Riassunto The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language - Crystal D. PDF

Preview

Summary

Riassunto del libro fino al capitolo 22...

Description

LINGUA E TRADUZIONE INGLESE I – MOD. A CHAPTER 8: THE NATURE OF THE LEXICON The term “lexicon” is known in English from the early 17th century, when it referred to a book containing a selection of a language’s words and meanings, arranged in alphabetical order. Within linguistics it refers to the total stock of meaningful units in a language (words, idioms and part of words which express meaning, such as the prefixes and suffixes). To study the lexicon of English is to study all aspects of the vocabulary of the language (for example, how words are formed, how they are developed over the time, how they are used now, etc.). It is a study which is carried on by lexicologist, who are thus practising lexicology. Lexicographers: lexicologist who choose to write a dictionary and their calling is lexicography (but one can be a good lexicologist without ever having written a dictionary at all). The lexicon is the area of language which is most difficult to systematize and control. Its size, range and variability is both an attraction and a hindrance. It comprises the largest part of the forms and structures which make up a language. WHAT IS A LEXEME? A lexeme (or lexical item) is the fundamental unit of the lexicon of a language. Etymology: from the Greek, “word, speech”.  A lexeme is often, but not always, an individual word (simple lexeme or dictionary word). A simple lexeme (love) may have a few inflectional forms or grammatical variants (loved; lover; loving).  A lexeme can be made up of more than one orthographic word (multiword or composite lexeme), such as a phrasal verb (speak up), an open compound (fire engine), or an idiom (throw in the towel). Come, coming and come in are all lexemes. The way in which a lexeme can be used in a sentence is determined by its word class or grammatical category. HOW LARGE IS THE ENGLISH LEXICON? The Webster’s Third New International counts over 450.000 lexemes in 1961. In 1992, the Oxford English Dictionary counts over 500.000 lexemes.

ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations are shortened versions of words and phrases. The story of abbreviations can be traced back over 150 years. The fashionable use of abbreviation, a kind of society slang, comes and goes in waves, though it is never totally absent. They are one of the most noticeable features of present-day English linguistic life. Reasons to use abbreviations:  The desire for linguistic economy.  Succinctness and precision are highly valued, and abbreviations can contribute to a concise style.  Abbreviations help to convey a sense of social identity: using an abbreviated form to be part of a social group. Types: 1. Initialisms: a type of abbreviation which are spoken as individual letters (BBC, DJ, FBI, WWW). They are formed by using some of the letters in the word or phrase. 2. Acronyms: initialisms which are pronounced as single words. They are formed by using the first letters in the words of a phrase or first parts of a phrase (NATO, UNESCO, RADAR, GIF). 3. Clipping: the shortening of a longer word, often reducing it to one syllable (PHONE, AD). 4. Blends: a word which is made of the shortened forms of two or more other words (BRUNCH: breakfast + lunch; SMOG: smoke + fog). 5. Facetious forms: TGIF - Thank God It’s Friday. 6. Latin abbreviations: etc. - et caetera - “and the others”; ead. - eadem - “the same (woman)”. PROPER NAMES English proper names are on the boundary of the lexicon. Some of them are so closely bound up with the way meaning is structured on the language that it would be difficult to exclude them from any superdictionary. Proper names are part of the learning of a language: there are rules of pronunciations which must be followed and rules of grammar which apply to proper names in special way.  There are names which form part of the idiomatic history of an Englishspeaking community, such as The Times, Billy the Kid, Phi Beta Kappa and Woolworth’s.

 And there are names which have taken on an additional sense, such as Fleet Street (= “the British press”) and The White House (= “the US government”). HOW LARGE IS YOUR LEXICON? It depends on a person’s hobbies and educational background. Someone who reads several novels a week is obviously going to pick up a rather larger vocabulary than someone whose daily reading is restricted to the telephone directory. There must always be two totals given when presenting the size of a person’s vocabulary: 1. One reflecting active vocabulary (lexemes active used in speech or writing). 2. One reflecting passive vocabulary (lexemes know but not used).

