Lexicology

A branch of linguistics which studies the form and the meaning of lexical items and tries to classify
them so as to make visible their systemic relations within a language.

 Morphology – word structure, word formation, grammatical categories distinctive of word-classes

donkey pre-test-ing high-er

 Lexical semantics – the meaning of words and word complexes and the meaning relations that are
internal to the vocabulary of a language

flat area - flat piece of wood - flat denial - flat tyre - flat ginger ale
quick – slow great – cool – swell

 Etymology – the study of the history of words, including their origin

picture – Middle English, from Latin pictura, from pictus, past participle of pingere to paint

Lexicography
Applied lexicology – the principles and the techniques that that underlie the process of writing and
compiling dictionaries and the study of their contents

 What selection of words?

 What information about words?

 How to define the meaning?

 How many meanings?

Language as a semio c system

Binary conception of the linguistic sign – Ferdinand de Saussure – Course in General Linguistics
(1916)
 langue vs parole

 marked vs unmarked forms (Jakobson 1972)

chair – chairs widow – widower person – guy

 the linguistic sign

 signifier/signifiant (form) vs signified/signifié (meaning)
 arbitrariness sleep donkey room
 conventionality holiday – vacation
  differentiality pat – bat – cat – mat
The semiotic triangle
Relation between
 sense (thought or reference)
 form of the sign (symbol)
 referent (what the sign stands for)

Typology of signs
Charles Sanders Pierce (1839 – 1914)

1. Icons – physical resemblance between the sign and the referent

 motivated words – snore, bark, hush

2. Indexes – association between the sign and the referent

 indexicals – he, we, here, now, there

3. Symbols – no resemblance between the sign and the referent

 arbitrary words – picture, sing, horrible

Motivation
 qualitative motivation (phonetical)
snore murmur bark

 secondary or linguistic motivation

 grammatical motivation shin-y re-arrange-ment
 semantic motivation walk over kindergarten

 quantitative motivation
She was talking, talking, talking…

The structure of a word

 Morpheme – the smallest meaningful grammatical unit

 free morpheme – snow, she, go, three
 bound morpheme – pre-, -ly, -dom

 Root – the smallest morphological form (morpheme) that makes up a word/lexeme, a free
morpheme
write, chair, high, some
  Affixes – added to the root to create new words/lexemes
 prefixes – in-, de-, en-
 suffixes – -er, -dom, -able

 Stem – the unmarked form of a word/lexeme to which inflectional affixes are added
work-ed window-s low-er

Word and Lexeme

Simple vs complex words

 simple (opaque) – bag, she, play

 complex (descriptive)
 derivations – simplification, familiarise
 compounds – water colours, chicken pox, take over

Lexeme – an abstract concept subsuming all the word forms of a lexical item which represents a
particular word-class and refers to a specific meaning

child + childʼs + children + childrenʼs

write + writes + wrote + written + writing

Aspects of meaning of a lexeme

 Denotation – (conceptual meaning, semantic nucleus) ‘the relationship that holds
between the lexeme and persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external
to the language system’ (Lyons: 1977)

 Reference – the meaning of expressions in real utterances, i.e. what real world referent it
stands for on a particular occasion

 Sense – relations within the language associated with the word or lexical item (lexeme)

 nuances of meaning in different constructions

slow student slow track slow business
 sense relations – synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy

John and Mary got married vs. John and Mary tied the knot.

Lexicography and dictionaries

 A branch of linguistics which studies how dictionaries are compiled, and what are the
principles applied to the selection, representation and definition of words in dictionaries

 Lexicography has its specific metalanguage which is used to describe language as a semiotic
system
  Lexicography studies
 selection of words in dictionaries
 arrangement of dictionary entries
 explanation of meaning
 choice of medium
 updating dictionary contents

Types of dictionaries
 A branch of linguistics which studies how dictionaries are compiled, and what are the
principles applied to the selection, representation and definition of words in dictionaries

 Lexicography has its specific metalanguage which is used to describe language as a semiotic
system

 Lexicography studies
 selection of words in dictionaries
 arrangement of dictionary entries
 explanation of meaning
 choice of medium
 updating dictionary contents
2) According to size

 desk size

Oxford English Dictionary (OED)

Webster

 concise size

Collins Cobuild Dictionary

Longman Consize English Dictionary

 pocket size

3) According to the content

 Encyclopaedia – explains the facts the words refer to
 Language – explains the meaning of words and the context of their use

