Part I: Introduction

1.1 The Object of Lexicology and Its Relationship to Other Branches of Linguistics

Lexicology is derived from the Greek lexikós “of words” and -logia “study.” A branch of linguistics, lexicology has the goal of “systematisation revealing characteristic features of words” (Arnold, 1986, p. 272). It deals not only with lexemes and their aspects but also with compound words and phraseological units. Stephen Ullman places semantics and etymology within the scope of lexicology; however, he views lexicology as the study of words as individual units rather than the overall study of the structure of the vocabulary (Collins English Dictionary). Leonhard Lipka defines lexicology “as the study of lexicon or lexis (specified as the vocabulary or total stock of words of a language) (2002, p.9). According to Witold Doroszewski, lexicology is “the branch of linguistics investigating words as regards their meaning and use, the science of vocabulary, the theoretical and scientific basis of lexicography” (1973, p.36). Ullman’s definition draws a connection between lexicology and semantics, while Doroszewski connects lexicology to lexicography. Howard Jackson restricts lexicology to the study of words as individual items (1991, p. 244). Christopher Hall, Patrick H. Smith, and Rachel Wicaksono describe lexicology as “the academic study of words: their spoken and written forms, their syntactic and morphological properties, and their meanings; in a particular language or in human language in general; both at a fixed point in history and as they change through time” (2011, p. 249). Analyzing all the aspects of lexicology, we define lexicology as the study of the lexicon, or word-stock, its meaning, the relations among lexemes, the structure of lexemes, their etymology and lexical units, and relations between lexicology and other areas of the language: phonology, morphology, phraseology, lexicography, and syntax.

As the eminent British linguist M. A. K. Halliday (2004) presents it, the goal of lexicology is to produce descriptions of the words of a language, and these descriptions are then published as dictionaries and thesauri. Thus, dictionary- or thesaurus- making starts as lexicology, the study and description of a body of words, and ends as lexicography, the compilation of these descriptions into a single reference work (Halliday & Yallop, 2004, p. 5).

Several kinds of lexicology are identified such as general lexicology, special lexicology, contrastive lexicology, historical lexicology, or etymology, and descriptive lexicology. General lexicology, being a part of general linguistics, studies vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any particular language and the meaning of words and word-combinations in isolation and in context. Special lexicology studies words and word-combinations, and describes the vocabulary and vocabulary units of a particular language. It is a part of general lexicology. Contrastive lexicology studies the relations between etymologically related words and word-combinations in different languages. It deals with the contrastive analysis of the lexicon, lexico-semantic relationships, thesauri of entire vocabularies, classification of lexical hierarchies, and taxonomic structure of specialized terminology. The origin of words and phrases, their change and development, and the linguistic and extra-linguistic influences on words’ structure, meaning, and usage are the subject matter of historical lexicology, or etymology. Descriptive lexicology studies the lexicon and lexico-semantic relationships of a certain language at a given stage of its development.

Comparatists and neogrammarians of the nineteenth century believed that linguistic science is just the study of the evolution and comparison of languages. Ferdinand de Saussure opposed this view, stating that scientific methods are applicable to the descriptive and the historical study of language, and since then, two main approaches have been applied to the study of language material: diachronic and synchronic. Synchronic (or static or descriptive) studies deal with the make-up of the language, its words, combinations, and lexico-semantic relationships at a given moment of time, while diachronic (or evaluative, or historical) studies deal with the transformations the lexicon undergoes in the course of time.

Lexicology is closely related to phonology, which studies what sounds a language has and how these sounds combine to form words; to syntax, which studies how words can be combined into sentences; and semantics, which is the study of the meanings of words and sentences. Mostly, lexicology studies words and word-combinations. An exception is made when we study phraseological units. V. Kunin includes proverbs into the phraseological stock of language, mostly because proverbs, like idiomatic phrases, have fully or partially figurative meanings. Lexicology is related to semiotics, which studies the types of relationship that may be held between a sign and the object it represents, or in de Saussure’s terminology between a signifier and its signified (1959, pp.111-117). Lexicology is connected with other branches of linguistics such as neurolinguistics, which deals with the biological and neural foundations of language; psycholinguistics, which is concerned “with linguistic performance — how we use our linguistic competence, our knowledge of language, in speech (or sign) production and comprehension” (Fromkin & Hummel, p. 409). Lexicology is related to computational linguistics that deals with the analysis of written texts and spoken discourse, the translation of text and speech from one language into another, the use of human (not computer) languages for communication between people and computers, and computer modeling and testing of linguistic theories (p. 431). There is a connection between lexicology and pragmatics, which studies the relationship between speaker, hearer, utterance, and context (Austin, 1975); and between lexicology and sociolinguistics, whose subject matter is the relationship between language and society (p. 483).

