Лексикология

1)the material of which an object is made may become the name of the object, e.g. a glass, boards, iron etc;

2)the name of the place may become the name of the people or of an object placed there, e.g. the House – members of Parliament, Fleet Street – bourgeois press, the White House – the Administration of the USA etc;

3)names of musical instruments may become names of musicians, e.g. the violin, the saxophone;

4)the name of some person may become a common noun, e.g. “boycott” was originally the name of the Irish family who were so much disliked by their neighbours that they did not mix with them, “sandwich” was named after Lord Sandwich who was a gambler. He did not want to interrupt his game and had his food brought to him while he was playing cards between two slices of bread not to soil his fingers;

5)names of inventors very often become terms to denote things they invented, e.g. “watt”, “om”, “rentgen” etc;

6)some geographical names can also become common nouns through metonymy, e.g. holland (linen fabrics), Brussels (a special kind of carpets), china (porcelain), astrakhan (a sheep fur) etc.

Elevation is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes better in the course of time, e.g. “knight” originally meant “a boy”, then “a young servant”, then “a military servant”, then “a noble man”. Now it is a title of nobility given to outstanding people, “marshal” originally meant “a horse man” now it is the highest rank etc.

Degradation is a transfer of the meaning when it becomes worse in the course of time. It is usually connected with nouns denoting common people, e.g. “villain” originally meant “working on villa” now it means “a scoundrel”.

Hyperbole is a transfer of the meaning when the speaker uses exaggeration, e.g. “to hate” (doing something), (not to see somebody) “for ages”.

Hyperbole is often used to form phraseological units, e.g. “to make a mountain out of a molehill”, “to split hairs” etc.

71

PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com

Litote is a transfer of the meaning when the speaker expresses affirmative with the negative or vica versa, e.g. not bad, no coward etc.

Questions:

1.How do the linguists try to explain the word meaning?

2.What are the elements of word-meaning?

3.What is the seme?

4.What does the word polysemy mean?

5.What is lexico-semantic wordbuilding?

6.What is generalization?

7.What is specialization?

8.Give the definition of metaphor.

9.Give the definition of metonomy.

Test

I. Linguists try to explain the word-meaning through:

a)semantic triangle.

b)definition of a word.

c)grammatical forms.

d)pronunciation.

II. Seme is:

a)the biggest element of the lexical meaning.

b)the grammatical characteristics.

c)a suffix of some nouns.

d)the smallest element of lexical meaning.

III. The word “polysemy” means:

a)secondary meaning of a word.

b)connotational meaning.

c)plurality of meanings.

d)the process of semantic development.

72

PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com

IV. The causes of semantic changes can be:

a)phonological.

b)morphological.

c)specialized.

d)extra-linguistic and linguistic.

V. Metaphor is a transfer of the meaning on the basis of:

a)comparison.

b)contiguity.

c)similarity.

d)oppositions.

Final test.

I. The central problem of lexicology is

a)word

b)word-group

c)sentence

d)meaning

II. Archaisms are words which:

a)ousted some new words.

b)are no longer used in everyday speech.

c)are used to express unimportance.

d)are used instead of new meanings.

III. Semantic borrowings are such units when:

a)a new meaning of the unit existing in the language is

borrowed.

b)word-for-word (morpheme-for-morpheme) is

translated.

c)words are borrowed with their spelling, pronunciation and meaning.

d)borrowings are fully assimilated in English.

73

PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com

IV. Morpheme is:

a)the main unit of lexicl system.

b)it is the smallest language unit which can stand alone as a complete utterance.

c)the smallest meaningful language unit.

d)a group of words that exists in the language as a ready-

made unit.

V. Seme is:

a)the biggest element of the lexical meaning.

b)the grammatical characteristics.

c)a suffix of some nouns.

d)the smallest element of lexical meaning.

Технический редактор – Т.И. Медведева

Отпечатано в издательско-полиграфическом центре

ФГОУ ВПО МичГАУ Подписано в печать 29.10.07 г. Формат 60х84 1/16,

Бумага офсетная № 1. Усл.печ.л. 4,3 Тираж 52 экз. Ризограф

Заказ №

_______________________________________________________________

Издательско-полиграфический центр

Мичуринского государственного аграрного университета 393760, Тамбовская обл., г. Мичуринск, ул. Интернациональная, 101,

тел. +7 (47545) 5-55-12 E-mail: vvdem@mgau.ru

74

PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version www.pdffactory.com