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Study of a language
(John Sinclair): language is seen according two types of principles:
1) Open choice principle (Traditional grammar view): sentence can be thought of as empty slots which
are to be filled by the speaker. Each choice is a separate one and function according predictable rules.
2) Idiom principle: Words do not occur at random in texts, there are regularities in how words occur. The
choice is within a number of fixed or semi-fixed expressions made up of several words, which constitute a semantic unit.
Types of knowledge:
- Passive/receptive knowledge (listening and reading)
- Active/productive knowledge (speaking and writing). The first one is broader.
Laws of knowledge:
- Natural laws (mental natural rules that native speakers obey because they learnt it when they were children)
- Manner laws (rules of usage of words: how, when, where, why … use a particular word)
Level of knowledge of English: Kachru’s Model (1985) :
- English as Native Language (ENL) – inner circle – countries where English is the native and official language: UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada
- English as Second Language (ESL ) – outer circle – countries where English is one of the official languages (used in government, business, administration, education), typically ex-colonies: India, Singapore, Kenia, Nigeria
- English as Foreign Language (EFL ) – Expanding circle – countries where English is a non- official language: Italy, China, Japan, Israel
Lexicology (Theoretical study of lexis (organisation, change through the time, sense and word
relations)
Lexeme : Abstract unit of vocabulary which underlies different variants of the same word (word-forms).
Word =Lexical item
- A) Orthographic word (preceded and followed by a space or a punctuation mark B) Phonological word (surrounded by pauses; only one main stress)
- A) Grammatical/Function/Empty word (carries functional content=gives grammatical info) B) Lexical/Full/Nava word (carries semantic content=gives meaning) Word-form : Concrete realisation of the lexeme, in other words on of all the possible variants through which a lexeme can occur Word Family : Core word (lexeme) + derived & inflected forms (Dictionary 54000; Degree student 20000) Word Class :
- Open word classes: express content (infinite number of words) NAVA words
- Closed word classes: express links in the message (finite number of words) prepositions; pronouns; conjunctions; determiners; auxiliary verbs. Polysemy (two words, same spelling-related meanings ex. Fox) & Homonymy ( t w, s s- different and unrelated meanings ex. Bank)
How words change?
- Lexical change : new forms with new meanings (Ex. Brexit, Phablet)
- Semantic change : old forms with new meanings (Ex. Travel – journey, experience; Beauty noun>verb)
Core vocabulary: essential lexis which sustains basic and ordinary communication, composed of highly
frequent words shared by adult speaker
- (^) First 1000 words: 80% Germanic origin; most monosyllabic words;
- First 2000 words: 34% Germanic
Most common words according to the British National corpus:
- Written subcorpus The, Of, And
- Spoken subcorpus The, I, You
Word lists:
1) GSL “General Service List” (Micheal West, 1953): it provides the top 2000 high frequent word families 2) AWL “Academic word list” : 570 word families outside the GSL usually found in academic texts of various field of study such as arts, science, law, commerce and science. Words that occur more than 100 times, at least 10 times in each academic domain.
Paradigmatic associations: two words that can fill the same position in the sentence (green-Blue)
I. Hyponymy, Hyperonymy & Co-hyponymy : hierarchical relationship of sense that relates a general
term (hyperonym) to more specific terms (hyponyms) within the same area of meaning. All the hyponyms of a hyperonym are co-hyponyms. Ex. Siblings – brothers, sisters
II. Meronymy : relation of sense that relates a totality with its components. Ex. Church – aisle, nave,
transept, chapel, steeple, apsis.
III. Oppositeness: relation of sense that express an opposition of meanings.
- Complementaries: two words whose senses are mutually exclusive, absolute contrast without third possibility. Ex. True-False, Friend-Enemy, Win-Lose, Pass-Fail
- Antonyms: two words whose senses aren’t mutually exclusive, no absolute contrast but many gradual levels are possible. Ex. Hot-Cold, Long-Short, Slow-Fast; Easy-Difficult; Bad-Good.
