Lexicology in theory, practice and tests Study guide Recommended by the Academic Council of Sumy State University Sumy Sumy State University 2015

There are three main types of the lexical meaning of words:

1. 
   Nominative meaning. It is the direct meaning of the word, which refers to objects in extralinguistic reality. The nominative meaning has denotational and connotational components. Denotation means the expression of the direct meaning of the word that doesn’t bear any emotive evaluation or stylistic colouring, e. g. friend, dog, love, great, begin, etc. Connotation is the supplementary expressive meaning which is performed either by emotive charge, e. g. girlie, doggy, worship, etc., or by stylistic reference, e. g. father (neutr.) :: parent (book.) :: dad (col.) :: governor (slang); great (neutr.) :: terrific (col.).
   
2. 
   Syntactically conditioned meaning. It displays itself in different colligations. Cf. look at :: look for :: look after, etc.
   
3. 
   Phraseologically bound meaning. It is idiomatic meaning which displays itself only in certain phraseological units, e. g. buy smth. for a song; to be on the safe side; to cut a long story short, etc. (see Table 8).
   

denotation

connotation

syntactically conditioned

meaning
e. g. look at, look for, look after, etc

phraseologically bound meaning

Three main semantic structures of words: monosemy, semantic diffusion and polysemy.

1. 
   Monosemy is the existence within one word of only one meaning. There are not too many monosemantic words. They are mainly scientific terms, e. g. chemistry, molecule, sputnic, etc.
   
2. 
   Semantic diffusion is observed in words with a very wide conceptual volume. Such words can name an indefinitely large number of objects. For example, the word thing means “any object of our thought”. It can name anything – living beings, problems, facts, affairs, pieces of writing, possessions, etc.
   
3. 
   Polysemy (from Greek poly, “many” semeion, “sign”) is when a word has several meanings or is open to several or many meanings. Polysemy is a treasure and value of every spoken language. It exists only in the language, but does not exist in speech. The majority of English words are polysemantic. In the process of polysemy development new meanings appear and old ones are lost. Polysemantic word is the presence of several meanings in one word. Though they are used to mark different subjects, occurrences, processes all of them are connected with each other. They are also used in different word combinations (see Table 9).
   

polysemy
e. g. table,

semantic diffusion

monosemy
e. g. chemistry,

Ch. Bally made distinction between two aspects of polysemy as a linguistic phenomenon: 1) one linguistic sign has several meanings, 2) one meaning is expressed by several signs.

Some meanings invariably come to the fore when we hear the word in actual speech or see it written. Other meanings are evident only due to the context of the word. The context makes the word explicit, i. e. brings them out. The word in one of its meanings is called lexico-semantic variant of this word. There may be no single semantic component common to all lexico-grammatical variants but every variant has something in common with at least one of the others. All the lexico-semantic variants of a word taken together form its semantic structure or semantic paradigm.

When analyzing the semantic structure of a polysemantic word, it is necessary to distinguish between two levels of analysis. On the first level, the semantic structure of a word is treated as a system of meanings. For instance, the semantic structure of the noun “head” could be presented by the scheme given below (here you can see only the most frequent meanings):
Head

A part of the human body

Person (intellect)

The top of something

1. a) Dick was indeed eager to get a little smattering of Spanish, and perhaps he was not really quite so stupid as he pretended to be. b) Нis hair was still thick and dark, with just a smattering of salt and pepper at each temple. 2. a) She must chirp and sing, and hop from place to place, and eat and drink, and preen her wings and do at least a dozen different things every minute. b) She always spends ages preening herself before she goes out. c) Why, they know when I praise them and preen themselves. 3. a) Bids through the host of thousand trumpets blare. b) It was almost dark outside now, and the lights in her house were blaring already. 4. a) The kitchen would be a mess – dishes in a sink, the detritus of meal preparation left across the counters, cheese going hard, and a knife left in the butter. b) All above that is terminal moraine, rock detritus piled upon rock foundation by the glacier. 5. a) She didn’t have her best friend’s flair for drama b) His carefully developed flair for character study, guessed them from the first. c) And she gathered impressions swiftly, and, moreover, had a natural flair for all that was first-rate, original or strange. 6. a) I was unjust enough to load him with the guilt of his plot against me. b) I would give all the money in my pocket to be with those dear little women at the round table in the saloon, or on the grass-plot in the garden. c) Amelia’s mother was driving the two of them home from the cinema – and a graphic retelling of the plot of Fatal Attraction was under the way. d) Can a sweet Flower make a plot and tell lies like the old doctor? 7. a) A gram-atom is the mass, in grams, of one mole of atoms in a monatomic element. b) Upon one cheek he had a mole, not unbecoming. c) Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves. d) Susannah finished work and emerged, blinking mole-like, from her darker, air-conditioned office. 8. a) Vera had her old baby title of Flapsy? Which somehow suited her restless nervous motions, and Agatha had become Nag. b) And thump, thump, goes the farmer's nag over the narrow bridge of the weir. 9. a) Peel the pumpkin and remove the seeds, cut into small pieces, and put into a saucepan. b) He peeled the jacket, and kissed the side of her neck.

