A Case Study On The Linguistic Features Of The Word – Iconoclast

A case study on the linguistic features of the word – Iconoclast.

Words have fascinating stories to tell – about the history and culture of their speakers, about the human mind and human creativity, and about the power of language. The average English speaker knows around 50 000 words. That represents an astonishing diversity – nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky. And even 50 000 seems insignificant besides the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at from an historical perspective, that variety becomes more apparent than real. Tracing a words development back in time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical terms were formerly known as one and the same word. The deep prehistory of words has nurtured little word-seeds that over the millennia have multiplied into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.

The aim of this essay is to work out all linguistic features surrounding the word iconoclast. In the theoretical framework of English philology the essay provides an explanation of the word iconoclast in the fields of phonology, morphology, lexicon, semantics and syntax.

The first two chapters compare the pronunciation of the word in two separate cases and briefly explain certain phonetic and phonological features of the word iconoclast. The third chapter deals with morphology and the differentiation of the tree types of features of morphology, which are the features of inflection, the word structure and what possibilities exist to form new words using the given one, or vice versa, is the given word a result of word formation itself. Chapter four investigates another field of classical linguistics – syntax. In this section the role of the word iconoclast in the structure of a sentence or clause is stated and described. Chapter five explains the section of semantics, the semantic status and semantic development of the word. It also deals with the question of meanings and the polysemy of the word iconoclast. The last chapter describes the semantic change of the word. It also deals with the etymological history of the word iconoclast. The conclusions sum up the entire research and provide findings to the collected results.

Phonetic transcription is the writing down of a spoken utterance using a suitable set of symbols. In its original meaning the word implied converting from one representation, which could be the written text, into another that could be known as phonetic symbols. There are a few different types of transcription but the most essential division that can be made is between phonemic and phonetic transcription. (Roach, 2009) Phonetic transcription a full variety of phonetic symbols can be used to transcribe the word to how it should be pronounced orally. According to “Cambridge English Pronunciation Dictionary” the word iconoclast should be transcribed as followed /aɪkɒnəklæst/.

Speech sounds are commonly divided into two groups: vowels and consonants. Vowels are produced with a relatively open vocal tract and no significant constriction of the oral cavities exists. The airstream from the vocal folds to the lips is relatively unimpeded. Therefore, vowels are considered to be open sounds. (Jones, 2011) The word iconoclast has four vowels from which one is a low-front vowel, presented by the sound /ɒ/, another is a low-back vowel, expressed by the sound /æ/, there is a mid-central vowel, presented by the sound /ə/, and the last one is a diphthong. Diphthongs contain a glide from one vowel quality to another. The latter is represented in the word by the sound /aɪ/.