§ 7. Structural and Semantic

Peculiarities of New

Vocabulary Units

It must be mentioned as a noteworthy peculiarity that new vocabulary items in Modern English belong only to the notional parts of speech, to be more exact, only to nouns, verbs and adjectives; of these nouns are most numerous.¹

New vocabulary units are as a rule monosemantic and most of them are marked by peculiar stylistic value — they primarily belong to the specialised vocabulary. Neutral words and phrases are comparatively few. Terms used in various fields of science and technique make the greater part of new words.

The analysis of the development of the vocabulary of Modern English shows that there are two aspects of the growth of the language — the appearance of new lexical items which increase the vocabulary numerically and the appearance of new meanings of old words.

New vocabulary units are mostly the result of the new combinations of old elements. Entirely new lexical items make an insignificant section of vocabulary.

Structurally new vocabulary items represent two types of lexical units: words, e.g. blackout, microfilm-reader, unfreeze, and word-groups, mostly phraseological units, e.g. blood bank — ‘a place where blood plasma are stored’; atomic pile — ‘reactor’, etc.

Words in their turn comprise various structural types: ²

1. simple words, e.g. jeep — ‘a small, light motor vehicle esp. for military use’; zebra — ’street crossing-place, marked by black and white stripes’;

2. derived words, such as collaborationist — ‘one who in occupied territory works* helpfully with the enemy’; centrism — ‘a middle-of-the road or a moderate position in polities’, a preppie — ‘a student or graduate of a preparatory school (sl.)’;

3. compounds, e.g. corpsman (mil.) — ‘a member of a hospital squad trained to administer first aid to wounded servicemen’, script-show — ‘a serial program on radio and television’; house-husband — U.S. ‘a married man who manages a household’, etc. The analysis of new words for their derivational structure shows a marked predominance of derived and compound words and a rather small number of simple words.

Word-groups comprise a considerable part of vocabulary extension. Structurally, the bulk of the word-groups belongs to the

¹ The analysis mentioned above shows that out of the 498 new units under consideration 373 (i.e. about 75%) are nouns and nominal word-groups, 61 (or about 12%) are adjectives and only 1 (or 0,25%) adverbs. The counts conducted in recent years give an approximately the same ratio — out of 122 new units 82 (i. e. 67%) are nouns, 22 (or 18%) are verbs, 18 (i. e. about 14%) are adjectives and only one (0,8%) adverb.

² See ‘Word-Structure’, § 12, p. 104.

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attributive-nominal type built on the A + N and N + N formulas, e.g. frequency modulation, jet engine, total war, Common Marketeer, machine time, etc.

Word-groups and different types of words are unequally distributed among various lexical stylistic groups of the vocabulary, with a predominance of one or another type in every group. For example, new words in the field of science are mostly of derived and compound structure but the technical section of the vocabulary extension is characterised by simple words. The greater part of word-groups is found among scientific and technical terms; the political layer of vocabulary is rather poor in word-groups. Besides this peculiar distribution of different types of words, every type acquires its own specific peculiarity in different lexical stylistic groups of the vocabulary, for example, although derived words are typical both of scientific and technical terms, words formed by conversion are found mostly among technical terms.

WAYS AND MEANS OF ENRICHING THE VOCABULARY

There are two ways of enriching the vocabulary as has been mentioned above: 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.