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LINGUA E TRADUZIONE INGLESE I – MOD. A
CHAPTER 8: THE NATURE OF THE LEXICON
The term “lexicon” is known in English from the early 17 th century, when it referred to a book containing a selection of a language’s words and meanings, arranged in alphabetical order. Within linguistics it refers to the total stock of meaningful units in a language (words, idioms and part of words which express meaning, such as the prefixes and suffixes). To study the lexicon of English is to study all aspects of the vocabulary of the language (for example, how words are formed, how they are developed over the time, how they are used now, etc.). It is a study which is carried on by lexicologist, who are thus practising lexicology. Lexicographers: lexicologist who choose to write a dictionary and their calling is lexicography (but one can be a good lexicologist without ever having written a dictionary at all). The lexicon is the area of language which is most difficult to systematize and control. Its size, range and variability is both an attraction and a hindrance. It comprises the largest part of the forms and structures which make up a language. WHAT IS A LEXEME? A lexeme (or lexical item) is the fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. Etymology: from the Greek, “word, speech”. A lexeme is often, but not always, an individual word (simple lexeme or dictionary word). A simple lexeme ( love ) may have a few inflectional forms or grammatical variants ( loved; lover; loving ). A lexeme can be made up of more than one orthographic word (multiword or composite lexeme), such as a phrasal verb ( speak up ), an open compound ( fire engine ), or an idiom ( throw in the towel ). Come , coming and come in are all lexemes. The way in which a lexeme can be used in a sentence is determined by its word class or grammatical category. HOW LARGE IS THE ENGLISH LEXICON? The Webster’s Third New International counts over 450.000 lexemes in 1961. In 1992, the Oxford English Dictionary counts over 500.000 lexemes.
ABBREVIATIONS
Abbreviations are shortened versions of words and phrases. The story of abbreviations can be traced back over 150 years. The fashionable use of abbreviation, a kind of society slang, comes and goes in waves, though it is never totally absent. They are one of the most noticeable features of present-day English linguistic life. Reasons to use abbreviations: The desire for linguistic economy. Succinctness and precision are highly valued, and abbreviations can contribute to a concise style. Abbreviations help to convey a sense of social identity: using an abbreviated form to be part of a social group. Types:
- Initialisms: a type of abbreviation which are spoken as individual letters ( BBC , DJ , FBI , WWW ). They are formed by using some of the letters in the word or phrase.
- Acronyms: initialisms which are pronounced as single words. They are formed by using the first letters in the words of a phrase or first parts of a phrase ( NATO , UNESCO , RADAR , GIF ).
- Clipping: the shortening of a longer word, often reducing it to one syllable ( PHONE, AD ).
- Blends: a word which is made of the shortened forms of two or more other words ( BRUNCH : breakfast + lunch; SMOG : smoke + fog).
- Facetious forms: TGIF - Thank God It’s Friday.
- Latin abbreviations: etc. - et caetera - “and the others”; ead. - eadem - “the same (woman)”. PROPER NAMES English proper names are on the boundary of the lexicon. Some of them are so closely bound up with the way meaning is structured on the language that it would be difficult to exclude them from any superdictionary. Proper names are part of the learning of a language: there are rules of pronunciations which must be followed and rules of grammar which apply to proper names in special way. There are names which form part of the idiomatic history of an English- speaking community, such as The Times , Billy the Kid , Phi Beta Kappa and Woolworth’s.
The Anglo-Saxon lexical character continues to dominate everyday conversations, whether it be grammatical words (in, on, be, that), lexical words (love, name) or affixes (mis-, un-, -ness, -less). Anglo-Saxon words are of: Parts of the body (arm, bone, chest, ear, eye, foot, hand, heart). The natural environment (field, hedge, hill, land, meadow, wood). The domestic life (door, floor, home, house). The calendar (day, month, moon, sun, year). Animals (cow, dog, fish, goat, hen, sheep, swine). Common adjectives (black, dark, good, long, white, wide). Common verbs (become, do, eat, fly, go, help, kiss, live, love, say, see, sell, send, think). FOREIGN BORROWINGS When one language takes lexemes from another, the new items are usually called loan words or borrowings.