CAPITOLO 9 - THE SOURCES OF THE LEXICON WHY DOES ENGLISH HAVE MORE WORDS THAN ANY OTHER LANGUAGE? The Oxford Dictionary says it is quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages. The reason is historical:  English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German: it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages.  After the Norman Conquest in 1066 English was hugely influenced by Norman French (the language of the ruling class) and by Latin (the language of scholarship and of the Church). Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language: English is very ready to accommodate foreign words. Because English became an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from many other sources. NATIVE VOCABULARY The Anglo-Saxon base: many lexemes have arrived with the Germanic invaders, settled in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries and never fallen out of use. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic and displaced the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants. Many of the words that we described as “core” earlier seem to be from Anglo-Saxon.

The Anglo-Saxon lexical character continues to dominate everyday conversations, whether it be grammatical words (in, on, be, that), lexical words (love, name) or affixes (mis-, un-, -ness, -less). Anglo-Saxon words are of:  Parts of the body (arm, bone, chest, ear, eye, foot, hand, heart).  The natural environment (field, hedge, hill, land, meadow, wood).  The domestic life (door, floor, home, house).  The calendar (day, month, moon, sun, year).  Animals (cow, dog, fish, goat, hen, sheep, swine).  Common adjectives (black, dark, good, long, white, wide).  Common verbs (become, do, eat, fly, go, help, kiss, live, love, say, see, sell, send, think). FOREIGN BORROWINGS When one language takes lexemes from another, the new items are usually called loan words or borrowings. 1. Celtic borrowings Although the Celts were already resident in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, there are few traces of their language in English today, mainly in the form of Celtic-based place names including river names and town names. 2. Scandinavian borrowings The Norse invaders (Vikings) settled in Britain in 9th century and they had a great influence on English: everyday words, grammatical words (like the verb “are”) and pronouns “their”, “them”, “they”. A good number of sc- or sk- words today are of Scandinavian origin (score, scrub, skill, skin). 3. French borrowings After the Norman conquest, the influx of words from the continent of Europe, especially French, doubled the size of the lexicon to over 100.000 items. Trilingualism in English, French and Latin was common in the world of:  Government: parliament, chancellor, government, country, crown.  Finance: treasure, wage, poverty.  Law: attorney, plaintiff, larceny, fraud, jury, verdict.  War: battle, army, castle, tower, siege, banner.  Religion: miracle, charity, saint, pardon. 4. Latin Borrowings

The influence of Latin is strong, especially after the arrival of Christianity (church, school, giant, plant). 5. Other borrowings As a result of empire and trade contacts, the lexicon of English continued to acquire from other languages including:  American: racoon, coyote, wigwam.  Australian: wallaby, kangaroo, boomerang.  Italian: paparazzo, pizza, dolce vita.  Arabic: saffron, tamarind, alchemy.  Persian: naphtha, chess, lilac.  Japanese: samurai, kimono.  Other Asian regions: yoga, karma, curry, ketchup. WORD FORMATION In linguistics, word formation refers to the ways in which new words are made based on other words. Word-formation can be viewed either diachronically (through different periods in history) or synchronically (at one period). Word formation is sometimes contrasted with semantic change, which is a change in a single word’s meaning. There are a few methods of word formation: 1. Abbreviations: a word or phrase is shortened (e.g. Dr.). 2. Calque or loan translation: a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation (e.g. It goes without saying). 3. Morphological derivation: the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix (e.g. unhappy). It’s different from inflection. 4. Compounding: a lexeme that consists of more than one stem (e.g. cupcake). 5. Conversion: change of a word from one-word class to another (e.g. to friend someone). 6. Neologism: forming a new word by coining (e.g. quark). 7. Back-formation: we remove part of a word - suffix or prefix (e.g. to enthuse). Nonce word: is a lexeme created for temporary use, to solve an immediate problem of communication.

