- •1. Semasiology. Referential and functional approaches to the study of meaning.
- •2. Component elements of word meaning.
- •3. Word meaning and motivation.
- •4. Causes of semantic change.
- •5. Nature of semantic change (psychological classification).
- •6. Results of semantic change. Changes in the denotational meaning.
- •7. Results of semantic change. Changes in the connotational meaning.
- •20. Polysemy and synonymy of phraseological units.
- •21. Proverbs, sayings and quotations.
- •22. Thematic or etymological classification
- •23. Semantic classification by V.V. Vinogradov.
- •24. American English. Linguistic status of American English.
- •25. The grammar system of American English.
- •26. Lexicography. Some main problems.
- •27. Types of dictionaries.
- •Linguistic
- •Encyclopaedic
- •28. Methods of semasiological analysis.
25. The grammar system of American English.
The dissimilarities in grammar are scarce.
The first distinctive feature is the use of the auxiliary verb will in the first person singular and plural of the Future Indefinite Tense. In British English in this case normative is shall. However, shall is becoming less common than will in British English too. The American I will go there does not imply modality, as in the similar British utterance where it means I am willing to go there, but pure futurity.
The second distinctive feature is a tendency to substitute the Past Indefinite Tense for the Present Perfect Tense, especially in oral communication. So, in American English, when people talk about something that happened in the past and now is finished, but still has the influence on the present situation they often use simple Past instead of the Present Perfect.
This feature is also rather typical of some English dialects.
The third prominent distinctive feature is usage of the old forms of the Past Participle of the verb to get: to get-got-gotten, the verb to prove: (Am)spring – sprung – sprung/(Br)spring – sprang – sprun; wake – waked – waked/ wake – woke - woken.
Some other verbs also have different forms of irregular verbs.
There are some other minor divergencies in grammar of American English and British English.
The grammatical system of both variants is actually the same with very few exceptions.
All said above brings us to the conclusion that the language spoken in the USA is in all essential features identical with that spoken in Great Britain.
So, the language spoken in the USA can be regarded as a regional variety of English.
Canadian, Australian and Indian (the English spoken in India) can also be considered regional varieties of English with their own peculiarities.
26. Lexicography. Some main problems.
Lexicography, that is the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries, is an important branch of applied linguistics. It has a common object of study with lexicology, as both describe the vocabulary of the language. The province of lexicography is semantic, formal and functional description of all individual words. Lexicographers have to arrange their material according to a purely external characteristic, namely alphabetically.
The most burning issues of lexicography are the following:
1) The selection of head-words. This problem can also be subdivided into several questions:
How far a dictionary should admit the historical
Selection between scientific and technical terms
Whether a dictionary should cover all the words of the language, including neologisms, nonce-words, slang, non-assimilated borrowings, foreign words, etc.
Should a dictionary be perceptive and prohibitive (should dictionary-makers attempt to improve and stabilize the vocabulary according to the best classical samples and advise the readers on preferable usage)
Should the frequency of the usage of words be taken into consideration (this is a modern criterion)
2) The arrangement and contents of the vocabulary entry:
a) Which of the selected units have the right to a separate entry and which are to be included under one common head-word.
b) Should the derivatives with suffixes –er, -ing, -ness, -ly be included in a dictionary
c) Differentiation and the sequence of various meanings of a polysemantic word.
d) A synchronic dictionary should also show the distribution of every word.
e) Many dictionaries indicate the different stylistical levels to which the words belong: colloquial, technical, poetic, rhetorical, archaic, familiar, vulgar, slang and the words’ expressive colouring: emphatic, ironical, diminutive, facetious.
3) The principles of sense definitions in a unilingual dictionary
a) there are two main types of definitions
linguistic – they are only concerned with words as speech material.
Encyclopaedic – they are concerned with things for which the words are names.
b) The meaning can also be explained through synonyms, but one synonym is never sufficient because no absolute synonyms exist. Besides, if synonyms are the only type of explanation, the reader is placed in a circle of synonymic references, with not a single word actually explained.
c) The meaning can also be explained by examples, i.e. contextually.
There is also a problem of whether all entries should be defined or whether it is possible to have the so-called run–ons for derivative words in which the root–form is readily recognized.