Учебно-методический комплекс дисциплины «Лексикология» для специальности 5В021000 «Иностранная филология» учебно-методические материалы

British spelling American spelling

cosy cozy

offence offense

practice practise

jewellery jewelry

travelling traveling

thraldom thralldom

encase incase

In the course of time with the development of the modern means of communication the lexical differences between the two variants show a tendency to decrease. Americanisms penetrate into Standard English and Britishisms come to be widely used in American speech. Americanisms mentioned as specific in manuals issued a few decades ago are now used on both sides of the Atlantic or substituted by terms formerly considered as specifically British. It was, for instance, customary to contrast the English word autumn with the American fall. In reality both words are used in both countries, only autumn is somewhat more elevated, while in England the word fall is now rare in literary use, though found in some dialects and surviving in set expressions: spring and fait, the fall of the year are still in fairly common use.

Cinema and TV are probably the most important channels for the passage of Americanisms into the language of Britain and other languages as well: the Germans adopted the word teenager and the French speak of l’automatisation. The influence of American advertising is also a vehicle of Americanisms. This is how the British term wireless is replaced by the Americanism radio.

The personal visits of British writers and scholars to the USA and all forms of other personal contacts bring back Americanisms.

The existing cases of difference between the two variants are conveniently classified into:

1. 
   Cases where there are no equivalents in British English: drive-in ‘a cinema where you can see the film without getting out of your car’ or ‘a shop where motorists buy things staying in the car’; dude ranch ‘a sham ranch used as a summer residence for holiday-makers from the cities’.
   
2. 
   Cases where different words are used for the same denotatum, such as can, candy, mailbox, movies, suspenders, truck in the USA and tin, sweets, pillar-box (or letter-box), pictures or flicks, braces and lorry in England.
   
3. 
   Cases where the semantic structure of a partially equivalent word is different. The word pavement, for example, means in the first place ‘covering of the street or the floor and the like made of asphalt, stones or some other material’. In England the derived meaning is ‘the footway at the side of the road’. The Americans use the noun sidewalk for this, while pavement with them means ‘the roadway’.
   
4. 
   Cases where otherwise equivalent words are different in distribution. The verb ride in Standard English is mostly combined with such nouns as a horse, a bicycle, more seldom they say ride on a bus. In American English combinations like a ride on the train, ride in a boat are quite usual.
   

5. 
   It sometimes happens that the same word is used in American English with some difference in emotional and stylistic colouring. Nasty, for example, is a much milder expression of disapproval in England than in the States, where it was even considered obscene in the 19th century. Politician in England means ‘someone in polities’, and is derogatory in the USA. Professor A.D. Schweitzer pays special attention to phenomena differing in social norms of usage. For example balance in its lexico-semantic variant ‘the remainder of anything’ is substandard in British English and quite literary in America.
   
6. 
   Last but not least, there may be a marked difference in frequency characteristics. Thus, time-table which occurs in American English very rarely, yielded its place to schedule.
   

This question of different frequency distribution is also of paramount importance if we wish to investigate the morphological peculiarities of the American variant.

Practically speaking the same patterns and means of word-formation are used in coining neologisms in both variants. Only the frequency observed in both cases may be different. Some of the suffixes more frequently used in American English are: -ее (draftee n ‘a young man about to be enlisted’), -ette (tambour-majorette ‘one of the girl drummers in front of a procession’), -dom and -ster, as in roadster ‘motorcar for long journeys by road’ or gangsterdom.

American slang uses alongside the traditional ones also a few specific models, such as verb stem+-er+adverb stem+-er, e. g. opener-upper ‘the first item on the programme’ and winder-upper ‘the last item’. It also possesses some specific affixes and semi-affixes not used in literary colloquial: -o, -eroo, -aroo, -sie, -sy, as in coppo ‘policeman’, fatso ‘a fat man’, bossaroo ‘boss’, chapsie ‘fellow’.

The trend to shorten words and to use initial abbreviations in American English is even more pronounced than in the British variant. New coinages are incessantly introduced in advertisements, in the press, in everyday conversation; soon they fade out and are replaced by the newest creations. Ring Lardner, very popular in the 30s, makes one of his characters, a hospital nurse, repeatedly use two enigmatic abbreviations: G.F. and B.F.; at last the patient asks her to clear the mystery.

“What about Roy Stewart?” asked the man in bed.

“Oh, he’s the fella I was telling you about,” said Miss Lyons. “He’s my G.F.’s B.F.”

“Maybe I’m a D.F. not to know, but would you tell me what a B.F. and G.F. are?”

“Well, you are dumb, aren’t you!” said Miss Lyons. “A G.F. that’s a girl friend, and a B.F. is a boy friend. I thought everybody knew that.”

The phrases boy friend and girl friend, now widely used everywhere, originated in the USA. So it is an Americanism in the wider meaning of the term, i.e. an Americanism “by right of birth", whereas in the above definition we have defined Americanisms synchronically as lexical units peculiar to the English language as spoken in the USA.

