¡Descarga Teoria de Lexicologia y más Apuntes en PDF de Lexicología solo en Docsity!
LEXICOLOGY
THEORY
UNIT 1
1. INTRODUCTION
Words are symbols, they are a combination of letters or sounds. The letters and sounds are the form and its meaning is the semantics. Inside the form we will study the morphology.
2. CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY Lexicology → Is a branch of linguistics concerned with the signification and application of words (Merriam Webster’s Online dictionary). Lexicology treats words in terms of how they are created and how they are unified with other words. Words that are related and correlated with other words. How are they correlated? We can determine why words are chosen inside of a sentence instead of others. According to Lipka, lexicology is concerned with structures, not with a mere agglomeration of words. What do lexicologies do? Patrons, paradigms, words from different dictionaries… we can see irregularities. Why is this important? We can determine the importance of their mechanisms. e.g: Jail and Prison. Jail is less than a year; prison is more than a year. What Cruse (1986) wants to show is that these words are synonyms but in terms of law there is a differentiation in meaning. The context is very important because their meanings change. This is part of the correlation of words. These words can be synonyms in language. What is the difference between speech and language? Speech is a realization of language, while language is an abstraction with all the grammatical rules, paradigms… Speech is when you take all of them because they follow certain rules and they fit inside of the context. e.g. jailer and prisoner - in the sintactamatic level we see the correlation of the words but in terms of pragmatic level, what do these words have in common? They have the
same morphological structure. Jailer is a prison keeper and a prisoner is a bad guy. A prisoner is the opposite of a jailer. Some units in language can be implemented in speech, as jailer or prisoner. Lexicography → According to Webster’s Dictionary Online, is the editing or making of a dictionary. Relation of synonymy → speech and language → speech is a realization of the language, a conversation following certain patterns, whereas language is a more abstract connotation. The words we have in dictionary belong to language, because they are there for us to use. Synonymy/ Antonymy → these words (jail and prisoner) can be correlative in terms of synonymy and antonymy. From a pragmatic point of view, we can see a variety. What they have in common is that they have the same morphological construction. They do not have the same connotation. The sentence “she walks to class” is speech because they are units and they are implemented in a sentence. It is realization of the units. There is a difference between lexeme and a lexical unit (they are a realization of the units): Lexeme → According to Curse, the lexeme is the abstract unit of the lexicon. It belongs to language (abstract). Lexemes are an abstract representation of reality. A lexeme has no morphemes nor inflections. The problem is that we associate lexemes with words but it is not like that. For instance, if I say ‘’classes’’, the lexeme will be ‘’class”. Lexical unit → are all the words we can find in a sentence. Difference between lexeme and lexical unit → the difference is that in the lexeme there are no inflections. We associate lexeme with isolate words. Culturally there are many ways of describing a lexeme. We tend to use words without morphological change. We can find lots of lexemes in dictionary.
- Synchronic → when we don’t care about the origin of the word. We use words as they stand. How the combination of simple units makes complex words? (In class we will use the words as they combine with other words). Words can be the combination of sounds but occasionally that sound may not have value. e.g. nuts /n ʌ t s/. Not everything in linguistics is arbitrary. There is something called phonotaxis where the sounds have its own meaning. Sounds may have a cognitive impact on meaning construction, e.g. /i/ in doggie or Nicky (small meaning) or /tm/ in stamp, stomp, step (forceful action). Bauer (1983) is another classic. He is the father of morphology. He says that there is a distinction between inflectional morphology and word-formation:
- Inflectional morphology : when lexemes are combined with grammatical endings. It deals with the various forms of lexemes. How words are created for grammar. E.g: when you create plural forms.
- Word-formation : deals with the formation of new lexemes from given bases and can be subdivided into derivation and compounding or composition. E.g: walker has been created through word-formation process. (Walk → walker) (table → tables) Morphology explains how lexemes are formed from old ones which is called lexeme formation , which is not the same as word formation.
- Lexeme formation : they say they call it lexeme because there might be a change of a part of the speech (V: amuse →N: amusement). It comes from the combination of amuse and - ment.
