Lexicology: Linguistics and Words
LECTURES ON ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY
INTRODUCTION The book is intended for English language students at Pedagogical Universities taking the course of English lexicology and fully meets the requirements of the programme in the subject. It may also be of interest to all readers, whose command of English is sufficient to enable them to read texts of average difficulty and who would like to gain some information about the vocabulary resources of Modern English (for example, about synonyms and antonyms), about the stylistic peculiarities of English vocabulary, about the complex nature of the word 's meaning and the modern methods of its investigation, about English idioms, about those changes that English vocabulary underwent in its historical development and about some other aspects of English lexicology. One can hardly acquire a perfect command of English without having knowledge of all these things, for a perfect command of a language implies the conscious approach to the language 's resources and at least a partial understanding of the "inner mechanism" which makes the huge language system work. In this book the reader will find the fundamentals of the word theory and of the main problems associated with English vocabulary, its characteristics and subdivisions. The aim of the course is to teach students to be word-conscious, to be able to guess the meaning of words they come across from the meanings of morphemes, to be able to recognise the origin of this or that lexical unit.
Lecture I. Working Definitions of Principal Concepts.
Lexicology is a branch of linguistics, the science of language. The term Lexi c o l o g y is composed of two Greek morphemes: lexis meaning ‘word, phrase’ and logos which denotes ‘learning, a department of knowledge’. Thus, the literal meaning of the term L e x i с o l о g у is ‘the science of the word’. The literal meaning, however, gives only a general notion of the aims and the subject-matter of this branch of linguistic science,
INTRODUCTION The book is intended for English language students at Pedagogical Universities taking the course of English lexicology and fully meets the requirements of the programme in the subject. It may also be of interest to all readers, whose command of English is sufficient to enable them to read texts of average difficulty and who would like to gain some information about the vocabulary resources of Modern English (for example, about synonyms and antonyms), about the stylistic peculiarities of English vocabulary, about the complex nature of the word 's meaning and the modern methods of its investigation, about English idioms, about those changes that English vocabulary underwent in its historical development and about some other aspects of English lexicology. One can hardly acquire a perfect command of English without having knowledge of all these things, for a perfect command of a language implies the conscious approach to the language 's resources and at least a partial understanding of the "inner mechanism" which makes the huge language system work. In this book the reader will find the fundamentals of the word theory and of the main problems associated with English vocabulary, its characteristics and subdivisions. The aim of the course is to teach students to be word-conscious, to be able to guess the meaning of words they come across from the meanings of morphemes, to be able to recognise the origin of this or that lexical unit.
Lecture I. Working Definitions of Principal Concepts.
Lexicology is a branch of linguistics, the science of language. The term Lexi c o l o g y is composed of two Greek morphemes: lexis meaning ‘word, phrase’ and logos which denotes ‘learning, a department of knowledge’. Thus, the literal meaning of the term L e x i с o l о g у is ‘the science of the word’. The literal meaning, however, gives only a general notion of the aims and the subject-matter of this branch of linguistic science,
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