Учебно-методический комплекс дисциплины «Лексикология» для специальности 5В021000 «Иностранная филология» учебно-методические материалы
Semantic structure of the English word
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2.3 Semantic structure of the English word 1. The definition of lexical meaning of a word 2. Grammatical meanings of words 3. The lexical meaning of words 4. Denotative (direct) and connotative (figurative) meaning Aims: teaching – To give the idea of the semantic structure of the English word; developing – To deepen the idea of the semantic structure of the English word; educational (pedagogic) – To increase the willing to study the semantic structure of the English word. 1. The branch of linguistics concerned with the meaning of words and word equivalents is called semasiology. The name comes from the Greek sēmasiā ‘signification’ (from sēma ‘sign’ sēmantikos ‘significant’ and logos ‘learning’). The definition of lexical meaning has been attempted more than once in accordance with the main principles of different linguistic schools. The definitions of meaning given by various authors, though different in detail, agree in the basic principle: they all point out that lexical meaning is the realisation of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. The complexity of the word meaning is manifold. The four most important types of semantic complexity may be roughly described as follows: Firstly, every word combines lexical and grammatical meanings. E.g.: Father is a personal noun. Secondly, many words not only refer to some object but have an aura of associations expressing the attitude of the speaker. They have not only denotative but connotative meaning as well. E. g.: Daddy is a colloquial term of endearment. Thirdly, the denotational meaning is segmented into semantic components or semes. E.g.: Father is a male parent. Fourthly, a word may be polysemantic, that is it may have several meanings, all interconnected and forming its semantic structure. E. g.: Father may mean: ‘male parent’, ‘an ancestor’, ‘a founder or leader’, ‘a priest’. 2. We notice, e.g., that word-forms, such as girls, winters, joys, tables, etc. though denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality which can be found in all of them. Thus grammatical meaning may be defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s, boy’s, night’s, etc.). In a broad sense it may be argued that linguists who make a distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning are, in fact, making a distinction between the functional (linguistic) meaning which operates at various levels as the interrelation of various linguistic units and referential (conceptual) meaning as the interrelation of linguistic units and referents (or concepts). In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in relation to other linguistic units, i.e. by its distribution. Word-forms speaks, reads, writes have one and the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution, e.g. only after the pronouns he, she, it and before adverbs like well, badly, to-day, etc. It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributionally different (cf. my work and I work).
The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the book is in/on, behind the table). “ It follows that by lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other. That can be also observed in the semantic analysis of correlated words in different languages. E.g. the Russian word сведения is not semantically identical with the English equivalent information because unlike the Russian сведения the English word does not possess the grammatical meaning of plurality which is part of the semantic structure of the Russian word.
As was mentioned above one of the functions of words is to denote things, concepts and so on. Users of a language cannot have any knowledge or thought of the objects or phenomena of the real world around them unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied in words which have essentially the same meaning for all speakers of that language. This is the denotative meaning, i.e. that component of the lexical meaning which makes communication possible. There is no doubt that a physicist knows more about the atom than a singer does, or that an arctic explorer possesses a much deeper knowledge of what arctic ice is like than a man who has never been in the North. Nevertheless they use the words atom, Arctic, etc. and understand each other. The second component of the lexical meaning is the connotative component, i.e. the emotive charge and the stylistic value of the word.
New notions constantly come into being, requiring new words to name them. Sometimes a new name is introduced for a thing or notion that continues to exist, and the older name ceases to be used. The number of words in a language is therefore not constant, the increase, as a rule, more than makes up for the leak-out. New words and expressions or neоlоgisms are created for new things irrespective of their scale of importance. They may be all-important and concern some social relationships, such as a new form of state, e. g. People’s Republic, or something threatening the very existence of humanity, like nuclear war. Or again the thing may be quite insignificant and short-lived, like fashions in dancing, clothing, hairdo or footwear (e. g. roll-neck). In every case either the old words are appropriately changed in meaning or new words are borrowed, or more often coined out of the existing language material either according to the patterns and ways already productive in the language at a given stage of its development or creating new ones. Thus, a neologism is a newly coined word or phrase or a new meaning for an existing word, or a word borrowed from another language. The intense development of science and industry has called forth the invention and introduction of an immense number of new words and changed the meanings of old ones, e. g. aerobic, black hole, computer, isotope, feedback, penicillin, pulsar, quasar, tape-recorder, supermarket and so on.
