The object of Lexicology. Etymological structure of the English vocabulary (the Native elements and the Borrowed elements).

The object of Lexicology. Etymological structure of the English vocabulary (the Native elements and the Borrowed elements).

Lexicology is the part of linguistics which studies words (ex. their meaning, the rules of their composition, relations between words, derivation). The object of lexicology is lexicon, or vocabulary of the particularly language. Sharing its object with other linguistic disciplines lexicology nevertheless concentrates on its own aspects of analysis: the structure, semantics and function of the lexicon.

Etymology is the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. According to the origin, the word-stock (vocabulary) may be subdivided into two main groups: one comprises the native elements; the other consists of the borrowed words.

Native Words belong to the original English stock (from the Old English period). They are mostly words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles in the 5th century by Germanic tribes. They form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech.

Characteristics: –most of them are polysemantic (man, head, go); –most of them are stylistically neutral; –many of them enter a number of phraseological units; –great word-building power.

The native word-stock includes the words of Indio-European origin and the words of Common Germanic origin.

I-E form the oldest layer. They fall into definite semantic groups:

- terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother;

- words denoting the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, water, wood, hill, stone, tree;

- names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf;

- parts of human body: arm, eye, foot, heart;

- the verbs: bear, come, sit, stand, etc;

- the adjectives: hard, quick, slow, red, white.

- most of the auxiliary and modal verbs: shall, will, should, would, must, can, may;

- pronouns: I, he, you, his, who, whose;

- prepositions: in. out, on, under;

- numerals: one, two;

- conjunctions: and, but.

CG words contain a great number of semantic groups. Examples:

- the nouns: summer, winter, storm, group, house, room, hope, life;

- the verbs: bake, burn, keep, make, meet, rise, see, send;

- the adjectives: broad, dead, deaf, deep.

Many adverbs and pronouns belong to this layer, though small in number.

Borrowings (Loan Words)

A borrowed (loan) word is a word adopted from another language and modified in sound form, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of English. Through its history the English language came in contact with many languages and borrowed freely from them. The greatest influx of borrowings mainly came from Latin (language of learning and religion), French and Scandinavian (the languages of the conquerors). The greatest number of borrowings has come from French.

Scandinavian languages (the personal pronouns: they, their, them; also same, till, though, fro (adv)).Sometimes words were borrowed to fill in gaps in the vocabulary. Thus, the English borrowed Latin, Greek, Spanish words (paper, tomato, potato) when these vegetables were first brought to England.

Oral borrowings took place chiefly in the early periods of history (mill, inch) -are usually short and undergo more changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. French communique, belles-letres, naivete) preserve their spelling, they are often rather long and their assimilation is a long process.

Though the borrowed words always undergo changes in the process of borrowing, some of them preserve their former characteristics for a long period. This enables us to recognize them as the borrowed element. Examples are:

–the initial position of the sounds [v], [d], [z] is a sign that the word is not native: vacuum (Lat), valley (FR.), volcano (Ital.), vanilla (Sp.);

–may be rendered by «g» and «j» gem (Lat), jungle (Hindi), gesture (Lat), giant (O.Fr.), genre, gendarme (Fr.);

–the initial position of the letters «x», «j» «z» is a sign that the word is a borrowed one: zeal (Lat), zero (Fr.), zinc (Gr.), xylophone (Gr.);

–the combinations ph, kh, eau in the root: philology (Gr.), khaki (Indian), beau (Fr.); –«ch» is pronounced [k] in words of Greek origin: echo, school, [S] in late French borrowings: machine, parachute; and [tS] in native words and early borrowings.

 

The native element1	The borrowed element
1.Indo-European element 2.Germanic element 3.English Proper element (no earlier than 5th c. A. D.)	I.Celtic (5th — 6th c. A. D.) II.Latin 1st group: 1st c. B. C. 2nd group: 7th c. A. D. 3rd group: the Renaissance period III.Scandinavian (8th — 11th c. A. D.) IV.French 1. Norman borrowings: 11th—13th c. A. D. 2. Parisian borrowings (Renaissance) V.Greek (Renaissance) VI.Italian (Renaissance and later) VII.Spanish (Renaissance and later)

 

Conversion.

- 1) hand-handful, 2)hand-to hand. In 1 a new word was formed by aff., in 2 by means of conversion (zero derivation). Conversion is a special type of derivation in which the word-forming means is the paradigm of the word. In our ex. The paradigms of the word are different. So a verb is formed from the noun by conversion. This approach was worked out by professor Смирнитский. It is called morphological approach to conversion.

