Comparative Lexicology
Comparative Lexicology
Comparative Lexicology
8.Greek borrowings.
Greek was also a language of learning, and Latin itself borrowed
words from Greek. Indeed the Latin alphabet is an adaptation of the
Greek alphabet.
Many of the Greek loan-words were through other languages:
through French – agony, aristocracy, enthusiasm, metaphor; through
Latin – ambrosia, nectar, phenomenon, rhapsody. There were some
general vocabulary items like fantasy, cathedral, charismatic,
idiosyncrasy as well as more technical vocabulary like anatomy,
barometer, microscope, homoeopathy.
During the Renaissance and after, there were modern coinages from
Greek elements (rather than borrowings). For example, photo-
yielded photograph, photogenic, photolysis and photokinesis; bio-
yielded biology, biogenesis, biometry, bioscope; tele- yielded
telephone, telepathy, telegraphic, telescopic. Other Greek elements
used to coin new words include crypto-, hydro-, hyper-, hypo-, neo-
and stereo-.
9. Latin borrowings
Latin, being the language of the Roman Empire, had already
influenced the language of the Germanic tribes even before they set
foot in Britain. Latin loanwords reflected the superior material
culture of the Roman Empire, which had spread across Europe:
street, wall, candle, chalk, inch, pound, port, camp.
Latin was also the language of Christianity, and St Augustine arrived
in Britain in AD 597 to christianise the nation. Terms in religion
were borrowed: pope, bishop, monk, nun, cleric, demon, disciple,
mass, priest, shrine. Christianity also brought with it learning: circul,
not (note), paper, scol (school), epistol.
Many Latin borrowings came in in the early MnE period.
Sometimes, it is difficult to say whether the loan-words were direct
borrowings from Latin or had come in through French (because,
after all, Latin was also the language of learning among the French).
One great motivation for the borrowings was the change in social
order, where scientific and philosophical empiricism was beginning
to be valued. Many of the new words are academic in nature
therefore: affidavit, apparatus, caveat, corpuscle, compendium,
equilibrium, equinox, formula, inertia, incubate, momentum,
molecule, pendulum, premium, stimulus, subtract, vaccinate,
vacuum. This resulted in the distinction between learned and popular
vocabulary in English.
16. Prefixation
a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can
attach. Prefixes are bound morphemes (they cannot occur as
independent words). While most languages employ both prefixes and
suffixes, prefixes are crosslinguistically less common. Some languages
employ mostly suffixes and almost no prefixes at all. The use of
prefixes has been found to correlate statistically with other linguistic
features, such as a verb-object word order and the use of prepositions.
In the Indo-European languages, prefixes are mostly derivational
morphemes .
High altitude
Bicycle
Together Cooperative
taking something away, the
Decentralisation
opposite
over-
more than normal, too much Overpopulation
trans-
across, beyond Transfer
17. Suffixation
A suffix is a letter or group of letters added at the end of a word to
make a new word.
-ness The suffix -ness, which goes back to Old English, continues to
have a productive life. It commonly attaches to adjectives in order to
form abstract nouns, such as artfulness and destructiveness. The suffix
-ness also forms nouns from adjectives made of participles, such as
contentedness and willingness. It can also form nouns from compound
adjectives, such as kindheartedness and straightforwardness. The
suffix -ness can even be used with phrases: matter-of-factness.
-ship The suffix -ship has a long history in English. It goes back to the
Old English suffix -scipe, which was attached to adjectives and nouns
to indicate a particular state or condition: hardship, friendship. In
Modern English the suffix has been added only to nouns and usually
indicates a state or condition authorship, kinship, partnership,
relationship), the qualities belonging to a class of human beings
(craftsmanship, horsemanship, sportsmanship), or rank or office
(ambassadorship).
-ward The basic meaning of the suffix -ward is “having a particular
direction or location.” Its use dates back to Old English. Thus inward
means “directed or located inside.” Other examples are outward,
forward, backward, upward, downward, earthward, homeward,
northward, southward, eastward, and westward. The suffix -ward
forms adjectives and adverbs. Adverbs ending in -ward can also end in
-wards. Thus I stepped backward and I stepped backwards are both
correct. Only backward (and not backwards) is an adjective: a
backward glance.
