Жанр: Учеба
Лексикология английского языка
...week-end there).
Both the laconic and the expressive value of compounds can be
well illustrated by English compound adjectives denoting colours (cf.
snow-white - as white as snow).
In the following extract a family are discussing which colour to
paint their new car.
"Hey," Sally yelled, "could you paint it canary yellow, Fred?"
"Turtle green," shouted my mother, quickly getting into the
spirit of the thing.
"Mouse grey," Randy suggested.
"Dove white, maybe?" my mother asked.
"Rattlesnake brown," my father said with a deadpan look...
"Forget it, all of you," I announced. "My Buick is going to be
peacock blue."
(From A Five-Colour Buick by P. Anderson Wood)
It is obvious that the meaning of all these "multi-coloured" adjectives
is based on comparison: the second constituent of the adjective
is the name of a colour used in its actual sense and the first is the
name of an object (animal, flower, etc.) with which the comparison is
drawn. The pattern immensely extends the possibilities of denoting
all imaginable shades of each co110
lour, the more so that the pattern is productive and a great number of
nonce-words are created after it. You can actually coin an adjective
comparing the colour of a defined object with almost anything on
earth: the pattern allows for vast creative experiments. This is well
shown in the fragment given above. If canary yellow, peacock blue,
dove white are quite "normal" in the language and registered by dictionaries,
turtle green and rattlesnake brown1 are certainly typical
nonce-words, amusing inventions of the author aimed at a humorous
effect.
Sometimes it is pointed out, as a disadvantage, that the English
language has only one word blue for two different colours denoted in
Russian by синий and голубой.
But this seeming inadequacy is compensated by a large number of
adjectives coined on the pattern of comparison such as navy blue,
cornflower blue, peacock blue, chicory blue, sapphire blue, china
blue, sky-blue, turquoise blue, forget-me-not blue, heliotrope blue,
powder-blue. This list can be supplemented by compound adjectives
which also denote different shades of blue, but are not built on comparison:
dark blue, light blue, pale blue, electric blue, Oxford blue,
Cambridge blue.
A further theoretical aspect of composition is the criteria for distinguishing
between a compound and a word-combination.
This question has a direct bearing on the specific feature of the
structure of most English compounds which has already been mentioned:
with the exception
1 R. "цвета гремучей змеи". The father of the family is absolutely
against the idea of buying the car, and the choice of this word
reflects his mood of resentment.
111
of the rare morphological type, they originate directly from wordcombinations
and are often homonymous to them: cf. a tall boy - a
tallboy.
In this case the graphic criterion of distinguishing between a
word and a word-group seems to be sufficiently convincing, yet in
many cases it cannot wholly be relied on. The spelling of many compounds,
tallboy among them, can be varied even within the same
book. In the case of tallboy the semantic criterion seems more reliable,
for the striking difference in the meanings of the word and the
word-group certainly points to the highest degree of semantic cohesion
in the word: tallboy does not even denote a person, but a piece of
furniture, a chest of drawers supported by a low stand.
Moreover, the word-group a tall boy conveys two concepts (1. a
young male person; 2. big in size), whereas the word tallboy expresses
one concept.
Yet the semantic criterion alone cannot prove anything as phraseological
units also convey a single concept and some of them are
characterised by a high degree of semantic cohesion (see Ch. 12).
The phonetic criterion for compounds may be treated as that of a
single stress. The criterion is convincingly applicable to many compound
nouns, yet does not work with compound adjectives:
cf. 'slowcoach, blackbird, 'tallboy,
but: blие-'eyed, 'absent-'minded, 'ill-'mannered.
Still, it is true that the morphological structure of these adjectives
and their hyphenated spelling leave no doubt about their status as
words and not word-groups.
Morphological and syntactic criteria can also be applied to compound
words in order to distinguish them from word-groups.
In the word-group a tall boy each of the constituents is independently
open to grammatical changes peculiar to its own category as a
part of speech: They were the tallest boys in their form.
Between the constituent parts of the word-group other words can
be inserted: a tall handsome boy.
The compound tallboy - and, in actual fact, any other compound
- is not subject to such changes. The first component is grammatically
invariable; the plural form ending is added to the whole unit:
tallboys. No word can be inserted between the components, even
with the compounds which have a traditional separate graphic form.
