English Lexicology

English lexicology.

Lexicology- a study and systematic description of English vocabulary in respect to its origin, development and current use

•Phonetic borrowings/loan words proper, e.g. labour, travel, chair,sputnik, bank, soprano, iceberg

•Translation loans (word for word/morpheme for morpheme translations), e.g.collective farm, Sunday, masterpiece (masterstuck), pipe of peace.

•non-assimilated semantically, e.g. sari, borshch, rickshaw, zloty

•non-assimilated grammatically, e.g. phenomenon - phenomena, datum – data, bacillus- bacilli

•non-assimilated phonetically, e.g. bourgeois, camouflage, unique, confetti, tomato

•partly assimilated graphically, e.g. psychology,synonym

•non-assimilated, seldom used barbarisms, e.g. tête-à-tête, dolce vita, ciao, ad libitum

Creating new words by means of existing elements and according to the patterns and rules of a given language.

•Part-of–speech classification ( noun, adjective, verb, adverb, numeral forming suffixes)

•Semantic classification (the agent of the action,nationality, collectivity, diminutiveness, feminine gender, abstract notion, quality)

•Lexico-grammatical character of the stem (verb, noun, adjective)

•Origin of suffixes (native Germanic: -er, -ful, --less, -ship, -hood, -ward, Romanic: -tion, -able/ible, -ance/ence, Greek: -ist, -ism, -ize, Russian: -nik)

•Productivity (productive: -er, -ize, -ness, semi-productive: -ette, -eer,non-productive: -th, -ard)

•Endocentric compounds – the two constituent elements are clearly the determinant and determinatum (rainbow – rain determines bow, colour-blind – colour determines blind, cf.mousetrap, ashtray, etc)

Metaphor- transfer of the name of one object to another (and different one) based on association of similarity.

words of the same language having the same meaning is very simple, but unfortunately misleading.

Idiom-an expression whose meaning is not predictable from the usual meanings of its constituent elements