- Celtic borrowings Although the Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, there are few traces of their language in English today, mainly in the form of Celtic-based place names including river names and town names.
- Scandinavian borrowings The Norse invaders (Vikings) settled in Britain in 9 th century and they had a great influence on English: everyday words, grammatical words (like the verb “are”) and pronouns “their”, “them”, “they”. A good number of sc- or sk- words today are of Scandinavian origin (score, scrub, skill, skin).
- French borrowings After the Norman conquest, the influx of words from the continent of Europe, especially French, doubled the size of the lexicon to over 100.000 items. Trilingualism in English, French and Latin was common in the world of: Government: parliament, chancellor, government, country, crown. Finance: treasure, wage, poverty. Law: attorney, plaintiff, larceny, fraud, jury, verdict. War: battle, army, castle, tower, siege, banner. Religion: miracle, charity, saint, pardon.
- Latin Borrowings
The influence of Latin is strong, especially after the arrival of Christianity (church, school, giant, plant).
- Other borrowings As a result of empire and trade contacts, the lexicon of English continued to acquire from other languages including: American: racoon, coyote, wigwam. Australian: wallaby, kangaroo, boomerang. Italian: paparazzo, pizza, dolce vita. Arabic: saffron, tamarind, alchemy. Persian: naphtha, chess, lilac. Japanese: samurai, kimono. Other Asian regions: yoga, karma, curry, ketchup. WORD FORMATION In linguistics, word formation refers to the ways in which new words are made based on other words. Word-formation can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one period). Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. There are a few methods of word formation:
- Abbreviations: a word or phrase is shortened (e.g. Dr.).
- Calque or loan translation: a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation (e.g. It goes without saying).
- Morphological derivation: the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix (e.g. unhappy). It’s different from inflection.
- Compounding: a lexeme that consists of more than one stem (e.g. cupcake).
- Conversion: change of a word from one-word class to another (e.g. to friend someone).
- Neologism: forming a new word by coining (e.g. quark).
- Back-formation: we remove part of a word - suffix or prefix (e.g. to enthuse). Nonce word: is a lexeme created for temporary use, to solve an immediate problem of communication.
CHAPTER 11 – THE STRUCTURE OF THE LEXICON
The lexeme excruciating tends to occur with pain or agony and not with joy or ignorance. Expectancies of this kind are known as collocations or selectional restrictions (we can say excruciating “select” or “collocate” with pain ). On the vertical dimension (paradigmatic), we sense the way in which one lexeme can substitute for another and relate to it in meaning. Es.: My auntie has bought a red automobile We might replace bought by a lexeme of similar meaning (a synonym), such as purchased ; or by one of contrasting meaning (an antonym), such as sold. We might replace automobile by a lexeme of more specific meaning (a hyponym), such as Ford ; or by one of more general meaning (a hypernym), such as vehicle. The predictable links between lexemes are called sense relations and they are the core of any account of lexical structure. COLLOCATIONS A collocation is formed by a central lexeme, or node, surrounded by a fixed amount of language, the span, within which the search for collocations takes place. For common lexemes, we need to examine quite a wide span and to look at many examples of use, for clear lexical patterns to emerge. LEXICAL PREDICTABILITY Often, a sequence of lexemes is governed by chance or by factors which are controlled by an individual speaker and not by tendencies in the language. Such sequences as I like films are said to be “free combinations” of lexemes: they are not collocations, because there is no mutual expectancy between the items. By contrast, the lexical item involved in a collocation are always to some degree mutually predictable, occurring regardless of the interests or personality of the individual user. Collocations may occur with apparent disregard for the observable situation to which they relate. Collocations cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the world. Sometimes the predictability is weak ( heavy collocate with quite a diverse range of items) and sometimes is strong ( auspicious collocate only with occasion and a few other closely related items). IDIOMS Two central features identify an idiom:
The meaning of the idiomatic expression cannot be deduced by examining the meanings of the constituent lexemes. The expression is fixed, both grammatically and lexically. LEXICAL PHRASES They are chunks of language in which all the items have been preassembled: it seems to me... , would you mind... , on the one hand... , etc. Such phrases are used frequently in both speech and writing, but they are especially important in conversation, where they perform a few roles: for instance, expressing agreement, summing up an argument, introducing an example or changing a topic. Types of lexical phrases:
- Polywords: short phrases which function very much like individual lexemes. They cannot be varied, and their parts cannot be separated. Es.: by the way ; so far so good ; once and for all.