Particularly common in American English are verbs with the hanging postpositive. They say that in Hollywood you never meet a man: you meet up with him, you do not study a subject but study up on it. In British English similar constructions serve to add a new meaning.

With words possessing several structural variants it may happen that some are more frequent in one country and the others in another. Thus, amid and toward, for example, are more often used in the United States and amidst and towards in Great Britain.

The lexical peculiarities of American English are an easy target for ironical outbursts on the part of some writers. John Updike is mildly humorous. His short poem “Philological” runs as follows:

The British puss demurely mews;

His transatlantic kin meow,

The kine in Minnesota moo;

Not so the gentle Devon cows:

They low,

As every schoolchild ought to know.

A well-known humorist G. Mikes goes as far as to say: “It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.” In his book “How to Scrape Skies” he gives numerous examples to illustrate this proposition: “You must be extremely careful concerning the names of certain articles. If you ask for suspenders in a man’s shop, you receive a pair of braces, if you ask for a pair of pants, you receive a pair of trousers, and should you ask for a pair of braces, you receive a queer look.

I should like to mention that although a lift is called an elevator in the United States, when hitch-hiking, you do not ask for an elevator, you ask for a lift.

There is some confusion about the word flat. A flat in America is called an apartment; what they call a flat is a puncture in your tyre (or as they spell it, tire). Consequently the notice: FLATS FIXED does not indicate an estate agent where they are going to fix you up with a flat, but a garage where they are equipped to mend a puncture.”

Disputing the common statement that there is no such thing as the American nation, he says: “They do indeed exist. They have produced the American constitution, the American way of life, the comic strips in their newspapers: they have their national game, baseball — which is cricket played with a strong American accent — and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language.”

This is of course an exaggeration, but a very significant one. It confirms the fact that there is a difference between the two variants to be reckoned with. Although not sufficiently great to warrant American English the status of an independent language, it is considerable enough to make a mixture of variants sound unnatural and be called Mid-Atlantic. Students of English should be warned against this danger.

3. It should of course be noted that American English is not the only existing variant. There are several other variants where difference from the British standard is normalised. Besides the Irish and Scottish variants that have been mentioned in the preceding paragraph, there are Australian English, Canadian English, Indian English. Each of these has developed a literature of its own, and is characterised by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

Canadian English is influenced both by British and American English but it also has some specific features of its own. Specifically Canadian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very frequent outside Canada, except shack ‘a hut’ and fathom out ‘to explain’.

The vocabulary of all the variants is characterised by a high percentage of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the land before the English colonisers came. Many of them denote some specific realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather conditions, new social relations, new trades and conditions of labour. The local words for new notions penetrate into the English language and later on may become international, if they are of sufficient interest and importance for people speaking other languages.

International words coming through the English of India are for instance: bungalow n, jute n, khaki a, mango n, nabob n, pyjamas, sahib, sari.

Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boomerang, dingo, kangaroo, are all adopted into the English language through its Australian variant and became international. They denote the new phenomena found by English immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words borrowed from the native inhabitants of Australia will be noticed in the sonorous Australian place names. ¹

It has been noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses English, the natives of Great Britain, often half-consciously, perhaps, feel that they have a special right to criticise his usage because it is “their” language. It is, however, unreasonable with respect to people in the United States, Canada, Australia and some other areas for whom English is their mother tongue. At present there is no single “correct” English and the American, Canadian and Australian English have developed standards of their own. It would therefore have been impossible to attempt a lexicological description of all the variants simultaneously: the aim of this book was to describe mainly the vocabulary of British English, as it is the British variant that is received and studied in Soviet schools.

3 САМОСТОЯТЕЛЬНАЯ РАБОТА СТУДЕНТА
3.1 Some general theoretical problems to the problem of the word
3.2 Characteristic of the word as basic unit of language
3.3 The branches of lexicology

3.4 Types of lexical units: a word, a morpheme and a phrase

3.5 Types of word meaning

3.6 Semasiology as a branch of lexicology

3.7 Word meaning in morphemes

3.8 The lexical meaning of a word


3.9 The grammatical meaning of words

3.10 Denotative meaning of a word

3.11 Connotative meaning of a word

3.12 The English Vocabulary as an Adaptive System. Neologisms


3.13 Morphological and Lexico-Grammatical Grouping
3.14 Terminological Systems

3.15 Different Types of Non-Semantic Grouping

3.16 Development of vocabulary

3.17 Structural and semantic peculiarities of new vocabulary units

3.18 Phraseological unit

3.19 Free Word-Groups, Versus Set-Phrases. Phraseological Units, Idioms, Word-Equivalents

3.20 Phraseological Units and Idioms Proper

3.21 Phraseology as a Subsystem of Language

3.22 Standard English variants and dialects

3.23 American English
3.24 Canadian, Australian and Indian variants

3.25 Classification of affixes

3.26 Allomorphs
3.27 Hybrids
Recommended literature:

1. Antrushina Modern English Lexicology - M.,2002

2. Arnold I.V. The English Word - M.,2002

3. Ginzburg Modern English Lexicology – M.,2000

4. Koonin A. English Lexicology - M.,2003

5. Смирницкий А.И. Лексикология английского языка - M.,2003

6. Харитончик З.А. Лексикология английского языка - M.,2002
Методические рекомендации к выполнению СРС:
Авторская творческая работа состоит из трех частей.