- When we add a substantial meaning ( → N1 [orphan] → N2 [orphanage]) the word changes because we refer to a place rather than a person. N2 refers to the place where N1 lives. Bloomfield (1933) is the father of linguistics. He says that the word is the smallest unit of the speech but not in language, why? Because we have lexemes and they are abstractions and not realization of that reality. He was the first one on distinguishing the terms of “language” and “speech”.
e.g: - ish (more or less) is a morpheme: they are meaningful units. The meaning of - er (person), has that a semantic categorization of the word (wak → walker). Isolatedly we cannot use these morphemes. They cannot be found free on speech. - ish is an exception because we can use it isolated in a sentence: We can meet at 5:00 ish (more or less). Word → Bloomfield says that words are the minimum free form. Lexeme: is a dictionary word is called lexeme (also lexicon by linguists). It is an abstract entity that can be thought of as a set of word-forms. Word-form: is a text word. It is concrete in that it can be pronounced and used in texts. A word-form belongs to a lexeme. A paradigm can be a set of word-forms that belong to a lexeme: cut, cuts, cutting (inflectional morphology). Paradigms can be a group of synonyms or words that have the same formation patterns: doggie, girlie, sweetie (morpheme, diminution). Paradigms can be studied in two levels:
- Inflectional morphology : fat and overweight (synonymy)
- Derivational morphology : doggie, girlie, sweetie… (diminution) According to Lipka, a lexeme can consist of one morpheme, two or more formatives or morphemes (syntagmatically), or a set of mutually substitutable word-forms (paradigmatically). Bauer says that we have to make a classification for words:
- Grammatical words such as prepositions , conjunctions , articles etc. We have to locate them in sentences.
- Lexical words because it has content as nouns , verbs etc. are easily to identify.
- Orthographic words : sometimes lexical words can be hyphenated or not. We can write words differently although we don’t need to create any new classification. e.g: taxfree.
- Phonologically some words can be distinguished from others. Stress is important here because the whole word can mean another thing. The phonological issue determines the meaning of a word. e.g:
fat(t)ish,snack`less. - Lexical units : how words exits. “Walk” as a word but “forget-me-not” is a word? Yes, it is. But we have been trained to correlate one unit to a word when we have more than 1 unit. We get lost and we don’t face that words such as “forget- me-not” is also a word because it has its own meaning. We can see this also in idioms, phrasal verbs, fixed figurative expressions and proverbs. In the case of proverbs grammatically is not a word. Proverbs (para jose) is not part of that classification because they are a sentence and not nouns.
- The morpheme is an abstract unit of the system of a language, for example the plural morpheme or the past tense morpheme in English. A general definition of morpheme: the “smallest unit of language that has its own meaning” (Lieber 2009: 3). It can be a simple word (giraffe) or a prefix (il-). So, a word can be defined as one or more morphemes that can stand alone in the language. Types of morphemes: ● Simplex words: when there is one morpheme. e.g: fraud, murmur, oops. ● Complex words: when there is a combination of more than one morpheme. e.g: opposition, illegal, washable. Lexical: ❖ Free (roots/stems) ❖ Bound (affixes) ➢ prefixes suffixes blocked morph. (cranberry) Grammatical: ❖ Free (function words, e.g. the, and) ❖ Bound (inflectional, e.g. – s in plural) On type of morpheme that is very unusual is the blocked morpheme : cranberry. The origin was meaningful but not nowadays. It is when it does not appear on dictionaries; “cran” is not a base that exists nowadays in dictionaries. E.g. Friday is a blocked morpheme because “fri” does not appear anything in dictionaries. With days of the week, they are all blocked morphemes. Lexicography Macrostructure → The principle of a lexicographical work that defines the list order of a work. ● Intrinsic properties of the lexeme: alphabetical order, semantic order, morphological structure. ● Extrinsic criteria: they are used for linguistic purposes. These dictionaries are not useful for standar readers (level of frequency). Microstructure → internal structure of a lexical entry.
❖ Lemma ❖ Homonym ❖ Sense ❖ Citation form ❖ Phonological representation (and /or sound) ❖ Phonological / morphological variants ❖ Dialect / sociolect ❖ Style ❖ Stage ❖ Morphosyntactic category ❖ Word-formation / derivatives ❖ Phraseology ❖ Gloss - extra comments that you make to a certain meaning. Certain words are prefered to a certain context. ❖ Semantic relations ❖ Etymology ❖ Cognates (semantically related words from genetically related languages). ❖ Picture ❖ Reference ❖ Date of entry
⃠ We are not going to see all of this; this is just to see the different parts.
UNIT 2- LEXICAL RELATIONS: HOMONYMY, POLYSEMY, ANTONYMY and SYNONYMY
1. Introduction to lexical semantics
- A lexical item in the lexicon is an abstract representation that is instantiated as a lexical unit in language use (Cruse 1986)
- While the lexicon contains non-arbitrary strings of words, they re in fact arbitrary in that they have been conventionalized as a particular form (Murphy 2003) ex: nurse and carer (related by their semantics) nurse - why?
- The meaning of a complex expression is completely determined by the meaning of its constituents.
