Semasiology: Change of meaning
Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего профессионального образования «Уральский федеральный университет имени первого Президента России Б.Н.Ельцина»
ПРАКТИКУМ
«Лексикология современного английского языка»
(для студентов
кафедры германской филологии)
Екатеринбург
2014
Содержание
Предисловие
Семинарские задания
Семинар 1
Семинар 2
Семинар 3
Семинар 4
Семинар 5
Семинар 6
Семинар 7
Семинар 8
План лексикологического анализа текста
Тексты для лексикологического анализа
Форма контроля
Вопросы к экзамену
Литература
Предисловие
Курс по лексикологии современного английского языка является одним из базовых курсов в программе подготовки филологов-англистов по специальности «Филология», специализация «Зарубежная филология» (Английский язык и литература). Курс создаёт базу для приобретения и развития навыка обобщения наблюдаемых лингвистических явлений и прививает обучающимся навыки самостоятельного аналитического и критического отношения к фактам языка.
Цельюкурсаявляется изучение основных теоретических проблем лексикологии современного английского языка и раскрытие принципов лексикологического анализа текста, что позволит в дальнейшем сознательно подходить к изучению лексики английского языка как самостоятельно, так и в ряде других курсов («Литературное чтение», «Устная речь» и других), подготовить базу для овладения специализированным языковым курсом «Стилистика английского языка».
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Практикум предлагает последовательное изучение аспектов лексикологии посредством различного рода выполняемых упражнений с опорой на теоретические знания студентов, полученные в ходе лекций по лексикологии современного английского языка.
В первом полугодии студентам - бакалаврам вычитывается базовый лекционный курс по дисциплине «Лексикология современного английского языка», предлагается выступить с собственными презентациями по предложенным темам о региональном своеобразии английского языка (специфики фонетики, грамматики, лексики) и различных вариантах английского языка.
Основная задача второго полугодия - научить лексикологическому анализу текста по определенному плану, прорабатываемому на семинарских занятиях.
Кроме плана лексикологического анализа, в практикум включены отрывки из литературных произведений английских и американских авторов для самостоятельного анализа и для работы на семинарах.
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Структурно практикум включает 8 базовых тем для семинарских занятий, план лексикологического анализа, а также тексты для самоконтроля. Кроме того в практикуме систематизируются вопросы к экзамену, дается основная литература по курсу русских и зарубежных авторов.
При подготовке к семинарам студентам необходимо выполнить предтекстовые и послетекстовые задания, в которых активизируется лингвистическая терминология, уделяется внимание вопросам лексической семантики, словообразования и морфемного анализа. Авторы приводят цитаты из трудов зарубежных лингвистов по изучаемой проблематике семинарских занятий и предлагают тексты лингвистического характера для обобщения знаний.
Предложенный практикум позволит студентам оптимизировать подготовку к семинарским занятиям и поможет им в сдаче итоговой аттестации. Итоговая аттестация по курсу включает теоретический вопрос и лексикологический анализ текста. Практическая направленность данного учебного издания наглядно демонстрирует его своеобразие и специфичность.
Семинарские задания
Seminar 1.
Semasiology: Semantic structure of English words
1. Two approaches to meaning.
2. Types of meaning:
a) grammatical
b) lexical
c) contextual
-1-
1. Following is a well-known passage from Shakespeare in which the relationship word-concept-thing is clearly brought out. Can you explain it?
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What’s Montague? It is not hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet:
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title: Romeo, doff thy name;
And for that time, which is not part of thee,
Take all myself.
(W. Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet.)
2. The English novelist E.M. Forster said once:
“How can I tell what I think, till I see what I say?”
How can you explain it in terms of our views on the relationship between language and thought?
3. Discuss the meaning of the word in bold type in connection with the problem “concept-meaning”.
a) A house in the country. A full house ( аншлаг ). Every word was heard in all the parts of the house. White House. An ancient trading house in the city. A noisy cheerful house. To keep house. To bring down the house( вызвать гром аплодисментов ). To leave one’s father’s house. On the house. (за счет предприятия, бесплатно).
b) White clouds. White hair. A white elephant. The white race. White magic. White meat. As white as snow. White vine. It’s white of you. White lie.
-2-
1. Discuss the following groups of words from the point of view of their meaning (denotational and connotational components).
a) joke, jest, witticism, gag, wisecrack.
b) Fat, stout, plump.
c) Friend, crony, buddy, companion.
d) Stubborn, mulish, obstinate.
e) Abridged, shortened, epitomized.
f) Lament, mourn, deplore, grieve for.
It is very important to distinguish between the lexical meaning of the word in speech and its semantic structure in language. The meaning in speech is contextual. (“Any woman will love any man who bothers her enough” H.Philipps.)
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Polysemy does not interfere with the communicative function of the language because in every particular case the situation and context cancel all the unnecessary meanings and make the speech unambiguous.
