Introduction to Lexicology

Lexicology: Definition and Objectives

• Lexicology is a branch of Linguistics that studies the vocabulary of a language and characteristic features of lexical units.
• The object of Lexicology is to study morphemes, words, word-groups, and phraseological units.

Branches of Lexicology

• General Lexicology: studies words and vocabulary in general, regardless of specific features of any particular language.
• Special Lexicology: studies the vocabulary of a particular language.

Aspects of Words

• Etymology: studies the origin of words and historical changes in meanings.
• Semasiology: deals with the semantic structure of words and development of meanings.
• Word-building: studies the process of creating new words, their structural and semantic patterns.

Phraseology and Borrowing

• Phraseology: studies word-groups with specialized meanings.
• Borrowing: deals with the process of adopting and assimilating words from other languages.

Links with Other Linguistic Disciplines

Phonetics

• Lexicology connects with Phonetics on the acoustic level, where words consist of phonemes that distinguish between meanings.
• Examples: object vs. object, cop vs. cope, blackbird vs. black bird.

Grammar

• The lexical meaning of a word can be conditioned by its grammatical forms.
• Examples: glass (стекло), a glass (стакан), glasses (очки).
• The lexical meaning of a word may affect its grammatical forms and syntactical functions.
• Examples: come true, turn red, go wrong.
• Grammatical meaning can be expressed by lexical means.
• Examples: We are going there tomorrow instead of We shall go there.

Stylistics

• Lexicology connects with Stylistics, which differentiates vocabulary according to the functional styles of the language.
• Examples: father (neutral or formal) vs. dad (informal).

The Word as a Principal Object of Lexicology

• The word is the minimal (after the morpheme) meaningful unit of the language, a two-plane linguistic sign.
• The word possesses both form (the plane of expression) and meaning (the plane of content).

Motivation of Words

• phonetical motivation: based on similarity between sounds and their meanings.
• Examples: boom, splash, whistle.
• phonetical motivation: based on association between sound-clusters and meaning.
• Examples: [fl] (“quick movement”) – flap, flash, flutter.
• Morphological motivation: based on direct connection between morphological structure and meaning.
• Examples: poetess, overestimate, regain, blackberry.
• Semantic motivation: based on co-existence of direct and figurative meaning.
• Examples: foot of a page, eye of a needle, head of an army (metaphoric transfer).
• Examples: astrakhan, china, tweed (metonymic transfer).