The characteristic features of the english word

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1. The
   volume of the vocabulary.

2. Archaisms.

3. Neologisms.

4. Professional
   terminology.

5. Standard
   English. Slang.

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1. The volume of the vocabulary

In
contrast to grammar, the vocabulary of a language is not systematic
but chaotic.

Nowadays
in English there are 450,000 words. Passive vocabulary is 30,000 to
understand and active vocabulary is 5,000 words to speak.

The
English vocabulary can be subdivided into two large stylistic layers:
literary words and expressions and conversational words and
expressions. Each of these large layers is, in its turn, further
subdivided into lexical groups. The words in our practical vocabulary
are neutral and frequent. The basic word stock includes root words,
derivatives and compounds. It includes different parts of speech,
native and borrowed words.

The
basic word-stock is a good building material for phrases: to
go mad,
to
go on strike,
to
go one’s way,
to
go out of fashion;
to
make a date,
to
make friends,
to
make a long story short,
to
make a scene.
The words from the basic stock are usually pollysemantic.

Literary
words can
be divided into general literary words and special literary words.

2. Archaisms

Archaisms
are words that were common but have been replaced from the language
by their modern synonyms and are no longer used in neutral or
colloquial speech, but they mostly belong to the poetic style, e.g.
betwixt,
prep. (between),
damsel,
n (noble
girl), fluey,
adj. (dusty),
hark,
v (listen),
morn,
n (morning).
Archaisms
remain in the language: they are used in poetry and in official
documents, e.g. steed
(horse),
slay
(kill),
behold
(see),
perchance (perhaps),
woe
(sorrow).
Sometimes
a lexical archaism gets a new meaning, and the old meaning becomes a
semantic archaism, e.g. fair
in the meaning of “beautiful” is a semantic archaism, but in the
meaning of “blond” it belongs to the neutral style.

3. Neologisms

A
neologism
(Greek
neo
– “new” and logos
“word”)
is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created – often
to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language
form. Neologisms are especially useful in identifying inventions, new
phenomena. A neologism denotes a new object or phenomenon, e.g.
e-book,
n
– a book in an electronic format; ecotourism,
n –
tourism to places having unspoiled natural resources; home
shopping, n –
the purchase of goods from home, especially goods offered on cable
television.

Neologisms
come about by different means: some are imported from other
languages, some phrases are translated from another language, many
are made by combining familiar words or roots to make new
combinations (e.g. Greek word “tele”, meaning “at a distance”,
and the Latin word “visio” – “sight”, gave the word
television.),
some words began life as abbreviations (laser
is an abbreviation of “light amplification by stimulated emission
of radiation). New words can be added to the language due to new
technologies or any idea must be expressed.

At
the present moment English is developing very swiftly and there is so
called “neology blowup”. Averagely 800 neologisms appear every
year in Modern English.
Lexical
units are primarily used by university teachers, newspaper reporters,
scientists, by those who are connected with mass media.

The
intensive development of science, industry, terminology, means of
communication leads to the invention of new words and phrases. There
is the group of neologisms connected with computerization, and we can
mention words used to denote:

1)
different types of computers: PC,
super-computer,
multi-user,
neurocomputer
(analogue of a human brain);

2)
parts of computers: hardware,
software,
monitor,
screen,
data,
vaporware
(experimental samples of computers for exhibition, not for
production);

3)
computer languages: BASIC,
ALGOL,
FORTRAN
etc;

4)
notions connected with work on computer: computerization,
computerize,
to
troubleshoot,
to
blitz out
(to ruin data in computer’s memory).

There
are also different types of activities performed with the help of
computers, many of them are formed with the help of morpheme “tele”:
telework,
to
telecommute (to
work at home having a computer which is connected with the enterprise
for which one works),
telebanking,
telemarketing,
teleshopping
(when you can perform different operations with the help of your
computer without leaving your home, all operations are registered by
the computer at your bank). In the sphere of
linguistics we have such neologisms as: machine
translation,
interlingual
(an artificial language for machine translation into several
languages) and some others.

In
the sphere of medicine computers are also used and we have the
following neologism: telemonitory
unit
(a telemonitory system for treating patience at a distance).

With
the development of social activities neologisms appeared as well,
e.g. youthquake
(волнения
среди
молодёжи),
pussy-footer
(политик,
идущий
на
компромиссы),
Euromarket,
Eurodollar,
Europarliament,
Europol
etc.