2.Analyze the following sets of sentences.
a) He bought a chair at the furniture store. He was condemned to the chair. Please address the chair. He will chair the meeting. He was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the university.
b) My father came. Father Murphy came. He was the father of the idea.
c) The horse runs. The man runs. The water runs. The tap runs. His nose runs. He ran his business well.
d) He charged the battery. He charged them to do their duty. The judge charged him with the crime.
In “Through the Looking Glass” Lewis Carroll makes Humpy Dumpy say the following.
“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”
Discuss this statement. What are its linguistic implications?
-3-
1. Read the passage given below, make a plan and comment on it.
William Bright
University of Colorado
“ What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics
“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a song to comfort you.”
“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. “It’s long,” said the Knight, “but very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it—either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else—” “Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes’.”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested. “No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man’.” “Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself. “No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!” “Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-Sitting on a Gate’:
and the tune’s my own invention.”
—Through the Looking-Glass
Many books and articles have taken as their title the famous line from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” I choose to raise a slightly different question:
“What IS a name?”—not to answer the question definitively, of course, but simply to
focus attention on some aspects of the problem. In doing so, I also want to focus attention on the field of onomastics, understood as the study of names. Such study is, in fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including linguistics, ethnography, folklore, philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship. In Europe, especially in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness the three-volume encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there.
By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a scholarly field at all. To be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society, which publishes a small journal called Names, but only a few linguists belong to the society, and most linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the journal. I myself have been interested in onomastics since my student days, and I have published articles in the journal Names; but even so, in 1992, when I edited the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, it never occurred to me to plan for an article on names. Fortunately, the forthcoming second edition of that encyclopedia will repair my omission.
To begin with, the word name is often used to mean a term which can refer to anything, as when we say: “Banana is the name of a fruit,” or “Murder is the name of a crime.” In this sense, the word name is virtually synonymous with the word noun;
indeed, in some languages, the same term can used for both, e.g., French nom. In this
sense, the relationship between a name and that to which it refers has been the topic of an extensive literature written by philosophers specializing in semantics (cf. Zabeeh 1968, Lehrer 1992, Lamarque 1994). These writers have had much to say about the material in the famous quotation from Through the Looking Glass. I must admit to ignorance of this large topic, and so I will go on to more limited aspects of names and naming.
Within the general category of names, people often use the word name for what we can more precisely call proper names. Within this subdivision, it is common to distinguish two principal types. One of these is place names or toponyms; another is
PERSONAL NAMES, for which we have no commonly used term derived from Greek, but which are sometimes called anthroponyms. My discussion is limited to these two types, but it can be noted that other varieties exist, such as ethnonyms—terms referring to nationalities or ethnic groups—and glottonyms, referring to languages. An English example of both these types is Chinese, referring not only to the nationality, but also to the language that corresponds to the toponym China. It is not easy to define the term proper name (Algeo 1973). In English and some other European languages, such words often appear in writing with initial capital letters; but obviously this cannot define the term for spoken language, or for writing systems like Chinese which have no capital letters. Are there grammatical criteria to identify the proper name?
In English, it is often observed that it is unusual for proper names to occur with articles — either indefinite (a, an) or definite (the). A sentence like The George and a
Henry come from England is hard to interpret unless someone explains that it is intended to mean ‘The one person in this group named George, and one of the people
named Henry, come from England.’
Such usage may be made clearer by the use of spoken or written emphasis: He’s not THE George (who was King of England), he’s just A George (one of many people named George). But of course other languages have very different rules for using definite and indefinite articles; and many languages, such as Chinese, do not use articles at all.
It may be that, for a universal concept of the proper name, we must seek semantic
and pragmatic definitions. To put it briefly, we may say that a proper name represents a social convention for brief reference to a specific entity, as opposed to a class of
persons or places. For example, George may refer to ‘my cousin who is legally designated as George Baker; the Bakers refers to a family of people named Baker (as
contrasted with the bakers ‘the people who bake bread’); America may refer to ‘the
nation which is legally and politically designated as the United States of America’.
Much more could be—and has been—said about this (cf. Lehrer 1994), but I only want to establish this simple understanding as a basis for further discussion.
As I’ve said, the types of proper names which are most often discussed are personal names and placenames. I wish to focus here, first, on a proposed characteristic of personal names, namely their universality; and second, on a frequently remarked characteristic of placenames, namely their descriptiveness. As we shall see, there is a relationship between these two topics.
Finally, at the end of this paper, I wish to point out that, in some languages, placenames may function not only as nouns, but also as adverbs. I believe that this may the case in many more languages than have been reported.”
Seminar 2.
Semasiology: Change of meaning
1. Causes of semantic change.
2. Nature of semantic change.
3. Results of semantic change.
1.Read the following extracts and explain the semantic processes (nature) by which the italicized words acquired their meaning.
a) “Bureau”, a desk, was borrowed from French in the 17th c. In modern French it means not only the desk but also the office itself & the authority exercised by the office. Hence the familiar bureaucracy is likely to become increasingly familiar. The desk was called so because covered with bureau, a thick coarse cloth of a brown russet.