Lexicology is connected to applied linguistics, which is “a discipline concerned with the role a language or languages play in perceived problems of communication, social identity, education, health, economics, politics and justice, and in the development of ways to remediate or resolve these problems” (Hall, Smith, & Wicaksono, 2011, p.15). Corpus linguistics, which is the creation and analysis of (normally large, computerized) collections of language composed of actual texts (speech and writing), and their application to problems in descriptive and applied linguistics (p. 15), has connections with lexicology.

1.2 Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis

No matter what aspect of language a scholar is looking into, he or she will adhere to the principles of scientific method: observation, classification, generalization, predictions, and verification. “The procedures by which researchers go about their work of describing, explaining and predicting phenomena are called research methodology. It is also defined as the study of methods by which knowledge is gained” (Rajasekar, Philominathan, & Chinnathambi, 2006, p.2). Observations do not always give a clear sense of what data may be relevant and what data are not. Accurate observation is especially critical in lexicology when the phenomena under investigation appear to be anomalous. Classification includes an orderly arrangement of data obtained through observation. It also includes arrangement of some anomalous data.

The next principle includes generalization. The collected data are analyzed, and on this basis, certain hypotheses are offered to explain the phenomena. Theory and hypothesis are two concepts that are associated with explanations in lexicology. A theory may be a well-developed and well-confirmed body of explanatory material. Some scholars believe that predictions are a part of the hypothesis, and once predictions are made, the hypothesis can be tested (Perry, p. 17). Verification involves confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis.

R. S. Ginzburg , S. S. Khidekel, G. Y. Knyazeva, and A. A. Sankin (1979) propose the following methods and procedures of linguistic analyses: contrastive analysis; statistical methods of analysis; immediate constituents analysis; distributional analysis and co-occurrence; transformational analysis; componential analysis; and method of semantic differential.

Comparative and contrastive analysis involves the systematic comparison of two or more philogenically-related and non-related languages with the aim of finding the similarities and differences between or among them. The term ‘comparative’ was first used by Sir William Jones in 1786, in a speech at the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta, India. In his speech, he compared Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic and pointed out that some words shared similarities. “The comparative method is a technique of linguistic analysis that compares lists of related words in a selection of languages” (Denham & Lobeck, 2011, p.361). This method also helps individuals study the structure of a target language by comparing it to the structure of their native language. Specialists in the field of applied linguistics believe that the most effective teaching materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the target language, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner (Fries, 1957). The contrastive analysis is the prediction that a contrastive analysis of structural differences between two or more languages will allow individuals to identify areas of contrast and predict where there will be some difficulty and errors on the part of a second-language learner. The method helps to predict and explain difficulties individuals may experience while learning a second language.

The second approach is statistical, or quantitative. It has originated mainly from “the field of psychology where there has been heavy emphasis on the use of statistics to make generalizations from samples to populations” (Perry, 2011, p. 79). A quantitative method is used to represent data in numbers; it is a study that uses numerical data with emphasis on statistics to answer the research questions. A quantitative method differs from a qualitative method. Qualitative research does not highlight statistical data. It is a research done in “a natural setting, involving intensive holistic data collection through observation at a very close personal level without the influence of prior theory and contains mostly verbal analysis” (Perry, 2011, p. 257). A qualitative method may be used in case studies and discourse analysis.

The term immediate constituents (IC) was first used by Leonard Bloomfield in his book, Language. “The principle of immediate constituents leads us to observe the structural order, which may differ from their actual sequence” (Bloomfield, 1935, p. 210). Ginzburg et al. (1979) further develop the theory of immediate constituents, and they try to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. For example, the phrase effective use of published research for practical purposes in educational settings may be divided into the following successive layers – immediate constituents, which in turn are subdivided into further immediate constituents:

The purpose of IC analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into independent sequences, or ICs, thus revealing the hierarchical structure of this set. “Successive segmentation results in Ultimate Constituents (UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units having both sound-form and meaning” (Ginzburg, Khidekel, Knyazeva, & Sankin, 1979, p. 246).

