Part II: The Structure of the English Lexicon

The term lexicon is derived from Greek lexicon (The Living Webster, 1977, p. 549), and it means the vocabulary of a language, specifically in a dictionary form. The terms vocabulary and lexicon are treated as synonyms in this book. The structure of the English lexicon may be studied in a variety of ways. For example, we can study classes of words (parts of speech), the meanings of words (semantics) and their associative fields, and semantic or lexical fields. We may apply diachronic and synchronic approaches to the structure of the English vocabulary.

2.1 Words and Their Associative Fields

According to Aitchison (1987), a network in relation to the mental lexicon refers to an interconnected system. This system can be based on the linguistic elements such as the phonological structure, the syntactic category, the morphological structure, and the presence of semantically related words. Ferdinand de Saussure states, “a particular word is the center of a constellation; it is the points of convergence of an indefinite number of coordinated terms” (1959, p. 126). De Saussure illustrates these relations in the form of a diagram with the center-word enseignement. We used the same principle in our diagram with the central word constructor.

In this diagram, six lines of association radiate from the noun constructor. In the first group, constructorsare “class methods that are executed when an object of a class or structure is created” (Programming Guide, n.d., para.1), and five types of constructors are presented. The second group contains agent nouns formed from verbs with the help of the suffix –or. They share the same morphological structure: root+suffix –or. The third group is built on the associations of the characteristics a constructor/builder possesses. The fourth group is based on semantic associations, while the fifth group shares the stem construct. The sixth group shares word class: all the words belong to the class of nouns. “Mental association creates other groups besides those based on the comparing of terms that have something in common” (de Saussure, 1959, p. 125). The number of associations depends on the ability of the mind to create “as many associative series as there are diverse relations” (p. 126).

2.2 Word Families

Another approach to grouping lexemes is creating word families. Words are grouped into the families according to their morphology. A word family “consists of a base word and all its derived and inflected forms” (Bauer & Nation, 1993, p.253). The following group of words belongs to the same word family: legal, illegal, legalize, and legalese. L. Bauer and P. Nation propose a set of levels into which families are divided. They apply eight criteria which are used to determine the level at which a particular affix should be placed: frequency, productivity, predictability, regularity of the written form of the base, regularity of the spoken form of the base, regularity of the spelling of the affix, regularity of the spoken form of the affix, and regularity of function. “These criteria determine the level at which an affix is placed, and they also place restrictions on what particular words can be included as part of a word family at a given level” (1993, p.256). At the first level, “each form is a different word” (p.258) and does not have a morphological marking—an item has a zero ending. Some examples are bear (to have children), bear (tolerate), bear (to carry), and bear (animal). So, there is no family.

The second level deals with inflectional suffixes. Words with the same base but different inflections belong to this word family. The inflectional categories used here are plural, third person singular present tense, past tense, past participle, present participle, gerund, comparative, superlative, and possessive. The following example with the base head illustrates this level: heads (plural), heads (third person singular present tense), head’s (possessive case), headed (past participle), and heading (present participle).

The third level deals with the most frequent and regular derivational affixes such as -able, -er, -ish, -less, -ly, -ness, -th, -y, non-, and un- .

The fourth level constitutes a word family with the following affixes such as –al (legal),

-ation (collaboration), -ess (goddess), -ful (careful, joyful, and sinful), -ism (atheism), - ist (atheist), - ity (purity), -ize (generalize), -ment (achievement), -ous (curious and continuous), and in- (innovative). “From a theoretical perspective, it is clear that the suffix -ation has a number of variants” (Bauer & Nation, 1993, p.274): –ion, -sion, -ation, and -fication. Some examples are electrification, identification, authorization, fertilization, formulation, adoration, affirmation, and submission.

The fifth level deals with regular but infrequent affixes. It adds “a number of affixes whose behavior is fairly regular, which may be productive, but which, because they are not widely generalized, do not individually add greatly to the number of words that can be understood” (p.260). Some affixes belonging to this level are –age (cellarage, flowerage, frontage, shrinkage, wreckage, and breakage), -ese (Japanese, officialese, and legalese), -esque (picturesque), -ant (consultant), -an (African), -ette (roomette), -dom (thralldom, stardom, kingdom), and others.

The seventh level contains classical roots and affixes. “All the classical roots which abound in English words and which occur not only as bound roots in English (as in embolism) but also as elements in neo-classical compounds (such as photography)” (Bauer & Nation, 1993, p.262) belong to this level. Common prefixes belonging to this level are ab-(abnormal), ad-, com-, de-(devalue), dis-(disappear), ex-(ex-husband), and sub-(subway).

