Lexicology - Introduction to English Linguistics PDF

5 Lexicology Introduction to English Linguistics – Schleburg 5 Lexicology Structural properties of English vocabulary Dissociation (lack of formal coherence of semantically related words): city – urban, end – final, mouth – oral; calf – vea...

5 Lexicology Introduction to English Linguistics – Schleburg 5 Lexicology Structural properties of English vocabulary Dissociation (lack of formal coherence of semantically related words): city – urban, end – final, mouth – oral; calf – veal, king – queen – royal cf. German Stadt – städtisch, Mund – mündlich, König – Königin – königlich Homophony and homonymy (related to monosyllabicity): one-syllable words air – heir, key – quay, cell – sell, plain – plane, right – rite – write bat, lock, well Loss of unstressed syllables: diachronic Old English lufu (noun) – lufian (verb) > love (noun) – love (verb) Phonological mergers: Middle English see / / – sea / / (minimal pair) > see / / – sea / / Synonymy (near-equivalence of meaning): freedom – liberty, big – great – large – tall, brief – short, male – manly – masculine – virile think, think about, think of, think out, think over, think through – cogitate, consider, deliberate, meditate, muse, ponder, reflect, ruminate … 5 Lexicology Structural properties of English vocabulary Complex lexical items: collocations (words frequently occurring together): come to an end, keep a promise, pay a compliment; disappointed at, interested in, proud of light verb constructions: do one’s hair, give a call, have a look, take a break phrasal and prepositional verbs: turn up, look for, get away with idioms: a bad apple, a piece of cake; down to earth, once in a blue moon; be in hot water, go cold turkey, hit the sack decreasing compositionality English shows a strong tendency to weaken the meaning of individual words and assign a specific meaning to fixed combinations, which can be lexicalised (become part of the vocabulary) together. In idioms the principle of compositionality (›the meaning of a complex expression can be derived from the meanings of its parts‹) no longer holds: they have to be learned by heart. 5 Lexicology Problems of synchronic analysis Many English morphemes undergo irregular phonological transformation in morphological processes (morphophonemic alternation, base allomorphy): belief → to believe , use → to use crime → criminal , part → partial divine → divinity , equal → equality Japan → Japanese long → length , wide → width photo – photographic – photographer The concept of morphophonemic alternation allows us to apply some tolerance in the description of synchronic word-formation: it would be counterintuitive to assert that national does not contain the morpheme nation just because the pronunciation is not exactly the same. 5 Lexicology More problems of synchronic analysis Families of compounds contain elements that do not appear anywhere else and thus have no clear meaning of their own (unique morphs): cran-berry, huckle-berry, rasp-berry cf. black-berry, blue-berry, straw-berry Mon-day, Tues-day, Wednes-day Sun-day Certain elements recur in morphologically related forms but do not carry identifiable meaning (formatives): con-sist, de-sist, in-sist, per-sist, re-sist, sub-sist cf. de-mobilise, in-sure, com-mit, e-mit, o-mit, per-mit, re-mit, sub-mit re-write, sub-classify 5 Lexicology Internationality aardvark (Dutch), amok (Malay), blitz (German), café (French), geisha (Japanese), geyser (Icelandic), jasmine (Persian), karma (Sanskrit), marmalade (Portuguese), pasta (Italian), salsa (Spanish), sauna (Finnish), tariff (Arabic), tea (Chinese), vodka (Russian), yogurt (Turkish) … Major foreign influences in premodern times: diachronic Old Norse (Viking raids, 8th to 11th century): egg, fellow, husband, ill, leg, low, odd, raise, seem, sister, sky, take, they (!), want, window … French (Norman Conquest, after 1066): chapter, crown, dress, evidence, image, jugdment, mercy, office, peace, pork, prayer, sir, victory … Latin (via French, Renaissance): abbreviate, actual, benefit, desperate, disability, excursion, jurisprudence, legal, meditate, support … Ancient Greek (via French, Renaissance): astronomy, catholic, chaos, crisis, emphasis, enthusiasm, exorcise, harmony, idol, method, system … → hard-word problem for less educated speakers 5 Lexicology Internationality Origin of most frequent English words 100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% top 1000 top 