Lexicology

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Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition. [1]

Contents

Lexicology also considers the relationships that exist between words. In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is composed of lexemes, which are abstract units of meaning that correspond to a set of related forms of a word. Lexicology looks at how words can be broken down as well as identifies common patterns they follow. [2]

Lexicology is associated with lexicography, which is the practice of compiling dictionaries. [3]

Etymology

The term lexicology derives from the Greek word λεξικόν lexicon (neuter of λεξικός lexikos, "of or for words", [4] from λέξις lexis, "speech" or "word" [5] ) and -λογία -logia, "the study of" (a suffix derived from λόγος logos , amongst others meaning "learning, reasoning, explanation, subject-matter"). [6] Etymology as a science is actually a focus of lexicology. Since lexicology studies the meaning of words and their semantic relations, it often explores the history and development of a word. Etymologists analyze related languages using the comparative method, which is a set of techniques that allow linguists to recover the ancestral phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc., components of modern languages by comparing their cognate material. [7] This means many word roots from different branches of the Indo-European language family can be traced back to single words from the Proto-Indo-European language. The English language, for instance, contains more borrowed words (or loan words) in its vocabulary than native words. [8] Examples include parkour from French, karaoke from Japanese, coconut from Portuguese, mango from Hindi, etc. A lot of music terminology, like piano, solo, and opera, is borrowed from Italian. These words can be further classified according to the linguistic element that is borrowed: phonemes, morphemes, and semantics. [7]

Approach

General lexicology is the broad study of words regardless of a language's specific properties. It is concerned with linguistic features that are common among all languages, such as phonemes and morphemes. Special lexicology, on the other hand, looks at what a particular language contributes to its vocabulary, such as grammars. [2] Altogether lexicological studies can be approached two ways:

  1. Diachronic or historical lexicology is devoted to the evolution of words and word-formation over time. It investigates the origins of a word and the ways in which its structure, meaning, and usage have since changed. [9]
  2. Synchronic or descriptive lexicology examines the words of a language within a certain time frame. This could be a period during the language's early stages of development, its current state, or any given interval in between. [10]

These complementary perspectives were proposed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. [10] Lexicology can have both comparative and contrastive methodologies. Comparative lexicology searches for similar features that are shared among two or more languages. Contrastive lexicology identifies the linguistic characteristics which distinguish between related and unrelated languages. [9]

Semantics

The subfield of semantics that pertains especially to lexicological work is called lexical semantics. In brief, lexical semantics contemplates the significance of words and their meanings through several lenses, including synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and polysemy, among others. Semantic analysis of lexical material may involve both the contextualization of the word(s) and syntactic ambiguity. Semasiology and onomasiology are relevant linguistic disciplines associated with lexical semantics. [9]

A word can have two kinds of meaning: grammatical and lexical. Grammatical meaning refers to a word's function in a language, such as tense or plurality, which can be deduced from affixes. Lexical meaning is not limited to a single form of a word, but rather what the word denotes as a base word. For example, the verb to walk can become walks, walked, and walking – each word has a different grammatical meaning, but the same lexical meaning ("to move one's feet at a regular pace"). [11]

Phraseology

Another focus of lexicology is phraseology, which studies multi-word expressions, or idioms, like 'raining cats and dogs.' The meaning of the phrase as a whole has a different meaning than each word does on its own and is often unpredictable when considering its components individually. Phraseology examines how and why such meanings exist, and analyzes the laws that govern these word combinations. [12]

Idioms and other phraseological units can be classified according to content and/ or meaning. They are difficult to translate word-for-word from one language to another. [13]

Lexicography

This section is an excerpt from Lexicography.[ edit ]
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Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. [14]

There is some disagreement on the definition of lexicology, as distinct from lexicography. Some use "lexicology" as a synonym for theoretical lexicography; others use it to mean a branch of linguistics pertaining to the inventory of words in a particular language.

Lexicologists

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Related Research Articles

A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.

A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single root word. For example, in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN.

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.