The concept of a word family is important for “a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching” (p.253), for deciding the vocabulary load of texts, and for the compilation of dictionaries. This approach provides lexicographers a more secure basis for the treatment of affixes and derived words in the dictionaries (Jackson &Amvela, 2007, p.21).

2.3 Word Classes

When the structural linguists tried to identify the word categories of English, “they looked at the words themselves, their forms, their meanings, and their functions in the sentence, and then established two main categories: the form classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and the structure classes” (Kolln & Funk, 2012, p.16). The structure classes consist of the following classes: determiners, auxiliaries, conjunctions, qualifiers, interrogatives, expletives, and prepositions.One of the differences between the classes is their form. “As their label suggests, the form classes are those that can undergo changes in form— that are, in fact, distinguishable by their form— whereas the structure classes are not” (p. 226).Determiners arewords that mark nouns, among which the following groups are identified: articles (a, an, and the), possessive nouns and pronouns (Dan’s, my, mine, his, her, its, our, ours, your, yours, their, and theirs), demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, and those), and indefinite pronouns (some, both, each, another, anybody, anyone, anything, something, many, much, few, etc.), numerals (one, two, etc). Like determiners, auxiliaries are closed words. The auxiliary class contains the following: do (does and did), have (has and had), be (am, is, are, was, and were), can (could), must, may (might), should, and others.

Among conjunctions, we can identify coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so), subordinating conjunctions (time: when, whenever, after, as, before, once, since, till, until, now that, while, as long as, and as soon as; concession: though, although, even though, if, and while; contingency: if and once; condition: if, in case, as long as, unless, and provided that; reason: because, since, and as long as; result: so that; comparison: as, just as, and as if; contrast: while and whereas), and correlative conjunctions(both– and , either– or , neither– nor, and not only– but also).

Qualifiers mark adjectives and adverbs. They qualify or intensify adjectives and adverbs: very beautiful, rather impressive, damnsure, and ratherslowly. Interrogatives, as their name implies, introduce questions: who, whose, whom, which, what, how, why, when, and where. Expletive words, sometimes called empty words, act simply as operators that allow us to manipulate sentences in a variety of ways. The following are expletives: there (There is a book on the table); that (I think that he is a good doctor); or (the structure of the English lexicon, or vocabulary); as (We elected him as the chair) (Kolln & Funk, 2012, pp.282-284).

A preposition links nouns, pronouns, and phrases to other words in a sentence. The word or phrase that the preposition introduces is called the object of the preposition. Prepositions are divided into simple prepositions (about, beneath, into, through, above, beside, throughout, across, between, after, beyond, of, to, against, off, toward, along, by, on, under, amid, underneath, among, around, down, outside, within, before, from, without, etc.) and phrasal prepositions, which consist of a simple preposition preceded by a word from another category, such as an adverb, adjective, or conjunction (according to, because of, next to, ahead of, out of, along with, contrary to, prior to, by means of, in charge of, in spite of, in accordance with, in front of, on account of, in back of, in lieu of, on behalf of, in case of, in search of, etc.) (Kolln & Funk, 2012, pp. 274-276).

Form classes comprise the largest group of words. They are called “open classes because new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs regularly enter the language as new technology and new ideas require them” (p. 225). Structure classes stay stable; that is why, they are called closed classes, because they “remain constant from one generation to the next” (p.265).

2.4 Semantic, or Lexical, Fields

The term lexical field was first introduced by the German linguist Jost Trier. He noted that fields are living realities intermediate between individual words and the totality of the vocabulary; as a part of the whole, they share with words the property of being integrated in a large structure and with the vocabulary the property of being structured in terms of smaller units (as quoted in Ullman, 1951, p. 157; Lyons, 1977, p. 253). A set of lexemes which are related in meaning share a lexical, or semantic, field, so semantic fields are classifications of words associated by their meanings. David Crystal defines a semantic field as “a named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways” (1995, p. 157). This task may make it look easy to group, for example, all the vegetables under the lexical field “vegetables”: cucumber, carrot, and cabbage; and to group all the pieces of furniture under the lexical field of “furniture”: stool, chair, bed, table wardrobe, sideboard, and bookshelf. Nevertheless, it is not so straightforward. Crystal notes that some lexemes belong to the fields which are difficult to define or vague, e.g., noise or difficult. Some lexemes may belong to more than one field, such as orange. Does it belong to the field of color or fruit? He admits that even if there are some difficulties in arranging the lexemes according to their semantic fields, grouping lexemes by subject matter will be beneficial to the learners of English as a second language as well as young children.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1755