(The Romance of Words by E. Weekley.)
b) An Earl of Spencer made a short overcoat fashionable for same time. An Earl of Sandwich invented a form of Light refreshment which enabled him to take a meal without leaving the card-table. Hence we have such words as spencer & sandwich in English.
(The romance of Words. By E. Weekley)
b) A common name for overalls & trousers is jeans. In singular jean is also a term for a durable twilled cotton & is short for the phrase Jean fustian which first appeared in texts of 16th c. Fustian is a cotton or a cotton& linen fabric, & jean is the modern spelling of Middle English Jene or Genes, The Middle English name of the Italian city Genoa, where it was made & shipped abroad.
2. Define the type of transference which has taken place.
a) the wing of a bird – the wing of a building; the eye of a man – the eye of a needle; the hand of a child – the hand of a clock; the heart of a man – the heart of a matter; the bridge across a river – the bridge of a nose.
b) Green grass – green years; black shoes – black despair; glass – a glass; Ford – a Ford.
3. Analyse the process of development of new meanings in italicized words.
1.I put the letter well into the mouth of the box & let it go & it fell over & over like an autumn leaf.2. Those who had been the head of the line paused momentarily on entry & looked around curiously. 3. A cheerful-looking girl in blue jeans came up to the stairs whistling. 4. He inspired universal confidence & had an iron nerve. 5. Oh, Steven I read Dickens the other day. It was awfully funny.
4 .In the examples given below identify the results of semantic change
1.While the others waited the elderly executive filled his pipe & lit it. 1. Finn was watching the birds. 3. The two girls took hold of one another, one acting gentleman, the other lady; three or more pairs immediately join them & began waltz. Smokey had followed a dictum all his life: If you want a woman to stick beside you, pick an ugly one. Ugly one stayed to slice meat & stir the gravy.
5. Read the following passage from “Regularity in Semantic Change ” , make a plan and comment on it.
In English there has been considerable fluctuation in the preterite and past participle ending after sonorants for weak verbs: either a voiced /-d/ or a voiceless /-t/. This has resulted in the exploitation of the two options for semantic purposes. The situation for most varieties of English today is that the ending -ed stresses the process of the verb and the ending -t emphasises the result as seen in the following examples.
| Process | Result |
| He spoiled his daughters | A spoilt brat |
| The timber burned for hours | Burnt timber |
POLYSEMOUS WORDS These are words which have a basic and a related figurative meaning, e.g. foot and foot of the mountain. Characteristic for the figurative meaning is that it occurs in a phrase in which its metaphorical use is clear. But with time the secondary use may occur without any specifying information. This is the first step towards a shift from basic to figurative meaning as the unmarked member of a pair. For instance decimate formerly meant to reduce to one tenth in size (from Latin decem) but now the secondary meaning ‘to waste, destroy’ has become the primary meaning and the original basic one is lost. An example of a word which has both meanings in equilibrium would be headache which means both ‘pain in the head’ and ‘unwanted problem’ (also true of German, cf. Das bereitet mir grosse Kopfschmerzen).
DOES A LANGUAGE LOSE WORDS? The answer to this question is not simple. The clearest instance is where a word is borrowed from another language and the original word is then lost. This has happened with Old English niman (cf. German nehmen) which was replaced in Middle English by take from Norse taka. However, most loans do not lead to the replacement of native words with similar meanings. Rather they attain connotations which the native words do not possess.
There may be an instance or two where a word almost dissolves phonologically. Old English æa from an earlier *ahu (cognate with Latin aqua and represented in German by Aue) was [æ:], and would have raised to [ɛ:, e:, i:] if it had continued, but it was replaced by the more substantial stream (itself from Old English) and river (a French loan in Middle English).
The more usual situation is for a language to differentiate two words semantically and for both to survive. For instance Old English fōda and mete co-existed with the meaning of what people eat. After the Middle English period the second word occurs only in the sense of ‘flesh of animals’ and the word flesh (< flesc) is itself restricted to ‘human flesh’. The original meaning of mete is found in mincemeat ‘minced food’ which does not contain any meat.
THE WORDS FOR ‘MAN' In Old English there were at least three words for ‘man': guma, wer and mann. Only the last of these survived into Modern English. Guma ‘man’ was lost in the course of Middle English. It was formerly an independent noun and also occurred in compounds. One of these was brydguma which consisted of the words for ‘bride’ and ‘man’. With the loss of the independent form guma, it was reinterpreted in this compound as being groom, a form which still existed in English for instance with the meaning ‘someone who looks after, minds horses’. The second word wer disappeared unobtrusively and is today only found in the compound werewolf ‘man-wolf’.
ETYMOLOGY AND THE LEXICON The development of different meanings for words automatically raises the question of whether there is an original meaning. Lay speakers tend to think there is. By ‘original’ they mean ‘oldest’. This conception of meaning is termed the etymological fallacy and states that there is an original meaning to a word if one could only go back far enough in time. But this is obviously not true. No matter how far back you trace a word there will always have been a stage before that with a probably different meaning.