- Institutionalized expressions: units of sentence length, functioning as separate utterances. They are invariable, and their parts cannot be separated. They include proverbs, aphorisms and other quotable utterances. Es.: have a nice day ; give me a break ; long time no see.
- Phrasal constraints: these are phrases which allow some degree of variation. They are usually quite short. Es.: good – (morning/night) ; a – ago (day, long time) ; as far as I – (can see/know).
- Sentence builders: phrases which provide the framework for whole sentences. They allow considerable variations. Es.: not only... but also... ; my point is that... ; that reminds me of... SYNONYMS Synonyms are lexemes which have the same meaning. But there may be no lexemes which have exactly the same meaning: it is usually possible to find some nuance which separate them, or a context in which one of the lexemes can appear but the other(s) cannot. There may be a dialect difference: autumn and fall are synonymous, but the former is British English and the latter is American. There may be a stylistic difference: insane and loony are synonymous, but the former is formal, and the latter is informal. There may be a collocational difference: rancid and rotten are synonymous, but the former is used only of butter or bacon. There may be a difference of emotional feeling or connotation: youth and youngster are synonymous, but youths are less pleasant than youngsters.
Example: the sentence I am thinking of an object which is painted in a single colour, and it is red and yellow fail to make sense, because red and yellow are both hyponyms under the same hypernym ( colour ). OTHER SENSE RELATIONS There are other kinds of meaning relationship much less widespread, applying to restricted sets of lexemes. Parts and wholes: wheel and car ; sleeve and jacket ; door and house. Hierarchies: a lexical hierarchy is a graded series of lexemes in which each item holds a particular rank, being “higher” or “lower” than adjacent items. Es.: corporal – sergeant – lieutenant. Series: the days of the week; the month of the year. They are cyclical in character, we reach the end of the series then we start again. MAKING SENSE A definition is the linguistic mechanism which brings everything together. It is a special type of sentence which relates all the relevant aspects of a lexeme’s meaning, enabling us to understand it. Definitions are listed in dictionaries, sometimes using a full sentence, sometimes in an abbreviated form. Basic structure of a definitional sentence: there is a general category to which a word belongs, and the specific features or attributes which distinguish that word form related words.