All this leads us to the conclusion that, in most cases, only several
criteria (semantic, morphological, syntactic, phonetic, graphic) can
convincingly classify a lexical unit as either a compound word or a
word group.
Semi-Affixes
Consider the following examples.
"... The Great Glass Elevator is shockproof, waterproof, bombproof,
bulletproof, and Knidproof1 ..." (From Charlie and the
Great Glass Elevator by R. Dahl)
Lady Malvern tried to freeze him with a look, but you can't do
that sort of thing to Jeeves. He is look-proof.
(From Carry on, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse)
Better sorts of lip-stick are frequently described in advertisements
as kissproof. Some building materials may be advertised as fireproof.
Certain technical devices are foolproof meaning that they are safe
even in a fool's hands.
1 Knids - fantastic monsters supposed to inhabit the Cosmos and
invented by the author of this book for children.
All these words, with -proof for the second component, stand
between compounds and derived words in their characteristics. On
the one hand, the second component seems to bear all the features of
a stem and preserves certain semantic associations with the free form
proof. On the other hand, the meaning of -proof in all the numerous
words built on this pattern has become so generalised that it is certainly
approaching that of a suffix. The high productivity of the pattern
is proved, once more, by the possibility of coining nonce-words
after this pattern: look-proof and Knidproof, the second produced
from the non-existent stem Knid.
The component -proof, standing thus between a stem and an affix,
is regarded by some scholars as a semi-affix.
Another example of semi-affix is -man in a vast group of English
nouns denoting people: sportsman, gentleman, nobleman, salesman,
seaman, fisherman, countryman, statesman, policeman, chairman,
etc.
Semantically, the constituent -man in these words approaches the
generalised meaning of such noun-forming suffixes as -er, -or, -ist
(e. g. artist), -ite (e. g. hypocrite). It has moved so far in its meaning
from the corresponding free form man, that such word-groups as
woman policeman or Mrs. Chairman are quite usual. Nor does the
statement Lady, you are no gentleman sound eccentric or illogical for
the speaker uses the word gentleman in its general sense of a noble
upright person, regardless of sex. It must be added though that this is
only an occasional usage and that gentleman is normally applied to
men.
Other examples of semi-affixes are -land (e. g. Ire land, Scotland,
fatherland, wonderland), -like (e. g. ladylike, unladylike, businesslike,
unbusiness like, starlike, flowerlike, etc.), -worthy (e. g. seaworthy,
trustworthy, praiseworthy).
Shortening (Contraction)
This comparatively new way of word-building has achieved a
high degree of productivity nowadays, especially in American English.
Shortenings (or contracted/curtailed words) 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. ['ju:neu] from the United Nations
Organisation, B.B.C. from the British Broadcasting Corporation,
M.P. from Member of Parliament. This type is called initial
shortenings. They are found not only among formal words, such as
the ones above, but also among colloquialisms and slang. So, g. f. is a
shortened word made from the compound girl-friend. The word,
though, seems to be somewhat ambiguous as the following conversation
between two undergraduates clearly shows:
- Who's the letter from?
- My g. f.
- Didn't know you had girl-friends. A nice girl?
- Idiot! It's from my grandfather!
It is commonly believed that the preference for shortenings can be
explained by their brevity and is due to the ever-increasing tempo of
modern life. Yet, in the conversation given above the use of an ambiguous
contraction does not in the least contribute to the brevity of
the communication: on the contrary, it takes the speakers some time
to clarify the misunderstand115
ing. Confusion and ambiguousness are quite natural consequences of
the modern overabundance of shortened words, and initial shortenings
are often especially enigmatic and misleading.
Both types of shortenings are characteristic of informal speech in
general and of uncultivated speech particularly. The history of the
American okay seems to be rather typical. Originally this initial
shortening was spelt O.K. and was supposed to stand for all correct.
The purely oral manner in which sounds were recorded for letters
resulted in O.K. whereas it should have been AC. or aysee. Indeed,
the ways of words are full of surprises.
