Productive Types of Compound Adjectives 17 страница
In the analysis of word-formation pattern the investigation on the level of lexico-semantic groups is commonly used to find out the word-meaning, the part of speech, the lexical restrictions of the stems, etc. For example, the analysis of the derivational pattern n+ish -> A shows that the suffix -ish is practically never combined with the noun-stems which denote units of time, units of space, etc. (*hourish, *mileish, etc.). The overwhelming majority of adjectives in -ish are formed from the noun-stems denoting living beings (wolfish, clownish, boyish, etc.).
It follows that distribution may be viewed as the place of a lexical item relative to other lexical items on the level of semantic classes and sub-classes.
The analysis of lexical collocability in word-groups is widely applied for different purposes: to find out typical, most commonly used collocations in modern English, to investigate the possibility / impossibility of certain types of meaning in certain types of collocations, and so on.
It stands to reason that certain lexical items rarely if ever co-occur because of extra-linguistic factors. There are no restrictions inherent in the grammar or vocabulary of the English language that would make co-occurrence of the participle flying with the noun rhinoceros impossible, yet we may be reasonably certain that the two words are unlikely to co-occur.
What we describe as meaning by collocation or meaning by co-occurrence is actually a blend of extra-linguistic and intra-linguistic components of meaning.
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One or the other component may prevail. For instance, one may argue that the meaning of the adjective good is different in good doctor, good mother, good milkman, etc. because we know that a good doctor is ‘a doctor who gives his patient adequate medical care and treatment’, whereas good mother is ‘a mother who takes care of the needs of her children and cares for them adequately’. Here naturally it is the extralinguistic factors that account for the difference in meaning.
Of greatest importance for language teaching, however, is the investigation of lexical restrictions in collocability that are of purely intralinguistic nature and cannot be accounted for by logical considerations. This can be perhaps best illustrated by comparing the collocability of correlated words in different languages. In the English language, e.g., the verb to seize may be combined with nouns denoting different kinds of emotions: I was seised with joy, grief, etc., whereas in the Russian language one can say на меня напала тоска, отчаяние, сомнение, etc. but the collocations напала радость, надежда are impossible, that is to say the Russian verb cannot be combined with nouns denoting pleasurable emotions.
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The results of the co-occurrence or distributional analysis may be of great help to teachers in preparation of teaching material.
To illustrate the point under consideration it is sufficient to discuss the experiment the goal of which was to find out the semantic peculiarities of the verb to giggle. Giggle refers to a type of laughter — to giggle is usually defined as ‘to laugh in a nervous manner’. There is nothing in the dictionary definition to indicate a very important peculiarity of the word-meaning, i.e. that giggling is habitually associated with women. A completion test carried out by a group of English linguists yielded interesting results.
The sentences to be completed were of the type: The man — with obvious pleasure, The woman — with obvious pleasure, etc.
The informants were to fill in the blanks with either the verb to laugh or to giggle and were presented with a choice of subjects male and female.
A clear preference was shown for women giggling and men laughing with obvious pleasure. The analysis of the informants’ responses also showed that a man may giggle drunkenly or nervously, but not happily or politely. In the case of women, however, of whom giggling is more characteristic it appears that all collocations — giggle drunkenly, nervously, happily, politely — are equally acceptable. It may be inferred from the above that the meaning by co-occurrence is an inherent part and an essential component of the word-meaning.
| § 5. Transformational Analysis |
Transformational analysis in lexicological investigations may be defined as re-patterning of various distributional structures in order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of practically identical distributional patterns.
As distributional patterns are in a number of cases polysemantic, transformational procedures are of help not only in the analysis of semantic sameness / difference of the lexical units under investigation
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but also in the analysis of the factors that account for their polysemy.
For example, if we compare two compound words dogfight and dogcart, we shall see that the distributional pattern of stems is identical and may be represented as n+n. The meaning of these words broadly speaking is also similar as the first of the stems modifies, describes, the second and we understand these compounds as ‘a kind of fight’ and ‘a kind of cart’ respectively. The semantic relationship between the stems, however, is different and hence the lexical meaning of the words is also different. This can be shown by means of a transformational procedure which shows that a dogfight is semantically equivalent to ‘a fight between dogs’, whereas a dogcart is not ‘a cart between dogs’ but ‘a cart drawn by dogs’.
