Топик: Лекции Л. И. Городнего по лексикологии английского языка

The emotive charge does not depend on the “feeling” of the individual speaker, but is true for all speakers of English. The emotive charge is one of the objective semantic features of word as linguistic units and forms part of the connotational component of meaning.

But it should be confused with emotive implication that the words may acquire in speech. The emotive implication of the word is to a great extent selective as it greatly depends on the personal experience of the speaker, the mental imagery⁷ the word envokes in him.

Learning objection of the lecture ”The meaning of the word, its components”

After you have studied the lecture, you should be able:

1. To explain the essence of the notions:

   1. The meaning of the word, its main types;

   2. The grammatical meaning;

   3. The lexical meaning;

   4. Interrelation between them.

2. To give the semantic analyze of the lexical meaning of a word:

   1. The denotational component,

   2. The connotative component.

3. To speak about stylistic reference of words.

04 Polysemy. Semantic Structure of the Word

The modern approach to semasiology is based on the assump­tion that the inner form (or facet) of the word (i.e. its meaning) presents a structure, which is called the semantic structure of the word.

We know that most words convey several concepts and thus possess the corresponding number of meanings. A word having se­veral meanings is called polysemantic, and the ability of words to have more than one meaning is described by the term polysemy

The word "polysemy" (from Greece "polus"-many and "sema"-meaning) means a plurality of meanings.

The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops gradually, mostly over the, centuries. These complicated processes of polysemy development involve both the appearance of the new meanings and the loss of old ones. Yet, the general tenden­cy with English vocabulary at the modern stage of its history is to increase the total number of its meanings and to provide for a quantitieve and qualitative growth of the expressive resources of the language.

Thus, word counts show that the total number of meanings separately registered in the New English Dictionary (NED) for the 1st thousand of the most frequent English words is almost 25 000,i.e. the average number of meanings for each of these words is 25.

For example: the word "power" has 15 meanings:

1. Capacity of producing some effect (the power of heart burn)

2. Control over some people (the power of Government)