-wise The suffix -wise forms adverbs when it attaches to adjectives or
nouns. It comes from an Old English suffix -wise, which meant “in a
particular direction or manner.” Thus clockwise means “in the direction
that a clock goes,” and likewise means “in like manner, similarly.” For
the last fifty years or so, -wise has also meant “with respect to,” as in
saleswise, meaning “with respect to sales,” and taxwise, meaning “with
respect to taxes.” Many people consider this usage awkward, however,
and you may want to avoid it, especially in formal settings.
18.Compounding
Compounding is a highly productive process in English and most
languages. Compounding is a word formation process that provides an
interface between the compositional semantics of the phrase and the
direct or non-compositional form-meaning mappings that characterize
lexical items.In the English language of the second half of the
twentieth century there developed so called block compounds, that is
compound words which have a uniting stress but a split spelling, such
as «chat show», «pinguin suit» etc. Such compound words can be
easily mixed up with word-groups of the type «stone wall», so called
nominative binomials. Such linguistic units serve to denote a notion
which is more specific than the notion expressed by the second
component and consists of two nouns, the first of which is an attribute
to the second one.
19. Conversion
Conversion is the derivational process whereby an item changes its
word-class without the addition of an affix.Conversion is particularly
common in English because the basic form of nouns and verbs is
identical in many cases. It is a curious and attractive subject because it
has a wide field of action: all grammatical categories can undergo
conversion to more than one word-form, it is compatible with other
word-formation processes, and it has no demonstrated limitations. All
these reasons make the scope of conversion nearly unlimited.
Conversion is extremely productive to increase the English lexicon
because it provides an easy way to create new words from existing
ones. Thus, the meaning is perfectly comprehensible and the speaker
can rapidly fill a meaningful gap in his language or use fewer words.
The major cases of conversion are from noun to verb and from verb to
noun. Conversion from adjective to verb is also common, but it has a
lower ratio. Other grammatical categories, including closed-class ones,
can only shift to open-class categories, but not to closed-class ones
(prepositions, conjunctions). In addition, it is not rare that a simple
word shifts into more than one category.
21. Abbreviation
Abbreviation (from Latin brevis "short") is strictly a shorter form of a
word, but more particularly, an abbreviation is a letter or group of
letters, taken from a word or words, and employed to represent them
for the sake of brevity.
Apart from the common form of shortening one word, there are other
types of abbreviations. These include
~apocopations (refers to a word formed by removing the end of a
longer original word)
~syllabic abbreviations, (A syllabic abbreviation is an abbreviation
formed from (usually) initial syllables of several words, such as
Interpol = International + police.
Syllabic abbreviations are usually written using lower case, sometimes
starting with a capital letter, and are always pronounced as words
rather than letter by letter.)
~acronyms & initialisms (abbreviations such as NATO or DNA,
written as the initial letter or letters of words, and pronounced based on
this abbreviated written form.)
~portmanteaux (a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme
that fuses two or more grammatical functions.)
26. Polysemy
Most of lex. items in English are polysemantic. There are
monosemantic words (a lorry, a loudspeaker) In case of polysemy, we
deal with modification of the content plane. Different meanings of one
& the same word are closely interrelated. Polysemy is a result of:
1. Shifts in application (adj. red)
2. Specialization (partner - basic meaning; a type of relationship
between 2 or more people (business partner, marriage partner, partner
in crime) 3. Metaphorical extension (a fundamental feature of any
language) (hands of a person ~ hands of a clock)
Polysemy has been complicated by the tendency of words to pick up
the meanings from other dialects, languages & slang. (executive~BrE –
one who acts under the direction of somebody ~AmE – a
manager~now: AmE meaning is more widely used.)
New & old meanings become interrelated, form a hierarchy.
They have some common semantic features which preserve the
integrity of the word.
27. Narrowing, extension, elevation, degradation
A striking feature of existing research on lexical pragmatics is that
narrowing, approximation and metaphorical extension tend to be seen
as distinct processes which lack a common explanation.
Extension is the widening or extending of the meaning of a word:
red -> 'a person with socialist political/economic beliefs'
silverware -> 'table utensils: knives, forks, etc.'
holiday -> 'customary day of no work', or in BrE 'vacation'
Narrowing is the opposite: the meaning of a word is reduced, rather
than extended.
band -> 'a group of persons, especially one which performs
music'
building -> 'something built to enclose and cover a large space'
doctor -> 'one holding a doctorate degree (PhD) in medicine
or other field'
Words may be extended or narrowed to yield either a more positive or
negative meaning, and we then find with cases of
Elevation: brave (which earlier meant 'bright, gaudy'), prize (which
earlier meant 'price'), great (which used to mean 'large, important').
