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Types of word meaning in English. Polysemy and its sources.

Grammatical meaning of the word -thus grammatical meaning may be defined ,as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (girl's, boy's, night's etc.).

Lexical meaning of the word - is the realisation of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system.

The word "polysemy" (from Greece "polus"-many and "sema"-meaning) means a plurality of meanings.

The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops gradually, mostly over the, centuries. These complicated processes of polysemy development involve both the appearance of the new meanings and the loss of old ones. Yet, the general tendency with English vocabulary at the modern stage of its history is to increase the total number of its meanings and to provide for a quantitieve and qualitative growth of the expressive resources of the language.

The four most important types of semantic complexity may be roughly described as follows:

Firstly, every word combines lexical and grammatical meanings. E.g.: Father is a personal noun.

Secondly, many words not only refer to some object but have an aura of associations expressing the attitude of the speaker. They have not only denotative but connotative meaning as well. E. g.: Daddy is a colloquial term of endearment.

Thirdly, the denotational meaning is segmented into semantic components or semes. E.g.: Father is a male parent.

Fourthly, a word may be polysemantic, that is it may have several meanings, all interconnected and forming its semantic structure. E. g.: Father may mean: ‘male parent’, ‘an ancestor’, ‘a founder or leader’, ‘a priest’.

4. Morphological structure of a word. Immediate constituents’ analysis.

If we describe a w o r d as an autonomous unit of language in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammatical employment and able to form a sentence by itself , we have the possibility to dis­tinguish it from the other fundamental language unit, namely, the mor­pheme.

A morpheme is the smallest component of a word, or other linguistic unit, that has semantic meaning.According to the role they play in constructing words, morphemes are subdivided into roots and affixes.

The stem expresses the lexical and the part of speech meaning.

A suffixis a derivational morpheme following the stem and form­ing a new derivative in a different part of speech or a different word class.

A prefix is a derivational morpheme standing before the root and modifying meaning.

IC-analysis divides up a sentence into major parts or immediate constituents, and these constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents. The process continues until irreducible constituents are reached, i.e., until each constituent consists of only a word or a meaningful part of a word.



5. Productive ways of English word-formation: affixation, shortening, conversion, compounding.

Affixation

Linguists use the term affix to describe where exactly a bound morpheme is attached to a word. Prefixes are attached at the onset of a free morpheme, while suffixes are attached to the end. Infixes – affixes that occur in the middle of a word – are very rare in English, a well-known exception being expletive infixation. While in English suffixes can be either derivational or inflectional (teacher, slowly vs. apples, kicked), prefixes are always derivational (untie, recover, defrost). ConversionAnother highly productive word formation process is conversion, which is the term used to describe a word class change without any morphological marking.

party (noun) -> party (verb)

We will be at the party

They like to party

Shortenings are produced in two different ways. The first is to make a new word from a syllable (rarer, two) of the original word. The latter may lose its beginning (as in phone made from telephone, fence from defence), its ending (as in hols from holidays, vac from vacation, props from properties, ad from advertisement) or both the beginning and ending (as in flu from influenza, fridge from refrigerator).The second way of shortening is to make a new word from the initial letters of a word group: U.N.O. from the United Nations Organisation, B.B.C. from the British Broadcasting Corporation. This type is called initial shortenings.

Clipping consists in cutting off two or more syllables of a word. (doc-doctor, mit-mitten, phone-telephone, influenza – flu). CLIPPING -Consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts.

An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase.

6. Non-productive ways of word-formation in English: back-formation, blending, sound-imitation, sound & stress interchange.

Onomatopoeia- is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes. Onomatopoeias include animal noises, such as "oink" or "meow" or "roar".

Sound interchange is the way of word building when some sounds are changed to form a new word. e.g. to strike - stroke, to sing – song, hot - to heat , blood - to bleed.

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent - to ac`cent. French: to af`fix -`affix, to con`flict- `conflict. As a result of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such words because vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed positions.

Blendingsmay be defined as formation that combine two words that include the letters or sounds they have in common as a connecting element (Smoke + fog = smog, positron – positive electron).


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 2600


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