Лексикология
.pdftherefore, if taken as a basis for general linguistic theory, give no insight into the mechanism of meaning. Some of Bloomfield’s successors went so far as to exclude semasiology from linguistics on the ground that meaning could not be studied objectively, and was not part of language but an aspect of the use to which language is put. This point of view was never generally accepted. The more general opinion is well revealed in R. Jakobson’s pun. He said: “Linguistics without meaning is meaningless”.
In our country definitions given by the majority of authors, however different in detail, agree in one basic principle: they all point out that the lexical meaning is the realization of the notion by means of a definite language system. It has also been repeatedly stated that the plane of content in speech reflects the whole of human consciousness, which comprises not only mental activity but emotions as well.
The notional content of a word is expressed by the denotative meaning (also referential or extensional meaning) which may be of two types, according to whether the word’s function is significative or identifying (demonstrative). To denote, then, is to serve as linguistic expression for a notion or as a name for an actually existing object referred to by a word. The term denotatum (pl. denotata) or referent means either a notion or an actually content of the word is its capacity to evoke or directly express emotion. It is rendered by the emotional or expressive counterpart of meaning, also called emotive charge, intentional or affective connotations of words.
The denotative meaning may be of two types according to whether the word function is significative and evokes a general idea, or demonstrative, i.e. identifying.
To find the words in their significative meaning it is best to turn to aphorisms and other sayings expressing general ideas. Thus A good laugh is sunshine in the house (THACKERAY) or A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies (WILDE) contain words in their significative meanings. The second type (demonstrative meaning) is revealed when it is the individual elements of reality that the word serves to name. Some large blue
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china jars and parrot-tulips were ranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small leaded panes of the window streamed the apricot coloured light of a summer day in London (WILDE).
Te expressive counterpart of meaning is optional, and even when it is present, its proportion with respect to the logical counterpart may vary within wide limits. The meaning of many words is subject to complex associations originating in habitual contexts, verbal or situational, of which the speaker and the listener are aware, and which from the connotational component of meaning. In some words the realization of meaning is accompanied by additional stylistic characteristics revealing the speaker’s attitude to the situation, the subject-matter, and to his interlocutor.
Within the affective connotations of a word we distinguish its capacity to evoke or directly express: a) emotion e.g. daddy as compared to father; b) evaluation, e.g. clique as compared to group; c) intensity, e.g. adore as compared to love; d) stylistic colouring, e.g. slay as compared to kill.
The complexity of the word meaning is manifold. Apart from the lexical meaning including denotative and connotative meaning it is always combined with the grammatical meaning.
It is useful to remember that the grammatical meaning is defined as an expression in speech of relationship between words based on contrastive features of arrangements in which they occur.
More than that, every denotational meaning is itself a combination of several more elementary components. The meaning of kill, for instance, can be described as follows: {cause [become(not + alive)]}. One further point should made: cause, become, not and alive in this analysis are not words of English or any other language; they are elements of meaning, which can be combined in various ways with other such elements in the meaning of different words. In what follows they will be called semantic components. To illustrate this idea of componential analysis we shall consider the word adored in the following epigram by Oscar Wilde: “Men can be analysed, women – merely
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adored”. Adored has a lexical meaning and a grammatical meaning. The grammatical meaning is that of a Participle II of a transitive verb. The denotational counterpart of the lexical meaning realizes the corresponding notion, and consists of several components, namely – feeling, attachment, intensity, respect. The connotational component is that of intensity and loftiness. The definition of adore is ‘to feel a great attachment and respect, to worship’.
III. One and the same word may have several meanings. A word that has more than one meaning is called polysemantic. The word ‘polysemy’ means ‘plurality of meanings’. It exists only in the language, not in speech. A word which has more than one meaning is called polysemantic. Different meanings of a polysemantic word may come together due to the proximity of notions which they express. E.g. the word ‘blanket’ has the following meanings: a woolen covering used on beds, a covering for keeping a horse warm, a covering of any kind /a blanket of snow/, covering all or most cases /used attributively/, e.g. we can say ‘a blanket insurance policy’. There are some words in the language which are monosemantic, such as most terms, /synonym, molecule, bronchitis/, some pronouns /this, my, both/, numerals.
