5. Lexicology

Size of English vocabulary:

Oxford English dictionary: 600,000+ entries

Varying size of individual’s vocabulary → Problems of definition:

  • What counts as word?

  • What counts as knowing a word?


Structural properties of English vocabulary

  • Dissociation (lack of formal coherence of semantically related words) e.g. city and urban

  • Homophony and homonymy (related to monosyllabicity)

    • Over time: loss of unstressed syllables and phonological mergers

  • Synonymy (near-equivalence of meaning) e.g. freedom, liberty

  • Complex lexical items

    • collocations (words frequently occuring together) e.g. come to an end

    • light verb constructions e.g. do one’s hair

    • phrasal and prepositional verbs e.g. turn up

    • idioms e.g. down to earth

    → decrease compositionality

    • “meaning of complex expression derived from meaning of its parts) → have to be learned by heart

    • English has tendency to weaken meaning of indivdual words and assign meaning to fixed combinations which can be lexicalised


Problems of synchronic analysis

  • Morphophonemic alternation, base allomorphy:

    • many English morphemes undergo irregular transformation in morphological processes

    • e.g. belief - to believe, crime - criminal

    → Allows tolerance in description of synchronic word-formation

  • Unique morphs

    • compound families contain elements that don’t appear elsewhere, have no clear meaning of their own

    • e.g. CRAN-berry

    • certain elements recur in related forms but don’t carry identifiable meaning → formatives

    • e.g. con-sist, in-sist, per-sist


Internationality:

Major influences in premodern times:

  • Old Norse 8th-11th century, e.g. egg, they

  • French after 1066 e.g. Chapter, dress, …

  • Latin via French & Renaissance e.g. abbreviate, benefit, …

  • Ancient Greek via French & Renaissance e.g. astronomy, crisis, …

→ Hard-word problem for less educated speakers

  • Hybrid fomrations combine elements from different languages within word e.g. air-craft, count-less, drink-able

  • Internationality cause for high degree of dissociation, wealth of synonyms and heterogeneity in spelling


The Oxford English Dictionary OED

  • comprehensive (1150 onward), historical, documented (quotations)

  • 1860 start

  • 1928 first edition completed (10 volumes)

  • 1989 second edition (20 volumes)


Etymology of etymology

  • Greek étymo = true, real

  • Ancient etymology: origin of word contains true, timeless definition of concept, correctness on vocabulary

  • Etymologiae written by Isidore Seville (560-636) extracts order of world from vocabulary


Etymological fallacy

  • idea lingers when people argue “Original meaning” of word should be preserved/reactivated

But:

  • established origin of a word not absolute beginning, but arbitrary, earliest form we can reconstruct

  • Meanings change, snychronic status determindes by intuitive judgement of speakers



Some word stories are suprising:

  • nice from Latin nescius (ignorant) meant trivial

  • glamour and grammar historically the same

  • travel and travail same word


Obscured compunds: morphological transparency lost through phonological/lexicological change e.g. wif-mann (female human) → woman

Folk etymology: New transparency given by speakers through popular association e.g. “bride-man” → bridegroom (groom = male servant)