THE SCOPE OF LEXICOLOGY

LEXICOLOGY
UNIT 1
The word lexicology derives from Greek with lexis meaning word, or the total
stock of words and logos meaning science or theory discourse. Thus, lexicology, a
branch of linguistics, is the study of words.
Lexicology is defined as “the study of lexis , understood as a stock of words in a
given language, i.e. its vocabulary or lexicon” (Jackson & Amvela, 2007)
Lexicology deals with simple words in all their aspects, but also with complex and
compound words, the meaningful units of language.
Four

fields

related

to

lexicology:

Semantics,

morphology,

etymology,

lexicography.
MORPHOLOGY
Morphology is the study of morphemes and their arrangements in forming words.
Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units which may constitute words or parts
of words. They are „smallest‟ or „minimal‟ in the sense that they cannot be broken
down further on the basis of meaning.

the morpheme is “the smallest unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical
function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built.”
(Katamba 2005: 29)
They are „meaningful‟ because we can specify the kind of relationship they have
with the non-linguistic world.
im-, in-, il-, ir- are variants of the same morpheme.
Free morphemes are morphemes that can stand by themselves as single words.
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Ex: open, boy, desire, man, cat, chair, farm, etc.
 lexical morphemes: girl, man, house, tiger, yellow, etc.
 functional morphemes: and, but, when, because, near, etc.
Bound morphemes which are the forms that cannot normally stand alone and are
typically attached to another form.
- Derivational morphemes are bound morphemes to make new words or to
make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.
Derivational affixes" serve to alter the meaning of a word by building on a base,
eg. –s in writes helps to form the present tense form of the verb “to write” or when
it is the predicate of a third person singular subject.
List of derivational morphemes includes suffixes such as –ish, -ly, -ment
List of derivational morphemes includes prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, mis-, co-,
un- Inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes to indicate aspects of the
grammatical function of a word.
There are only eight "inflectional affixes" in English, and these are all suffixes.
English has the following inflectional suffixes, which serve a variety of
grammatical functions when added to specific types of words. These grammatical
functions are shown to the right of each suffix.
•

-s

noun plural: girl – girls; boy – boys; flower – flowers; ...

•

-'s

noun possessive: boy‟s; child‟s; student‟s; ...

•

-s

verb present tense third person singular: eats; sings; works; ...

•

-ing

verb present participle/gerund: eating; singing; working; ...

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•

-ed

verb simple past tense: worked; played; occured; ...

•

-en

verb past perfect participle: eaten; taken; written; ...

•

-er

adjective comparative: colder; older; happier; ...

•

-est

adjective superlative: coldest; oldest; happiest; ...

Inflectional affixes are relational markers that fit words for use in syntax.
English has over sixty common derivational affixes. There are 2 kinds of
derivational affixes.
A root may or may not stand alone as a word. It is not further divisible into smaller
parts that have a meaning.
Root creation refers to the building of a word that has no relationship whatsoever
with any previously existing word.
If roots are equivalent to a word in the language and carry the notional meaning of
this word into all the new words they form, they are considered free roots (eg.

civil in civility, region in regional or person in personify).
A bound root is combined with other morphemes to form a meaningful word
(receive, conceive, perceive, deceive share the same bound root which is –ceive).
They are totally barred from occurring independently.
Any concrete realization of a morpheme in a given utterance is called a „morph‟.
Hence, the forms caf, chair, farm, -ing, -s, and -er are all morphs.
Morphs are the actual forms used to realize morphemes. Ex: cats: 2 morphs (cat +s)
Allomorphs are versions of one morpheme. Ex: -s and –es are two allomorphs of
the same morpheme “plural”
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Complex words: a morpheme root + one or more affixes.
Morphs should not be confused with syllables. The basic difference between the
two is that while morphs are manifestations of morphemes and represent a specific
meaning, syllables are paris of words which are isolated only on the basis of
pronunciation.
Simple words are all free morphemes.
Complex (or derived) words are formed from simpler words by the addition of
affixes or some other kind of morphological modification.
Compound words, or simply compounds, are formed by combining two or more
words (free morphemes) with or without morphological modification, e.g. doorknob, cheeseburger, pound saver, wild-animal-tamer.
The construction of words and parts of words, and the distinction between the
different types of words are all based on morphological analysis.
SEMANTICS
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences.
Pragmatic semantics studies the meaning of utterances in context.
Sentence semantics handles the meaning of sentences as well as meaning relations
between sentences.

Lexical semantics deals with the meaning of words and the meaning relations that
are internal to the vocabulary of a language.
Semantics is usually approached from one of two perspectives: philosophical or
linguistic.