There are two processes of the semantic development of a word: radiation and concatenation. In cases of radiation the primary meaning stands in the center and the secondary meanings proceed out it like rays. Each secondary meaning can be traced to the primary one. E.g. in the word ‘face’ the primary meaning denotes ‘the front part of the human head’. Connected with the front position the meanings: the front part of a watch, the front part of a building, the front part of a playing card were formed. Connected with the word ‘face’ itself the meanings: expression of the face, outward appearance are formed.
In cases of concatenation secondary meanings of a word develop like a chain. In such cases it is difficult to trace some meanings to the primary one. E.g. in the word ‘crust’ the primary
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meaning ‘hard outer part of bread’ developed a secondary meaning ‘hard part of anything /a pie, a cake/, then the meaning ‘harderr layer over soft snow’ was developed, then ‘a sullen gloomy person’, then ‘impudence’ were developed. Here the last meanings have nothing to do with the primary ones. In such cases homonyms appear in the language. It is called the split of polysemy.
Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and notions, as they always contain a generalization of several traits of the object. Some of these traits are common with other objects. Hence the possibility of identical names for objects possessing common features.
Thus polysemy is characteristic of most words in many languages, however different they may be. But it is more characteristic of the English vocabulary as compared with Russian, due to the monosyllabic character of English and the predominance of root words. The greater the relative frequency of the word, the greater the number of elements that constitute its semantic structure, i.e. the more polysemantic it is. This regularity is of course a statistical, not a rigid one.
Word counts show that the total number of meanings separately registered in NED for the first thousand of the most frequent English words is almost 25, 000, i.e. the average number of meanings for each of these most frequent words is 25.
Consider some of the variants of a very frequent, and consequently polysemantic word run. We define the main variant as ‘to go by moving the legs quickly’ as in Tired I was, I began to run frantically home. The lexical meaning does not change in the forms ran and running. The basic meaning may be extended to inanimate things: I caught the bus that runs between C and B; or the word run may be used figuratively: It makes the blood run cold. Both the components “on foot” and “quickly” are suppressed in This self-service shop run by Co-op and The car runs on petrol. The idea of motion remains but it is reduced to “operate or function”. The difference of meaning is reflected in the difference of syntactic valency. It is impossible to use this
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variant about humans and say We humans run on foot. It is possible to use the active-passive transformation when the meaning implies “management”: The Co-op runs this self-service shop but not I was run by home. There are other variants of run where there is no implication of speed or “on foot”, or motion but the implication of direction is retained: On the other side of the stream the bank ran up steeply. The bank ran without the indication of direction is meaningless. The verb run has also several other variants, they all have something in common with some others. Thus, though there is no single semantic component common to all variants, every variant has something in common with at least one of the others.
It is only recently that linguists have made serious attempt to give a systematic, account of grammar and semantics, semantics and context. Every meaning in language and every difference in meaning is signaled either by the form of the word itself or by context. Cf. ship :: sheep, brothers :: brethren, smoke screen :: screen star.
In analyzing the polysemy of a word we have to take into consideration that the meaning is the content of a two-facet linguistic sign existing in unity with sound form of the sign and its distribution, i.e. its syntagmatic relations depending on the position in the spoken chain.
We have therefore to search the cases of unity for both facets of the linguistic sign – its form and its content. This unity is present in the so-called lexico-grammatical variants of words.
No universally accepted criteria for differentiating these variants within one polysemantic word can so far be offered, although the problem has lately attracted a great deal of attention. The main points can be summed up as follows: lexicogrammatical variants of a word are its variants characterized by paradigmatic or morphological peculiarities, different valency, different syntactic functions, very often they belong to different lexico-grammatical groups of the same part of speech thus run is intransitive in I run home, but transitive in I run this office.