4) According to the historical period

 Diachronic
 historical – Old English, Middle English, Modern English
 etymological – study the origin and the development of the form and meaning of
words
  Synchronic
 present modern language,
 dictionaries of previous states of the language without translation into modern English
5) According to the number of languages involved
 Multilingual dictionaries for translation purposes
 bilingual
 plurilingual
 Monolingual (English/English) dictionaries
 explain the meaning of words by periphrastic devices or by using synonyms, antonyms
etc.
6) According to the principle of arrangement
 alphabetical
 frequency
 according to topics – thesaurus
7) Dictionaries according to the medium used
 printed form
 computer dictionaries

Specialised dictionaries
Dictionaries that cover a relatively restricted set of phenomena:
 specific language varieties
 national varieties (e.g. British, American, Australian)
 dialects
 slangs
 jargons
 terminology
 aspects of language
 pronunciation
 combinatory
 phraseology
 idioms
 synonyms/antonyms
 orthography

Information provided by a dictionary entry

 Citation form (lemma)

 Phonetical information – transcription

 Spelling – irregular forms

 Morphological information – inflectional forms

  Syntactic information – word class, transitivity, prepositions

 Semantic information – definition of the word

 Sociolinguistic information – register/dialect variation

 Etymological information – origins and historical development of the form/meaning of the

word

Dictionary definitions
 Citation form (lemma)

 Phonetical information – transcription

 Spelling – irregular forms

 Morphological information – inflectional forms

 Syntactic information – word class, transitivity, prepositions

 Semantic information – definition of the word

 Sociolinguistic information – register/dialect variation

 Etymological information – origins and historical development of the form/meaning of the

word

What can go wrong?

1) Obscurity – when the meaning of the word in explained
 in terms of more lexical items
take: accept and receive possession of
 by words in a semi-metaphorical meaning
find: to come upon by chance
 by the use of unusual phrases
gather: to bring together in one company or aggregate
 in terms of scientific definitions
air: a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and other gases which surrounds the earth and forms its
atmosphere

2) Circularity – explain one word recurring to another word, which is in turn explained with reference
to the first (within the definition or the dictionary)
demand: ask for as authority or claim as a right
claim: to demand by or as by virtue of a right
3) Superfluous components – the definition comprises a component which may be removed without
affecting the explicitness of the definition
weapon: an instrument of offensive or defensive combat; something to fight with

4) Accuracy – concerns the level of accuracy of a definition

  inaccuracy occurs when a definition is too broad, i.e. it may cover the whole range of
use of the word itself and more besides
cashier: person in charge of cash
 or when the definition is too narrow, i.e. it does not account for the possible uses of a
word
appointment: a time you have arranged to go and see someone

Language Corpora

Corpus – a collection of texts (spoken or written)

 machine-readable form

 representativeness and sampling

 size
 large general language corpora (millions of words)
 small specialized corpora (up to 250 000 words)

 annotation
 tagging – word classes and grammatical features of words
 parsing – functions of words in sentence structure
 prosody
 other

Famous corpora
Brown corpus (1960s, USA) – written American English
 1 million words – academic, press, fiction, humour etc.

LOB (1970s, Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen) corpus – written Br. English

 equivalent of the Brown corpus (500 texts of 2000 words)

London-Lund corpus (1980s) – spoken British English

 435,000 words – face-to-face, telephone conversations, lectures etc.

BNC (British National Corpus, 1990s) – written and spoken Br. English

 100 million words – 10 million spoken + 90 million written

MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English, 1990s)

  1,850 000 words – 152 transcript

BAWE (British Academic Written English, 2004 – 2007) corpus

 6,5 million words – lectures, seminars, tutorials etc.

Concordances
 Antconc – a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis –
[Link]

 Microconcord – basic concordancing program for learners

 WordSmith tools – lexical analysis software

 SketchEngine – corpus tool for linguists, lexicographers and translators, to search language
corpora in more than 80 languages – [Link]
 access to numerous corpora
 build-up of corpora from text (.doc, .rtf, .pdf) and internet sources
 automatic corpus tagging

Corpus analysis
The use of software tools – concordances for generating

 frequency lists

 lexical density (vocabulary range)

 concordances

 grammar – I think that, I am thinking of

 semantics – contextualised meaning

white board, white wine, white coffee, white collar

 collocation – mutual expectancy, structure

confess a sin, undergo surgery

LEMMA – a set of morphological variants (= lexeme; head-word or citation form in a dictionary)

Lexical Semantics
Word meaning
Word meaning

 the relationship between the aspects of the linguistic sign

 needs to accommodate the fuzziness of meaning and the ambiguity of the signifiant
 Princess Diana, Princess of Wales, was one of the most adored members of the British royal
family.
Caroline is a princess. Look how beautiful she is in her yellow dress.

