Lexicology in Modern English

• The notes cover the definition, levels, and structure of lexicology in modern English

Lexicology Defined

• Lexicology studies lexis, which are the words in a language's vocabulary or lexicon.

• 'Word' is central to lexicology but must be technically defined.

• Vocabulary is colloquial, a lexicon is technical, and lexis is halfway between.

• While vocabulary, lexis, and lexicon refer to a language's total word stock, a dictionary is a selective record.

• Lexicology studies simple, complex, and compound words, relying on morphology (word forms) and semantics (word meanings)

• Etymology (word origins) is of interest, but lexicology differs from lexicography (dictionary compilation).

Related Fields

• Morphology, semantics, etymology, and lexicography as they relate to lexicology

Morphology

• Morphology studies morphemes, the smallest meaningful units that form words.

• Morphemes are atoms with which words are built and are meaningful as they relate to the world.

• Examples of morphemes are cat, child, with, sleep, -ing, arm, chair, -s, farm, and -er

• Morphemes can be ‘free’ (occur alone as words) or ‘bound’ (occur with other morphemes).

• Free morphemes: cat, chair, farm

• Bound Morphemes: -ing, -s, and -er

• Morphs are the concrete realization of a morpheme in an utterance, while allomorphs are different representations of the same morpheme.

• The indefinite article "a" is used before consonants, while "an" is used before vowels.

• Allomorphs are in complementary distribution, meaning they cannot occur in the same context.

• Distribution refers to the set of linguistic contexts where a form occurs, which explains how morphology relates to word types like simple, complex, and compound.

• Simple words (door, knob) are free morphemes and are morphologically unanalyzable.

• Complex words (spoonful, wildish) are formed by adding affixes, while compound words (door-knob, cheeseburger) combine words.

• Morphology is based on word construction, word parts, and word types.

Semantics

• Semantics is the study of meaning in natural languages, and it's pervasive throughout language.

• Pragmatic, sentence, and lexical semantics exist.

• Semantics can be approached philosophically (logical properties) or linguistically (meaning in natural languages).

• Semantics is part of phonology, syntax, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and pragmatics, but lexical semantics is relevant to lexicology.

• 'Acceptability' and 'meaningfulness' differ as utterances can be meaningless but acceptable and vice versa.

• "That woman is a man" may be meaningless as it conflicts but can be acceptable in a play setting.

• Meaningfulness and acceptability depend on context and knowledge.

• "Crocodiles can fly" is meaningful but unacceptable due to contradicting knowledge, while grammatical errors can highlight these issues.

Etymology

• Etymology is the study of word history, not just origin, and was coined by the Stoics.
• The Stoics attempted to find the ‘etyma’ to relate language to reality, discovering the original forms of words.
• Establishing origins is difficult in etymology because some words aren't related to ancient forms, and true meanings are difficult to ascertain.
• Etymological information includes cognates, source language, borrowing date, and previous word history.
• Folk etymology occurs when speakers replace an obscure form with a transparent one.
• Bridegroom changed from bridegome and depart evolved into do and part.

Lexicography

• Lexicography is the writing and compilation of dictionaries.
• In its widest sense, it refers to the principles that underlie dictionary compilation and editing.
• Lexicography is ‘applied lexicology’ because lexicographical compilation is derived from lexicological theory.
• The link between lexicography and linguistics has only recently been established, and both prescriptive and descriptive approaches are used.
• Dictionaries are now compiled by lexicographers trained in linguistics, so lexicology plays a more significant role.
• Lexicology provides an input to lexicography, along with morphology, syntax, phonology, and sociolinguistics.

Lexicology and Phonology

• Differences between lexical items can be phonological, such as pill versus bill or export versus export.
• Compounds have phonological features that distinguish them from noun phrases.
• Stress patterns differentiate compounds from noun phrases, this is an indication of the interdependence of phonology, lexicology and syntax

Lexicology and Syntax

• Syntax assembles words to construct sentences and is responsible for the understanding of sentences.
• A sentence can be syntactic but unacceptable lexically, such as "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."
• The problem of the distinction between lexicology and syntax may be reduced to the distinction between sentences that are unacceptable on syntactic grounds and those that are deviant from the lexical point of view.
• Syntax deals with general language facts; lexicology handles special aspects, so general versus particular helps clarify the difference between the two.
• Lexical restrictions are tendencies, but lexical restrictions are not generally a matter of well established rules but of tendencies.

Structure of English Vocabulary

• Vocabulary, lexis, and lexicon refer to the total stock of words in a language, and internal vocab organization is a question that can be addressed.
• The questions can be answered by focusing on individual words and their associations, semantic or lexical fields, and lastly on word families.

Word and Associative Field

• Every word is involved in a network of associations; these can be based on the similarity of meaning, form, or both.
• De Saussure's graphic formula presents a term as the center of a constellation, where coordinated terms converge.
• Relations can be referred to as 'paradigmatic' or 'in absentia' since words substitute with other words
• ‘Syntagmatic’ relations are concerned with words that are co-occurrent items.

Lexical Fields

• Lexical fields study some semantic or lexical fields, such as the hierarchy of military ranks, numerals, color and kinship terms.

• Crystal defines a semantic or lexical field as a named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelate and define each other.

• Swiss scholars put forward the field theory in the 1920s and 1930s

• Vocabulary is a dynamic system with relationships of meaning and change. The general-particular and part-whole relationships occur.

• Early theorists of field theory presented fields as realities intermediate between individual words and the totality of vocabulary.

• The challenge is that lexical fields stem from where it is hard to assign lexemes, and one lexeme may be valid in being assigned to two fields

• Lexemes that have an influence of other field has trouble in defining the bounds and links between fields.

• Large numbers of lexemes can be grouped together into fields and sub-fields in a clear way so the theory is useful.

Word Families

• Words can be in ‘families’ based on their morphology, both their inflections and their derivations
• Word families include a base form, possible inflectional forms, and derivations
• A Levels can be established on a number of criteria relating to frequency, productivity, regularity, and predictability.
• Criteria are related to frequency, specifically the number of words in which an affix occurs
• Productivity: the extent to which an affix continues to be used to form new words
• Predictability (concerning meaning and regularity

Word Classes

• Word classes also account for structure, based on Latin and Greek traditions.
• Grammars of English distinguish eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
• Modern grammarians have further classes:
• Closed classes: preposition, pronoun, determiner, conjunction, auxiliary verb
• Open classes: noun, adjective, verb, adverb
• Lesser categories: numeral, interjection
• A small number of words of unique function: the particle not and the infinitive marker to
• The former are so-called ‘grammatical’ or ‘function’ words, which generally serve the grammatical construction.
• The latter are ‘content’ words that carry the main meaning.
• It is not possible to tell which word class a word belongs to simply by looking at it if inflections provide a clue, behavior in sentences.
• The notion is useful as it allows general statements but is more useful in syntax than in lexicology, which is used more in open-class word types.
• Class boundaries are fuzzy, and a word may belong to more than one word class.

Summary

• Established the lexicon as a level between phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, etymology, and lexicography
• Examined the attempts made to discover the structure of English.
• Revealed the central position of words in lexicology.