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All the lexical and lexico=grammatical variants of a word taken together form its semantic structure. Thus, in the semantic structure of the word youth three lexico-grammatical variants may be distinguished: the first is an abstract uncountable noun, as in the friends of one’s youth, the second is a countable personal noun ‘a young man’ (plural youths) that can be substituted be the pronoun he in the singular and they in the plural; the third is a collective noun ‘young man or woman” having only one form, that of the singular, substituted by the pronoun they. Within the first lexico-grammatical variant two shades of meaning can be distinguished with two different referents, one denoting the state of being young, and the other the time of being young. These shades of meaning are recognized due to lexical peculiarities of distribution and sometimes are blended together as in to feel that one’s youth has gone, where both the time and the state can be meant. These variants form a structured set because they are expressed by the same sound complex and are interrelated in meaning as they all contain the semantic component ‘young’ and can be explained by means of one another.
The difference in syntactic context is best seen in verbs. Among the many variants of the verb carry one can distinguish a lexico-grammatical variant with the meaning ‘to support the weight of a thing, and to move it from one place to another”. In this variant there is always an object after the verb which may be followed by an adverbial or a prepositional object, as in the following formulas: N1 + carry + N2 (Railways and ships carry goods) or N1 + carry +N2 + prep + N3 (She was carrying the baby in her arms).
In both cases carry is a transitive verb. There is also an intransitive variant in which carry is followed by a predicative or a adverbial of distance, time, etc. and means ‘to have power to reach’: N1 + carry + prep + N2 (His voice carried across the room).
Nonce usage takes place in cases of occasional figurative meanings. Nonce usage is also sometimes called application and defined as the extensional meaning of a word or term. The
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following example serves to illustrate nonce usage as application:
Tom possessed a formidable capacity for psychological bustling. In an easy agreeable way he bustled other people into doing things they don’t want to do. (W. COOPER) Here the word bustle does not show any of its dictionary meaning. This is nonce usage which is clearly motivated and readily understood.
To sum up this discussion the semantic structure of a word we return to its definition as a structured set of interrelated lexical variants with different meanings. These variants belong to the same set because they are expressed by the same combination of morphemes, although on different conditions or distribution. The elements are interrelated due to some common semantic component. In other words, the word’s semantic structure is an organized whole comprised by recurrent meanings and shades of meaning a particular sound complex can assume in different contexts, together with emotional or stylistic colouring and other connotations, if any.
Polysemy and semantic structure exist only in language, not in speech. The sum total of many contexts in which the word may occur permits us to observe and record cases of identical meaning and cases that differ in meaning. They are registered and classified by lexicographers and found in dictionaries. For example, we read that bother has two variants as: 1) ‘to worry or to cause trouble’ and 2) to take the trouble.
It is very important to distinguish between the lexical meaning of a word in speech and its semantic structure in language. The meaning in speech is contextual. If one examines, for example, the word bother in the following: Any woman will love any man who bothers her enough (H. PHILIPPS) one sees it in a definite context that that particularizes it and makes possible only one meaning: ‘to cause trouble’. This notion receives the emotional colouring of irony revealing the protagonist’s view of love as cynical and pessimistic. This colouring in the word bother is combined with a colloquial stylistic tone. Actually used it has only on meaning, it is monosemantic but it may render a complicated notion or emotion with many features.
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Polysemy does not interfere with the communicative function of the language because in every particular case the situation and context, i.e. the environment of the word, cancel all the unnecessary meanings and make speech unambiguous.
IV. The meaning of a word can change in the course of time. Changes of lexical meaning of the noun ‘pen’ was due to extra linguistic causes. Primarily ‘pen’ come a back to the Latin word ‘penna’ (a feather of a bird). As people wrote with goose pens the name was transferred to steel pens which were later on used for writing. Still later any instrument for writing was called ‘a pen’.
On the other hand causes can be linguistic, e.g. the conflict of synonyms when a perfect synonym of a native word is borrowed from some other language one of them may specialize in its meaning, e.g. the noun ’tide’ in Old English was polysemantic and denoted ‘time’, ‘season’, ‘hour’. When the French words ‘time’, ‘season’, ‘hour’ were borrowed into English they ousted the word ‘tide’ in this meaning. It was specialized and now means ‘regular rise and fall of the sea caused by attraction of the moon’. The meaning of the word can also change due to ellipsis, e.g. the word-group ‘a train of carriages’ had the meaning of a ‘row of carriages’, later on ‘of carriages’ was dropped and the noun ‘train’ changed its meaning, it is used now in the function and with the meaning of the whole word-group.