Here are some more examples of informal shortenings. Movie
(from moving-picture), gent (from gentleman), specs (from spectacles),
circs (from circumstances, e. g. under the circs), I. O. Y. (a
written acknowledgement of debt, made from I owe you), lib (from
liberty, as in May I take the lib of saying something to you?), cert
(from certainty, as in This enterprise is a cert if you have a bit of
capital), metrop (from metropoly, e. g. Paris is a gay metrop), exhibish
(from exhibition), posish (from position).
Undergraduates' informal speech abounds in words of the type:
exam, lab, prof, vac, hol, co-ed (a girl student at a coeducational
school or college).
Some of the Minor Types of Modern Word-Building. SoundImitation
(Onomatopoeia1)
Words coined by this interesting type of word-building are made
by imitating different kinds of sounds that may be produced by animals,
birds, insects, human beings and inanimate objects.
1 [onemaete'pie]. This type of word-formation is now also called
echoism (the term was introduced by O. Jespersen).
It is of some interest that sounds produced by the same kind of
animal are. frequently represented by quite different sound groups in
different languages. For instance, English dogs bark (cf. the R. лаять)
or howl (cf. the R. выть). The English cock cries cock-adoodle-doo
(cf. the R. ку-ка-ре-ку). In England ducks quack and
frogs croak (cf. the R. крякать said about ducks and квакать said
about frogs). It is only English and Russian cats who seem capable of
mutual understanding when they meet, for English cats mew or
miaow (meow). The same can be said about cows: they moo (but also
low).
Some names of animals and especially of birds and insects are
also produced by sound-imitation: crow, cuckoo, humming-bird,
whip-poor-will, cricket.
The following desperate letter contains a great number of soundimitation
words reproducing sounds made by modern machinery:
The Baltimore & Ohio R. R. Co.,
Pittsburg, Pa.
Gentlemen:
Why is it that your switch engine has to ding and fizz and spit and
pant and grate and grind and puff and bump and chug and hoot and
toot and whistle and wheeze and howl and clang and growl and
thump and clash and boom and jolt and screech and snarl and snort
and slam and throb and soar and rattle and hiss and yell and smoke
and shriek all night long when I come home from a hard day at the
boiler works and have to keep the dog quiet and the baby quiet so my
wife can squawk at me for snoring in my sleep?
Yours
(From Language and Humour by G. G. Pocheptsov.)
There is a hypothesis that sound-imitation as a way of wordformation
should be viewed as something much wider than just the
production of words by the imitation of
purely acoustic phenomena. Some scholars suggest that words may
imitate through their sound form certain unacoustic features and
qualities of inanimate objects, actions and processes or that the
meaning of the word can be regarded as the immediate relation of the
sound group to the object. If a young chicken or kitten is described as
fluffy there seems to be something in the sound of the adjective that
conveys the softness and the downy quality of its plumage or its fur.
Such verbs as to glance, to glide, to slide, to slip are supposed to convey
by their very sound the nature of the smooth, easy movement
over a slippery surface. The sound form of the words shimmer, glimmer,
glitter seems to reproduce the wavering, tremulous nature of the
faint light. The sound of the verbs to rush, to dash, to flash may be
said to reflect the brevity, swiftness and energetic nature of their corresponding
actions. The word thrill has something in the quality of its
sound that very aptly conveys the tremulous, tingling sensation it expresses.
Some scholars have given serious consideration to this theory.
However, it has not yet been properly developed.
Reduplication
In reduplication new words are made by doubling a stem, either
without any phonetic changes as in bye-bye (coll, for good-bye) or
with a variation of the root-vowel or consonant as in ping-pong, chitchat
(this second type is called gradational reduplication).
This type of word-building is greatly facilitated in Modern English
by the vast number of monosyllables. Stylistically speaking, most
words made by reduplication represent informal groups: colloquialisms
and slang. E. g. walkie-talkie ("a portable radio"), riff-raff ("the
worthless or disreputable element of society"; "the dregs of society"),
chi-chi (sl. for chic as in a chi-chi girl).
In a modern novel an angry father accuses his teenager son of
doing nothing but dilly-dallying all over the town.
(dilly-dallying - wasting time, doing nothing, loitering)
Another example of a word made by reduplication may be found
in the following quotation from The Importance of Being Earnest by
O. Wilde:
Lady Bracknell. I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury
made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die.