LOSS OF LEXICAL TRANSPARENCY If in the course of its development a word or part of a word becomes opaque to a later generation then its meaning may be re-interpreted in an incorrect way. Such a reinterpretation is called a folketymology and occurs on the basis of another word or words which are similar in sound and meaning. A simple example is the German word Friedhof which was reinterpreted as ‘the place where one obtains one’s final peace’, ‘Ort des letzten Friedens’ but in fact it originally meant ‘an enclosed plot of land’, ‘der umfriedete Hof’.
Three examples from the history of English illustrate this process clearly. The Modern English word sandblind derives from Old English sam -blind which contains the element sam ‘half’ (cf. Latin semi). Whensam was lost as a word in English the compound came to be reinterpreted as meaning ‘blind from sand’.
The Modern English word shamefaced comes from Middle English schamfast with the meaning ‘firm in modesty’. When the adverb fast altered its meaning to ‘quick’ it was reinterpreted in this compound asface and the compound came to mean ‘with a face full of shame’.
A key to the phenomenon of folk etymology is that words which are similar phonetically can develop similar meanings. The example this time is a Latin loan obnoxious which originally meant ‘liable to injury’ but came to mean ‘very objectionable’, probably under the influence of the related word noxious.”
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Richard
Seminar 3
Synonyms and antonyms
1. In the following groups of synonyms, find the synonymic dominant. Give reasons for your choice.
1. exact, precise, accurate.
2. savage, uncivilised, barbarous.
3. hide, conceal, disguise.
4. agree, approve, consent.
5. recall, recollect.
6. cry, weep, scream, shriek.
7. lazy, indolent, idle, vain.
8. clever, able, intelligent, keen, sharp.
9. ignorant, illiterate, uneducated, misinformed.
10. agile, nimble, alert, quick, brisk, active.
2. State whether the marked word is a synonymic dominant or a general term.
1. victory, triumph, conquest.
2. complain, grumble, mutter.
3. sound, clatter, creak, bang, cluck.
4. fragrance, scent, perfume, odour, smell.
5. olive, pink, brown, colour, pea-green, rose.
6. scarlet, crimson, cherry, red, purple.
7. mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry.
8. footwear, shoes, rubbers, slippers, felt-boots.
9. hound, borzoi, dog, colly.
10. courage, bravery, valour, fortitude.
3. Find in the following list of words synonymic series and classify them into three groups: a) synonyms which display an obvious semantic difference (ideographic synonyms); b) synonyms which display an obvious stylistic difference (stylistic synonyms); c) synonyms more or less equally displaying both differences.
ailing, arrogant, battle, begin, behold, bicker, brawl, bright, callous, clever, commence, conflict, conquest, consume, cruel, defeat, devour, diseased, dispiteous, dumb, easy, eat, engorge, facile, fatuous, fight, food, grub, hard-boiled, haughty, high-hat, hoity-toity, horse, ill, inept, ingest, intelligent, light, mandicate, obdurate, pace, proud, quarrel, sagacious, see, shrewd, snobbish, snooty, squabble, steed, stride, stroll, stupid, supercilious, tiff, walk
3. Analyse the following synonyms.
The Cataract of Lodore
(fragments)
by Robert Southey
| Here it comes sparkling, And there it lies darkling. Here smoking and frothing, Its tumult and wrath in, It hastens along, conflicting strong; Now striking and raging, As if a war waging, Its caverns and rooks among. Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and flinging Showering and springing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around; With endless rebound; Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in, Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound. Receding and speeding, And shocking and rocking. And darting and parting, And threading and spreading. And whizzing and hissing, And dripping and skipping, And brightening and whitening. And quivering and shivering. And glittering and flittering, And foaming and roaming, And working and jerking, | And heaving and cleaving, And thundering and floundering, And falling and crawling and sprawling, And driving and riving and striving. And sprinkling and twinkling and wrinkling, And sounding and bounding and rounding, And bubbling and troubling and doubling, Dividing and gliding and sliding, And grumbling and rumbling and tumbling, And clattering and battering and shattering, And gleaming and streaming and steaming and beaming And rushing and flushing and brushing and gushing. And flapping and rapping and clapping and slapping, And curling and whirling and purling and twirling, Retreating and meeting, and beating, and sheeting, Delaying and straying and playing and spraying, Advancing and prancing and glancing and dancing, Recoiling, turmoiling, and toiling, and boiling, And thumping and plumping and bumping and jumping, And dashing and flashing and splashing and clashing; And so never ending and always descending, Sound and motions for ever and ever are blending; All at once, and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, — And in this way the water comes down at Lodore. |
Seminar 4
Homonyms
1. The following words are homographs. How are they pronounced and what do they mean?
bow, bow; desert, desert; lead, lead; minute, minute; row, row
2.Give the main nominative meanings of the following homonyms.
lap, lap; lark, lark; league, league; light, light; means, means; mint, mint; quid, quid; racket, racket; roe, roe; ward, ward
3.Read the passage given below and answer questions following it.