- «If you are lucky, you’ll have a good buy». Ther’s another approach to conversion, which is worked out by prof. Арнольд. She treats C. as a morphologo-syntactical way of forming word. The word «buy» is a noun, formed from the verb to buy and the proof may be found in the syntactical characteristics of the word. If function in the sentence is that as a direct object. Besides it has a descriptive attribute and the article a. All these characteristics are typical for the Eng.noun. Cases of C. are accompanied by syntactic change. For ex. when a verb is made from the noun then may be the following changes: 1)nose-to nise, hammer-to hammer – The noun is the name of a tool and the verb is the name of an action performed by this tool. 2)dog-to dog (следовать по пятам), monkey-to monkey (гримасничать) – the noun is the name of an animal and the verb denotes behavior typical of for that animal. Love-to love – it is no always easy to say which of the pair is the original word and which was made by conversion. For ex. if we look at the pair synchronically in M.E. to love is formed by conversion. Diachronically, these words are not linked by conversion. Their identity is the result of historical development. In O.E. there was a noun “lufu” and a verb “lufian”. Due to the dropping of the ending and other processes we have homonyms today.

C. is productive in M.E. because of the character of the language. Root words are typical for its structure and they easily enter conversion pairs. Russian words have flections so we don’t speak about C. in Rus.

Shortening.

S. – is the process of substituting a part for a whole. S. may be dif. Kinds: 1) Clipping is cutting off a part of a word to one or two syllables. The beg. Of the word is shortened: phone<-telephone, the middle of the word shortened: mart<-market, the end is shortened: ed(editor), ad(advertisement). 2)abbreviation is forming a word out of the initial elements of a word combination: MP (member of parliament), UNO, FBI, CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), USA. Often met in newspaper style.

Minor types of word building are important as aff. and conversion: 1)blending is combining parts of 2 words to form one word: brunch<->breakfast+lunch, smog<->smoke+fog, magalog<->magazine+catalog. Sound and stress interchange is a way of making words by changing the phonetic shape of the root. It was production in O.E.: full-fill, blood-bleed, sing-song, ‘present-pre’sent, ‘conflict-con’flict, ‘con’duct, abstract (a.):: ab'stract. Sound-imitative (onomatopoeic) words are made by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals, birds, in­sects, human beings and inanimate objects, e.g.: babble, bang, buzz, crash, giggle, hiss, moo, purr, rustle, etc.

 

 

Total synonyms

· an extremely rare occurrence

· Ulman: “a luxury that language can hardly afford.”

· M. Breal spoke about a law of distribution in the language (words should be synonyms, were synonyms in the past usually acquire different meanings and are no longer interchangeable).

Ex.: бегемот – гиппопотам

Ideographic synonyms.

· They bear the same idea but not identical in their referential content.

· Ex.: to ascent – to mount – to climb

· To happen – to occur – to befall – to chance

· Look – appearance – complexion – countenance

Dialectical synonyms.

· Ex.: lift – elevator

· Queue – line

· Autumn – fall

Contextual synonyms.

Context can emphasize some certain semantic trades & suppress other semantic trades; words with different meaning can become synonyms in a certain context.

Ex.: tasteless – dull

Active – curious

Curious – responsive

Synonyms can reflect social conventions.

Ex.: Clever (neutral)

Bright (Only speaking about younger people by older people)

Brainy (Is not used by the higher educated people)

Intelligent (Positive connotation)

Dever-clever (Stylistically remarked)

Stylistic synonyms.

Belong to different styles.

Child (neutral) - Infant (elevated) – Kid (colloquial)

To die (neutral) - To kick the bucket (colloquial).

Sources of synonymy.

Synonymy – the coincidence in the essential meanings of linguistic elements which (at the same time) usually preserve their differences in connotations and stylistic characteristics.

O. Jespersen and many others used to stress that the English language is especially rich in synonyms, because Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans fighting and settling upon the soil of the British Isles could not but influence each other’s speech. British scholars studied Greek and Latin and for centuries used Latin as a medium for communication on scholarly topics. Synonymy has its characteristic patterns in each language. Its peculiar feature in English is the contrast between simple native words stylistically neutral, literary words borrowed from French and learned words of Greco-Latin origin. New words may be formed by affixation or loss of affixes, by conversion, compounding, shortening and so on, and being coined, form synonyms to those already in use.

Antonyms – a class of words grouped together on the basis of the semantic relations of opposition. Antonyms are words belonging to one part of speech sharing certain common semantic characteristics and in this respect they are similar to such semantic classes as synonyms, lexical sets, lexico-semantic groups. (lexical sets (предметные или тематические группы) - words denoting different things correlated on extralinguistic grounds: lion, tiger, leopard, puma, cat refer to the lexical set of “the animals of the cat family’; words describing different sides of one and the same general notion are united in a lexico-semantic group: group denoting “physical movement” – to go, to turn, to run). There exist different classifications of antonyms. Structurally, antonyms can be divided into antonyms of the same root (1), e.g. to do – to undo, cheerful – cheerless, and antonyms of different roots (2), e.g. day – night, rich – poor. Semantically, antonyms may be classified into contradictories, contraries and incompatibles.

1. Contradictories represent the type of semantic relations that exist between pairs like, for example, dead – alive, single – married. Contradictory antonyms are mutually opposed, they deny one another.