This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.
(shilly-shallying - irresolution, indecision)
Back-Formation
(Reversion)
The earliest examples of this type of word-building are the verb to
beg that was made from the French borrowing beggar, to burgle from
burglar, to cobble from cobbler. In all these cases the verb was made
from the noun by subtracting what was mistakenly associated with
the English suffix -er. The pattern of the type to work - worker was
firmly established in the subconscious of English-speaking people at
the time when these formations appeared, and it was taken for
granted that any noun denoting profession or occupation is certain to
have a corresponding verb of the same root. So, in the case of the
verbs to beg, to burgle, to cobble the process was reversed: instead of
a noun made from a verb by affixation (as in painter from to paint), a
verb was produced from a noun by subtraction. That is why this type
of word-building received the name of back-formation or reversion.
Later examples of back-formation are to butle from butler, to
baby-sit from baby-sitter, to force-land from forced landing, to
blood-transfuse from blood-transfuing sorry
for everybody who isn't a girl and who can't come here, I am sure the
college you attended when you were a boy couldn't have been so
nice.
My room is up in a tower. There are three other girls on the same
floor of the tower - a Senior who wears spectacles and is always
asking us please to be a little more quiet, and two Freshmen named
Sallie McBride and Julia Rutledge Pendleton. Sallie has red hair and
a turn-up nose and is quite friendly; Julia comes from one of the first
families in New York and hasn't noticed me yet. They room together
and the Senior and I have singles.
Usually Freshmen can't get singles; they are very few, but I got
one without even asking. I suppose the register didn't think it would
be right to ask a properly brought up girl to room with a foundling.
You see there are advantages.
(From Daddy-Long-Legs by J. Webster)
CHAPTER 7
What Is "Meaning"?
Language is the amber in which a thousand
precious and subtle thoughts have
been safely embedded and preserved.
(From Word and
Phrase by J. Fitzgerald)
The question posed by the title of this chapter is one of those
questions which are easier to ask than answer. The linguistic science
at present is not able to put forward a definition of meaning which is
conclusive.
However, there are certain facts of which we can be reasonably
sure, and one of them is that the very function of the word as a unit of
communication is made possible by its possessing a meaning. Therefore,
among the word's various characteristics, meaning is certainly
the most important.
Generally speaking, meaning can be more or less described as a
component of the word through which a concept is communicated, in
this way endowing the word with the ability of denoting real objects,
qualities, actions and abstract notions. The complex and somewhat
mysterious relationships between referent (object, etc. denoted by the
word), concept and word are traditionally represented by the following
triangle [35]:
Thought or Reference
Symbol Referent
5. "Лексикология" 129
By the "symbol" here is meant the word; thought or reference is
concept. The dotted line suggests that there is no immediate relation
between word and referent: it is established only through the concept.
On the other hand, there is a hypothesis that concepts can only
find their realisation through words. It seems that thought is dormant
till the word wakens it up. It is only when we hear a spoken word or
read a printed word that the corresponding concept springs into mind.
The mechanism by which concepts (i. e. mental phenomena) are
converted into words (i. e. linguistic phenomena) and the reverse process
by which a heard or a printed word is converted into a kind of
mental picture are not yet understood or described. Probably that is
the reason why the process of communication through words, if one
gives it some thought, seems nothing short of a miracle. Isn't it fantastic
that the mere vibrations of a speaker's vocal chords should be
taken up by a listener's brain and converted into vivid pictures? If
magic does exist in the world, then it is truly the magic of human
speech; only we are so used to this miracle that we do not realise its
almost supernatural qualities.
The branch of linguistics which specialises in the study of meaning
is called semantics. As with many terms, the term "semantics" is
ambiguous for it can stand, as well, for the expressive aspect of language
in general and for the meaning of one particular word in all its
varied aspects and nuances (i.e. the semantics of a word = the meaning(s)
of a word).
As Mario Pei puts it in The Study of Language, "Semantics is 'language'
in its broadest, most inclusive aspect. Sounds, words, grammatical
forms, syntactical constructions are the tools of language.
Semantics is language's avowed purpose" [39]
The meanings of all the utterances of a speech community are
said by another leading linguist to include the total experience of that
community; arts, science, practical occupations, amusements, personal
and family life.
