Methods of Lexicological Investigation: Immediate Constituent Analysis.
In IC analysis, a sentence is divided up into major divisions or "immediate constituents", and these constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents, and this process continues until irreducible constituents are reached, i.e., until each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word. The end result of IC analysis is often presented in a visual diagrammatic form that reveals the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of a sentence. For sentences whose structures are unusual, this diagramming may become excessively complex; in such cases verbal description is used.
For example, the sentence "The girl is happy" can be divided into immediate constituents "The girl" and "is happy". These in turn can be analyzed into immediate constituents (the+girl) and (is+happy), and so on. Bloomfield doesn't give any special technique to detect immediate constituents, rather appeals to the native speaker's intuition.[1]
Methods of Lexicological Investigation: Contrastive Analysis.
Contrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies
In fact contrastive analysis grew as the result of the practical demandsof language teaching methodology where it was empirically shown that theerrors which are made recurrently by foreign language students can beoften traced back to the differences in structure between the targetlanguage and the language of the learner. This naturally implies thenecessity of a detailed comparison of the structure of a native and atarget language which has been named contrastive analysis. It should be borne in mind that though objective reality exists outsidehuman beings and irrespective of the language they speak every languageclassifies reality in its own way by means of vocabulary units. InEnglish, the word foot is used to denote the extremity of the leg. InUkrainian there is no exact equivalent for foot. The word denotes thewhole leg including the foot. Classification of the real world around us provided by the vocabularyunits of our mother tongue is learned and assimilated together with ourfirst language. Because we are used to the way in which our own languagestructures experience we are often inclined to think of this as the onlynatural way of handling things whereas in fact it is highly-arbitary. One example is provided by the words watch and clock. It would seemnatural for Ukrainian speakers to have a single word to refer to alldevices that tell us what time it is; yet in English they are dividedinto two semantic
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Methods of Lexicological Investigation: Statistical Analysis.
An important and promising trend in modern linguistics which has beenmaking progress during the last few decades is the quantitative study oflanguage phenomena and the application of statistical methods inlinguistic analysis. The first requirement for a successful statistical study is therepresentativeness of the objects counted for the problem in question,its relevance from the linguistic point of view. Statistical approachproved essential in the selection of vocabulary items of a foreignlanguage for teaching purposes. It is common knowledge that very few people know more than 10% of thewords of their mother tongue. It follows that if we do not wish to wastetime on committing to memory vocabulary items which are never likely tobe useful to the learner, we have to select only lexical units that arecommonly used by native speakers. It goes without saying that to be useful in teaching statistics shoulddeal with meanings as well as sound-forms as not all word-meanings areequally frequent. Besides, the number of meanings exceeds by far the number of words. Thetotal number of different meanings recorded and illustrated in OxfordEnglish Dictionary for the first 500 words of the Thorndike Word List is14,070, for the first thousand it is nearly 25,000. Naturally not allthe meanings should be included in the list of the first two thousandmost commonly used words. Statistical analysis of meaning frequenciesresulted in the compilation of A General Service List of English Wordswith Semantic Frequencies. The semantic count is a count of thefrequency of the occurrence of the various senses of 2,000 most frequentwords as found in a study of five million running words. The semanticcount is based on the differentiation of the meanings in the OED and thefrequencies are expressed as percentage, so that the teacher andtextbook writer may find it easier to understand and use the list. Anexample will make the procedure clear. room (’space’) takes less room, not enough room to turn round (in) make room for (figurative) room for improvement – 12%come to my room, bedroom, sitting room;drawing room, bathroom – 83%(plural = suite, lodgings) my room in college to let rooms – 2% It can be easily observed from the semantic count above that the meaning‘part of a house’ (sitting room, drawing room,) makes up 83% of alloccurrences of the word room and should be included in the list ofmeanings to be learned by the beginners, whereas the meaning ’suite,lodgings’ is not essential and makes up only 2% of all occurrences ofthis word. In Ukrainian: Кімната (окреме приміщення перев. для проживання в квартирі, будинку) –41%
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