2. Contraries are antonyms that can be arranged into a series according to the increasing difference in one of their qualities. This may be observed in cold – hot and cool – warm which are intermediate members. Thus, we may regard as antonyms not only cold and hot but also cold and warm. Contrary antonyms may also be considered in terms of degrees of the quality involved. Thus, water may be cold or very cold, and water in one glass may be colder than in another glass.

3. Incompatibles are antonyms which are characterized by the relations of exclusion. For example, to say morning is to say not afternoon, not evening, not night. The use of one member of this set implies the exclusion of the other members of the set. A relation of incompatibility may be also observed between colour terms since the choice of red, for example, entails the exclusion of black, blue, yellow, etc.

 

The object of Lexicology. Etymological structure of the English vocabulary (the Native elements and the Borrowed elements).

Lexicology is the part of linguistics which studies words (ex. their meaning, the rules of their composition, relations between words, derivation). The object of lexicology is lexicon, or vocabulary of the particularly language. Sharing its object with other linguistic disciplines lexicology nevertheless concentrates on its own aspects of analysis: the structure, semantics and function of the lexicon.

Etymology is the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. According to the origin, the word-stock (vocabulary) may be subdivided into two main groups: one comprises the native elements; the other consists of the borrowed words.

Native Words belong to the original English stock (from the Old English period). They are mostly words of Anglo-Saxon origin brought to the British Isles in the 5th century by Germanic tribes. They form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech.

Characteristics: –most of them are polysemantic (man, head, go); –most of them are stylistically neutral; –many of them enter a number of phraseological units; –great word-building power.

The native word-stock includes the words of Indio-European origin and the words of Common Germanic origin.

I-E form the oldest layer. They fall into definite semantic groups:

- terms of kinship: father, mother, son, daughter, brother;

- words denoting the most important objects and phenomena of nature: sun, moon, star, water, wood, hill, stone, tree;

- names of animals and birds: bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf;

- parts of human body: arm, eye, foot, heart;

- the verbs: bear, come, sit, stand, etc;

- the adjectives: hard, quick, slow, red, white.

- most of the auxiliary and modal verbs: shall, will, should, would, must, can, may;

- pronouns: I, he, you, his, who, whose;

- prepositions: in. out, on, under;

- numerals: one, two;

- conjunctions: and, but.

CG words contain a great number of semantic groups. Examples:

- the nouns: summer, winter, storm, group, house, room, hope, life;

- the verbs: bake, burn, keep, make, meet, rise, see, send;

- the adjectives: broad, dead, deaf, deep.

Many adverbs and pronouns belong to this layer, though small in number.

Borrowings (Loan Words)

A borrowed (loan) word is a word adopted from another language and modified in sound form, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of English. Through its history the English language came in contact with many languages and borrowed freely from them. The greatest influx of borrowings mainly came from Latin (language of learning and religion), French and Scandinavian (the languages of the conquerors). The greatest number of borrowings has come from French.

Scandinavian languages (the personal pronouns: they, their, them; also same, till, though, fro (adv)).Sometimes words were borrowed to fill in gaps in the vocabulary. Thus, the English borrowed Latin, Greek, Spanish words (paper, tomato, potato) when these vegetables were first brought to England.

Oral borrowings took place chiefly in the early periods of history (mill, inch) -are usually short and undergo more changes in the act of adoption. Written borrowings (e.g. French communique, belles-letres, naivete) preserve their spelling, they are often rather long and their assimilation is a long process.

Though the borrowed words always undergo changes in the process of borrowing, some of them preserve their former characteristics for a long period. This enables us to recognize them as the borrowed element. Examples are:

–the initial position of the sounds [v], [d], [z] is a sign that the word is not native: vacuum (Lat), valley (FR.), volcano (Ital.), vanilla (Sp.);

–may be rendered by «g» and «j» gem (Lat), jungle (Hindi), gesture (Lat), giant (O.Fr.), genre, gendarme (Fr.);

–the initial position of the letters «x», «j» «z» is a sign that the word is a borrowed one: zeal (Lat), zero (Fr.), zinc (Gr.), xylophone (Gr.);

–the combinations ph, kh, eau in the root: philology (Gr.), khaki (Indian), beau (Fr.); –«ch» is pronounced [k] in words of Greek origin: echo, school, [S] in late French borrowings: machine, parachute; and [tS] in native words and early borrowings.

 

The native element1	The borrowed element
1.Indo-European element 2.Germanic element 3.English Proper element (no earlier than 5th c. A. D.)	I.Celtic (5th — 6th c. A. D.) II.Latin 1st group: 1st c. B. C. 2nd group: 7th c. A. D. 3rd group: the Renaissance period III.Scandinavian (8th — 11th c. A. D.) IV.French 1. Norman borrowings: 11th—13th c. A. D. 2. Parisian borrowings (Renaissance) V.Greek (Renaissance) VI.Italian (Renaissance and later) VII.Spanish (Renaissance and later)