Synonymy and antonymy in English. Homonyms and their classifications.

We use the term antonymsto indicate words of the same category of parts of speech which have contrasting meanings, such as hot - cold, light - dark, happiness - sorrow, to accept - to reject, up - down.

If synonyms form whole, often numerous, groups, antonyms are usually believed to appear in pairs. Yet, this is not quite true in reality. For instance, the adjective cold may be said to have warm for its second antonym, and sorrow may be very well contrasted with gaiety.

On the other hand, a polysemantic word may have an antonym (or several antonyms) for each of its meanings. So, the adjective dull has the antonyms interesting, amusing, entertaining for its meaning of "deficient in interest", clever, bright, capable for its meaning of "deficient in intellect", and active for the meaning of "deficient in activity", etc.

Synonyms are different words with almost identical or similar meanings.

Homonyms are words which have the same form but are different in meaning. "The same form" implies identity in sound form or spelling, i.e. all the three aspects are taken into account: sound-form, graphic form and meaning.

From the viewpoint of their origin homonyms are sometimes divided into historical and etymological.

Historical homonyms are those which result from the breaking up of polysemy; then one polysemantic word will split up into two or more separate words.

Etymologiсal homonyms are words of different origin which come to be alike in sound or in spelling (and may be both written and pronounced alike).

9. English phraseology: definition, approaches and classifications.

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when used independently.

The Koonin’s classification is the latest outstanding achievement in the Russian theory of phraseology. The classification is based on the combined structural - semantic principle and it also considers the quotient of stability of phraseological units.

I. Nominative phraseological units - are represented by word - groups, including the ones with one meaningful word, and coordinative phrases of the type wear and tear, well and good.

II. Nominative - communicative phraseological units - include word - groups, of the type to break the ice - the ice is broken, that is, verbal word - groups which are transformed into a sentence when the verb is used in the Passive Voice.

III. Phraseological units - which are neither nominative nor communicative include interjectional word - groups.

IV. Communicative phraseological units - are represented by proverbs and sayings.

Stylistics

Stylistic classification of the English vocabulary.

Vocabulary word-stock three layers:

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1628