CHAPTER 12 – LEXICAL DIMENSIONS
A single lexeme simultaneously contains information relating to several linguistic dimension: Historical dimension: when it came into English. Structural dimension: how it is formed. Regional dimension: whether it is in standard use or restricted to a dialect. Social dimension: whether it carries resonances of gender, class, formality or ethnicity. Occupational dimension: whether it has special status in such domains as science, religion or law. Much more. The lexicon is a particularly sensitive index of historical, social and technology change. LOADED VOCABULARY
A denotation is the objective relationship between a lexeme and the reality to which it refers: identifies the central aspect of lexical meaning, which everyone would agree about (the dictionary meaning of lexemes is often called their denotation). By contrast, connotation refers to the personal aspect of lexical meaning, often the emotional associations which a lexeme incidentally brings to mind. Connotations vary according to the experience of individuals and they are to some degree unpredictable. On the other hand, because people do have some common experience, many lexemes in the language have connotations which would be shared by large groups of speakers. When a lexeme is highly charged with connotations, we commonly refer to it as “loaded”. The language of politics and religion is full of such loaded expressions: capitalism, fascism, radical, dogma, pagan, heresy. The language of science and law, on the other hand, attempts (not always successfully) to avoid vocabulary which is highly connotative. The more a domain or topic is controversial, the more it will contain loaded vocabulary. TABOO Taboo language comprise items which people avoid using in polite society, either because they believe them harmful or feel them embarrassing or offensive. The possibility of harm may be genuinely though to exist, in the case of notions to do with death and the supernatural, or there may be merely a vague discomfort deriving from a half-believed superstition. Embarrassment tends to be associated with the sexual act and its consequences. Offensiveness relates to the various substances exuded by the body, and to the different form of physical, mental and social abnormality. The prohibition on use may be explicit, as in the law courts (“contempt of court”) and the broadcasting media (words officially banned until after a certain time in the evening, so that children are less likely to be exposed to them). More commonly, it is a tacit understanding between people, which occasionally becomes explicit in the form of comment, correction or sanction. There are various ways of avoiding a taboo item: one is to replace it by a more technical term (as commonly happens in medicine). The everyday method is to employ an expression which refers to the taboo topic in a vague or indirect way: a euphemism. SWEARING
People like to be part of an intellectual or technical elite and the use of jargon, whether understood or not, is a badge of membership. DOUBLESPEAK During the 1970’s in the USA, there was a marked increase in concern about the way jargon was being used to confuse or deceive by people in power. The National Council of Teachers of English passed two resolutions of language:
- On Dishonest and Inhumane Use of Language
- On the Relation of Language to Public Policy In 1973 the Council decide on its way forward, forming a Committee on Public Doublespeak. The term “doublespeak” originates in George Orwell’s book “1984” (Nineteen Eighty-Four): it is a blend of two of the book’s central concepts, “doublethink” and “newspeak”. The Committee focused on classroom activities and on professional awareness, but its highest public profile came with the birth of the annual Doublespeak Awards. Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts or reverses its real or purported meaning. It is language which avoid or shifts responsibility. It is stressed that such language is not the product of carelessness, rather, it is the result of clear thinking. This language has been carefully designed to change reality and to mislead. POLITICAL CORRECTNESS Political correctness (PC) is a term used to describe language, policies or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. The most sensitive domains are to do with race, gender, sexual affinity, ecology and physical or mental personal development. Many of the critics were members of progressive or activist groups and as the movement grew, it drew down upon itself the antagonism of conservative academics and journalist. By the 1990s, the term was used pejoratively by conservatives to criticize this hard- line linguistic orthodoxy. Anyone who used vocabulary held to be “politically incorrect” risked severe condemnation by PC activist. The word “black”, for example, was felt to be so sensitive that some banned its use in all possible context.
Critics of PC believe that the search for “caring” lexicon is pointless, as long as the inequalities which the language reflects do not change. Proponents of PC argue that the use of language itself helps to perpetuate these inequalities. CATCH PHRASES A catch phrase is simply a phrase which is so appealing that people take pleasure in using it. In some cases, a phrase comes and goes within a few weeks. More usually, it stays for a few years. Every now and then, it stays in use for decades. It is even possible for catch phrases to be so useful that they become permanent additions to the language, in the form of rather self-conscious and often jocular expressions whose origins people may have long forgotten. Catch phrases, typically, have a clearly identifiable source: to identify them we need to be part of the culture which gave rise to them. VOGUE WORDS Vogue words are lexemes which take on a fashionable or cult status within the language as a whole, or among the members of a particular group. They are similar in many ways to catch phrases, but vogue words usually lack the specific sources which can be found for most catch phrases. Vogue words do not suddenly appear, but grow gradually and unobtrusively, until one day we are aware that everybody is using them. They are not the same as neologisms: a lexeme which has been in the language for years may become a vogue word, but only a few neologisms become so popular that they could be called “vogue”. To become “vogue” a word has to be taken up and used with extra frequency by large numbers of people and must be extended to contexts beyond the one which originally gave rise to it. The use of affixes has come to be an important feature of vogue words in recent years. The trouble with vogue words is that they are transient and unpredictable. SLOGANS Originally, the word “slogan” was used to describe the battle-cry of a Scottish clan. Today, the application is different, but the intention behind modern slogans is much the same: to form a forceful, catchy, mind-grabbing utterance which will rally people, in this case to buy something or to behave in a certain way. In their linguistic structure, slogans are very like proverbs. Sentences tend to be short, with a strong rhythm: “Safety First”.
