Lexikologie – anglická filologie
Vocabulary as a system (centre, periphery, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in the lexicon; collocations, idioms, clichés; polysemy, homonymy (homograph, homophone); synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, hyperonymy; lexical subsystems, semantic fields). Types of dictionaries.
Vocabulary
- Grows by absorbing new words or by giving new additional meaning to the existing ones; the old meaning or the old word is sometimes replaced by the new one, but very often they coexist
Centre
- Words with very high frequency and stability
- Majority are nouns
Periphery
- Words limited in frequency
- 1. archaism – extra linguistic reality has changed ? highway man X robber; they are sometimes surviving in phrases, e.g. Merry Christmas X gay, cheerful
- 2. dated voc – schoolmaster replaced by teacher
- 3. emotional words – top hole
- 4. neologism – every 10 years a new generation of words enter the vocabulary, e.g. in 1980s in was the word yuppie
- 5. nonce words – words created by a writer, e.g. whiskey, pábitelé
paradigmatic relations
- are focused in lexicology
- = relations of substitutability, the choice of one exclude the choice of other, e.g. man/boy/girl cried
- Often represented by avertical line
syntagmatic relations
- More possibilities of combinations, e.g. the man cried
- Often represented by a horizontal line
Relations between meaning and form
1. polysemy – sharing at least one element of meaning (otherwise it would be homonymy) , meaning is known from the context, exist due to economy of language, e.g. rasa can be race + breed, mouth can be ústa or ústí
2. homonymy – same form but different meaning, e.g. seal – tuleň nebo pečeť, bark – kůra nebo štěkat, bank – banka nebo břeh
3. homophones – sounds alike but different in spelling, e.g. bare X bear, been X bean, be X bee
4. homographs – identical spelling but different pronunciation, e.g. tear – slza X tear – that (please look up the pronunciation in the dictionary – don’t have phonetic symbols on PC)
5. hyponym – subordinated term – e.g., forget-me-not
6. hyperonym- superordinated term – e.g. flowerer
7. synonymy – denotation is the same but connotation differs, must be from the same word category, they link words from different lexical strata (e.g. dialectal synonyms valley + dale)
1. absolute s. – very few, in EN e.g. kind + sort; usually domestic word + loan word – geografie + zeměpis
2. partial s. I) notional s. – differ in a shade of meaning (safety of work versus security) II) stylistic – poetic, archaic
8. antonyms – in a polysemic word each meaning have a different antonym, 1 word can have several antonyms
a) gradable antonyms – can be graded+ modified by an adverb, denying 1 member doesn’t mean the second member, e.g. when something isn’t cold it doesn’t mean it’s hot
b) complementary antonyms – one or the other, e.g. above X below
c) negative affixes – e.g. using the noun lack or the adjective free
subsystems
– even if extra linguistic reality is fairly clear there can be a lack of agreement between languages, there’s asymmetry and gaps in the subsystems, it’s most visible in:
a) gender/age of animal – puppy is in EN also for offspring of other animals
b) kin-ship – CZ: sestřenice, bratranec EN: cousin
c) parts of body CZ: ruka EN: hand, arm
idioms – connotation is obscure ? we can?t deduce the meaning, e.g. phrasal verbs
a) transparent – clip somebody’s wings
b) opaque – go bananas (= go mad)
collocations – part of connotation (as mentioned above), e.g. heavy smoker/heavy rain X hard work
clichés – called ‚ready means of communication‘, often lost their grammatical meaning, e.g. ‚Can I help you‘ when used by a shop assistant
dictionaries:
1. national – Oxford English Dictionary
2. translational/bilingual
3. subject – medical
4. thesaurus – have also synonyms + collocation
5. historical
