Lexicology notes.

LECTURE 1.

THE WORD AND ITS MEANING

OUTLINE

1. The word and its main characteristics.

2. Types of meaning.

3. Semantic changes and their causes.

1. The word and its main characteristics.

Lexicology is a branch of linguistics that deals with the vocabulary of the language and characteristics of words as the main lexical units. Lexical units comprise words and set expressions, or groups of words of fixed character.

There are over 200 definitions of a word but none is generally accepted. The word reflects world mapping which is culturally and nationally specific. Word use is also pre-determined by person’s social and educational status, gender, age, etc.

The word performs the following functions:

1. denotational (denotes things, qualities, actions,etc);

2. generalizing function (e.g. tree, house, animal);

3. emotive function (expresses our feelings and emotions);

4. structural function (performs a certain syntactic function, is a part of a sentence).

The word is the smallest meaningful unit possessing the following features:

1. isolatability, i.e. ability of a word to function in communication alone, to make a sentence, e.g. ‘Help!’ This distinguishes a word from another meaningful unit – a morpheme, which cannot be used in isolation. It can function only as a part of a word.

2. indivisibility, i.e. a word cannot be further divided without breaking its meaning. Cf. asleep – a (sound) sleep, alive – a (quiet) life.

3. positional mobility, i.e. a word can change its position in a sentence. E.g. Suddenly they came up to a house. They came up to a house suddenly. Up to a house they suddenly came.

The word is a two-facet unit combining meaning and form. The relationship between the two is denoted by the term motivation. If the connection between the meaning of a word and its form is clear and the form helps us to understand the meaning, the word is considered motivated. If the connection is conventional, the word is said to be non-motivated at the present stage of language development.

There are three types of motivation:

1. Phonetic , the sound form of the word helps us to understand its meaning, e.g. bang, bump, hiss, cuckoo, etc.

2. morphological, the morphemic composition of a word helps to understand its meaning, e.g. ex+ noun = former …; re+ verb = do again; verb+er = agent, doer of the action.

3. figurative meaning of a word becomes clear through its direct meaning, e.g. the leg of the table, the foot of the mountain, the eye of the needle.

II. Types of meaning.

The meaning is not homogeneous. It is a system of systems:

1). It combines lexical and grammatical meanings, e.g. actress is a personal noun.

2). Lexical meaning includes denotative and connotative ones.

3). Denotative meaning is conceptual (what a word denotes), it is divided into semantic

components called semes , e.g. Father is a male parent. Denotative components may

be culturally predetermined (cf. winter in Siberia and in Australia, it is a season

between autumn and spring but all other characteristics are different: duration,

temperature, etc.).

4). Connotative meanings express the speaker’s attitude to the subject of speech and may

be as follows:

1. stylistic: chap, fellow, associate; child, infant, kid;

2. emotive: cool, awesome, terrific;

3. expressive: to trudge, to march, to gobble;

4. evaluative: clever, silly, good, bad(rational evaluation), scoundrel (emotional evaluation);

5. associative (a fir-tree – forest, New Year);

6. national and cultural (kilt – Scots);

7. pragmatic: Can you open the door?

5). A word may be polysemantic, i.e. it may have several interrelated denotative

meanings:

1. One of the meanings is called primary, this is the meaning in which the word made its first appearance in the language, all the other meanings which developed later are called secondary, e.g. chair as a piece of furniture (primary), chair as the head of some meeting, conference or chair as a department (secondary meanings).

2. One of the meanings is central, others are peripheral. As a rule, primary and central meanings coincide but it is not necessarily so. In the course of language development a secondary meaning may become the central one ousting the primary meaning to the periphery, e.g. revolution: primary meaning is that of rotary movement, revolving, secondary – social change (now central).

3. Meaning can be direct and indirect (figurative, transferred), e.g. white collar, blue collar, smoke screen, etc.