2000 top 3000 top 4000 top 5000 top 10000 native French Latin Norse other [MINKOVA & STOCKWELL 2006] 5 Lexicology Internationality Hybrid formations combine elements from different languages even within a single word: air-craft (Greek + native) count-less (Romance + native) drink-able, starv-ation (native + Romance) odd-ity (Scandinavian + Romance) un-mistak-able (native + Scandinavian + Romance) The internationality of the English lexicon is the main reason for its high degree of dissociation and the wealth of synonyms. It also explains its heterogeneity in terms of spelling and stress patterns: nature – stature – mature – – episode – epitome Viscount Beauchamp Dun Laoghaire – La Jolla – The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) comprehensive (1150 onward), historical (origins, development), documented (quotations) 1860 start of the project 1928 first edition completed (A New English Dictionary, 10 volumes) 1989 second edition (20 volumes), 1992 CD-ROM www.oed.com (licensed; access on the campus or via vpn-ur.uni-regensburg.de) 5 Lexicology The etymology of etymology Greek étymo- means ‘true, real’. Ancient and medieval etymology is based on the assumption that the origin of a word (at least in Hebrew, Greek and Latin) contains the true, timeless definition of a concept. Scholars looked for some primordial ›correctness‹ in the vocabulary of these languages. A comprehensive encyclopedia of early medieval knowledge, written by Archbishop Isidore of Seville (~560 – 636), is titled Etymologiae. It extracts the order of the world from the vocabulary of the author’s culture: Vir nuncupatus, quia maior in eo Man is called vir because there is more vis est quam in feminis … strength (vis) in him than in woman. Mulier vero a mollitie, tamquam Woman, on the other hand, is called mulier, mollier, detracta littera vel mutata, or mollier as it were (dropping or changing appellata est mulier. Utrique enim a letter), from mollities ‘softness’ because fortitudine et inbecillitate the two are different in the strength and corporum separantur. weakness of their bodies. (Isidore of Seville: Etymologiae XI) 6 Lexicology The etymology of etymology Ancient and medieval etymology … Modern etymology … believes in the (natural or God-given) assumes the arbitrariness of linguistic correctness of some languages, signs and the equality of all languages, expects to find the (›correct‹) world- hopes to find the historical motivation picture of their culture confirmed by behind a word from a (completely the data, different) culture of the past, works with synchronically available evaluates the philological record and forms, considers the earliest evidence, is based on accidental similarities in is based on scholarly models of sound form and meaning, change and semantic change, accepts all sorts of associations, establishes regular patterns of word- abbreviations, blends etc., formation, accepts circular derivations and tries to reconstruct one plausible multiple answers – sequence of events – which will sound perfectly acceptable which may sound extremely far-fetched to members of the same culture. to non-linguists … 5 Lexicology Scholarly etymology Some descendants of the Proto-Indoeuropean root *[gwiH₃-] ‘live’: Gaelic Latin Greek English Czech Sanskrit beatha ‘life’ vīta ‘life’ bios ‘life’ quick ‘alive’ žít ‘live’ jīva- ‘life’ život ‘life’ jīvati ‘lives’ biology živý ‘alive’ amphibian microbe zǭon ‘living being’ zoo zodiac vitamin vītālis ‘related to life’ vital vīvere ‘live’ survive vīvidus ‘lively’ vivid vīviparus ‘bearing alive’ viviparous uisge beatha viper ‘water of life’ whisky 5 Lexicology Etymological fallacy Some of the medieval ideal of ›correctness‹ lingers on when people argue that the ›original meaning‹ of a word is the one we should (!) preserve or reactivate. Etymology is often useful and sometimes fascinating, but… The ›origin‹ of a word as established by etymological scholarship is no absolute beginning in a philosophical sense but a point in the continuous development as arbitrary as any other – it just happens to be the earliest form we can reconstruct with the evidence at hand. Meanings (including emotional associations) change – this development is also part of the etymological story of a word. The synchronic status of a word in the language is determined by the intuitive judgment of (a substantial part of) the speakers – they may or may not know, or care about, what the word meant 500 or 2000 years ago.