There is upper-class slang alongside lower-class slang (for example, the slang of doctors and the slang of footballers). The complexity of slang is immediately apparent when we examine its varied functions. According to the British lexicographer Eric Partridge, people use slang for any at least 15 reasons:
- Just for the fun of the thing.
- As an exercise either in wit and ingenuity or in humour.
- To be different or novel.
- To be picturesque.
- To be unmistakeably arresting, even startling.
- To escape from clichés or to be brief and concise.
- To enrich the language.
- To lend an air of solidity, concreteness, to the abstract.
- To lessen the sting of or to give additional point to. 9b. To reduce the excessive seriousness of a conversation. 9c. To soften the tragedy or to mask the pity of profound turpitude.
- To speak or write down to an inferior or to amuse a superior public.
- For ease of social intercourse.
- To induce either friendliness or intimacy of a deep or a durable kind.
- To show that one belongs to a certain profession, artistic or intellectual set or social class.
- To show or prove that someone is not “in the swim”.
- To be secret, not understood by those around one. Slang is one of the chief markers of in-group identity. As such, it comes very close to jargon. QUOTATIONS A quotation is a fragment of socially embalmed language. It is language which is freely available for anyone to use but readily sensitive to abuse. An error (misquotation) may not always be noticed, but if it is, there is a real risk of peer group derision. Anything which someone has said or written can be a quotation, but the term usually refers to those instances which have become “famous” over the years. Catch phrases are a species of quotation, but there are important differences: catch phrases tend to be of spoken origin, very short, subject to variation, relatively trivial in subject matter and popular for only a short period; quotations tends to be of written origin, indeterminate in length, highly restricted in the contexts where they may be used, semantically more profound and capable of standing the test of time. There is a colloquial tone to the former and a literary tone to the latter.
Sometimes, especially with political utterances, it is possible to see shifting between the categories. But when an utterance finally settles down as a quotation, there is no longer any capability for change. PROVERBS Proverbial expressions have been given a variety of labels: adages, dictums, maxims, mottoes, precepts, saws, truisms. The terms all convey the notion of a piece of traditional wisdom, handed down by previous generations. In most cases the origin of a proverb is unknown. The effectiveness of a proverb lies largely in its brevity and directness. The syntax is simple, the images vivid, the allusions domestic and thus easy to understand. Memorability is aided through the use of alliteration, rhythm and rhyme. ARCHAISMS An archaism is a feature of an older state of the language which continues to be used while retaining the aura of its past. The clearest cases are those which are separated by a substantial time-gap, notably those dating from Middle and Early Modern English. Lexical items include “behold”, “damsel”, “unto”, “wight”, etc. Grammatical features include present-tense verb endings (-est, -eth) and their irregular forms, contracted forms (‘gainst), past tenses (“spake”), pronouns such as “thou” and “ye” and vocative constructions beginning with “O”. Archaisms are used in many historical novels, plays, poems and films. They can be found in religious and legal settings, in nursey rhymes and fairy tales, and in trade names and commercial advertising. Rural dialects often retain words which have gone out of use in the standard language. Many older elements are preserved in place names (such as “lea” = “wood”). CLICHÉS In clichés we see fragments of language apparently dying, yet unable to die. Clichés emerge when expressions outlive their usefulness as conveyors of information. They are dying not from underuse, but from overuse. Such phrases as “at this moment in time” have come to be so frequently used that they have lost their power to mean. And yet they survive because people continue to use them, despite complaints and criticisms.