CHAPTER 11 – THE STRUCTURE OF THE LEXICON

SEMANTIC STRUCTURE When we talk about the “structure” of the lexicon, we are referring to the network of meaning relationships which bind lexemes together: known as semantic structure. As soon as we think of a lexeme (uncle), a series of others come to mind: some of these help to define it (brother, father), other relates to it closely in meaning (aunt, cousin), others have a looser semantic connection (relatives, family). There may be figurative or literary use, as well as a few personal or idiosyncratic associations (birthday, funeral). SEMANTIC FIELDS A fruitful notion in investigating lexical structure is the semantic or lexical field: a named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways. Assign all the lexemes in English to a semantic field is not as straightforward as it might appear: some lexemes seem to belong to fields which are very difficult to define, or which are vague (does “orange” belong to “fruit” or “colour”?). A very large number of lexemes can be grouped together into fields and subfields in a clear-cut way. DICTIONARY AND THESAURUS The Thesaurus is an alternative to the traditional approach to lexicography using alphabetical order. Thesauri are based on the notion of grouping lexemes thematically: a notion which can be traced back to 16th century. Francis Bacon and John Wilkins wrote essays which outlined a way of dividing everything into a small number of major areas, each being progressively subclassified until all concepts are dealt with in their appropriate place. Roget’s Thesaurus, first published in 1852, divides the lexicon into six main areas: abstract relations, space, the material world, the intellect, volition and sentient/moral powers. Each area is then progressively subclassified, giving a total of 1.000 semantic categories. LEXICAL STRUCTURE Ferdinand De Saussure has developed a two-dimensional model of language structure:  On the horizontal dimension (syntagmatic), we sense the relationships between lexemes in a sequence. Es.: It writhed on the ground in excruciating pain

The lexeme excruciating tends to occur with pain or agony and not with joy or ignorance. Expectancies of this kind are known as collocations or selectional restrictions (we can say excruciating “select” or “collocate” with pain).  On the vertical dimension (paradigmatic), we sense the way in which one lexeme can substitute for another and relate to it in meaning. Es.: My auntie has bought a red automobile We might replace bought by a lexeme of similar meaning (a synonym), such as purchased; or by one of contrasting meaning (an antonym), such as sold. We might replace automobile by a lexeme of more specific meaning (a hyponym), such as Ford; or by one of more general meaning (a hypernym), such as vehicle. The predictable links between lexemes are called sense relations and they are the core of any account of lexical structure. COLLOCATIONS A collocation is formed by a central lexeme, or node, surrounded by a fixed amount of language, the span, within which the search for collocations takes place. For common lexemes, we need to examine quite a wide span and to look at many examples of use, for clear lexical patterns to emerge. LEXICAL PREDICTABILITY Often, a sequence of lexemes is governed by chance or by factors which are controlled by an individual speaker and not by tendencies in the language. Such sequences as I like films are said to be “free combinations” of lexemes: they are not collocations, because there is no mutual expectancy between the items. By contrast, the lexical item involved in a collocation are always to some degree mutually predictable, occurring regardless of the interests or personality of the individual user. Collocations may occur with apparent disregard for the observable situation to which they relate. Collocations cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the world. Sometimes the predictability is weak (heavy collocate with quite a diverse range of items) and sometimes is strong (auspicious collocate only with occasion and a few other closely related items). IDIOMS Two central features identify an idiom:

 The meaning of the idiomatic expression cannot be deduced by examining the meanings of the constituent lexemes.  The expression is fixed, both grammatically and lexically. LEXICAL PHRASES They are chunks of language in which all the items have been preassembled: it seems to me..., would you mind..., on the one hand..., etc. Such phrases are used frequently in both speech and writing, but they are especially important in conversation, where they perform a few roles: for instance, expressing agreement, summing up an argument, introducing an example or changing a topic. Types of lexical phrases: 1. Polywords: short phrases which function very much like individual lexemes. They cannot be varied, and their parts cannot be separated. Es.: by the way; so far so good; once and for all. 2. Institutionalized expressions: units of sentence length, functioning as separate utterances. They are invariable, and their parts cannot be separated. They include proverbs, aphorisms and other quotable utterances. Es.: have a nice day; give me a break; long time no see. 3. Phrasal constraints: these are phrases which allow some degree of variation. They are usually quite short. Es.: good – (morning/night); a – ago (day, long time); as far as I – (can see/know). 4. Sentence builders: phrases which provide the framework for whole sentences. They allow considerable variations. Es.: not only... but also...; my point is that...; that reminds me of... SYNONYMS Synonyms are lexemes which have the same meaning. But there may be no lexemes which have exactly the same meaning: it is usually possible to find some nuance which separate them, or a context in which one of the lexemes can appear but the other(s) cannot.  There may be a dialect difference: autumn and fall are synonymous, but the former is British English and the latter is American.  There may be a stylistic difference: insane and loony are synonymous, but the former is formal, and the latter is informal.  There may be a collocational difference: rancid and rotten are synonymous, but the former is used only of butter or bacon.  There may be a difference of emotional feeling or connotation: youth and youngster are synonymous, but youths are less pleasant than youngsters.

