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FOREWORD .....................................................................................................................9
I. LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS ..................................................11
1.1. LEXICOLOGY..............................................................................................................11
1.2. THE WORD ................................................................................................................11
1.2.1. Orthographic words......................................................................................12
1.2.2. Phonological words ......................................................................................12
1.2.3. Words as vocabulary items .........................................................................13
1.2.4. Grammatical words .....................................................................................14
1.3. BRANCHES OF LEXICOLOGY ......................................................................................15
1.4. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEXICOLOGY AND OTHER BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
.........................................................................................................................................15
II. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY..............................................17
2.1. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY...................................17
2.1.1. The Old English period (450-1066).............................................................17
2.1.2. The Middle English period (1066-1500) ....................................................18
2.1.3. The Early Modern English period (1500–1800) ......................................19
2.1.4. The Modern English period (from 1800 onwards)..................................21
2.2. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY ................................................................22
2.2.1. Native words in English...............................................................................22
2.3. BORROWED WORDS IN ENGLISH .............................................................................23
2.3.1. Reasons for borrowing.................................................................................24
2.3.2. Adaptation (nativisation) of loanwords ...................................................26
2.3.3. Direct and indirect borrowing ...................................................................27
2.3.4. Latin words in English.................................................................................27
2.3.5. Scandinavian words in English..................................................................29
2.3.6. Greek words in English................................................................................31
2.3.7. French words in English..............................................................................31
2.3.8. Words from other European languages in English ................................34
2.3.9. Words from non-European languages in English ..................................36
2.3.10. Recent loans in English..............................................................................38
III. WORD FORMATION ...........................................................................................39
3.1. FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES ...............................................................................39
3.2. ROOT ........................................................................................................................40
3.3. AFFIX........................................................................................................................40
3.4. STEM ........................................................................................................................43
3.5. MAIN MEANS OF WORD-FORMATION .......................................................................43
3.5.1. Derivation.......................................................................................................43
3.5.1.1. Prefixation.............................................................................................................43
3.5.1.2. Suffixation ............................................................................................................46
3.5.2. Compounding ................................................................................................50
3.5.2.1. Orthographic characteristics of compounds ....................................................50
3.5.2.2. Phonological characteristics of compounds.....................................................50
3.5.2.3. Morphological characteristics of compounds..................................................51
5
3.5.2.4. Syntactic characteristics of compounds ...........................................................54
3.5.2.5. Semantic characteristics of compounds ...........................................................55
3.5.3. Conversion .....................................................................................................56
3.5.3.1. Nouns obtained by conversion...........................................................................57
3.5.3.2. Adjectives obtained by conversion....................................................................59
3.5.3.3. Verbs obtained by conversion............................................................................59
3.5.3.4. Adverbs obtained by conversion .......................................................................60
3.6. MINOR MEANS OF WORD FORMATION .....................................................................61
3.6.1. Clipping ..........................................................................................................61
3.6.2. Contraction....................................................................................................62
3.6.3. Back-formation.............................................................................................63
3.6.4. Folk etymology..............................................................................................63
3.6.5. Deflection .......................................................................................................64
3.6.6. Change of accent...........................................................................................65
3.6.7. Abbreviation ..................................................................................................65
3.6.8. Alphanumerics..............................................................................................66
3.6.9. Eponyms ........................................................................................................66
3.6.10. Nonce words................................................................................................69
IV. WORD MEANING..................................................................................................70
4.1. SAUSSURE’S APPROACH TO THE LINGUISTIC SIGN ....................................................70
4.2. OGDEN AND RICHARDS’ “SEMIOTIC TRIANGLE” .....................................................71
4.3. BÜHLER’S “ORGANON MODEL”...............................................................................72
4.4. WORD MEANING ......................................................................................................73
4.4.1. Denotation and reference ............................................................................73
4.4.2. Denotation and sense...................................................................................74
4.4.3. Denotation, connotation and markedness ...............................................75
4.5. SENSE RELATIONS BETWEEN WORDS .......................................................................77
4.5.1. Synonymy.......................................................................................................78
4.5.1.1. General characteristics of synonyms .................................................................78
4.5.1.2. Types of synonyms ..............................................................................................79
4.5.1.3. Sources of synonymy...........................................................................................83
4.5.2. Antonymy ......................................................................................................85
4.5.2.1. General characteristics of antonyms .................................................................86
4.5.2.2. Types of antonyms ..............................................................................................87
4.5.3. Hyponymy and meronymy.........................................................................88
4.5.4. Homonymy ....................................................................................................90
4.5.4.1. Types of homonyms ............................................................................................90
4.5.4.2. Sources of homonymy ........................................................................................92
4.6. POLYSEMY ................................................................................................................93
4.7. POLYSEMY AND HOMONYMY ....................................................................................94
4.8. SEMANTIC CHANGE ..................................................................................................96