Word-groups of identical distributional structure when re-patterned also show that the semantic relationship between words and consequently the meaning of word-groups may be different. For example, in the word-groups consisting of a possessive pronoun followed by a noun, e.g. his car, his failure, his arrest, his goodness, etc., the relationship between his and the following nouns is in each instant different which can be demonstrated by means of transformational procedures.
his car (pen, table, etc.) may be re-patterned into he has a car (a pen, a table, etc.) or in a more generalised form may be represented as A possesses B.
his failure (mistake, attempt, etc.) may be represented as he failed (was mistaken, attempted) or A performs В which is impossible in the case of his car (pen, table, etc.).
his arrest (imprisonment, embarrassment, etc.) may be re-patterned into he was arrested (imprisoned and embarrassed, etc.) or A is the goal of the action B.
his goodness (kindness, modesty, etc.) may be represented as he is good (kind, modest, etc.) or В is the quality of A.
It can also be inferred from the above that two phrases which are transforms of each other (e.g. his car -> he has a car; his kindness -> he is kind, etc.1) are correlated in meaning as well as in form.
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Regular correspondence and interdependence of different patterns is viewed as a criterion of different or same meaning. When the direction of. conversion was discussed it was pointed out that transformational procedure may be used as one of the criteria enabling us to decide which of the two words in a conversion pair is the derived member.2
Transformational analysis may also be described as a kind of translation. If we understand by translation transference of a message by different means, we may assume that there exist at least three types of translation:3 1. interlingual translation or translation from
1 -> stands for ‘may be replaced by’
2 See ‘Word-Formation’, § 19, p. 133.
3 See E. Nida. Towards a scientific theory of translation. Netherlands, 1964; Л. С. Бархударов. Язык и перевод. М., 1975.
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one language into another which is what we traditionally call translation; 2. intersemiotic translation or transference of a message from one kind of semiotic system to another. For example, we know that a verbal message may be transmitted into a flag message by hoisting up the proper flags in the right sequence, and at last 3. intralingual translation which consists essentially in rewording a message within the same language — a kind of paraphrasing. Thus, e.g., the same message may be transmitted by the following his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work.
The rules of transformational analysis, however, are rather strict and should not be identified with paraphrasing in the usual sense of the term. There are many restrictions both on the syntactic and the lexical level. An exhaustive discussion of these restrictions is unnecessary and impossible within the framework of the present textbook. We shall confine our brief survey to the transformational procedures commonly used in lexicological investigation. These are as follows:
1. permutation — the re-patterning of the kernel transform on condition that the basic subordinative relationships between words and the word-stems of the lexical units are not changed. In the example discussed above the basic relationships between lexical units and the stems of the notional words are essentially the same: cf. his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work -> he works excellently.
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2. replacement — the substitution of a component of the distributional structure by a member of a certain strictly defined set of lexical units, e.g. replacement of a notional verb by an auxiliary or a link verb, etc. Thus, in the two sentences having identical distributional structure He will make a bad mistake, He will make a good teacher, the verb to make can be substituted for by become or be only in the second sentence (he will become, be a good teacher) but not in the first (*he will become a bad mistake) which is a formal proof of the intuitively felt difference in the meaning of the verb to make in each of the sentences. In other words the fact of the impossibility of identical transformations of distributionally identical structures is a formal proof of the difference in their meaning.
3. additiоn (or expansion) — may be illustrated by the application of the procedure of addition to the classification of adjectives into two groups — adjectives denoting inherent and non-inherent properties. For example, if to the two sentences John is happy (popular, etc.) and John is tall (clever, etc.) we add, say, in Moscow, we shall see that *John is tall (clever, etc.) in Moscow is utterly nonsensical, whereas John is happy (popular, etc.) in Moscow is a well-formed sentence. Evidently this may be accounted for by the difference in the meaning of adjectives denoting inherent (tall, clever, etc.) and non-inherent (happy, popular, etc.) properties.
4. deletion — a procedure which shows whether one of the words is semantically subordinated to the other or others, i.e. whether the semantic relations between words are identical. For example, the word- group red flowers may be deleted and transformed into flowers without
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making the sentence nonsensical. Cf.: I love red flowers, I love flowers, whereas I hate red tape cannot be transformed into I hate tape or I hate red.1
Transformational procedures may be of use in practical classroom teaching as they bring to light the so-called sentence paradigm or to be more exact different ways in which the same message may be worded in modern English.
It is argued, e.g., that certain paired sentences, one containing a verb and one containing an adjective, are understood in the same way, e.g. sentence pairs where there is form similarity between the verb and the adjective.
Cf.: I desire that. . . — I am desirous that . . .; John hopes that . . . — John is hopeful that . . .; His stories amuse me . . . — are amusing to me; Cigarettes harm people — are harmful to people.
Such sentence pairs occur regularly in modern English, are used interchangeably in many cases and should be taught as two equally possible variants.