A semantic feature is a component of the concept associated with a lexical item. More generally, it can also be a component of the concept associated with any grammatical unit, whether composed or not. An individual semantic feature constitutes one component of a word's intention, which is the inherent sense or concept evoked. Linguistic meaning of a word is proposed to arise from contrasts and significant differences with other words. Semantic features enable linguistics to explain how words that share certain features may be members of the same semantic domain. Correspondingly, the contrast in meanings of words is explained by diverging semantic features. For example, father and son share the common components of "human", "kinship", "male" and are thus part of a semantic domain of male family relations. They differ in terms of "generation" and "adulthood", which is what gives each its individual meaning.

In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of  X ?

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:

Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.

Lexical may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collocation</span> Frequent occurrence of words next to each other

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.

Etymology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.

Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide an explanatory semantic representation. Explanatory in this sense refers to the ability of a given linguistic theory to describe how a component of language is acquired by a child.

In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units, 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. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’; instead, the phrase has a conventionalized meaning referring to any auction where, instead of rising, the prices fall.

Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.

In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon.

Computational lexicology is a branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars as the use of computers in the study of machine-readable dictionaries. It is distinguished from computational lexicography, which more properly would be the use of computers in the construction of dictionaries, though some researchers have used computational lexicography as synonymous.

Heterosemy is a concept in linguistics: a word is heterosemous if it has two or more meanings or functions that are historically related, but belong to different morphosyntactic categories. An example is the English word peel: peel functions as a noun in the expression I threw the orange peel in the bin, but as a verb in Would you peel the orange for me?. Heterosemy can be seen as a special case of homonymy.

Meaning–text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, due to its formal character, lends itself particularly well to computer applications, including machine translation, phraseology, and lexicography.

The Integrational theory of language is the general theory of language that has been developed within the general linguistic approach of integrational linguistics.

References

  1. ↑ Babich, Galina Nikolaevna (2016). Lexicology : a current guide = Lexicologia angliskogo yazyka (8 ed.). Moscow: Flinta. p. 1. ISBN   978-5-9765-0249-9. OCLC   934368509.
  2. 1 2 Dzharasova, T. T. (2020). English lexicology and lexicography : theory and practice (2 ed.). Almaty: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. pp. 4–5. ISBN   978-601-04-0595-0.
  3. ↑ Babich, Galina Nikolaevna (2016). Lexicology : a current guide = Lexicologia angliskogo yazyka (8 ed.). Moscow: Flinta. p. 133. ISBN   978-5-9765-0249-9. OCLC   934368509.
  4. ↑ λεξικός, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  5. ↑ λέξις, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  6. ↑ λόγος, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
  7. 1 2 Joseph, Brian D.; Janda, Richard D., eds. (2003), "The Handbook of Historical Linguistics", The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, p. 183, ISBN   9780631195719
  8. ↑ Babich, Galina Nikolaevna (2016). Lexicology : a current guide = Lexicologia angliskogo yazyka (8 ed.). Moscow: Flinta. pp. 20–23. ISBN   978-5-9765-0249-9. OCLC   934368509.
  9. 1 2 3 Popescu, Floriana (2019). A paradigm of comparative lexicology. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 19–20. ISBN   1-5275-1808-6. OCLC   1063709395.
  10. 1 2 Halliday, M. A. K. (2007). Lexicology : a short introduction. Colin Yallop. London: Continuum. pp. 56–57. ISBN   978-1-4411-5054-7. OCLC   741690096.
  11. ↑ Dzharasova, T. T. (2020). English lexicology and lexicography : theory and practice (2 ed.). Almaty: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. p. 41. ISBN   978-601-04-0595-0.
  12. ↑ Halliday, M. A. K. (2007). Lexicology : a short introduction. Colin Yallop. London: Continuum. pp. 12–13. ISBN   978-1-4411-5054-7. OCLC   741690096.
  13. ↑ Dzharasova, T. T. (2020). English lexicology and lexicography : theory and practice (2 ed.). Almaty: Al-Farabi Kazakh National University. pp. 75–76. ISBN   978-601-04-0595-0.
  14. ↑ Jackson, Howard (2017-10-02), "English lexicography in the Internet era", The Routledge Handbook of Lexicography, Routledge, pp. 540–553, doi:10.4324/9781315104942-34, ISBN   978-1-315-10494-2 , retrieved 2022-09-16

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