- Converses: sense of direction. Ex. North-South, Wife-Husband, Rise-Fall, Head-Foot, Bequeath- Inherit, Ancestor-Descendant, Forwards-Backwords.
IV. Synonymy: two words with near-identical meaning. Ex. Prison-Jail. The meaning is not perfectly
identical, it differ on the variety, the field of use, the collocation… ex. Holidays (BrE) – Vacations (GAmE) Syntagmatic associations: two words that can co-occur in a sentence (green-grass/house)
Morphology : study of internal structure and the formation of words. Inflectional morphology (deals with the different forms of a word) derivational morphology (deals with the process of word formation through affixation) Morpheme (smallest abstract unit of meaning or grammatical function, which cannot further be divided into smaller unit) Morph (concrete realisation of a morpheme). Ex. Unhelpful Morpheme: negative+help+adjective Morph: un-help-ful [Allomorph: one of the different realisations of a morpheme. Ex: morpheme “not” in- il- im- ir- un- a- etc…]
Types of morphs:
- Capability to stand alone:
- (^) Free morphs: can stand alone
- Bound morphs : must be added to another morph Affixes (prefixes & Suffixes)
- Type of information they provide:
- Grammatical morphs: give grammatical info
- Lexical morph: give meaning
- Branch of morphology in which they occur:
- Lexical morphs: express the meaning
- Inflectional morphs: used to express grammatical relations or function. Ex. –S plural; -ER comparative etc...
- Derivational morphs : used to derive new words when attached to other morphemes. (Affixes. Ex. -LY adverb; -NESS noun; -UN “not” Word formation I. Derivation or Affixation ():* adding an affix to an existing word. Ex. Moral > Morality, Bar > Mini-bar II. Compounding ():* combination of two or more lexemes. Ex. War-torn country, (to) Undercut
- Endocentric compounds: the semantic head is contained within the compound itself a) Descriptive compounds: the modifier describes the quality of the head. Ex. Blackboard b) Determinative compounds: the modifier determines the identity of the head. Ex. Footstool
- Exocentric: the semantic head is not expressed. Ex: Lionheart III. Conversion or Zero Derivation or functional shift: converting words from one word class to another without adding any affixes. Ex. I like to VERB (noun>verb) words, Google (noun>verb) IV. Backformation : deletion of affix-like endings. Ex: emotion (noun) > emote (verb); babysitter (noun) > babysit (verb); editor (noun) > edit (verb) V. Blending : merging part of one word to part of another to make a new word. Ex. Selfie, Brunch, Emoticons, Fantabulous VI. Loanwords or borrowings : borrow words from another language. Ex. Joy (French>English) VII. Clipping : reduction of a word. Ex. Airplane>Plane, Advertisement>AD VIII. Acronyms : merging the first letters of each words of a phrase to make one single word. Ex. Radar, Nato
- Verb phrase 2 elements : head (lexical verb) – pre-modifiers (auxiliary verbs) 2 types Finite/ Non finite
- (^) Adjectival phrase 3 elements: head (adjective) – pre-modifiers – post-modifiers
- Adverbial phrase 3 elements: head (adverb) – pre-modifiers – post-modifiers it provides info on circumstances, frequency, manner, time, place, degree, modality, point of view…
- Prepositional phrase 1 element: head (preposition) *followed usually by a noun phrase Cleft sentences: Emphatic structure that do not follow the classic pattern Subject + Verb + Object + … because they want to emphasise/focus a particular element of a sentence IT-clefts: It + verb (to) BE + noun/adj/adv/prep phrase + defining relative clause (that/ who/ where/ when/ why) Aim: focus the phrase after it + (to) BE. Ex. It’s my friends who gave this present to me Semi-cleft sentences: WH-clefts: what-clause + verb (to) be + verb/noun phrase Aim: focus the phrase after what-clause + (to) BE. Ex. What I need is … What you should do is … What I want is … ALL-clefts: all-clause + verb (to) be + verb/noun phrase. Ex. All I want to do is … The reason why, The thing that, The place where, The day when, The person/people who + verb (to) be + verb phrase/noun phrase
Collocations: habitual and regular combination of two or more words that go together (co-occur) and sounds right to native speakers.