A speaker speaks a word; a hearer hears it. If he understands the word he has stepped into the same area of sense as the speaker. The meaning of a word, then, may be thought of as this common area of meeting. But the sense, it goes without saying, depends on the referent, and the nature of the referent has to be defined by the context. Thus, the 'cat' of 'The cat sat on the mat' is different from the 'cat' of 'Bring back the cat for thugs and rapists'. We cannot say that 'cat' is a single word possessing two distinct meanings; there are two words phonemically identical but semantically different: we call these homonyms. The 'cat' of the second sentence refers back etymologically — by the grim fancy of 'cat o'nine tails' — to the cat of the hearthrug, but word-origin can never be invoked, as we have already pointed out, in the examination of meanings.
But what makes words less precise than mathematical symbols is their tendency to suggest meanings other than the ones intended in particular limited contexts. The definition of context is often not enough; many words tremble at various frontiers of sense; ambiguity is a vice of words. Ambiguity comes about not merely through homonymity, but through metaphorical extension (which may or may not lie behind homonymity, as with 'cat'), and through the fact that words attempt two opposing jobs — particularization and generalization. 'Cat* will describe a new-born kitten and a fully-grown tiger, so that opposite notions (weakness, strength; tame, wild; tiny, huge) are contained in the same word. 'I love fish' can have opposed meanings; Shakespeare makes Henry V say that he loves France so well that he will not part with a single province of it. It is, indeed, only with the poet or imaginative prose-writer that language functions smoothly. Ambiguity ceases to be a vice; its deliberate exploitation is reveled in. There are layers of meaning, all relevant to the context. Homonyms become deliberate puns — not necessarily comic. Lady Macbeth will gild the faces of the grooms with blood, 'for it must seem their guilt'.
Anthony Burgess. Words
Questions
1. How do we distinguish between homonymy and polysemy? 2. Is the author positive on whether in the case of cat he is dealing with homonymy? 3. Explain the pun in the last sentence.
4.Give your own examples to illustrate the author's points.
Seminar 5
Morphology
1. Retell the following in terms of lexical morphemes vs. grammatical morphemes.
Words as things uttered split up into phonemes, but phonemes do not take meaning into account. We do not play on the phonemes of a word as we play on the keys of a piano, content with mere sound; when we utter a word we are concerned with the transmission of meaning. We need an appropriate kind of fission, then — one that is semantic, not phonemic. Will division into syllables do? Obviously not, for syllables are mechanical and metrical, mere equal ticks of a click or beats in a bar. If I divide (as for children's reading primer) the word 'metrical' into “met-ri-саl”, I have learned nothing new about the word: these three syllables are not functional as neutrons, protons, electrons are functional. But if I divide the word as “metr-; -ic; -аl”; I have done something rather different. I have indicated that it is made of the root 'metr-', which refers to measurement and is found in 'metronome' and, in a different phonetic disguise, in 'metre', 'kilometre', and the rest; '-ic', which is an adjectival ending found also in 'toxic', 'psychic', etc., but can sometimes indicate a noun, so that 'metric' itself can be used in a phrase like 'Milton's metric' with full noun status; '-аl, which is an unambiguous adjectival ending, as in 'festal', 'vernal', 'partial'. I have split 'metrical' into three contributory forms which (remembering that Greek morph — means 'form') I can call morphemes.
Let us now take a phrase or sentence and attempt a more extended analysis. This will do: 'Jack's father was eating his dinner very quickly'. Here I would suggest the following fission: 1) Mack'; 2) '-'s'; 3) 'father'; 4) 'was'; 5) 'eat'; 6) '-ing'; 7) 'hi-'; 8) '-s'; 9) 'dinner'; 10) 'very'; 11) 'quick'; 12) '-ly' — making a total of twelve morphemes. 'Jack' can exist on its own, but the addition of '-'s' (a morpheme denoting possession) turns a proper noun into an adjective. 'Father' cannot be reduced to smaller elements, for, though '-er' is an ending common to four nouns of family relationship, 'fath-' on its own has no more meaning than 'moth-' or 'broth-' or 'sist-'. 'Eat' can be an infinitive or imperative, but the suffix '-ing' makes it into a present participle. 'Hi-' signals an aspect of the singular masculine personal pronoun, but it can have no real meaning until it is completed by the objective ending '-m' or, as here, the '-s' denoting possession. 'Dinner' is indivisible, for 'din' on its own belongs to a very different semantic area... Finally, 'quick' is an adjective; the morpheme '-ly' turns it into an adverb.
It will be seen from the above that morphemes fall into two classes. There are those which cannot stand on their own but require to be combined with another morpheme before they can mean anything — like '-'s', '-ing', 'hi-', '-ly'. We can call these bound forms, or helper morphemes. The other morphemes are those which can stand on their own, conveying a meaning and these can be called free forms or semantemes ('meaning forms').
