The general study of words and a vocabulary irrespective (независимо от) of the specific features of any particular language is known as General lexicology.
Special Lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic peculiarities (особенности) in the vocabulary of a language.
Contrastive lexicology provides a theoretical basis on which the vocabularies of different languages can be compared and described.
Historical lexicology (etymology) – the evolution of any vocabulary forms. This branch of linguistics studies the origin of words, their change and development and investigates linguistic and extralinguistic forces modifying the structure, meaning and usage.
Descriptive lexicology deals with the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development (слов в определённый момент времени). It deals with the English words in its morphological and semantical structures investigating the intodependence between these two aspects.
3, The main lexicological problems.
The 1st problem is the problem of the definition of the notion (понятие) ‘word’. The basic language unit is the word within the scope of linguistics (в рамках лингвистики) the words has been defined:
1. Syntactically (Henry Sweet, Leonard)
2. Phonologically
3. Semantically
4. By combining various approaches.
The word has been syntactically defined as the minimum sentence by Henry Sweet and much later by Leonard Bloomfield as a minimum free form.
The word has been phonetically defined by Alan Gardiner as a sound symbol in its aspect of denoting something which is spoken about.
The word has been semantically defined by Stephen Ullman as meaningful unit composing (образующий) a connected discourse.
The weak point of all these definitions is that they are strongly dependent upon the line of approach and the aim of the scholar (лингвист, филолог).
The efforts of many linguists such as Виноградов, Смирницкий, Степанова resulted in creating a word theory viewing a word as a unity of form and content.
Thus (таким образом, итак) the word is a speech unit used for the purposes of a human communication materially representing a group of sounds possessing (обладающий) a meaning susceptible (подверженный) to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and semantic unity.
The 2nd problem: the modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing (различение) between the internal and external structure of the word. By external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure. ‘Post-impressionists’: the prefixes –post, -im, the root – press, the noun-forming suffixes –ion, -ist, and the grammatical suffix of plurality –s.
The internal structure of the word or its meaning is commonly refered to as the words semantic structure and it’s certainly the word’s main aspect. Internal structure of the word is more important.
The 3rd problem of word-building is associated with processes of making new words. Modern approaches to this problem are characterized by 2 different levels of study: syntagmatic and paradigmatic.
On the syngtagmatic level, the semantic structure of the word is analysed in its linear relationships with words in connected speech. In other words, the semantic characteristics of the words are started on the basis of the context ‘a hat on her head’ the noun “head” means “part of the body”, whereas in the phrase ‘head of the department’ the word department means chief.
On the paradigmatic level the word is studied in its relationships with other words in the vocabulary system. A word may be studied in comparison with other words of similar meaning (work-labour, to refuse-to reject-to decline); of opposite meaning (busy-idle); of different stylistic characteristics (man-chap-bloke).
One further important objective of lexicology is the study of the vocabulary as the system. The vocabulary can be studied synchronically (that is, at a given stage of its development) or diachronically (that is, in the context of the processes through which it grew, developed and acquired its modern form, в процессе, развитии)
The opposition of these 2 approaches is disputable (спорный) as the vocabulary is not only what it is now but also what it was centuries ago and has been throughout the history.
The 5th problem of paradigm: the system showing a word in all its forms is called paradigm.
The lexical meaning of the word is the same throughout the paradigm. That means all the word forms of one and the same word are lexically identical.
The grammatical meaning varies from one from to another.