In
the modern English society there is a tendency to social
stratification, and there are neologisms in this sphere as well,
e.g.: belonger
(представитель
среднего
класса,
приверженец
консервативных
взглядов),
survivers
(people belonging to the lowest layer of the society), sustainers
(a little bit more prosperous), emulaters
(people
who try to prosper in life and imitate those, they want to belong
to), achievers (people who have prospered but are not belongers). All
these layers of society are called VAL
(Value and Lifestyle). The rich belong to jet
set
that is those who can afford to travel by jet planes all over the
world enjoying their life. Sometimes they are called jet
plane travellers.

To
this group we can also refer abbreviations: yuppie
(young
urban professional people), PLU
(during
Margaret Thatcher’s rule this abbreviation appeared which means
“People like us” by which snobbistic circles of society call
themselves.). Nowadays PLU has been substituted by “one
of us”.

There
are a lot of immigrants now in the UK, in connection with which
neologisms partial
(имеющие
право
жить
в
стране)
and non-partial
(не
имеющие
право
жить
в
стране)
were formed.

The
word-group “welfare
mother”
was formed to denote a non-working single mother living on benefit.

The
higher society has neologism in their speech, such as: dial-a-meal,
dial-a-taxi.

In
the language of teenagers there are such words as: Drugs!
(OK), sweat
(бег
на
длинные
дистанции),
task
(home composition), brunch
(breakfast + lunch) поздний
завтрак,
etc. With the development of the professional jargons a lot of words
ending in “speak” appeared in English, e.g. artspeak,
sportspeak,
medspeak,
education-speak,
video-speak,
cable-speak
etc.

There
are different semantic groups of neologisms belonging to everyday
life:

1)
food e.g.
starter
(instead of “hors d’oevres”), microbiotic
(raw
vegetables, crude rice), longlife
milk,
clingfilm,
microwave
stove,
consumer
electronics,
fridge-freezer,
hamburgers
(beef-, cheese-, fish-, veg-);

2)
clothing e.g. catsuit
(one
piece clingning suit), string
(miniscule bikini), hipsters
(trousers or skirt with the belt on hips), completenik
(a long sweater for trousers), swetnik
(a long jacket), pants-skirt
bloomers
(lady’s sports trousers);

3)
footwear e.g.
winkle-pickers
(shoes with long pointed toes), thongs
(open sandals), backsters
(beech sandals with thick soles);

4)
bags e.g. bumbag
(a
small bag worn on waist), sling
bag (a
bag with a long belt), maitre
(a small bag for cosmetics).

There
are also such words as: dangledolly
(a dolly-talisman dangling in the car before the wind screen),
boot-sale
(selling from the boot of the car), touch-tone
(a telephone with press button).

There
are also abbreviations of different types such as resto
(vintage car), teen
(teenager), dinky
DINKS
(dual income no kids yet), AIDS
(Aquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), HIV
(human immunodeficiency virus).

Strong
neologisms also include phonetic borrowings, such as perestroika
(Russian),
solidarnost
(Polish), dolce
vita
(Italian) etc.

Linguists
distinguish three groups of neologisms: a) unstable,
i.e. extremely new, being proposed, or being used only by a very
small subculture; b) diffused
– having reached a significant audience, but not yet having gained
acceptance; c) stable
–
having gained recognizable and probably lasting acceptance.

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Lexicology. General characteristics of Modern English Vocabulary 1. 2. Lexicology as a science. The theoretical value of lexicology. Lexicology and other branches of linguistics. General characteristics of Modern English vocabulary as a system. The problem of the classification of the vocabulary.

Lexicology as a science. • Lexicology – a branch of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary of the language and aims at study and systematic description of the vocabulary: its meaning, structure, origin, development and usage. • The term «lexicology» is of Greek origin «lexis» — «word» «logos» — «science» .

The theoretical value of lexicology • As a theoretical science Modern English lexicology investigates problems of word structure, word formation in Modern English, the semantic structure of words, main principles of classification of vocabulary units into various groups, synonymy, hyponymy, semantic fields etc.

Branches of lexicology • General lexicology – a part of general linguistics. It is concerned with the study of vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any particular language.

• Special lexicology – the lexicology of a particular language, i. e. the study and description of its vocabulary and vocabulary units. It is based on the principles worked out by general lexicology. • Special lexicology employs synchronic and diachronic approaches: — special descriptive lexicology (synchronic lexicology) – deals with the vocabulary and vocabulary units of a particular language at a certain time; — special historical lexicology (diachronic lexicology) – deals with the changes and the development of vocabulary in the course of time.