Первая часть "Базовое содержание темы" – это подробное изложение выбранной вами темы на основе подобранного вместе с тьютором источника (учебник, журнал, монография, нормативный акт, справочник, этический кодекс).

Текст набирается на компьютере, через 1 интервал шрифтом "Times new Romans", кегль 14. Поля: левое - 3см, верхнее, нижнее и правое – по  2 см.

Объем задания по первой части  на 1 СРС (по часовому объему кратно 3 часам работы студента) включает примерно 3 "разворота" источника – то есть 6 страниц из базового текста источника (учебника, монографии, научной статьи из журнала), набранного согласно указанным выше требованиям.     Учебные цели по первой  части работы направлены на формирование у вас элементарных навыков скоропечатания на компьютере,  на развитие  навыков аналитического чтения и аналитического мышления. Не прибегайте к сканеру. Этим вы не разовьете в себе тех качеств, которые  обязательны на современном рынке труда. Сканер не актуален на данном этапе вашего обучения.

Уважаемые студенты, обратите внимание на то, что при написании первой части СРС подстрочные сноски обязательны. Научитесь оформлять сноску через услугу компьютера. Только в таком виде (со сносками!) будет приниматься ваша работа. 

Затем студент приступает к собственно авторской  самостоятельной работе – это вторая часть работы.

Вторая часть – креативная творческая часть: формирование  тематических и прямых вопросов.

Вы самостоятельно формулируете к уже набранному тексту пять вопросов тематических. Тематический вопрос не предполагает вопросительного знака в конце предложения. Это вопрос-тема, вопрос-проблема. Его аналог вы видели неоднократно в школьных учебниках как подпараграфы, в экзаменационных билетах как вопрос, требующий подробного, комплексного ответа. Сформулировав тематический (проблемный) вопрос вы  даете на основе этого же набранного текста подробный ответ. Затем – вы формулируете прямые вопросы. Это вопрос с наличием вопросительного знака или предлагающий назвать имя, дату, дать определения понятия.

Третья часть – креативная творческая часть: тестовые вопросы.

Вы самостоятельно задаете к изученному и набранному тексту вопросы, и на каждый даете пять вариантов ответа, один из которых правильный. За основу Вы также берете материал данной темы в целом.

Тема, выбранная для авторской творческой работы, оформляется  в виде письменной работы по стандартному образцу. Сначала – титульный лист. Затем – содержание работы. Далее – все составные части работы: Базовая часть (набранный материал с обязательными сносками на каждой странице),  вторая кретивная творческая часть: тематические и прямые вопросы обязательно с ответами, третья креативная творческая часть: тестовые вопросы обязательно с ответами.

Одна из тем СРС готовится для презентации перед группой.

Для подготовки к успешной  презентации Вам необходимо обеспечить наглядность и доступность предлагаемой для аудитории информации, заинтересовать аудиторию при своем выступлении: текст не читается,  а  передается в формате свободного рассказа. Обязательна "обратная связь" после выступления. Это мониторинг усвоения материала, который вы предложили своим          коллегам по обучению. Именно в этой части вы проверите качество своих тестовых вопросов, прямых вопросов. Эти вопросы будут дополнять тот содержательный материал, который вы изложите перед группой через проблемные (тематические вопросы). Для обеспечения наглядности вам понадобятся Флиппчарты. Это современный, широко используемый в корпоративном обучении на бизнес-пространстве РК прием установления диалога с группой.  Для всех специалистов в сфере коммуникативного поля обязательны навыки грамотного убедительного публичного выступления с применением современных приемов организационного и технического сопровождения. Именно эти навыки и отрабатываются в процессе СРСП презентационного формата. Презентация предполагает на только эффектность и убедительность вашего говорения, вашей вербальной культуры, но и вашу внешнюю, невербальную убедительность. Поэтому презентация предполагает соблюдение этических стандартов внутриофисного общения наряду со стандартами внутриофисной одежды и стиля. Оценка этих параметров будет производиться всей группой и тьютором курса. Презентация – это ответственное, интересное  и полезное для вас мероприятие. Вы сможете увидеть и прочувствовать свои возможности в работе с людьми, понять, в чем вы более успешны, а с чем есть еще время поработать.

На презентацию Вы можете пригласить свою "группу поддержки" – друзей,  младших братьев, сестер, и, конечно, родителей. Им будет приятно и интересно  посмотреть на Вас, на ваших сокурсников, познакомиться с тьютором и иметь собственное впечатление об учебном процессе, который вы успешно осваиваете. Самостоятельная работа студента – это самый важный этап в вашем личностном росте и  приобретении вами настоящей профессиональной компетенции. Подробное консультирование по особенностям организации и проведения СРС вы получаете в процессе индивидуальных консультаций тьютора курса в формате занятий "СРСП" – самостоятельная работа с преподавателем.