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Philosophical semantics is concerned with the logical properties of language, the
nature of formal theories and the language of logic.
Linguistic semantics involves all aspects of meaning in natural language, from the
meaning of complex utterances in specific contexts to that of individual sounds in
syllables.
 Conceptual meaning covers the basic, essential components of meaning
that are conveyed by the literal use of a word.
 Associative meaning/connotation covers the components of a word. These
components would be part of the conceptual meaning.
 Ex: connotations of the word „needle‟ are pain, illness, blood, drugs, thread
(a very thin fibre) or knitting.
 Semantic features: basic elements in differentiating the meaning of each
word in a language from every other word.
 Ex: child: [+human], [-adult]/[-mature],[ +_male]
 Hen: [+animate], [+bird], [+fowl], [+grown], [+female]
„Acceptability‟ and „meaningfulness‟, belong more to the area of sentence
semantics, are distinct but related concepts.
ETYMOLOGY
Etymology can be defined as the study of the whole history of words, not just their
origin.
Some difficulties faced by etymological studies:

 Some words are not etymologically related to ancient forms.  difficult to
indicate their origin.
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 Some terms can not be specified the exact time they entered the language
 There can be no true or original meaning
Etymology also makes reference to cognates (i.e. words related in form) in other
languages.
For borrowed words:
- Gives the source language, the date when the borrowing took place
- Supplies the previous history of the words
LEXICOGRAPHY
Lexicography has been defined as “A special technique, the writing and
compilation of dictionaries”.
lexicographical compilation may be considered as derived from lexicological
theory (Jackson 1988: 248). It is in this sense that lexicography can be regarded as
‘applied lexicology’.
It also refers to the principles that underlie the process of compiling and editing
dictionaries.
Lexicography is the compilation and writing of dictionaries.
Lexicography refers to a technique, the writing and compilation of dictionaries.
Lexicology is not only the branch of linguistics providing an input to lexicography.
 morphology, syntax and phonology do. Sociolinguistics contributes too.
(language variety, information on style and registers)
Lexicology is only one possible level of language analysis, others being
phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
Lexicology and phonology:
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 Ex: pill and bill, sheep and ship, meat and meal > they differ only in one
sound unit .
 Suprasegmental or prosodic features such as stress can be phonological
difference between words. Ex: ex‟port (v) vs „export (n)
 Stress in compounds also shows the relevance of phonology and lexicology.
Ex: a) compound

b) Noun phrase

blackboard

black board

blackbird

black bird

greyhound

grey hound

White house

white house

Lexicology and syntax:
 Syntax is concerned with the relationships between words in constructions

and the way these words are put together to form sentences.
Q: Are people able to speak or understand the language if they know the meanings
of all the words in a large dictionary?
 If we say someone knows English, it means that they‟ve acquired a set of
rules (the rules of syntax) to produce English sentences, the rules that help
them understand the sentences of another person speaking the language.
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” proposed by Chomsky (1957)
 This sentence is built according to the rules of English syntax but it is
unacceptable on lexical grounds.
Syntax: general (deals with rules and regularities); lexicology: particular (the way
individual words operate and affect other words in the same context)
THE STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH VOCABULARY
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Every word is involved in a network of associations which connect it with other
terms in the language .
These associations  similarity of meaning, purely formal (forms), forms and
meaning
Paradigmatic relations (relations in absentia)
The terms involved consist of a word present in the utterance and others that are
not actually in the same utterance but that are substitutable for it in that context.
Ex: difficult is paradigmatically related with „easy‟, „ funny‟ or „silly‟ in the
expressions such as „an easy question‟, a funny question‟, „a silly question‟
Syntagmatic relations: the words involved are actually co-occurrent items
(relations in praesentia).
„Semantic field‟ or „semantic domain‟ are used alternatively for the terms „lexical
field‟ or „lexical set‟.
A semantic field is a set of words with identifiable semantic affinities.

Ex: The lexical/semantic field of kinship terms: father, mother, brother, sister,
uncle, aunt, etc.
The lexical/ssemantic field of color terms: green, blue, red, black, white, etc.
A lexical field or lexical set can be defined as „a named area of meaning in which
lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways.‟ (Crystal, 1995).
Ex: lexical field of kinship terms: father, mother, son, daughter, cousin, nephew,
etc.
The vocabulary of a language is essentially a dynamic and well-integrated system
of lexemes structured by relationships of meaning.
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/>WORD FAMILIES
Words are grouped into „families‟ on the basis of their morphology, both their
inflections and their derivations.
Words are grouped in fields on the basis of an element of shared meaning.
A family consists of a base form, its possible inflectional forms, and the words
derived from it by prefixation and suffixation.
Bauer and Nation (1993) develop the notion of word families by proposing a set of
levels into which families are divided. The levels are established on a number of
criteria relating to the fequency, productivity, regularity and predictability of the
affixes in English.
Bauer and Nation (1993) establish seven levels of family relationship.
WORD CLASSES
Traditional grammars of English distinguish eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun,
adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
More modern grammarians have elaborated these parts of speech into further
classes. For example, Quirk et al. (1985: 67) distinguish the following:
(a) closed classes: preposition, pronoun, determiner, conjunction, auxiliary verb;

 The closed classes contain the so-called „grammatical‟ or „function‟ words,
which generally serve the grammatical construction of sentences. They are smal!
classes, with a restricted and largely unchanging membership.
(b) open classes: noun, adjective, verb, adverb;

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 The open classes, by contrast, are large, and they are constantly being added to.
The members of the open classes are the „content‟ words, carrying the main
meaning of a sentence; they are the words likely to be retained in a telegram or a
headline.
(c) lesser categories: numeral, interjection;
(d) a small number of words of unique function: the particle not and the infinitive
marker to.
A word may belong to more than one word class.

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