• Historical lexicology deals with the historic change of words in the course of lang. development. • Comparative lexicology studies closely relative languages from the point of view of their identity and differentiation. • Contrastive — both relative and unrelative languages establishes differences and similarity. • Applied lexicology — translation, lexicography, pragmatics of speech.

• Phraseology is the branch of lexicology specializing in word groups which are characterized by stability of structure and transferred meaning.

Lexicology and other branches of linguistics. Lexicology and phonetics: • A word is a group of sounds with the given meaning (ex. Tip-top ). • The function of phonemes is building up morphemes. • The meaning is introduced on the level of morphemes.

Lexicology and grammar. • The difference and interconnection between grammar and lexicology is a controversial problem in linguistics. • We should point out that words seldom occur in isolation, they are arranged in certain patterns, conveying the relations between the things for which they stand, thus with a lexical meaning they possess some grammatical meaning.

2. English vocabulary as a system • The main unit of English vocabulary system is a word. • The word is a unit of speech which serves for the purposes of human communication. • The word has a sound form that consists of number of phonemes. • The word viewed structurally possesses several characteristics. It has a particular morphological structure. Here we should distinguish between the external and internal structure. By the external structure – the morphological structure is meant; by the internal- semantic (the main aspect of the word)

• The word is fundamental unit of the language. It is the unity of form and content. • Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses both external and semantic unity. E. g. Blackbird — black bird • Susceptibility to grammatical employment. Every word is used in different grammatical groups when it is necessary. The system of all forms of the word is called a paradigm. The lexical meaning of the word is the same throughout the paradigm. E. g. : girl, girls, girl’s, girls’ ; a child, children’s toys, a child’s ball.

The word is a speech unit used for purposes of human communication materially representing a group of sounds possessing a meaning susceptible to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and semantic unity.

General characteristics of English vocabulary • The total word-stock of a language is immense and openended. The exact number of vocabulary units in Modern English cannot be stated with any degree of certainty for a number of reasons: a) Constant growth of Modern English word-stock. b) Intrinsic heterogeneity of Modern English vocabulary. c) Divergent views concerning the nature of basic vocabulary units connected with some crucial debatable problems of lexicology: homonymy, polysemy, phraseology, nonce-words. d) The absence of a sharp and distinct border-line between English and foreign words and between modern and outdated English vocabulary units.

OED 500. 000 lexical units.

Historically, we distinguish several groups of words: • Neologisms — newly coined words. E. g. : smartcard, bridge-building, golden handcuffs • Archaisms — words that were once common but are now replaced by their synonyms. E. g. : ney-no; maiden – girl; to slay-to kill; morn-morning; billow –wave, evening; betwixt-between, ere-before. • Historisms — words denoting objects and phenomena which are things of the past and no longer exist. OEwunden- stefna a curved-stemmed ship. • Obsolete words — words dropped from the language. E. g. : zyxt (see)

Two aspects of the growth of the language I. the appearance of the new lexical items (vocabulary extension) q 1. productive or patterned ways of word-formation; q 2. non-patterned ways of word-creation; q 3. borrowing from other languages. II. the appearance of new meanings of old words ( semantic extension). q 1. polysemy ; q 2. homonymy.

1. productive or patterned ways of word-formation: qaffixation (prefixation mainly for verbs and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives); qconversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns). E. g. : work – to work; pale – to pale; qcomposition (most productive in nouns and adjectives). E. g. : brain-washer, a double-talker, a sit-inner, to hi-fi.

2. non-patterned ways of wordcreation: A. Lexicalisation B. Shortening q a non-patterned way of • shortening which results in word-formation when a new lexical items; grammatical form of a word • graphical abbreviations develops a new lexical (e. g. : RD for Road and St for meaning. Street; tu for tube, aer for q E. g. : arms, customs, aerial) colours

II. semantic extension q. Polysemy. ( She runs two km a day. The law runs for 7 years. ) q Homonymy. ( back- a part of the human body and back — a direction). q. E. g. : beehive — ‘a woman’s hair style’; lungs (n pl. ) — ‘breathing spaces, such as small parks that might be placed in overpopulated or trafficcongested areas’; a bird — ‘any flying craft’; a vegetable — ‘a lifeless, inert person’; clean (sl. ) — free from the use of narcotic drugs’;

The classification of the English vocabulary • Two groups of classification I. Semantic II. Non semantic

I. Non-semantic classifications 1. 2. 3. 4. the alphabetical organization of words; The classification based on the length of the words; According to the frequency; according to the morphological structure of the words (root-words, derivatives, compound words, compoundderivatives); 5. according to word families (according to the common root -morpheme); 6. Into notional words and form words; 7. the division into parts of speech (the words of one or the same part of speech may be subdivided into lexical and grammatical groups).