Approaches to the study of word meaning

 Semantic and lexical fields

 Componential analysis

 Prototype theory

Semantic and lexical fields

Semantic field
 denotes a segment of reality symbolized by the meaning of a group of lexical items
 all areas of meaning were neatly and economically divided up like a mosaic
 semantic field theory tries to find out what the fields of meaning have in common and
in what way they differ
 human meaning can seen as a continuum arbitrarily divided by specific languages (Trier
(1934)

Lexical field
 the linguistic realization of a semantic field in a particular language; there is is no
absolute list of such fields
 a group or framework of related words and word elements that covers or refers to an
aspect of the world, e.g. colours, day of the week, months, culinary terms, military
ranks
 each group comprises labelled lexical sets – synonyms, antonyms or associated words.

Componential analysis
 based on similarities among sets of words

 the word is broken down into meaningful components which make up the total sum of the
meaning in a word

man noun + male + adult + human

 components are treated as binary opposites distinguished by + / -, but not all features can fit
the binary pattern

 semantic markers – semantic features shared by a large number of words; they have an
impact on grammar, e.g. only animate nouns can take the Saxon genitive and can carry such
actions as laughing and sleeping
SM lion (+noun) (+animate) (-human) (+countable)

 semantic distinguishers – semantic features shared by a very limited number of words

SD lion (+wild) as opposed to a pet or domestic animal
(+four-legged) as opposed to such animals as penguins or fish

Semantic primitives
Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (reductive paraphrase)
Wierzbicka (1972,1996)
 a set of expressions (semantically minimal core) which cannot be defined any further (but may be
decomposed grammatically and have allomorphs)
 primitives are seen as lexical universals – have exact translation in all languages

Wierzbicka’s (1972) 13 basic semantic predicatives

I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, WORLD, THIS, WANT, NOT WANT, THINK OF, SAY, IMAGINE, BE
PART OF, BECOME

Wierzbicka’s (1996) – about sixty items

+ THERE IS, LIVE, DIE, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, NOT, MAYBE, CAN,
ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCH, KIND OF, PART OF, VERY, MORE, GOOD, BAD, BIG, SMALL,
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER, DO, HAPPEN, MOVE

Prototypes
Prototype theory of concepts (Rosch 1975)
 originates in cognitive psychology – mental representation of meaning
 decides membership in a category through possession of particular properties
 group membership does not require possession of all qualities, just enough for the fabric of the
concept to hold together

A prototype – a best instance example of a concept

tree – oak tree bird – sparrow

 prototypes, as items judged to be typical members of a concept can be categorised more

efficiently that atypical ones
 prototypes are learned first by children
 dictionary definitions of general meaning words (e.g. tree, chair, bird) are based on protypes
 prototypes are typically named first when subjects are asked to give examples of members of a
concept

Polysemy and Homonymy

Homonymy – the case when different words (homonyms) happen accidentally to have the same
form
 absolute homonyms – can of beans – yes, I can
 homophones – sameness of phonetic form – know – no
 homographs – sameness of graphic form – lead – lead
Polysemy – the existence of several distinct-but-related meanings of the same word

He shook his head The head of the committee resigned.

Associative Meanings
Reflects the ‘real world’ experience associated with the word which may vary
Connotative according to time, culture and social context

Stylistic Signals the social circumstances of language use and reflects stylistic variation

 formality commence begin

 jargon dose sponge radiology worker
fighting Darwin patients refusing essential
treatment through
stubbornness or stupidity
Affective Reflects the emotions and attitudes of the speaker/writer

lanky thin + suggests awkwardness and loose-jointedness

skinny thin + lacking usual or desirable bulk, quantity, qualities
slim thin + thin in an attractive way
slender thin + thin especially in an attractive or graceful way
Reflected Results from association with another sense of the expression leading to ambiguity
and possible misinterpretations. Often used to produce humorous effect.

