There are two ways of enriching the vocabulary:

A. vocabulary extension — the appearance of new lexical items. New vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of: 1. productive or patterned ways of word-formation; 2. non-patterned ways of word-creation; 3. borrowing from other languages.

B. semantic extension — the appearance of new meanings of existing words which may result in homonyms.

Productive word-formation is the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation (prefixation mainly for verbs and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns) and composition (most productive in nouns and adjectives).

9. Write a description of functional words

Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus, they serve as important elements to the structures of sentences. Function words are also known as grammatical words.

Function words include determiners (for example, the, that), conjunctions (and, but),prepositions (in, of), pronouns (she, they), auxiliary verbs (be, have), modals (may, could), and quantifers (some, both).

Words that are not function words are called content words (or open class wordsorlexical words or autosemantic words): these include nouns,verbs,adjectives, and mostadverbs, although some adverbs are function words (e.g.,then and why).

In contrast to a content word, a function word has little or no meaningful content.

10. Define the descriptive lexicology

Special Lexicology is further subdivided into Diachronic/Historical and Synchronic/Descriptive.

The diachronic approach in terms of Special Lexicology deals with the changes and the development of vocabulary in the course of time. With regard to special lexicology the synchronic approach is concerned with the vocabulary of a language as it exists at a certain time (e.g., a course in Modern English Lexicology).

Descriptive lexicology deals with the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development. It studies the functions of words and their specific structure as a characteristic inherent in the system. The descriptive lexicology of the English language deals with the English word in its morphological and semantical structures, investigating the interdependence between these two aspects. These structures are identified and distinguished by contrasting the nature and arrangement of their elements.