Pejoration is the process by which a word's meaning worsens or
degenerates, coming to represent something less favorable than it
originally did.
28. Phraseology
In linguistics it describes the context in which a word is used. This
often includes typical usages/sequences, such as idioms, phrasal verbs,
and multi-word units.
Phraseology, an established concept in central and eastern Europe, has
in recent years received increasing attention in the English-speaking
world. It has long been clear to language learners and teachers that a
native speaker's competence in a language goes well beyond a lexico-
semantic knowledge of the individual words and the grammatical rules
for combining them into sentences; linguistic competence also includes
a familiarity with restricted collocations (like break the rules), idioms
(like spill the beans in a non-literal sense) and proverbs (like Revenge
is sweet), as well as the ability to produce or understand metaphorical
interpretations. The first five papers of this volume set out to define the
basic phraseological concepts collocation, idiom, proverb, metaphor
and the related one of compound (-word). The remaining six papers
explore a series of issues involving analytic, quantitative,
computational and lexicographic aspects of phraseological units. The
volume, as a whole, is a comprehensive and comprehensible
introduction to this blossoming field of linguistics.
29. Synonymy
A synonym – a word of similar or identical meaning to one or more
words in the same language. All languages contain synonyms but in
English they exist in superabundance.
There no two absolutely identical words because connotations, ways of
usage, frequency of an occurence are different.
Classification:
1.Total synonyms - an extremely rare occurence (Ulman: a luxury that
language can hardly afford.)(бегемот – гиппопотам)
2. Ideographic synonyms. They bear the same idea but not identical in
their referential content. (To happen ~ to occur ~ to befall ~ to chance)
3. Dialectical synonyms. (Autumn ~ fall)
4. Contextual synonyms. Context can emphasize some certain semantic
trades & suppress other semantic trades; words with different meaning
can become synonyms in a certain context. (Active ~ curious)
5. Stylistic synonyms. Belong to different styles. (child ~ Infant ~ Kid)
Synonymic condensation is typical of the English language.
It refers to situations when writers or speakers bring together several
words with one & the same meaning to add more conviction, to
description more vivid. (save & sound)
30. Native words
Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from
being homogenous. It consists of two layers – the native stock of words
and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of
words is considerably larger than the native stock of words.
In fact native words comprise only 30% of the total number of words in
the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most
frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides, the native
words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are
highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set
expressions.
Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another language
and modified according to the patterns of the receiving language.
In many cases a borrowed word especially one borrowed long ago is
practically indistinguishable from a native word without a thorough
etymological analysis. The number of the borrowings in the vocabulary
of the language and the role played by them is determined by the
historical development of the nation speaking the language.
During the 1980s and 1990s the information available on the major
regional varieties of English increased dramatically. Five large,
specialized dictionaries were published, providing detailed records of
regional Englishes: The Australian National Dictionary (1988); A
Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (1996); A
Dictionary of Caribbean Usage (1996); The Canadian Oxford
Dictionary (1997); and The Dictionary of New Zealand English (1998).
The Ukrainian dialects in Romania, in large measure, constitute an
extension of the dialectal groups that exist on the territory of Ukraine,
and in particular, the central Transcarpathian, Hutsul, Bukovynian,
Podilian and Steppe dialects. Only the Banat region of Transylvania
forms an area of Ukrainian dialect in Romania that is not contiguous
with the territory of Ukraine.
45. Lexicography
lexicography, the applied study of the meaning, evolution, and function
of the vocabulary units of a language for the purpose of compilation in
book form—in short, the process of dictionary making. Early
lexicography, practiced from the 7th cent. B.C. in Mesopotamia,
Greece, and Rome, was reserved for abstruse words of specific
disciplines. General lexicography originated in the 16th cent., and
aspects of the modern dictionary, such as etymology, developed during
the 17th and 18th cent.
It is now widely accepted that lexicography is a scholarly discipline in
its own right and not a sub-branch of linguistics.
Most English lexicographers would find interest in Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary of the English Language (1755). He famously defined a
lexicographer as "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that
busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of
words".