Disaster tabker adrift in a sea of baffling questions

Sir Humphrey: Dear lady.

Dorothy: Not as dear as a Cabinet Secretary, Humphrey.
Collocative Results from association with words with which the lexical item tends to collocate.
It is connected with the notion of semantic prosody – the way in which certain
seemingly neutral words can be perceived with positive or negative associations
through frequent occurrences with particular collocations.
handsome + man, building beautiful / pretty + girl, picture

Figurative speech
Causes for changes in meaning
1. Linguistic causes – phonological, grammatical or semantic
 borrowing, instability of spelling and phonetic changes
doublet forms → different words
to attack – to attach; shirt – skirt; flower – flour
 substantivisation – grammatical changes
adjectives – the poor, the rich
interjections – the ahs, the ohs
 desemantisation
formal subjects – it, there
auxiliary verb do
 change of the syntactical function of words
provided providing
2. Historical causes – referring to a new concept
pen ← penne (lat.) = feather
lady (OE) ← loaf-kneader lord ← loaf-keeper

3. Social causes
 specialisation – creating terms
game – 1) children’s play, 2) game in sports
crane – 1) a bird, 2) an instrument for lifting heavy burdens
 slang and jargons
military jargon – an egg = a bomb; a coffee-grinder = machine gun
AmE. slang a cop = policeman;
cuckoo = stupid, a crook = a swindler

4. Psychological causes – emotional or evaluative colouring of a word often associated with in

positive or negative bias
 narrowing of the meaning of a word
 taboos and euphemisms

How they change the meaning

 Widening/extension of meaning – the semantic area of a word becomes more general or
more abstract

place – an open square in a town, market place →

place – any location

thing = assembly (court of law), Parliament →

thing – any location + abstract meaning
 Narrowing of meaning - the semantic area of a word is restricted to a specific use or to a
limited number of expressions in a limited type of context; there is a tendency for the
abstract to become concrete and for the generic to stand for the specific
meat – food of any kind (M.E.) →
kept in: meat and drink, sweetmeats

flesh – meat (M.E.) →

flesh – the flesh of living beings

undertaker – one who undertakes business (M.E.) →

undertaker – funeral undertaker
 conversion
  the material for the article itself – glass, iron, fox, nickel
 substantivised adjectives – editorial article → editorial
capital stock or fund → capital, private soldier → private
 Narrowing of meaning - the semantic area of a word is restricted to a specific use or to a
limited number of expressions in a limited type of context; there is a tendency for the
abstract to become concrete and for the generic to stand for the specific
meat – food of any kind (M.E.) →
kept in: meat and drink, sweetmeats

flesh – meat (M.E.) →

flesh – the flesh of living beings

undertaker – one who undertakes business (M.E.) →

undertaker – funeral undertaker
 conversion
 the material for the article itself – glass, iron, fox, nickel
 substantivised adjectives – editorial article → editorial
capital stock or fund → capital, private soldier → private

Stylistic neologism
 a shift of a word form one stylistic layer into another
 Taboo words – avoided for religious, moral, social or psychological reasons
(taboo – Polynesian term denoting the sacred and mystically untouchable
 Tabooed words are replaced by
 modification/adaptation – by changing one or several sounds in the word
God = gad, gog, gom, Gosh!
Damn it! = Dash it
 abbreviation
f-word p-word
 substitution
euphemism *disphemism
perspiration = sweat snail mail = post mail
maniac = madman pig = policeman
to pass away = to die bullshit = lies

Semantic neologism
 a very productive process in which new meaning is added to an existing naming unit, i.e. it
results in polysemy, as the original and the new meaning of the word coexist
 the main source for semantic shifts – figurative language:
 Simile – transfer of characteristic features based on explicit comparison
to be cool as a cucumber, her hair is white as snow

 Metaphor – characteristic features of the source are directly assigned to the target
this week really rushed by
the head of the committee
a pig, a viper, a Goliath
to freeze wages, to break a promise, to hang around
warm reception, burning question, a strong/weak point

Conceptual metaphor – the underlying identification of an abstract concept with a more basic or
concrete concept (i.e. a mapping between a concrete domain and an abstract domain). Conceptual
metaphors may be seen as invoked to explain the coherence between whole sets of ordinary
language expressions.