In the distributional analysis and co-occurrence, the term ‘distribution’ means “the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.) (1979, p. 246). Lexemes occupy certain positions in a sentence, and if words are polysemous, they realize their meanings in the context, in different distributional patterns; for example, compare the verb chase in the phrases chase around after someone (to seek someone or something in different places), chase after someone or something (to pursue or hunt for someone), chase someone or something away from some place (to drive someone or something out of some place), chase someone or something down (to track down and seize someone or something), chase someone in(to) some place (to drive someone or some creature into a place), and chase someone and something up (to seek someone or something out; to look high and low for someone or something. So, the term ‘distribution’ is “the aptness of a word in one of its meanings to collocate or to co-occur with a certain group, or certain groups of words having some common semantic component” (1979, p. 249). V. Fromkin, R. Rodman, N. Hyams, and K. M. Hummel (2010) term this analysis as collocation analysis when the presence of one word in the text affects the occurrence of other words, so a collocation is “the occurrence of two or more words within a short space of each other in a corpus” (p.432).

Transformational analysis in lexicological investigations is the “re-patterning of various distributional structures in order to discover difference or similarity of meaning of practically identical distributional patterns” (Ginzburg, Khidekel, Knyazeva, & Sankin, 1979, p.251). In a number of cases, distributional patterns are polysemous; therefore, transformational procedures will help to analyze the semantic similarity or difference of the lexemes under examination and the factors that account for their polysemy. If we compare the compound words highball, highland, highlight, and high-rise, we see that the distributional pattern of stems is identical, and it may be represented as adj+n pattern. The first part of the stems modifies or describes the second part, and these compounds may be assumed as ‘a kind of ball,’ ‘a kind of land,’ ‘a kind of light,’ and ‘a kind of rise.’ However, this assumption may be wrong because the semantic relationship between the stems is different; therefore, the lexical meanings of the words are also different. A transformational procedure shows that highland is semantically equivalent to ‘an area of high ground’; highball is not a kind of ball but corresponds to “whiskey and water or soda with ice, served in a tall glass’ or ‘a railroad signal for a train to proceed at full speed’; highlight semantically equals to ‘the part of the surface that catches more light’; and high-rise is semantically the same as ‘a building with many stories (Br. storeys).’ Although distributional structure of these compound words is similar, the transformational analysis of these words shows that the semantic relationship between the stems and the lexical meanings of the words is different. This same approach may be applied to the analysis of the word-groups, and the result will be the same: “word-groups of identical distributional structure when re-patterned also show that the semantic relationship between words and consequently the meaning of word-groups may be different” (Ibid, p.252).

Structural linguists take a seemingly different approach to the analysis of lexemes, known as componential analysis—that is an analysis in terms of components. This view to the depiction of meaning of words and phrases is based upon “the thesis that the sense of every lexeme can be analyzed in terms of a set of more general sense components (or semantic features)” (Lyons, 1987, p.317). This term was first used by N.Trubetzkoi (1939) who introduced componential analysis to phonology. Later, Hjelmslev and Jakobson applied it to grammar and semantics. In America, componential analysis was proposed by “anthropologists as a technique for describing and comparing the vocabulary of kinship in various languages (as cited in Lyons, 1978, p. 318), and only later American linguists adopted the method and integrated it into semantics and syntax. Componential analysis is useful when identifying similarities and differences among words with related meanings. F.R. Palmer suggests that sex provides a set of components for kinship terms. We can add here other components as well:

If we apply componential analysis to living creatures that represent some kind of ‘proportional’ relationship, the most characteristic is a three-fold division with many words that refer to living creatures (Palmer, 1990, p. 109):

The characteristic of componential analysis is that it attempts “as far as possible to treat components in terms of binary oppositions” (Palmer, 1990, p.111), e.g., between an adult and a child, a male and female, parent and child, animate and inanimate, and other oppositions.

Words are related to semantic meaning not only in denotation, as the above analyses show, but also in connotation. The analysis of the connotational meanings of words is difficult to do because their nuances are slight and difficult to grasp, and they do not yield themselves easily to objective investigation and verification. Semantic differential, the technique introduced by psycholinguists Charles Egerton Osgood, George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum, has been proven to be very effective in establishing and displaying these differences. “The semantic differential is a combination of controlled association and scaling procedures” (1957, p. 20). The participants are provided “a concept to be differentiated and a set of bipolar adjectival scales against which to do it” (1957, p.20), and they are tasked to rate a concept, or a term, on a 7-scale semantic differential for the concept, with the poles described by two antonymic adjectives (e.g. ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’). The following example illustrates this technique:

Woman

Although the participants will apply their subjective evaluation, this method proves to be objective because the procedures are explicit and can be replicated (1957, p.125).

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1484