It is also argued that certain paired sentences, one containing a verb and one a deverbal noun, are also a common occurrence in Modern English. Cf., e.g., I like jazz — > my liking for jazz; John considers Mary’s feelings -> John’s consideration of Mary’s feelings.2
Learning a foreign language one must memorise as a rule several commonly used structures with similar meaning. These structures make up what can be described as a paradigm of the sentence just as a set of forms (e.g. go — went — gone, etc.) makes up a word paradigm. Thus, the sentence of the type John likes his wife to eat well makes up part of the sentence paradigm which may be represented as follows John likes his wife to eat well — > John likes his wife eating well — > what John likes is his wife eating well, etc. as any sentence of this type may be re-patterned in the same way.
Transformational procedures are also used as will be shown below in componental analysis of lexical units.
| § 6. Componental Analysis |
In recent years problems of semasiology have come to the fore in the research work of linguists of different schools of thought and a number of attempts have been made to find efficient procedures for the analysis and interpretation of meaning.3 An important step forward was taken in 1950’s with the development of componental analysis. In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes (or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-many correspondence. For example, in the lexical item woman several components of meaning or sememes may be singled out and namely ‘human’, ‘female’, ‘adult’. This one-to-many correspondence may be represented as follows.
1 See ‘Word-Groups and Phraseological Units’, §3, p. 67.
2 This is usually referred to as nominalisation and is viewed as one of the permutation procedures. See also ‘Word-Formation’, § 19, p. 133.
3 See, e. g., Л. С. Бархударов. Язык и перевод. М., 1975, с. 50 — 73.
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The analysis of the word girl would also yield the sememes ‘human’ and ‘female’, but instead of the sememe ‘adult’ we shall find the sememe ‘young’ distinguishing the meaning of the word woman from that of girl. The comparison of the results of the componental analysis of the words boy and girl would also show the difference just in one component, i..e. the sememe denoting ‘male’ and ‘female’ respectively.
It should be pointed out that componental analysis deals with individual meanings. Different meanings of polysemantic words have different componental structure. For example, the comparison of two meanings of the noun boy (1. a male child up to the age of 17 or 18 and 2. a male servant (any age) esp. in African and Asian countries) reveals that though both of them contain the semantic components ‘human’ and ‘male’ the component ‘young’ which is part of one meaning is not to be found in the other. As a rule when we discuss the analysis of word-meaning we imply the basic meaning of the word under consideration.
In its classical form componental analysis was applied to the so-called closed subsystems of vocabulary, mostly only to kinship and colour terms. The analysis as a rule was formalised only as far as the symbolic representation of meaning components is concerned. Thus, e.g. in the analysis of kinship terms, the component denoting sex may be represented by A — male, A — female, В may stand for one generation above ego, В — for the generation below ego, С — for direct lineality, С — for indirect lineality, etc. Accordingly the clusters of symbols ABC and ABC represent the semantic components of the word mother, and father respectively.
In its more elaborate form componental analysis also proceeds from the assumption that word-meaning is not an unanalysable whole but can be decomposed into elementary semantic components. It is assumed, however, that these basic semantic elements which might be called semantic features can be classified into several subtypes thus ultimately constituting a highly structured system. In other words it is assumed that any item can be described in terms of categories arranged in a hierarchical way; that is a subsequent category is a subcategory of the previous category.
The most inclusive categories are parts of speech — the major word classes are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. All members of a major class share a distinguishing semantic feature and involve a certain type of semantic information. More revealing names for such features might be “thingness” or “substantiality” for nouns, “quality” for adjectives, and so on.
All other semantic features may be classified into semantic markers — semantic features which are present also in the lexical meaning of other words and distinguishers — semantic features which are individual, i.e. which do not recur in the lexical meaning of other
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words. Thus, the distinction between markers and distinguishers is that markers refer to features which the item has in common with other items, distinguishers refer to what differentiates an item from other items. The componental analysis of the word, e.g., spinster runs: noun, count-noun, human, adult, female, who has never married. Noun of course is the part of speech, meaning the most inclusive category; count-noun is a marker, it represents a subclass within nouns and refers to the semantic feature which the word spinster has in common with all other countable nouns (boy, table, flower, idea, etc.) but which distinguishes it from all uncountable nouns, e.g. salt, bread, water, etc; human is also a marker which refers the word spinster to a subcategory of countable nouns, i.e. to nouns denoting human beings; adult is another marker pointing at a specific subdivision of human beings into adults & young or not grown up. The word spinster possesses still another marker — female — which it shares with such words as woman, widow, mother, etc., and which represents a subclass of adult females. At last comes the distinguisher who has never married which differentiates the meaning of the word from other words which have all other common semantic features. Thus, the componental analysis may be represented as a hierarchical structure with several subcategories each of which stands in relation of subordination to the preceding subclass of semantic features.
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