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

rep = repetition (in school slang smth, need to know by hard)

A further course of homonyms is called split⁵ polysemy: 2 or more homonyms can originate different meanings of the same word, when for some reason the semantic structure of the word breaks into several parts. We may illustrate this by the 3 following homonyms of the word “spring”, means:

1. The act of springing, leap;

2. A place, where a steam of water comes up out to the sky;

3. A season of the year.

Historically all three originate from the same verb with meaning to jump, to leap. This is the Old English word “springun”⁶. So that the meaning of the first homonym is the oldest or the most etymological one. The meanings of the 2^nd and the 3^rd examples were originally made in metaphor. As the head of the strim, the water something lips out of the earth, so that metaphorically such a place could be described as a “leap”. On the other hand, the season of the year, following winter, could be poetically defined as a “leap” from the darkness and cold into sunlight and life.

Polysemy, synonymy and homonymy

One of the most complicated problems in semasiology is to define the place of homonyms among other relationships of words. In a simple code each sign has only one meaning and it’s meaning is associated with only one sign. But this ideal is not realized in natural language. When several related meanings are associated with the same form, the word is called polysemantic. When 2 or more unrelated meanings are associated with the same form, these words are homonyms. When 2 or more forms are associated with the same or nearly the same meaning, they are called the synonyms.

Morphological structure of the word

Leaning objectives: After you've studied the material you should be able to:

I. 1) define the terms "morpheme", its free and bound forms; 2) define roots and affixes, give their classification;

II. 3) speak on the ways of enriching, the vocabulary

a) Semantic extension

b) Word-formation (productive types and minor ways): Affixation, Compounding, Conversion, Shortening.

Literature for the seminar:

1. Practical Lexicology by Kashcheyeva pp. 91-128, Ex.l,2cl/2

2. English lexicology by Antrushina G.B.

pp. 78-103 (Ex. I, III, V, VI), pp. 104-120 (Ex. I, II)

Morphological structure of the word

Morphemes, free and bound forms. We describe a. word As an autonomous unit of language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammatical employment and able to form a sentence by itself, we have the possibility to distinguish it from the other fundamental unit, namely the morpheme.

A morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why morphemes: may be defined as the smallest meaningful units of form.

The term morpheme is derived from Gr. Morphe - "form" + erne. The Greek suffix - eme has been adopted by linguists to denote the smallest unit or the minimum distinctive feature (phoneme, sememe). The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form, (a form in these cases is recurring discrete unit of speech) (повторяющаяся отдельная самостоятельная единица речи).

A form is said to be free if it may stand alone without changing its meaning; if not, it is a bound form, because it always bound to something else: for example, if we compare the words sportive and elegant and their parts, we see that sport, sportive, elegant may occur alone as utterances, whereas eleg- -ive, -ant are bound forms because they never occur alone. A word is, by Bloomfield's definition, a minimum free form a morpheme is said to be either bound or free. This statement should be taken with caution. It means that some morphemes are capable of forming words without adding other morphemes: that is, thy are homonymous to free forms.

According to the role they play in constructing words morphemes are subdivided into: ROOTS and AFFIXES. The latter are further subdivided, according to their position, into prefixes, suffixes and infixes, according to their function and meaning, into derivational and functional affixes, the latter are also called ending or outer formatives (словообразующий).