- The meaning of a complex expression is completely predictable by general meanings of its constituents → the ending - er is a person
- Every grammatical constituent has a meaning which contributes to the meaning of the whole. Componential analysis (CA): is a method of semantic analysis. Based on the isolation of the smallest units of semantic decomposition (seme). Implications of CA : each semantic feature is made explicit by presence (+) or absence (-). The difference in meaning between words can be expressed by these features. HOMONYMY & POLYSEMY Examples:
- For a loan, just go to your bank →
- She lives by the river bank →
- You can find this info at the blood bank → What sort of relation are there among 1,2 and 3?
Polysemy : the process by which one word can have several meanings. It is the result of metaphorical creativity of natural languages. Homonymy : the process that is used to describe same words (spelling and pronunciation) with no different meanings. HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY ➢ How to distinguish these two meanings?
- Etymology (ear ‘organ’ vs ear ‘corn’).
- Formal identity or distinctness (grammaticality)
- Close semantic relatedness. ● Homonymy: complete as bank (1) and bank (2); or partial (incomplete):
- Homophony: flower / flour
- Homography: lead (v) / lead (n) ● At times, the correlation between homonymy and polysemy is seen as a continuum, in which homonymy is one of the extremes. Note the following examples: → can1 → modal verb (need a verb to complement) → can2 → object → can3 → verb The three senses might be considered homonyms, but the distinction between 2 and 3 is not so clear. ● Different word class and meaning must lead to the distinction of homonymous lexemes (Lipka 2002: 156) ● Polysemous words can differ considerably according to the degree of relatedness and difference which their meanings display…homonymy (total distinctness of the meaning of identical forms) is properly seen as the endpoint of the continuum (Cowie 1982: 51) · Varieties of polysemy (Cruse 2000: 110):
- Linear polysemy : one sense is a specialization of the other, which entails that the latter is a generalization of the former: Cats and dogs must be kept aside (animal) That’s not a dog, that’s a bitch (male animal)
- Converseness : it denotes an equivalent mirror-image relation, the order of arguments is reversed: x bought y from z; z sold y to x. à si yo compro un coche a Sogorb, Sogorb me está vendiendo el coche a mi. ● Complementaries, antonyms and converses always occur in pairs, treated and interpreted as two-member lexical fields (Lipka 2002: 165). ● The term ‘antonymy’ demonstrates to be a global and comprehensive notion, allowing for a better understanding of lexical opposites and binary sets (without unnecessary ambiguity). ● The formation of ‘opposite units’ in a language does not necessarily imply a fixed or rigid pairing of words in the system, e.g. boy might be acknowledged as the opposite of girl, and on some occasions, man or adult. ● The process of antonymy might be context-driven, and its systemic sets are available to a broad range of lexical pairings (Jones et al. 2012, 2), which are also subject to shared semantic and referential properties, and the so-called ‘minimal differences’ (cf. Lyons 1977; Cruse 1986; Murphy 2003). ● Following the aforementioned example, boy and girl share a number of similarities (‘human’, ‘same-aged’, etc.) whereas a minimal difference governs their oppositeness (‘gender’). ● The notion of markedness is also applied to opposites: possible vs impossible; true vs untrue (suffix-dependent) ● When markedness is not present (base-dependent) the pair or constitnuents can also be suffixed: stardom vs regulardom. ● There is also semantic markedness: the lion and lioness were lying together (sex contrast); the lions approached the truck (sex contrast is neutralized)
● Polarity (types)
- Morphological polarity : one term bears a negative affix, the other does not.
- Logical polarity : the fact that one negative cancels out another: she is not dumb à she’s smart
- Privative polarity : one term is associated with the presence of something salient, and the other with its absence (alive is + and dead is - ) (REPASAR QUE ESTÉ TODO Y AÑADIR APUNTES) UNIT 3: SYNONYMY & REGISTER. SLANG, TABOO & EUPHEMISM (COPIAR APUNTES) SYNONYMY ● It is usually defined by specifying what is similar among the words, rather than what is different. ● The property that differs is form. ● Relation of Contrast (RC): A synonym set includes only word-concepts that have all the same contextually relevant properties, but differ in form (Murphy 2003: 134) (AÑADIR APUNTES) **UNIT 4: COMPOUNDING, DERIVATION & CONVERSION
- COMPOUNDING** ● “Compounding can be regarded as the formation of words through the combination of bases” (Bauer and Huddleston 2002: 1626), e.g. jailbird, lawmaker.
● Adjective-adjective is more complex: premodifying (a ‘skyblue dress) whereas predicative (it is sky-blúe) ● Verbal compounds prefer left-stress in AmE (swéet-talk), and it is less consistent in BrE (fréeze-dry or freeze-dry’).