The meaning of a word can change in the course of time. Changes of lexical meanings can be proved by comparing contexts of different times. Transfer of the meaning is called lexico-semantic word-building – when the outer aspect of a word does not change. The reasons of semantic changes can be extra-linguistic and linguistic, e. g. the lexical meaning of the noun pen was due to extra-linguistic causes. The word pen comes from the Latin word penna (a feather of a bird). As people wrote with goose pens the name was transferred to steel pens which were later on used for writing. Still later any instrument for writing was called a pen. On the other hand this may occur on linguistic reasons, e. g. the conflict of synonyms when a perfect synonym of a native word is borrowed from some other language one of them may specialize in its meaning, e. g. the noun tide in Old English was polysemantic and denoted time, season, hour. When the French words time, season, hour were borrowed into English they ousted the word tide in these meanings. It was specialized and now means regular rise and fall of the sea caused by attraction of the moon.

Lexical meaning reflects the concept which is expressed by the given word. If the polysemantic structure of the word is subjected to a diachronic semantic analysis, then the word, as a rule, retains its original meaning, but at the same time acquires several new ones. Hence one should distinguish the following meanings comprising the set treated diachronically:

1. 
   The direct meaning, subdivided into: a) the primary (etymological) meaning, e. g. wall – L. vallum – “fortification”; b) the derived meaning: wall – “upright structure, forming part of a room or building”.
   
2. 
   The secondary meaning, subdivided into: a) the secondary denotative meaning: wall – “inside surface of cavity or vessel”, e. g. walls of the heart; reactor wall; b) the figurative meaning, e. g. wall of partition/between persons; wall of fire; wall of hostility.
   

The process of development of a new meaning (or a change of meaning) is called transference – the name of one object is transferred onto another, proceeding from their similarity (of shape, color, function, etc.) or closeness (of material existence, cause/effect, instrument/result, part/whole relations, etc.).

This type of transference is based on resemblance (similarity). A new meaning is a result of associating two objects (phenomena, qualities, etc.) due to their outward similarity.

The noun eye has for one of its meaning ‘hole in the end of a needle’ which developed through transference based on resemblance. Metaphors may be based on different types of similarity, for instance, similarity of shape, position, colour, function, etc.: е. g. the neck of a bottle, the teeth of a saw, to catch an idea, etc.

The noun drop has several meanings: ‘a small particle of water or other liquid’, ‘ear-rings shaped as drops of water’ (e. g. diamond drops), and ‘candy of the same shape’ (e. g. mint drops) both these meanings are also based on resemblance.

Words that denote animals and their actions may be used metaphorically to denote human qualities. Such cases belong to zoosemy, e. g. a fox (“a crafty person”), an ass (“a stupid, foolish, or stubborn person”), to wolf (“to eat greedily”), a cock (“a leader, chief person”), a bear (“a gruff, clumsy, bad-manner person”), etc.

Metaphoric epithets, that denote human qualities, are often applied to inanimate objects: a treacherous calm, cruel heat, a sullen sky, pitiless cold, a virgin soil etc.

This type of transference is based on contiguity. The association is based upon subtle psychological links between different objects and phenomena, sometimes traced and identified with much difficulty. The two objects may be associated together because they often appear in common situations, and so the image of one is easily accompanied by the image of the other.

The simplest case of metonymy is synecdoche. Here the name of a part is applied to the whole or vice versa, e. g. to earn one’s bread; I don’t want to provoke the police (a single policeman is meant), etc. In metonymic epithets certain properties of the whole are ascribed to the part, e. g. threatening eyes (it is the person who is threatening), etc.

Metonymy has several different types: a) the material an object is made of may become the name of the object, e. g. a glass, iron, etc; b) the name of the place may become the name of the people or of an object placed there, e. g. the House – members of Parliament, Fleet Street – bourgeois press, the White House – the Administration of the USA etc; c) names of musical instruments may become names of musicians, e. g. the violin, the saxophone; d) the name of some person may become a common noun, e. g. boycott was originally the name of an Irish family who were so much disliked by their neighbours that they did not mix with them, sandwich was named after Lord Sandwich who was a gambler. He did not want to interrupt his game and had his food brought to him while he was playing cards between two slices of bread not to soil his fingers. e) names of inventors are very often terms to denote things they invented, e. g. watt, om, roentgen, etc f) some geographical names can also become common nouns through metonymy, e. g. holland (linen fabrics), Brussels (a special kind of carpets) , china (porcelain), etc.

Other examples of metonymy include:

The foot of a bed is the place where the feet rest when one lies in the bed, but the foot of a mountain got its name by another association: the foot of a mountain is its lowest part, so that the association here is founded on common position.

By the arms of an arm-chair we mean the place where the arms lie, so that the type of association here is same as in the foot of the bed. The leg of a bed (table…) is a part which serves as a support, the original meaning “the leg of a man or animal”.

The meaning of the adj. sad in Old English was ‘satisfied with food’ (cf. the Ukr. ситий). Later this meaning developed a connotation of a greater intensity of quality and came to mean ‘oversatisfied with food’, having eaten too much. Thus, the meaning of the adj. sad developed a negative evaluative connotation and now described the physical unease and discomfort of a person who has had too much to eat. The next shift of meaning as to transform the description of physical discomfort into one of spiritual discontent because these two states often go together. So the modern meaning of the word ‘sad’ → ‘melancholy’, ‘sorrowful’ was developed.

The scope of transference in metonymy is much more limited than that of metaphor, which is quite understandable: the scope of human imagination that identifies two objects (phenomena, actions) on the grounds of commonness of their innumerable characteristics is boundless while actual relations between objects are more limited.