Anthony Burgess. Words
2. Do you agree with what is said in the last paragraph? Discuss the concepts of free and bound forms.
3. Find in the text that follows words in which the root and the stem formally coincide.
For the moment — but only for the moment — it will be safe to assume that we all know what is meant by the word 'word'. I may even consider that my typing fingers know it, defining a word (in a whimsical conceit) as what comes between two spaces. The Greeks saw the word as the minimal unit of speech; to them, too, the atom was minimal unit of matter. Our own age has learnt to split the atom and also the word. If atoms are divisible into protons, electrons and neutrons, what are words divisible into?
(Ibid.)
4. Read the following passage and give your own exam ples of free and bound morphemes.
We may perhaps start with an attempt to define components of our words, separating them into free forms, which may occur in isolation, and bound forms, which never occur alone. For example, blackberry consists of two free forms compounded, as both black and berry are found in isolation. If we examine raspberry we may at first think it is the same type for we undoubtedly do have a word rasp, but although the forms are identical phonetically they are not identical in meaning, and rasp, in the sense in which it is used in raspberry, is not found in isolation, except in the shortened form of raspberry, for rasp is often used colloquially for both the bush and the fruit. In the case of bilberry we are on even safer ground, for the element bil — is not found in isolation in English, and is therefore quite definitely a bound form.
(J. A. Sheard. The Words We Use)
5. Group the following words according to the type of word-segmentability they may be referred to.
Budget, discuss, carefulness, proceed, unfriendly, hostage, mirror, feminist, overload, fraction, athlete, pretend, amoral, pioneer, contain, homeless.
Seminar 6
Main types of word building
1. What are the principal ways of English word formation?
2. What is the morphological and the derivational structure of the words: disillusionment, overlooker, overproduction.
3. Explain the difference between productive and non-productive affixes.
4. Pick out words with prefix pre-: prepay, prepare, prefer, preside, president, prevail, pretend, preview, previous.
5. What is the origin of English prefixes?
6. Do prefixes in the following words have the same meaning or different?
a) unwillig, untie, unbearable, unbind, unbend.
b) Displease, disclose, disobey, disaffectation.
7. State the origin and explain the meaning of the suffixes in the following words: childhood, friendship, hardship, freedom, manhood, boredom, teacher, hindrance, drunkard.
8. Give a definition of conversion.
9. Explain the drawbacks of the terms: conversion, zero derivation, root formation, functional change.
10. What is word composition?
11. Analyse the structure of the following compounds and classify them: baby-sit, backbite, blackboard, black-eyed, bloodthirsty, cease-fire, classroom, colour-blind, daybreak, die-hard, forget-me-not, good-for-nothing, good-looking, hot-blooded, lady-killer, moonbeam, narrow-chested, navy-blue, up-to-date, H-bag, speedometer.
Seminar 7.
Minor types of building.
1. Classify the following units according to type of word-formation.
A.B.C., A-bomb, ad, a.m., auto, B.A., bus, cab, Capt., comfy, D-day, dorm, laser, M.P., perm, zoo, radar, Prof., branch, N.Y.
2. Characterize the phenomenon of initial abbreviation.
3. Give a definition of clippings and introduce classifications..2
4. 0000000
5. Classify the following clippings.
condo < condominium, hood < neighbourhood, graf < graffity, Amerenglish < American English, pol < politician, teen< teenager, mersh < commercial, diss < disrespect, stew < stewardess, indie < independent, Amerasian < American Asian, def < definitive, resto < restaurant, detox < detoxification fax < facsimile, Motown < Motor Town( Motown describes a type of black music , originated by Tamla - Motown Records , founded in 1960 by Berry Gordy Jr .)
6. Introduce a theory of blends.
7. Comment on the structure of the following words.
tizzy - tinny + buzzing, zootique - zoo+boutique, advertorial - advertisement + editorial, blaxploitation - blacks exploitation, buppie - a black yuppie, dramedy - drama + comedy, infomercial - information + commercial, magalog - magazine + catalogue, rockumentary - rock music + documentary, crincly - crumbly + wrinkly.
8. What types of acronyms do you know?
Read the following passages and explain the principles of back-formation.
This is one of the curiosities of word-formation. It occurs when a word is wrongly imagined to be a derivative from some other (non-existent) form, and this hypothetical basic form is then invented and becomes a word in the language. An example of back-formation in English which is often cited (though is not an absolutely certain one) is the verb to beg, probably derived by back-formation from the noun beggar. If this theory is right, the noun beggar is derived from Old French begard in time, however, it came to be wrongly apprehended as a derivative form containing the agent suffix -er, and a verb to beg was accordingly created as the stem of this form. It will be seen that back-formation is in fact an example of analogy: the speaker knows pairs like rob/robber and drink/drinker, and when he hears the word beggar he makes it conform to the pattern by inventing a form beg. Another well-known historical example of back-formation in English is the verb to sidle, from the adverb sidling.
