Учебное пособие: Brief course on lexicology

Lecture 1

Lexicology is the science of the word and distinguished in:

- General and special

- Contrastive and comparative

- Descriptive (the synchronic approach) and historical (the diachronic approach).

Contrastive and comparative, descriptive and historical are closely connected.

Lexical units are morphemes, words, word-groups, phraseological units.

Paradigm – the system showing a word in all its word-forms. The lexical meaning is the same; the grammatical meaning varies from one form to another (to take, takes, taken, took, taking).

Semasiology – the branch of lexicology that is devoted to the study of the meaning. There are 2 schools with their own approaches to the problem of the words meaning: referential and functional.

Types of the meaning

- Grammatical meaning

- Part of speech meaning

- Lexical meaning – may be denotational (making the communication possible) and connotational (the emotive charge and the stylistic value).

Stylistic value is subdivided into neutral, bookish and colloquial. The last may be pointed out like slang, common colloquial, vulgarisms, dialectical words, professionalisms, jargonisms.

Meaning is the inner facet of the word, inseparable from its outer facet (sound form) which is indispensable to the existence of meaning and to intercommunication.

Motivation:

Morphological (-able, -less, re-, anti-)

Phonetical (boom, splash, cuckoo, pooh!)

Semantic

Change of meaning

Word-meaning is liable to change in the course of the historical development of language.

Causes of semantic change

- Extra-linguistic

- Linguistic (ellipsis, discrimination of synonyms, linguistic analogy)

The kinds of association involved in semantic changes are:

1. similarity of meanings

2. contiguity of meanings

Results of semantic change:

1. changes in denotational meaning (specialization, extension (generalization [specialized, common]))

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