Questions For The Examination Lexicology
Questions for the examination Lexicology.
Features of the word: morphological structure; certain arrangement of morphemes; different word forms; different syntactic functions; signal various meanings; indivisible; mobile in a sentence.
Morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit. One of the most widely spread classifications of morphemes is into free and bound. Free morphemes are capable of occurring as individual words (e.g. boy, tall). Bound morphemes are not capable of such occurrence. They are dependent on free morphemes, e.g. –ish can only function when attached to such words as boy, girl, woman, red, grey and build adjectives from nouns or adjectives, cf. boyish, girlish. The morpheme –ness builds nouns from adjectives, as in boyishness, sleepiness.
Phonological word – A group of sounds related to meaning (usually includes different accentuation patterns, phonetic variability). In spoken discourse, it is usually easy to notice pronunciation peculiarities of different people. The peculiarities might be due to an individual character of a person but more frequently they are an expression of one’s affiliation with one or another regional or social group.
Lexemes - A particular realization of grammatical possibilities of the word.
At the morphological level, meaning also plays a very important role. Morphemes are distinguished on the basis of meaning. For example, read is a morpheme, so is –er, as in reader, or –s as in readers. They are all meaningful: the meaning of read can be found in a dictionary, the suffix –er renders the meaning of an agent or instrument, and –s expresses the meaning of plurality. The latter is a grammatical morpheme.
1. Grammatical, sometimes called structural, meaning is mostly applicable in reference to the meaning of grammatical morphemes, words and grammatical structures. The grammatical meaning is not, as a rule, included in dictionaries. In English, grammatical morphemes mainly include noun inflections, degrees of comparison of adjectives and verb tense-forms. Their number is limited and they are usually described as a closed class of entities, or a class which has a limited number of entities and is unlikely to admit new elements. In language they recur very frequently and express such ideas as plurality, as in students, possessivity or another case relation, as in student’s books or students’ books, higher or highest degree of quality, as in brighter and brightest, or a certain temporal setting, as in he writes – he is writing – he wrote – he will write. The grammatical meaning is also expressed by such words as the, and, will or shall. Thus come has a lexical meaning, whereas will in the utterance He will come has a grammatical meaning. In students we can identify student as carrying the lexical meaning of ‘a person who is studying at a university’, whereas the inflection –s carries the grammatical meaning of plurality.
Lexical meaning or the meaning of words, word group and their relationships in a system, or vocabulary. The lexical meaning can be found in a dictionary and is hardly predictable, since it varies from word to word. This is an open class of entities, i.e. their number is not fixed. If a new word is created to name a new thing or phenomenon, it acquires a lexical meaning and enters the lexicon (words like computers, e-mail some time ago were unknown to the English speaking population). In most general terms, the evolvement of ideas into words is called lexicalization; more technically, the term applies to assigning meaning to a word, or lexeme.