Semantic changes have been classified by different scientists. The most complete classification was suggested by a German scientist Herman Paul in his work ‘Prinzipien des Sprachgeschichte’. It is based on the logical principle. He distinguishes two main ways where the semantic change is gradual (specialization and generalization), two momentary conscious semantic changes (metaphor and metonymy) and also secondary ways: gradual (elevation and degradation), momentary (hyperbole and litote).
Specialization is a gradual process when a word passes from a general sphere to some special sphere of communication, e.g. ‘case’ has general meaning ‘circumstances in which a person or a
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thing is’. It is specialized in its meaning when it is used in law (a law suit), in grammar (a form in the paradigm of a noun), in medicine (a patient, an illness). The difference between these meanings is revealed in the context.
The meaning of a word can specialize when it remains in the general usage. It happens in the case of the conflict between two absolute synonyms when one of them must specialize in its meaning to remain in the language, e.g. the native word ‘meat’ had the meaning ‘food’, this meaning is preserved in the compound ‘sweetmeats’. The meaning ‘edible flesh’ was formed when the word ‘food’, its absolute synonym, won in the conflict of absolute synonyms (both words are native). The English verb ‘to starve’ was specialized in its meaning after the Scandinavian verb ‘die’ was borrowed into English. ’Die’ became the general verb with this meaning because in English there were the noun ‘death’ and the adjective ‘dead’. ‘Starve’ got the meaning ‘to die of hunger’.
The third way of specialization is the formation of Proper names from common nouns, it is often used in toponimics, e.g. the City –the business part of London, Oxford – university town in England, the Tower – originally a fortress and palace, later – a prison, now – a museum.
The fourth way of specialization is ellipsis. In such cases primarily we have a word-group of the type ‘attribute + noun’, which is used constantly in a definite situation. Due to the attribute can be dropped and the noun can get the meaning of the whole word-group, e.g. ‘room’ originally meant ‘space’, this meaning is retained in the adjective ‘roomy’ and word combinations: ‘no room for’, ‘to take room’, ‘to take no room’. The meaning of the word ‘room’ was specialized because it was often used in combinations: ‘dining room’, ‘sleeping room’ which meant ‘space for dining’, ‘space for sleeping’.
Generalization is a process contrary to specialization, in such cases the meaning of a word becomes more general in the course of time.
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To transfer from a concrete meaning to an abstract one is most frequent, e.g. ‘ready’ (a derivative from the verb ‘ridan’- ‘ride’) meant ‘prepared for a ride’, now its meaning is ‘prepared for anything’. ‘Journey’ was borrowed from French with the meaning ‘one day trip’, now it means ‘a trip of any duration’.
All auxiliary verbs are cases of generalization of their lexical meaning, because they developed a grammatical meaning: ‘have’, ‘be’, ‘do’, ‘shall’, ‘will’ when used as auxiliary verbs are devoid of their lexical meaning which they have when used as notional verbs or modal verbs, e.g. cf. ‘I have several books by this writer’ and ‘I have read some books by this author’. In the first sentence the verb ‘have’ has the meaning ‘possess’, in the second sentence it has no lexical meaning, its grammatical meaning is to form Present Perfect.
Metaphor is a transfer of meaning on the basis of comparison. Herman Paul points out that metaphor can be based on different types of similarity:
1)similarity of shape, e.g. head (of a cabbage), bottleneck, teeth (of a saw, a comb);
2)similarity of position, e.g. foot ( of a page, of a mountain), head ( of a procession);
3)similarity of function, behaviour e.g. a whip (an official in the British Parliament whose duty is to see that members were present at the voting);
4)similarity of colour, e.g. orange, hazel, chestnut etc.
In some cases we have a complex similarity, e.g. the leg of a table has a similarity to human leg in its shape, position and function.
Many metaphors are based on parts of human body, e.g. an eye of a needle, arms and mouth of a river, head of an army.
A special type of metaphor is when Proper names become common nouns, e.g. philistine – a mercenary person, vandals – destructive people, a Don Juan – a lover of many women etc.
Metonymy is a transfer of the meaning on the basis of contiguity. There are different types of metonymy:
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