Back-formation is not of much importance in the growth of the vocabulary, but there are a few examples of its operation in our times. One is the verb automate, 'introduce automatic machinery into (an industry, a factory)', formed from the noun automation on the analogy of such pair as' inflate/inflation, meditate/meditation; the noun automa tion is itself a new word, presumably formed from auto matic...
Perhaps we should also count as back-formation such compound verbs as baby-sit, bird-watch, hedge-hop ('fly very low'), and mass-produce1, it seems probable that such verbs have not been formed direct, but are derived from verbal nouns like bird-watching, and hedge-hopping', when, by constant collocation, such compound nouns have come to be felt as one word, a verb is then derived from them by back-formation.
(Charles Barber. Linguistic Change in Present-day English, p. 94)
Back-formation is a fruitful source of new forms. Some of these are deliberate, though many were originally the result of ignorance; often it has happened that a word has been thought to be formed from a primary stem by the addition of a suffix when this has not been the case, and so a new 'root-form' has been unconsciously coined...
In the sixteenth century grovelling was an adverb, with the meaning 'on the ground, in the abject manner'. Because the adverbial ending -ling was confused with the ending -ing, it was thought to be a present participle, for such a word could be used in many contexts where a present participle might be expected, and so a new verb to grovel was formed...
As an example of verbs formed from nouns we may note butcher, from Fr. boucher \ the -er has no connection with the English suffix -er to denote an agent, yet the verb to butch appears in some dialects. In the* standard language editor gives to edit, though -or 'is an integral part of the word, and not a mere suffix added to a verbal stem (Latin editor — one who gives out from edere — to give out); and similarly to audit, to hawk, to peddle, to swindle, developed from auditor, hawker, pedlar, and swindler...
To burgle is quite a recent formation, but burglar goes back to Middle English, and cobbler is probably older than to cobble. This is a reversal of the usual process, for most names of agents are formed from a verb by the addition of a suffix, but in all these cases the noun is recorded earlier than the verb.
Nouns have formed from adjectives by this process, as greed from greedy,..
... The verb 'to donate, developed from the noun donation, is perhaps hardly yet standard English, yet it is becoming more and more frequent, although the NED[1] doubly damns it as chiefly US and, in the sense of 'grant, give', also 'vulgar'. Another recent example has developed from television; the second element of this word, is from the Latin past participle visas, and from this, not from the Latin infinitive videre , we have developed a new verb, to televise. The Americanism to enthuse, developed from enthusiast, enthusiasm, is very recent, but has already gained a footing on this side of the Atlantic. To vamp seems to be well on the way to being established, and to reminisce seems to be used more frequently also...
This type of formation is found more frequently in colloquial speech, and has also been put to humorous use; G. K. Chesterton writes: "The wicked grocer groces", the parodist J. K- Stephen has:
The Rudyards cease from kipling And the Haggards ride no more.
and W. S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance has "When the enterprising burglar isn't burgling". Only the last of these is acceptable yet in standard English, yet they do show a tendency, and indeed there is much good sense in such formations, if an actor acts and a painter paints, why may not a butler buttle, or a scupltor sculpt?...
(J. A. Sheard. The Words We Use, pp. 83-86)
Sentences given below illustrate the usage of verbs formed through regression (back-formation).
1. She was liaising with them all (<liason, n). 2. In tuiting a situation — not quite to her liking. (<intuition). 3. It is an education to valet and buttle your lordship (<butler). 4. Pinky laughed rather wildly and said: "If I don't tell somebody, I'll spontaneously combust, so I'm going to tell you." (<combustion). 5. You know the old saying — nothing propinks like propinquity. 6. They were so badly injured that they had to be painlessly euthed (<euthanazia). 7. The leading lady leading man Bad Beginning has been a staple of dramaturgy as long as it has been turging .
Following are other cases of back-formation. Determine the source.
conscript v, emote v, frivol v, locomote v, orate vt pea n, peeve v
Seminar 8
Phraseology
1. Phraseological units are primarily characterized by the contradiction which exists between the semantic integrity of the whole and the formal independence of its parts. Proceeding from this distinction make up two lists out of the following combinations of words — free combinations of words and phraseological units.
at death's door, at long last, beat about the bush, big house, bite off more than one can chew, black suit, black sheep, by heart, dance around the room, draw a blank, draw the curtains, fall in love, fly high, going strong, open wide, pass through the door, pay through the nose, red tape, smell a flower, smell a rat
2. Explain the meanings of the following combinations of words a) as free word combinations and b) as phraseological units c) classify them.
be on firm ground, best man, the bird is flown, black ball, blow one's own trumpet, break the ice, burn one's fingers, first night, give smb a ring, keep one's head above water, look after, meet smb half-way, run out, show smb the door, throw down the glove, touch bottom
2a. Give Russian equivalents for the phraseological units listed above.
