Lexical Fields.. Word Families. Word Classes

Lexicology as a branch of linguistics; its tasks and objectives.

Lexicology is a branch of linguistics the science of language. The term “lexicology” is composed of two Greek morphemes “lexic” word, phrase & “logos” which denotes learning a department of knowledge. Thus the literal meaning of the term “lexicology” is “the science of the word”. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics has its own aims & methods of scientific research. Its basic task being a study & systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development & its current use. Lexicology is concerned with words, variable word-groups, phraseological units & morphemes which make up words. Distinction is made between GENERAL LEXICOLOGY & SPECIAL LEXICOLOGY. General is concerned with the study of vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any particular language . Special lexicology is the lexicology of a particular language ( Russian , German , French , etc. i.e. the study and description of its words and vocabulary…..

Relation of Lexicology to other linguistic fields.

Lexicology has close ties with other branches of linguistics as they also take into account words in one way or another approaching them from different angles.

There is a relationship between lexicology and phoneticssince phonetics is also concerned with the study of the word, i.e. with the sound form of the word. A close connection between lexicology and grammaris conditioned by the ties between the objects of their study. Even isolated words as presented in a dictionary bear a definite relation to the grammatical system of the language because they belong to some part of speech and conform to some lexico - grammatical characteristics of the word class to which they belong. Lexicology is linked with the history of a language since the latter investigates the changes and the development of the vocabulary of a language. There is also a close relationship between lexicology and stylistics. Stylistics studies many problems treated in lexicology. These are the problems of meaning, synonymy, differentiation of vocabulary according to the sphere of communication and some other issues. Lexicology is bound up with sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics investigates the extra linguistic or social causes of the changes in the vocabulary of a language.

3. What is a Word? The Notion of Lexeme.

Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis.

It has been universally acknowledged that a great many words have a composite nature and are made up of morphemes, the basic units on the morphemic level, which are defined as the smallest indivisible two-facet language units.

lexeme - A minimal lexical and abstract unit of of morphological analysis in linguistics. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN.^[

Lexical Fields.. Word Families. Word Classes

Lexical field or semantic field is the way of organizing related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, father, mother, uncle, and aunt,... belong to one lexical field. The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property.

Word Classes - A set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution. Similar to the more traditional term part of speech.

Word families are groups of words that have a common feature or pattern - they have some of the same combinations of letters in them and a similar sound. For example, at, cat, hat, and fat are a family of words with the "at" sound and letter combination in common.

The 37 most common word families in English (according to Wylie and Durrell) are: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck ,ug, ump, unk.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 4637