ANTONYMS Antonyms are lexemes which are opposite in meaning. Unlike synonymy (where there is doubt about whether true synonyms exist at all), antonymy very definitely exists.  Gradable antonyms: opposite such as large/small, happy/sad and wet/dry. These are items which are capable of comparison. They do not refer to absolute qualities.  Complementary antonyms: opposite such as single/married, first/last and alive/dead. In such cases, if one of the pair of lexemes applies, the other does not. The items complement each other in their meaning.  Converse terms: opposite such as over/under, buy/sell and wife/husband. These antonyms are mutually dependent on each other. This type of oppositeness, when one item presupposes the other, is called converseness. All these lexemes have a common feature: they can all be used in the questionanswer exchange. There is usually an intuitive certainty about the relationship between these lexemes: this is what distinguishes antonymy from other kinds of oppositeness, where the concept may be opposed but the lexemes are not. Es.: the antonym of little is big, and of large is small. Large is not the antonym of little, even though they are conceptually apposed. HYPONYMS Hyponymy shows the relationship between a generic term (hypernym) and a specific instance of it (hyponym). A hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is more specific than its hypernym. The semantic field of a hypernym, also known as a superordinate, is broader than that of a hyponym. Es.: Rose (hypernym) is one of many lexemes which are all “included” within flower (hyponym). Hyponymy is particularly important to linguists because it is the core relationship within a dictionary. The most illuminating way of defining a lexeme is to provide a hypernym along with various distinguishing features. INCOMPATIBILES When we want to exclude one meaning from another, we talk about incompatibility. Under this heading are grouped sets of lexemes which are mutually exclusive members of the same subordinate category.

Example: the sentence I am thinking of an object which is painted in a single colour, and it is red and yellow fail to make sense, because red and yellow are both hyponyms under the same hypernym (colour). OTHER SENSE RELATIONS There are other kinds of meaning relationship much less widespread, applying to restricted sets of lexemes.  Parts and wholes: wheel and car; sleeve and jacket; door and house.  Hierarchies: a lexical hierarchy is a graded series of lexemes in which each item holds a particular rank, being “higher” or “lower” than adjacent items. Es.: corporal – sergeant – lieutenant.  Series: the days of the week; the month of the year. They are cyclical in character, we reach the end of the series then we start again. MAKING SENSE A definition is the linguistic mechanism which brings everything together. It is a special type of sentence which relates all the relevant aspects of a lexeme’s meaning, enabling us to understand it. Definitions are listed in dictionaries, sometimes using a full sentence, sometimes in an abbreviated form. Basic structure of a definitional sentence: there is a general category to which a word belongs, and the specific features or attributes which distinguish that word form related words.

CHAPTER 12 – LEXICAL DIMENSIONS A single lexeme simultaneously contains information relating to several linguistic dimension:  Historical dimension: when it came into English.  Structural dimension: how it is formed.  Regional dimension: whether it is in standard use or restricted to a dialect.  Social dimension: whether it carries resonances of gender, class, formality or ethnicity.  Occupational dimension: whether it has special status in such domains as science, religion or law.  Much more. The lexicon is a particularly sensitive index of historical, social and technology change. LOADED VOCABULARY

 A denotation is the objective relationship between a lexeme and the reality to which it refers: identifies the central aspect of lexical meaning, which everyone would agree about (the dictionary meaning of lexemes is often called their denotation).  By contrast, connotation refers to the personal aspect of lexical meaning, often the emotional associations which a lexeme incidentally brings to mind. Connotations vary according to the experience of individuals and they are to some degree unpredictable. On the other hand, because people do have some common experience, many lexemes in the language have connotations which would be shared by large groups...