3. Study the passage below and arrange the expressions following it according to their degree of 'freedom' or ”set ness”.[2]
It is impossible to establish a sharp boundary between free combinations and set ones. It can be shown that there are different degrees of 'setness', or different degrees of restrictions. If we compare expressions like light burden, light bag with combinations like light supper, light food, we see that in the latter ones, the combinatorial possibilities are more restricted. In combinations as light in fantry, the restriction is more severe and the combinations seem to approach the status of a multiword lexical unit, if it has not reached it already. And in light hand, we have undoubtedly a set combination before us.
(Ladislav Zgusta. Manual of Lexicography, pp. 154-155)
4. Read the passage given below, make a plan and comment on it.
“The status of phraseology and its object of investigation
Phraseology is an intermediary field, being close, in the reference literature, both to vocabulary studies, since it studies fixed word combinations, characterized by a unitary meaning, as well as to syntax, since phraseologic phenomena are defined by syntactic relations of various kinds, which are realized on a syntagmatic axis (Boroianu, 1974, I: 24). Given the expressive nature of phraseologic phenomena, these have also been associated to stylistics (Bally, 1951: 66-87; Iordan, 1975: 265-304). Taking into consideration the possibility of differentiating styles and functional variants of a language by analysing phraseologic units, it has been particularly drawn closer to functional stylistics (Coteanu, 1973: 99).
But beyond the closeness to different linguistic disciplines, phraseology tends to be regarded as an autonomous discipline, with its own object and methods of investigation (Hristea, 1984: 134).
The term phraseology designates the discipline as well as its object, the set or totality of phraseologic units in a given language. According to the origin of phraseologisms, a line has been drawn between two areas of investigation, namely, linguistic phraseology understood as “a community’s means of expression” and literary phraseology including “aphorisms, witticism, word combinations with an accidental character, belonging to certain writers, outstanding people” (Boroianu, 1974, I: 27).
As an autonomous discipline, the object of research of phraseology consists in phraseologic units from a given language (or a group of languages). The concept of phraseologic unit (unité phraséologique) has been first used by Charles Bally, in Précis de stylistique, wherefrom it was taken by V. V. Vinogradov and other Soviet linguists, who translated it by frazeologhiceskaia edinitsa, which led to the term frazeologhizm, with the same meaning, and then subsequently borrowed by different languages belonging to the European culture (Hristea, 1984: 138). In present-day Romanian linguistics, the concepts of phraseologic unit and phraseologism are seriously challenged, on different levels, by the structures stable syntactic groups, phraseologic groups, constant word combinations, fixed word combinations, fixed syntagms, syntagmatic units. For that matter, Casia Zaharia has drawn out an extensive list of phraseologic terms used in Romanian and German linguistics and also wrote, at the same time and in a paper on comparative phraseology with a significant theoretical foundation, a biography of the most important ones (Zaharia, 2004: 97-107).
To clearly delineate the area of phraseology as a linguistic discipline, we may regard it as starting where vocabulary meets syntax, once the boundaries of the word - conceived as a semantic and functional unit contained in-between spaces (Boroianu, 1974, I: 27) - have been crossed. Therefore, the delineation of the field of phraseology requires, on the one hand, the separation of lexicology by illustrating the differences between the phraseologic unit and the compound word and, on the other hand, the separation from syntax by differentiation from syntagm or the phrase of an accidental, unrepeatable, unstable nature. Fulvia Ciobanu and Finuţa Hasan attempt to outline stable syntactic groups of words, starting from the premise that a compound represents one single word and the syntactic group, several words. Taking into account the three characteristics of a word, morphological unit, syntactic unit and syntactic behaviour, the authors aim at defining the category of compound words. Morphologically speaking, the elements which distinguish compound words from fixed syntactic groups are the presence of inflection, the indefinite article, the existence of a single main accent. Semantically speaking, the relations between the terms of the compound are, most of the times, understandable. In terms of syntactic behaviour, the compound word which displays morphological unity, behaves like a simple word, not allowing the insertion of a determinant, and compound words with no morphological unity can be separated by possessive or demonstrative adjectives (Ciobanu - Hasan, 1970: 8-19).
The difference between phraseological units and free word combinations is derived precisely from the syntactic stability of the former which, having been established through usage, are felt as distinct units due to the very fusion (to a larger or smaller extent) of the constitutive elements. Anyway, the borders between free word combinations and phraseologic units, as well as those between a phraseologic unit and a compound word are volatile: due to frequent use, a free word combination may turn into a phraseologic unit and, in its turn, this may become, in time and also through frequent and long use, a compound word.”
Petronela Savin
План лексикологического анализа текста
1. Contextual meaning (2-3 words).
2. Analysis into I.C. (1 word).
3. Types of morphemic segmentability (complete, conditional, defective).
4. Types of morphemes (structurally: free, semi-free, bound; semantically: root, affixational).
5. Types of word-building (main, minor).
6. Phraseology (Smirnitsky: collocations, set expressions, idioms; Vinogradov: phraseological fusions, unities, collocations).
7. Synonyms (types, synonymic dominant).
8. Antonyms (root, derivational; conversives).
9. Homonyms.
10. Functional styles.
11. Variant of the English language.
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