1. Root or morpheme words. Their stem contains one free morpheme, e. g. dog, hand. 2. Derivatives contain no less than two morphemes of which at least one is bound, e.g. dogged, doggedly, handy, handful; sometimes both are bound: terrier. 3. Compound words consist of not less than two free morphemes, the presence of bound morphemes is possible but not necessary, e. g. dog-cheap ‘very cheap’; dog-days ‘hottest part of the year’; handball, handbook. 4. Compound derivatives consist of not less than two free morphemes and one bound morpheme referring to the whole combination. The pattern is (stem+stem) +suffix, e. g. dog-legged ‘crooked or bent like a dog’s hind leg’, left-handed. This division is the basic one for lexicology. Another type of traditional lexicological grouping is known as word-families. The number of groups is certainly much greater, being equal to the number of root morphemes if all the words are grouped according to the root morpheme. For example: dog, doggish, doglike, doggy/doggie, to dog, dogged, doggedly, doggedness, dog-wolf, dog-days, dog-biscuit, dog-cart, etc.; hand, handy, handicraft, handbag, handball, handful, handmade, handsome, etc. Similar groupings according to a common suffix or prefix are also possible, if not as often made use of. The greater the combining power of the affix, the more numerous the group. Groups with such suffixes as -er, -ing, -ish, -less, -ness constitute infinite (open) sets, i.e. are almost unlimited, because new combinations are constantly created. When the suffix is no longer productive the group may have a diminishing number of elements, as with the adjective-forming suffix -some, e. g. gladsome, gruesome, handsome, lithesome, lonesome, tiresome, troublesome, wearisome, wholesome, winsome, etc. Lexico-grammatical groups should not be confused with parts of speech. A few more examples will help to grasp the difference. Audience and honesty, for instance, belong to the same part of speech but to different lexico-grammatical groups, because their lexico-grammatical meaning is different: audience is a group of people, and honesty is a quality; they have different paradigms: audience has two forms, singular and plural, honesty is used only in the singular; also honesty is hardly ever used in the Possessive case unless personified. To show that the substituting elements are different two examples will suffice: I am referring to what goes on inside the audience’s mind when they see the play (Arden). Honesty isn’t everything but I believe it’s the first thing (Priestley). Being a collective noun, the word audience is substituted by they; honesty is substituted by it. Other words belonging to the same lexico-grammatical group as audience are people, party, jury, but not flock or swarm, because the lexico-grammatical meaning of the last two words is different: they are substituted by it and denote groups of living beings but not persons, unless, of course, they are used metaphorically. 3. Sharply defined extensive semantic fields are found in terminological systems. Terminology constitutes the greatest part of every language vocabulary. It is also its most intensely developing part, i.e. the class giving the largest number of new formations. Terminology of a language consists of many systems of terms. We shall call a term any word or word-group used to name a notion characteristic of some special field of knowledge, industry or culture. A term is, in many respects, a very peculiar type of word. An ideal term should be monosemantic and, when used within its own sphere, does not depend upon the micro-context, provided it is not expressed by a figurative variant of a polysemantic word. Its meaning remains constant until some new discovery or invention changes the referent or the notion. Polysemy, when it arises, is a drawback, so that all the speakers and writers on special subjects should be very careful to avoid it. Polysemy may be tolerated in one form only, namely if the same term has various meanings in different fields of science. The terms alphabet and word, for example, have in mathematics a meaning very different from those accepted in linguistics. Being mostly independent of the context a term can have no contextual meaning whatever. The only meaning possible is a denotational free meaning. A term is intended to ensure a one-to-one correspondence between morphological arrangement and content. No emotional colouring or evaluation are possible when the term is used within its proper sphere. As to connotation or stylistic colouring, they are superseded in terms by the connection with the other members of some particular terminological system and by the persistent associations with this system when the term is used out of its usual sphere. A term can obtain a figurative or emotionally coloured meaning only when taken out of its sphere and used in literary or colloquial speech. But in that case it ceases to be a term and its denotational meaning may also become very vague. It turns into an ordinary word. The adjective atomic used to describe the atomic structure of matter was until 1945 as emotionally neutral as words like quantum or parallelogram. But since Hiroshima and the ensuing nuclear arms race it has assumed a new implication, so that the common phrase this atomic age, which taken literally has no meaning at all, is now used to denote an age of great scientific progress, but also holds connotations of ruthless menace and monstrous destruction. The terminology of a branch of science is not simply a sum total of its terms but a definite system reflecting the system of its notions. Terminological systems may be regarded as intersecting