- •VI. Etymological Survey of the English Word-Stock
- •§ 2. Semantic Characteristics and Collocability
- •4.Summary and Conclusions
- •§ 5. Causes and Ways of Borrowing
- •6. Criteria of Borrowings
- •§ 12. Influence of Borrowings
- •13 Summary and Conclusion
- •VII. Various aspects of vocabulary units and replenishment of modern english word-stock
- •Interdependence of various aspects
- •Replenishment of modern english vocabulary
- •§ 7. Structural and Semantic Peculiarities of New Vocabulary Units
- •Ways and means of enriching the vocabulary
- •§ 8. Productive Word-Formation
- •§ 9 Various Ways of Word-Creation
- •§10 Borrowing
- •§ 13. Intrinsic Heterogeneity of Modern English
- •§ 14 Number of Vocabulary Items in Actual Use and Number of Vocabulary Units in Modern English
- •§ 15. Summary and Conclusions
- •VIII. Variants and Dialects of the English Language
- •§ 1. General Characteristics of the English Language in Different Parts of the English-Speaking World
- •§ 3. Some Points of History of the Territorial Variants and Lexical Interchange Between Them
- •Local varieties in the british isles and in the usa
- •§ 4. Local Dialects in the British Isles
- •§ 5. The Relationship between the English National Language and British Local Dialects
- •6 Local Dialects in the usa
- •IX Fundamentals of English Lexicography
- •§1 Encyclopaedic and Linguistic Dictionaries
- •§2 Classification of linguistic Dictionaries
- •3. Explanatory Dictionaries
- •§ 4. Translation Dictionaries
- •§ 5. Specialized Dictionaries
- •§6. The selection of Lexical Units for Inclusion.
- •§ 7. Arrangement of Entries
- •§ 11. Choke of Adequate Equivalents.
- •§ 12. Setting of the Entry
- •§ 13. Structure of the Dictionary
- •§ 14. Main Characteristic Features
- •§ 15. Classification of Learners Dictionaries.
- •§ 16.Selection of Entry Words.
- •§ 17. Presentations of Meanings.
- •§ 18. Setting of the Entry
- •§ 19. Summary and Conclusions
- •X. Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis
- •§ 1. Contrastive Analysis
- •§ 2. Statistical Analysis
- •§ 3.Immediate Constituents Analysis
- •§ 4.Distributional Analysis and Co-occurrence
- •§ 5. Transformafional Analysis
- •§ 6. Componenfal Analysis
- •§ 7. Method of Semantic Differential
- •§ 8. Summary and Conclusions
- •I. Introduction
- •II. Semasiology Word-Meaning
- •Types of Meaning
- •Word-Meaning and Meaning in Morphemes
- •Word-Meaning and Motivation
- •Change of Meaning
- •Meaning and Polysemy
- •Polysemy and Homonymy
- •Word-Meaning in Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics
- •Meaning Relations in Paradigmatics and Semantic Classification of Words
- •III. Word-groups and phraseological units Some Basic Features of Word-Croups
- •Meaning of Word-Groups
- •Interdependence of Structure and Meaning in Word-Groups
- •IV. Word-structure
- •V. Word-formation
- •Various Ways of Forming Words
- •Affixation
- •Conversion
- •Word-Composition
- •Etymological survey of the english word-stock
- •Words of Native Origin
- •Borrowings
- •VII. Various aspects of vocabulary units and replenishment of modern english word-stock
- •Interdependence of Various Aspects of the Word
- •VIII. Variants and dialects of the english language
- •Learner's Dictionaries and Some Problems of Their Compilation
- •X. Methods and procedures of lexicological analysis
§ 14 Number of Vocabulary Items in Actual Use and Number of Vocabulary Units in Modern English
Taking into account the growth of the vocabulary in the last forty years an estimate of 30,000 words in the actual working vocabulary of educated persons today may be considered reasonable though it comprises a number of non-assimilated, archaic and occasional words. It should be pointed out, however, that a considerable number of words are scarcely ever used and the meaning of quite a number of them is unknown to an average educated English layman, e.g. abalone, abattoir, abele and the like.4 It follows that there is a considerable difference .between the number of lexical items in Modern English vocabulary and the number of lexical items in actual use. By the phrase "in actual use" we do not imply words and phrases used by any single individual but
1 See, e. g., The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1957. 2 See 'Various Aspects ...', § 6, p. 180.
3 Clarence L. Barnhart. Methods and Standards for Collecting Citations for English Descriptive Dictionaries, 1975.
4 See The Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1957,
197
the vocabulary actually used and understood by the bulk of English-speaking people as a whole at a given historical period. It also follows that not all vocabulary items are of equal practical importance. In this connection it should be recalled that there is a considerable difference between the vocabulary units a person uses and those he understands. According to the data available, the "passive" vocabulary of a "normally educated person" comprises about 30,000 words. At best about 20,000 are actually used in speech. Of these not all the words are equally important.
The relative "value" of lexical items is dependent on how frequently this or that particular unit occurs in speech and on the range of application of these units. 4,000—5,000 of most frequently occurring words are presumed to be amply sufficient for the daily needs of an average member of the given speech community. It is obvious that these 4,000— 5,000 comprise ordinary words which are as a rule polysemantic and characterized by neutral stylistic reference.1 Specialized vocabulary units (special words and terminology) are naturally excluded.
It should not be inferred from the above that frequency alone is an adequate criterion to establish the most useful list of words. There are, especially in science, words that appear very rarely even in a large corpus, but are central to the concepts of a whole science.
As is well known terminology in various fields of scientific inquiry comprises many peculiar vocabulary units the bulk of which is made up of Latin or Greek morphemes. Terms possess a number of common features in all European languages. Terms are as a rule used by comparatively small groups of professionals and certainly not by the language community as a whole. Most of them are to a certain extent "internatio-naj", i.e. understandable to specialists irrespective of their nationality. Compare for example Russ. зy6 — зубы, English tooth—teeth and the corresponding phonetic terms Russ. дентальный, Eng. dental. Compare also Eng. radio—Russ. paдuo, Eng. electronics—Russ. электроника, etc. Special words and terms make up the bulk of neologisms and the question naturally arises whether terms belong to common English vocabulary items. Nevertheless they are of great importance for those who are working in this or that branch of science or technology.