. Varieties of collocations: - Free/unrestricted collocations – common words which can be combined rather freely with a range of other words. Ex. Woman, large, bright …
- Semi-fixed/semi-restricted/variable collocations - Given a word, there is some degree of predictability of the others. Ex. Interest – promote, protect, safeguard … (Some degree of internal word-order is possible: EX. To SET FIRE to sthg vs. to SET sthg on FIRE.)
- Fixed/Frozen/Unique collocations – Collocations utterly restricted in their combinations Idioms Ex. Get on like a house on fire. . Phraseological phenomena:
- Proverbs: Ex. When in Rome, do as the romans; when the going gets tough, the toughs get going
- Idioms: Expressions longer than a word and shorter than a sentence whose meaning cannot be derived from the sum of the meanings of its components
- Pragmatic Idioms: Fixed or semi-fixed formulae useful in social situations. Ex. Apologizing: I’m sorry; Opening greetings: Good morning; How are you doing?; Leave-taking: See you soon
- Discourse organizers: multi-word units used to structure discourse. Ex. Starting a speech: let’s start; Explaining: In other words, I mean; Exemplifying: for instance
- Binomials: Particular types of idioms made up of two (or more) fixed elements connected by and. Ex. Ups and downs; bed and breakfast; fish and chips; odds and ends
- (^) Similes: stereotypical comparisons. Ex. Eat like a pig; drink like a fish; happy as a lark; as American as apple pie
Lexicography (Study of lexis in order to make dictionaries)
Lemma =Headword=Citation form: unit of dictionary
Entry: “an independent lexical unit listed in a dictionary in alphabetical order”. It consists of the
Headword and many information (syllables, pronunciation, stress, world-class, morphology, definitions, uses, phraseology, etymology, origin, and thesaurus).
Dictionaries
English dictionaries for native speakers
1604 “ A table alphabetical ” by Robert Cawdrey
- 1 st^ monolingual dictionary
- Composed of 2500 words
Examination : It can be examined with collocational software programmes through computational techniques:
- research by nod word
- research by collocate Advantages : enables lexicographers to figure out the most frequent uses process easily a large amount of data observe data without preconceptions about meanings, functions, collocability… examples are directly taken from the corpus It is possible to select a restricted vocabulary for explanations
The top big five dictionaries for learners: Oxford, Cambridge, Longman, Collins (COBUILD) and Macmillan Differences between Dictionaries for learners and dictionaries for native speakers:
- Information provided: NS– Decoding information: lexical, semantic, orthographic, etymologic data L – Encoding information: collocations, pronunciation, grammatical data
- Definitions: NS – Unrestricted vocabulary L – Restricted defining vocabulary: most frequent and easy words
- Extra items: L - Use of pictures, graphs, charts
Online dictionaries
1. users involvement - Institutional - Collective (bottom-up/collaborative) The result of a collaborative effort by non-professionals 2. Payment - Free - Paid Pay-per-view, subscription, bonus for buyers of paper edition, freemium (extra content not for free) 3. Site - (^) Standalone single dictionary
- Dictionaries sets several dictionaries offered in a single page
- Dictionaries aggregators dictionaries that collect different information from other sources Examples: Institutional free dictionaries:
- American: American Heritage Dictionary; Random House Unabridged Dictionary
- British: Collins English Free Dictionary; Chambers, Oxford Dictionary Collective dictionaries: Wiktionary, Urban Dictionary, Wordnik Aggregators: Dictionary.com; TheFreeDictionary.com Other types of dictionaries: Diachronic dictionaries; Pronouncing dictionaries; Specialized dictionaries; Onomasiological dictionaries; Acronym dictionaries; Etymology Dictionaries …