Examples of these inflectional suffixes (or simply inflectional) include plural -s, past tense -ed and comparative -er. c) Those occurring within the base are infixes. ADJECTIVES Inflections provide one of the ways in which the quality expressed by an adjective can be compared. The comparison can be to the same degree, to a higher degree or to a lower degree. The base form of the adjective is called the absolute form: “big”, “happy”. The inflections identify two steps in the expression of a higher degree: Adding -er produces the comparative form: “bigger”, “happier”. Adding -est produces the superlative form: “biggest”, “happiest”. There is also a syntactic (often called periphrastic) way of expressing higher degree, through the use of “more” (for the comparative) and “most” (for the superlative). There are no inflectional way of expressing the same or lower degrees in English. These notions are expressed syntactically: Using “as... as” for the same degree. Using “less” or “least” for lower degree. Adjectives of one syllable usually take the inflectional form. But there are exceptions: real, right and wrong. Adjective of three syllables or more use only the periphrastic form. But here too there are exceptions: for example, a few adjectives which being with -un do allow the inflection. Many of the adjectives of two syllables permit both forms of comparison. A few, such as “proper” and “eager”, do not allow the inflection at all. Others, such as many adjectives ending in -y, -er and -le, favour it. There are very few irregular comparative forms: “Better” and “best” are the comparison forms of “good”. “Worse” and “worst” are the comparison forms of “bad”. “Far” has two forms: “further” / “furthest” and “farther” / “farthest”. “Old” has regular forms (“older” / “oldest”) and also an irregular use (“elder” / “eldest”) when talking about family members. Some adverbs also allow inflectional comparison, but most adverbs are compared periphrastically.
NOUNS: NUMBER
Most nouns have both a singular and plural form and are known as variable nouns. A small group of cases do not have a number contrast and are known as invariable nouns. Most variable nouns change from singular and plural simply adding an -s. This is the regular plural form. In speech: the -s ending is pronounced in any of three possible ways, depending on the nature of the sound at the end of the singular noun. If the noun ends in an /s/-like sound, it is followed by an extra syllable (as in “phrases”). All other nouns ending in a voiceless consonant add /s/ (as in “cups”). All other nouns ending in a voiced consonant or a vowel add /z/ (as in “bags”). In writing: the spelling rules are more complex. The regular plural form includes those nouns where the singular form ends in a “silent -e” (such as “plate”). But there are several types of exception. The ending is -es if there is no silent -e, and the nouns end in -s, -z, -x, -ch and -sh. If the nouns ends in -o, the plural is spelled -os in most cases, but there are a few nouns which require -oes (as in “heroes”) and some allow both (as in “cargo(e)s”). If a common noun ends in -y, with a preceding consonant, the -y is replaced by -i and -es is added. If there is only a preceding vowel, the -y stays. There are several unusual cases, such as consonant doubling, the use of apostrophes after a letter name or a number and doubling a letter in some writing abbreviations. There are several groups of native English words which display exceptional plural forms: Seven nouns change their vowel (a process known as mutation): “man” – “men”, “foot” – “feet”, “goose” – “geese”, “mouse” – “mice”, “woman” – “women”, “tooth” – “teeth”, “louse” – “lice”. Four nouns add -en, in two cases changing the vowel sound: “ox” – “oxen”, “aurochs” – “aurochsen”, “child” – “children”, “brother” – “brethren”. A few nouns change their final fricative consonant as well as adding /z/. Some change /-f/ to /-v/ (as in “wives”).