ARGUMENT is WAR
their claims are indefensible, their criticism was right on target

LIFE is a JOURNEY
we’ll have to go our separate ways, their relationship is a dead-end street

Perceptual metaphor (a sub-type of conceptual metaphor) – mapping perceptual system

experiences on our experiences from the real world
For instance, when talking about the target field of emotions (abstract feelings) we tend to use other
source fields , such as tension, heat, chill or agitation
ANGER
Redness – scarlet with rage, flushed with anger, red with anger
Agitation – shaking with anger, hopping mad, quivering with rage
Interference with perception – blind with rage, seeing red
Insanity – drives me out of my mind, drives me nuts, go crazy/berserk
Body as a container
filled with anger, love, despair, loneliness; contain my joy
Emotion is the heat of a fluid in a container
keep cool, an old flame, reach the boiling point, make my blood boil
Emotion increase as steam, pressure, explosion
all steamed up, fuming, she blew up, blew a gasket, erupted (volcano),
set me off (explosive, bomb)

 Personification (subtype of metaphor) – assigns qualities of people to objects

the chapter discusses, a healthy organization, sick jokes

 Metonymy – substitution based on contiguity of two entities, i.e. something closely connected
with the target is used to refer to it
a) the name of an animal for its fur – fox, chinchilla
b) the name of a material for the object – a glass, an iron, a tin, a nickel
d) the name of the place for its inhabitants – the White House, the board
e) the name of the organ for a capability – to have a good ear for
 f) the name of the author for his word – a Shakespeare, a Titian, a Beethoven

 Synechdoche (sub-type of metonymy) – based on the part-whole relation: naming the whole
by the name of one of its parts or vice versa
we rushed out of the stove, ten sails were anchored in the harbour
her debut on the boards was memorable, England plays Wales
 Hyperbole (overstatement) – the use of lexical items with stronger meaning than an adequate
representation of the target idea requires

a flood of tears, he is killing me with his words

I haven’t seen you for ages

 Understatement – the use of lexical items which express the target idea too weakly so as to
make things seem less important or serious than they really are

a trifle cold, a bit late

Sense relations
Synonymy
 based on sameness or similarity of meaning; synonymous words which display different
shades of one and the same basic meaning (semantic component)
 Types of synonyms according to the criteria for meaning differentiation:
 Absolute synonyms are words identical in meaning
voiced stops = mediae; voiceless stops = tenues
 Phraseological synonyms, i.e. context dependant synonymy
FIELD = space proper to something ; a debate covering a wide AREA; unsurpassed in his
own BRANCH; belonging to the DOMAIN of philosophy
 Relative synonyms are words standing for the same meaning but varying in the shade
of meaning and collocation restrictions: do v. make
key – clue (less certain than a key) – hint ( less certain than a clue)
 Stylistic synonyms – linked to a particular context, style
foreign v. native words enemy – foe ask – question – interrogate
dialect / sociolect person – man – chum – chap
archaic / poetic vs. common English maine – sea joyful – jocund
emotive / evaluative value politician (-) v. statesman (+)
taboo vs. euphemism to die – to pass away

Antonymy
 the relation of incompatibility of meaning; holds only between words belonging to one and the
same word

 gradable – opposite values within a semantic domain seen as a scale

 implicit superlatives, generally resisting to grading adjectives
huge – tiny wonderful – terrible brilliant – stupid
  marked vs unmarked members How old / young is he?
hot – cold big – small quick – slow
 complementary – mutually exclusive, incompatible notions within the relevant
semantic domain
up – down dead – alive man – woman
complementary opposite pairs may be asymmetrical (negative prefix)
happy – unhappy like - dislike
 relational/converse – express a relationship between two entities, which may be
reversed
buy – sell husband – wife offense – defence

Hyponymy
 hyponymy – the relation of generalization where the meaning of one word is included in
another (the “kind of” relation); it suggests the logical link of entailment – if a dalmation is a
dog
This is a dalmation. = This is a dog. = This is an animal. = This is a living being.

 co-hyponyms – lexical units which share the same level of generality and have the same
superordinate unit are called

 hypernymy – the relation of specification where the meaning of a more general word and a
more specific one

hypernym

co-hyponyms

co-hyponyms

Meronymy
 Meronymy – the part-whole relation (generalization)
 structural units – whole wheel – car
 temporal sequences year - month
 spatial sequences front – surface

 Holonymy – the relation of the whole to its parts (specification)

Holonym sentence

co-meronyms subject verb object