§ 6. Development of Vocabulary

As has been already mentioned, no vocabulary of any living language is ever stable but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The changes occurring in the vocabulary are due both to linguistic and non-linguistic causes, but in most cases to the combination of both. Words may drop out altogether as a result of the disappearance of the actual objects they denote, e.g. the OE. wunden-stefna — 'a curved-stemmed ship'; зãг—

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’spear, dart’; some words were ousted¹ as a result of the influence of Scandinavian and French borrowings, e.g. the Scandinavian take and die ousted the OE: niman and sweltan, the French army and place replaced the OE. hēre and staÞs. Sometimes words do not actually drop out but become obsolete, sinking to the level of vocabulary units used in narrow, specialised fields of human intercourse making a group of archaisms: e g. billow — ‘wave’; welkin — ’sky’; steed — ‘horse’; slay — ‘kill’ are practically never used except in poetry; words like halberd, visor, gauntlet are used only as historical terms.

Yet the number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete, that the development of vocabularies may be described as a process of never-ending growth.²

Groups of Synonyms

Frequency Value

Structure

The Number of Meanings

Style

Etymology

Morphemic

Derivational

1 meaning

2 meanings

3 and more meanings

Neutral, standard colloquial

Bookish, non-literary

Native, early borrowings

Late borrowings

Monomorphic

Polymorphic

Simple

Derived Compound

I Fair Just Impartial Unbiased Equitable Dispassionate II Cool Composed Unruffled Imperturbable Nonchalant

1

+

+

+

+

+

1

+

+

+

+

+

7

+

—

+

+

+

+

11

+

+

-4-

+

13

+

+

+

+

14

+

+

+

+

+

+

1

+

+

+

+

15

+

+

+

+

+

17

+

+

+

—

+

+

17

+

+

+

+

+

19

+

—

+

+

+

+

¹ See ‘Etymological Survey...’, § 12, p. 172.

² It is of interest to note that the number of vocabulary units in Old English did not exceed 30 — 40 thousand words, the vocabulary of Modern English is at least ten times larger and contains about 400 — 500 thousand words.

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The appearance of a great number of new words and the development of new meanings in the words already available in the language may be largely accounted for by the rapid flow of events, the progress of science and technology and emergence of new concepts in different fields of human activity. The influx of new words has never been more rapid than in the last few decades of this century. Estimates suggest that during the past twenty-five years advances in technology and communications media have produced a greater change in our language than in any similar period in history. The specialised vocabularies of aviation, radio, television, medical and atomic research, new vocabulary items created by recent development in social history — all are part of this unusual influx. Thus war has brought into English such vocabulary items as blackout, fifth-columnist, paratroops, A-bomb, V-Day, etc.; the development of science gave such words as hydroponics, psycholinguistics, polystyrene, radar, cyclotron, meson, positron; antibiotic, etc.;¹ the conquest and research of cosmic space by the Soviet people gave birth to sputnik, lunnik, babymoon, space-rocket, space-ship, space-suit, moonship, moon crawler, Lunokhod, etc.

The growth of the vocabulary reflects not only the general progress made by mankind but also the peculiarities of the way of life of the speech community in which the new words appear, the way its science and culture tend to develop. The peculiar developments of the American way of life for example find expression in the vocabulary items like taxi-dancer — , ‘a girl employed by a dance hall, cafe, cabaret to dance with patrons who pay for each dance’; to job-hunt — ‘to search assiduously for a job’; the political life of America of to-day gave items like witchhunt — ‘the screening and subsequent persecution of political opponents’; ghostwriter — ‘a person engaged to write the speeches or articles of an eminent personality’; brinkmanship — ‘a political course of keeping the world on the brink of war’; sitdowner — ‘a participant of a sit-down strike’; to sit in — ‘to remain sitting in available places in a cafe, unserved in protest of Jim Crow Law’; a sitter-in; a lie-in or a lie-down — ‘a lying

¹ The results of the analysis of the New Word Section of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary covering a period of 14 years (from 1927 to 1941) and A Dictionary of New English by С. Barnhart covering a period of 10 years (from 1963 to 1972) confirm the statement; out of the 498 vocabulary items 100 (about 1/5 of the total number) are the result of technological development, about 80 items owe their appearance to the development of science, among which 60 are new terms in the field of physics, chemistry, nuclear physics and biochemistry. 42 words are connected with the sphere of social relations and only 28 with art, literature, music, etc. See P. С. Гинзбург. О пополнении словарного состава. «Иностранные языки в школе», 1954, № 1 ; Р. С. Гинзбург, Н. Г. Позднякова. Словарь новых слов Барнхарта и некоторые наблюдения над пополнением словарного состава современного английского языка. «Иностранные языки в школе», 1975, № 3.

A similar result is obtained by a count conducted for seven letters of the Addenda to The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English by A. S. Hornby, E. V. Gatenby, H. Wakefield, 1956. According to these counts out of 122 new units 65 are due to the development of science and technology, 21 to the development of social relations and only 31 to the general, non-specialised vocabulary. See Э. М. Медникова, Т. Ю. Каравкина. Социолингвистический аспект продуктивного словообразования. «Вестник Московского университета», 1964, № 5.

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down of a group of people in a public place to disrupt traffic as a form of protest or demonstration’; to nuclearise — ‘to equip conventional armies with nuclear weapons’; nuclearisation; nuclearism — ‘emphasis on nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war or as a means of attaining political and social goals’.