• Word family — a type of traditional lexicological grouping according to the root morpheme. • Lexico-grammatical group — a class of words which have a common lexico-grammatical meaning, a common paradigm, the same substituting elements and possibly a characteristic set of suffixes rendering the lexicogrammatical meaning.

II. Semantic classification 1. According to semantic similarities of morphemes we subdivide words into word families and words with semantically similar or identical affixational morphemes (waterproof, organization); 2. According to the semantic similarity or polarity of words (synonyms and antonyms); 3. According to the common denominator of meaning (it is observed in lexical groups making up semantic fields);

• Semantic field is closely connected sectors of the vocabulary characterized by a common concept.

4. According to common contextual associations we distinguish thematic groups. A thematic group deals with contexts on the level of the sentence. The words are joined with one thematic group. 5. According to the stylistic principle of the word we distinguish different layers in the language (standard vocabulary, non-standard).

Modern methods of lexicological research • • Contrastive Analysis Statistical analysis Distributional analysis Transformational analysis

Обратная связь

The most efficient communication between people is verbal. Without words there is no human language. In different speech communities the number of words, their form and meaning, their origin and use is different, and it is this difference in lexicons that alongside specific grammar and phonology that makes the way humans communicate with each other a separate language.

Of all the language components lexicon is the most sensitive to man’s social life, its development is influenced by different extralinguistic factors. One of the specific characteristics of the lexicon in modern English is that it is very extensive. Though it is not possible to give the exact amount of lexical units in any language because there is not a complete unanimity what should be considered a lexical unit, and because lexicon is too complex, dynamic and flexible for any accurate calculations, dictionary makers estimate that in English there are somewhere from 450,000 to 3,000 000 words.

The English language vocabulary development is very dynamic. Many words like mizzle ‘drizzle’, toom ‘empty’ become obsolete and drop out of the system. But still many more words are born. The characteristic feature of the English vocabulary is its steady replenishment.

The expansion of vocabulary is especially noticeable in the sphere of terminology. New developments in science and technology brought in use such words as television, laser, vinyl, computer, software, diskette, video, modem, to log in, high-tech, on-line, and there is no limit to their potential number.

Such recent prefixes like –mini-, maxi-, super-, micro-, mega-, hyper- are very active and highly productive in creating new words: mini-diskette, superchip, micro-surgery, or hypersonic.

Minor word-formations like blendings, or portmanteau words(pompetent for ‘pompous but competent’, smust (smoke and dust), sexplosion for ‘sex explosion’,movelist for ‘a writer for the movies’) and analogical word-formations like beef-a-roni;rice-a-roni, noodle-roni after the original macaroni or cheeseburger, fishburger after hamburger have become quite numerous in modern English.

A Native American proverb suggests that language changes within a mile. No wonder then that the English language, one of world languages spoken in all the continents by millions of people, exists in a great number of variants and dialects. The existing varieties of English are made first of all by lexical differences, as well as differences in phonetic and grammatical systems.

Still another characteristic feature of the English lexicon is its mixed etymological character. A Germanic language, English borrowed up to 70% of its total vocabulary from more than 50 languages of the world. Though not so intensively as during and after the periods of invasion of Great Britain, foreign words still enrich the English lexicon: bébé, baguette, bouillon [Fr], baba, babushka, borshch [Russ], a capella, bambino [It], charisma [Gk], bonsai, sushi [Jap], caramba, or bosque [Sp]. The majority of them were remodelled and assimilated according to the specific features of the English language system; some of them are still being assimilated. Taking into account the number of words borrowed from French and Latin, English is regarded by some linguists as half-Romance. Classical (i.e. from Latin and Greek) borrowings and neo-classical compounds constitute perhaps the absolute majority of all the words in the language though they are usually not used frequently. Not only words but many affixes came from Latin and Greek with the Renaissance, many of them became very productive and are often used with native roots forming such hybrids as womanize, witticism, etc.