The modern approach to semantics is based on the assumption
that the inner form of the word (i. e. its meaning) presents a structure
which is called the semantic structure of the word.
Yet, before going deeper into this problem, it is necessary to
make a brief survey of another semantic phenomenon which is
closely connected with it.
Polysemy. Semantic Structure of the Word
The semantic structure of the word does not present an indissoluble
unity (that is, actually, why it is referred to as "structure"), nor
does it necessarily stand for one concept. It is generally known that
most words convey several concepts and thus possess the corresponding
number of meanings. A word having several meanings is
called polysemantic, and the ability of words to have more than one
meaning is described by the term polysemy.
Two somewhat naive but frequently asked questions may arise in
connection with polysemy:
1. Is polysemy an anomaly or a general rule in English vocabulary?
2. Is polysemy an advantage or a disadvantage so far as the process
of communication is concerned?
Let us deal with both these questions together.
Polysemy is certainly not an anomaly. Most English words are polysemantic.
It should be noted that the wealth of expressive resources
of a language largely depends on the degree to which polysemy has
developed in the language. Sometimes people who are not
very well informed in linguistic matters claim that a language is
lacking in words if the need arises for the same word to be applied to
several different phenomena. In actual fact, it is exactly the opposite:
if each word is found to be capable of conveying, let us say, at least
two concepts instead of one, the expressive potential of the whole
vocabulary increases twofold. Hence, a well-developed polysemy is
not a drawback but a great advantage in a language.
On the other hand, it should be pointed out that the number of
sound combinations that human speech organs can produce is limited.
Therefore at a certain stage of language development the production
of new words by morphological means becomes limited, and polysemy
becomes increasingly important in providing the means for enriching
the vocabulary. From this, it should be clear that the process
of enriching the vocabulary does not consist merely in adding new
words to it, but, also, in the constant development of polysemy.
The system of meanings of any polysemantic word develops
gradually, mostly over the centuries, as more and more new meanings
are either added to old ones, or oust some of them (see Ch. 8). So the
complicated processes of polysemy development involve both the
appearance of 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 in this way to
provide for a quantitative and qualitative growth of the language's
expressive resources.
When analysing the semantic structure of a polysemantic word, it
is necessary to distinguish between two levels of analysis.
On the first level, the semantic structure of a word is treated as a
system of meanings. For example, the
semantic structure of the noun fire could be roughly presented by this
scheme (only the most frequent meanings are given):
Fire, n.
Flame
An instance of
destructive
burning; e. g. a
forest fire.
Burning material
in a stove, fireplace,
etc.; e. g.
There is a fire in
the next room. A
camp fire.
The shooting
of guns, etc.; e.
g. to open
(cease) fire.
Strong feeling,
passion, enthusiasm;
e. g. a
speech lacking
fire.
The above scheme suggests that meaning I holds a kind of dominance
over the other meanings conveying the concept in the most
general way whereas meanings II-V are associated with special circumstances,
aspects and instances of the same phenomenon.
Meaning I (generally referred to as the main meaning) presents
the centre of the semantic structure of the word holding it together. It
is mainly through meaning I that meanings II-V (they are called
secondary meanings) can be associated with one another, some of
them exclusively through meaning I, as, for instance, meanings IV
and V.
It would hardly be possible to establish any logical associations
between some of the meanings of the noun bar except through the
main meaning:1
1 We give only a fragment of the semantic structure of bar, so as to
illustrate the point.
Bar,
n
The profession
of barrister, law
e. g. go to the
Bar read for the
Вar
(In a public house or hotel) a counter
or room where drinks are served; e. g.
They went to the bar for a drink.
i
Any kind of barrier to prevent
people from passing.
Meanings II and III have no logical links with one another
whereas each separately is easily associated with meaning I: meaning
II through the traditional barrier dividing a court-room into two parts;
meaning III through the counter serving as a kind of barrier between
the customers of a pub and the barman.
Yet, it is not in every polysemantic word that such a centre can be
found. Some semantic structures are arranged on a different principle.
In the following list of meanings of the adjective dull one can hardly
hope to find a generalised meaning coveri
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