sets, because some terms belong simultaneously to several terminological systems. There is no harm in this if the meaning of the terms and their definitions remain constant, or if the respective branches of knowledge do not meet; where this is not so, much ambiguity can arise. The opposite phenomenon, i.e. the synonymy of terms, is no less dangerous for very obvious reasons. Scholars are apt to suspect that their colleagues who use terms different from those favoured by themselves are either talking nonsense or else are confused in their thinking. An interesting way out is offered by one of the most modern developments in world science, by cybernetics. It offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of systems: in linguistics and biological aspects of communication no less than in various engineering professions. This is of paramount importance, as it has been repeatedly found in science that the discovery of analogy or relation between two fields leads to each field helping the development of the other. 4. The simplest, most obvious non-semantic grouping, extensively used in all branches of applied linguistics is the alphabetical organisation of written words, as represented in most dictionaries. It is of great practical value as the simplest and the most universal way of facilitating the search for the necessary word. Even in dictionaries arranged on some other principles (in “Roget’s International Thesaurus", for example) we have an alphabetical index for the reader to refer to before searching the various categories. The theoretical value of alphabetical grouping is almost null, because no other property of the word can be predicted from the letter or letters the word begins with. We cannot infer anything about the word if the only thing we know is that it begins with a p. Only in exceptional cases some additional information can be obtained on a different, viz. the etymological, level. For instance, words beginning with a w are mostly native, and those beginning with a ph borrowed from Greek. But such cases are few and far between. The rhyming, i.e. inverse, dictionary presents a similar non-semantic grouping of isolated written words differing from the first in that the sound is also taken into consideration and in that the grouping is done the other way round and the words are arranged according to the similarity of their ends. The practical value of this type is much more limited. These dictionaries are intended for poets. They may be also used, if but rarely, by teachers, when making up lists of words with similar suffixes. A third type of non-semantic grouping of written words is based on their length, i.e. the number of letters they contain. This type, worked out with some additional details, may prove useful for communication engineering, for automatic reading of messages and correction of mistakes. It may prove useful for linguistic theory as well, although chiefly in its modified form, with length measured not in the number of letters but in the number of syllables. Important statistical correlations have been found to exist between the number of syllables, the frequency, the number of meanings and the stylistic characteristics a word possesses. The shorter words occur more frequently and accumulate a greater number of meanings. Finally, a very important type of non-semantic grouping for isolated lexical units is based on a statistical analysis of their frequency. Frequency counts carried out for practical purposes of lexicography, language teaching and shorthand enable the lexicographer to attach to each word a number showing its importance and range of occurrence. Large figures are, of course, needed to bring out any inherent regularities, and these regularities are, naturally, statistical, not rigid. But even with these limitations the figures are fairly reliable and show important correlations between quantitative and qualitative characteristics of lexical units, the most frequent words being polysemantic and stylistically neutral. 2.5 The basic ways of replenishing (development) the vocabulary 1. Development of vocabulary 2. Structural and semantic peculiarities of new vocabulary units Aims: teaching – To give the idea of the basic ways of replenishing (development) the vocabulary; developing – To deepen the idea of the development of vocabulary; educational (pedagogic) – To increase meaning the idea of the development of vocabulary. 1. As has been already mentioned, no vocabulary of any living language is ever stable but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The changes occurring in the vocabulary are due both to linguistic and non-linguistic causes, but in most cases to the combination of both. Words may drop out altogether as a result of the disappearance of the actual objects they denote, e.g. the OE. wunden-stefna — 'a curved-stemmed ship'; зãг—’spear, dart’; some words were ousted1 as a result of the influence of Scandinavian and French borrowings, e.g. the Scandinavian take and die ousted the OE: niman and sweltan, the French army and place replaced the OE. hēre and staÞs. Sometimes words do not actually drop out but become obsolete, sinking to the level of vocabulary units used in narrow, specialised fields of human intercourse making a group of archaisms: e g. billow — ‘wave’; welkin — ’sky’; steed — ‘horse’; slay — ‘kill’ are practically never used except in poetry; words like halberd, visor, gauntlet are used only as historical terms. Yet the number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete, that the development of vocabularies may be described as a process of never-ending growth.
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