Loan words radically changed the structure of the Old English lexicon. They led to numerous etymological doublets, homonyms, created a three-member pattern of stylistically different synonyms neutral ones being traced to Anglo-Saxon roots, literary words coming from French and learned words being borrowed from Latin.

However, native, predominantly monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin are still the most frequently used, polysemantic, communicatively important, and thus remain the core of the lexical system of modern English.

Specific characteristics of the English vocabulary are also revealed in all morphological and lexical-semantic aspects of a word.

Monomorphism of many words consisting of only roots (love, answer, sail, hate, birth, death, etc.) is one of the most distinctive features of the English vocabulary that was developed in the course of its history. Most of them, both native and loans, are also monosyllables: eye, head, nose, cat, dog, home, bed; air, cost, firm, pay, push, cry, move; die, egg, leg, sky, skirt; disc, pain.

These short words naming the most important concepts for human survival and further development possess a tremendous potential for derivation and they act as sources for new names derived by lexical-semantic, morphological and lexical-syntactic means.

Their active use in lexical-semantic naming lead to a high degree of polysemy of English words, estimated as one of the highest in the European languages.

Like in other Indo-European languages they are the bases for many morphologically derived words by means of affixation, composition, conversion, and other word buildingmeans that finally make up the majority of word-stock in English.

Linguistic and extralinguistic restrictions on long words prevent them from participating in numerous acts of derivation, and the majority of English derived words are the products of the first or the second degree of derivation as it can be seen in the morphological family of the noun hand: handy, handiness, handy-man, handily; handless, handbag, handbarrow, handbook, hand-breadth, hand-cart, handcuff, to handcuff, handful, hand-out, handshake. Derivatives of the third and fourth degree of derivation, like non-environmentalist, are rare in English.

High productivity of conversion as well as some other non-affixal ways of word-derivation such as shortening, back-formation, transposition, and some others, make many English derived words remain monomorphic (to knife, a fan, to edit, the rich).

Compounding is one of the most important types of word-formation in English. Within the system of English compounds the predominant part is made up of composites without a linking element (snowman, oil-rich, sky-blue). The mere juxtaposition of immediate constituents in English compounds alongside the lack of any other reliable criterion for referring a composite to the class of compounds make it difficult for lexicologists and lexicographers to differentiate among numerous cases of wide use of nouns in attributive function (as alife story, a stone wall). Semantically most important component in English compounds is always the second root.

English words are more polysemantic than Russian words and are characterized by a wide lexical and grammatical collocability.

In addition to different restrictions naturally provided by the English language system (cf.: strong tea but powerful argument), some collocations of words, and even some sentences, become more fixed as a result of their frequent use in speech. They change into readily reproduced clichés and finally become lexicalized alongside with morphemes and words. We are quick to say wrong numberwhen answering some telephone calls, or Good morning! when we greet a friend, we take the bus or walk on foot. In English, as in any other language, there are also, numerous word groups that semantically cannot be reduced to the meanings of their components and are characterized by functional integrity (to break the ice, in the long run, mare’s nest, etc.). Such idiomatic word groups along with words as smaller units and proverbs, sayings or quotations as longer ready-made units, are also part and parcel of the English lexicon.

Though lexicon is not any more viewed as a list of irregularities that have to be memorized but a certain system and structure having a generative character, the process of vocabulary acquisition for both first and second language learners is still a long and pains taking process because lexical rules are not rigid. Rather than strict laws they are major tendencies and are limited to particular groups of lexicon.

Segmentation of lexicon into lexical-semantic classes of words, ways of concept naming, semantic features chosen for motivation, morphemic, derivational and semantic structures, grammatical and lexical collocations of the correlative words in different languages are to a great extent arbitrary, and it needs a lot of practice to acquire them to avoid lexical-semantic errors in using a language.

But theoretical knowledge of a foreign language lexicon structure is a kind of a map that presents the major lines of differences and makes learning more efficient and enjoyable.

3. Etymology [fr Gk etymon ‘true meaning’ + logos ‘word, learning’] studies the history of a linguistic form, especially of a word.

Knowledge of vocabulary development history, especially in a foreign language, makes a person a sophisticated learner, saves his/her time, energy and efforts in second language acquisition, extends his/her philological horizons and explains unusual spelling, pronunciation or usage of words. The easiest, quickest and most dynamic way to survey a lexicon is to give its etymological characteristics, though to study them is one of the most strenuous and toilsome jobs in linguistics.

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