4. ORTHOGRAPHY Solid (butterfly) Hyphenated (child-care) Spaced (cell phone) ● Noun-noun compounds prefer spaced spelling. ● Adjectival compounds seem to prefer hyphenation (doglean, girl-crazy). ● Verbal compounds also show a clear tendency towards hyphenation (stir-fry, finger-catch) 5. TYPES OF COMPOUNDS a) NOMINAL COMPOUNDS ● The most productive in English ● N + N are not as problematic as Adj + N as the latter might have different stress and be spelled differently depending on its syntactic value: fást-food outlet (attributive) All compound adjectives in attributive position are hyphenated. ● Sometimes the first element is ambiguous (noun or verb): boarding pass, livingroom. ● Sometimes - er is attached to the verbal base to form the noun: passer-by, runner-up. ● V + prep can be nouns converted from phrasal verbs (breakdown) or analogical formation of converted phrasal verbs (sleep-in < sit-in). b) VERBAL COMPOUNDS ● Most compounds with verbal right elements seem to be derived by other processes: - nominal or adjectival compounds/phrases (head shake, carbon-copy) - inversion from phrasal construction (upgrade < grade up) - back derivation from nominal or adjectival compounds (crash-land < crash- landing) c) ADJECTIVAL COMPOUNDS
● They can be formed with nouns or adjectives in initial position (butter-yellow, blue-green). N + adj is argumental (butter yellow) Adj + adj is coordinative (blue-green) d) PREPOSITIONAL COMPOUNDS ● They cannot be analyzed as prepositions, except for those that have emerged as a product of verbation (fusion) as in upon, into, etc. ● N + prep are commonly nouns: sum-up, face-out. ● Sometimes - er is attached to the verbal base to form the noun: passer-by, runner-up) ● V + prep can be nouns converted from phrasal verbs (breakdown) or analogical formations of converted phrasal verbs (sleep-in < sit-in) e) NEOCLASSICAL COMPOUNDS ● Most of the neoclassical bases do not occur as free units. ● They have been traditionally classed as combining forms. ● They behave as suffixes, e.g. they are not usually stressed, particularly in final position. ● Neoclassical bases can combine with word (lazyitis) or another combining form (morphology) f) PHRASAL COMPOUNDS ● These are right-headed structures that are largely related to nominal heads: soon-to-be-divorced wife, on-air puzzle. ● Apparently, there are no syntactic restrictions on the formation of these elements. ● Some of these expressions have managed to become lexicalized: would-be. g) REDUPLICATIVE COMPOUNDS ● These types seem to be connected with the attitude of the speaker.
- “A morphologic syntagma is nothing but the reduced form of an explicit syntagma, the sentence”
- bullfighter < someone who fights the bull
- theatergoer < someone who goes to the theater Suffixes are meaningful because they can change the meaning of a word. ● Derivation and inflection are similar processes in the way that both involve morphemes in their processes, but their differences are relevant: ● Sometimes, derivation is also known as derivational morphology, and it establishes the relationship between lexemes of the same word family: reader is derived from the lexeme read (same semantic group) ● A derivation occurs when an affix is attached to a base, and some semantic changes might be brought about (not necessarily grammatical ones)
red → reddish (adj.)
● Not all the cases are as clear-cut as legalize. Therefore, derivation and inflection belong to the same continuum: Clearly inflectional patterns → (play-s) explanat- ory? → This word was borrowed from French. Diachronically the base has changed because of its adaptation to English. Clearly derivational pattern → (book-ish) (verbal base)
● Inflectional values are reflected in inflectional morphemes: number → - s (cars); - en (oxen) gender → - ess (hostess) ● Derivational meanings are more diverse than inflectional values agent → work/worker quality → kind/kindness facilitative → read/readable ● Derivational patterns usually change the grammatical categories of bases. ● Derivatives (name given to the result of the derivation process) can be classed as:
- Denominal (derived from a noun) sheepish (denominal adjective) ; an adjective that comes from a noun.
- Deverbal (derived from a verb) worker (deverbal noun); a noun that comes from a verb.
- Deadjectival (derived from an adjective) clearly (deadjectival adverb); an adverb that comes from an adjective. ● Common derivational patterns (taken from Liane Guillou and Alexander Fraser, 2016):
- DEVERBAL NOUNS
agent noun : drink → drink-er
patient noun : invite → invit-ee
instrument noun : blend → blender ( hammer → this doesn’t work form something
that you use for hamming; it doesn’t have any sense)
action noun : experiment → experimentation
2. DEADJECTIVAL NOUNS:
quality noun : new → newness
person noun : smart→ smartie