4.8.1. Causes of semantic change ..........................................................................96
4.8.1.1. Extra-linguistic causes of semantic change ......................................................96
4.8.1.2. Linguistic causes of semantic change ...............................................................97
4.8.2. Results of semantic change .........................................................................98
4.8.2.1. Extension or widening of meaning....................................................................98
4.8.2.2. Narrowing or restriction of meaning................................................................98
4.8.2.3. Degradation of meaning.....................................................................................98
4.8.2.4. Elevation of meaning..........................................................................................99
4.8.3. Transfer of meaning ..................................................................................100
6
4.8.3.1. Metaphor ............................................................................................................100
4.8.3.2. Metonymy ..........................................................................................................101
V. MULTI-WORD UNITS IN ENGLISH ..............................................................103
5.1. COLLOCATIONS .......................................................................................................103
5.1.1. Definition ......................................................................................................103
5.1.2. Characteristics and classification.............................................................104
5.2. IDIOMS ...................................................................................................................113
5.2.1. Definition......................................................................................................113
5.2.2. Characteristics and classification ............................................................114
5.2.3. Pragmatic idioms .......................................................................................123
5.3. MULTIWORD VERBS ...............................................................................................124
5.3.1. Definition ......................................................................................................124
5.3.2. Characteristics and classification ............................................................124
5.4. BINOMINALS ..........................................................................................................126
5.4.1. Definition......................................................................................................126
5.4.2. Characteristics ............................................................................................126
5.5. PROVERBS ..............................................................................................................127
5.5.1. Definition ......................................................................................................127
5.5.2. Characteristics ............................................................................................128
VI. LEXICAL STRATA IN ENGLISH....................................................................129
6.1. DIACHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA ...............................................................................129
6.1.1. Archaisms .....................................................................................................129
6.1.2. Neologisms ...................................................................................................130
6.2. SYNCHRONIC LEXICAL STRATA...............................................................................134
6.2.1. Geographical varieties of English ............................................................134
6.2.2. Ethnic varieties of English ........................................................................139
6.2.3. Social varieties of English .........................................................................142
6.2.3.1. Standard English ...............................................................................................142
6.2.3.2. Slang ...................................................................................................................146
6.2.4. Written and oral varieties of English......................................................149
VII. WORDS IN DICTIONARIES ..........................................................................156
7.1. TYPES OF DICTIONARIES .........................................................................................156
7.2. ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY .......................................................................................158
7.2.1. British lexicography....................................................................................158
7.2.2. American lexicography..............................................................................163
7.3. DICTIONARIES FOR ENGLISH AND ROMANIAN ......................................................165
REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................172
INDEX .............................................................................................................................178
7
FOREWORD
This book developed out of the course in English lexicology that I have
taught at the University of Timişoara over the past few years. Its primary target
audience are students of English (as a foreign language).
The book focuses on main matters concerning the vocabulary of English, is
descriptive in nature and is written in a reader-friendly manner, with both the
specific terminology introduced and the approach to the issues discussed not
exceeding an average level of difficulty. The material is organized in seven chapters
which should, ideally, be read in numerical sequence, but may be consulted in any
other order that the readers find suitable.
It opens with a chapter that focuses on what lexicology is, attempts at
defining its object of study - the word - from various perspectives and briefly talks
about the branches of lexicology and its relationship with other areas of linguistics.
The second chapter provides information about the sources of the English
vocabulary. After a brief look at its evolution - since the fifth century, through the
Middle and the Early Modern stages, on to the Modern period - and at its main
features during these intervals, the focus switches to where the current lexical stock
of English comes from. Native words are discussed alongside words borrowed from
Latin, Greek, French, Scandinavian and other European and non-European
languages. The adaptation of the loan words to the recipient language is also
touched upon.
The overview of the sources of the English vocabulary is completed, in
chapter three, with details about word formation processes that lead to the
enrichment of the language, starting from elements available on its own territory.
The means by which new words come into being – derivation, compounding and
conversion are enlarged upon, but minor ways of word formation such as clipping,
contraction, back-formation, folk-etymology, deflection, change of accent,
abbreviation, etc are also given their fair share of attention.
Chapter four builds on a semantic approach to words. Basic theories of the
linguistic sign – Saussure’s double-sided view of it, Ogden and Richard’s ‘Semiotic
Triangle’ and Bühler’s ‘Organon Model’ – lead the way to the discussion of aspects
connected to denotation, sense, connotation and markedness. A lengthy part of this
chapter is dedicated to sense relations between words – synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy, meronymy, homonymy and polysemy. The details about them are
followed by those about semantic change, extra-linguistic and linguistic causes of
this phenomenon and its results – extension, narrowing, elevation and degradation
of meaning – being the matters under scrutiny. Considerations about the transfer
of meaning based on similarity, whose result is metaphor, and about that based on
contiguity, whose result is metonymy, round off the fourth chapter.
Multi-word lexical units – collocations, idioms, multi-word verbs,
binominals and proverbs – are talked about in chapter five, special emphasis being
laid on their classification and characteristics.
Lexical strata of English are approached in chapter six, from a diachronic
as well as a synchronic perspective. Archaisms and neologisms are examined to
illustrate the diachronic perspective, while geographical, ethnic, social, written and
oral varieties are enlarged upon from a synchronic one. Thus, the way English
9
Words about Words
varies according to the part of the world where it is used is discussed in terms of
Kachru’s theory of inner, outer and expanding circles. Inner circle varieties of
English are exemplified by describing the most obvious features of American
English, outer circle varieties are illustrated by speaking about Indian English,
while varieties belonging to the expanding circle are tackled with reference to
English used in Romania as the most important foreign language, to the effects its
having this status has had on Romanian itself and to the adaptation of the English
loan words to our language. The approach of lexical strata of English from an
ethnic viewpoint prompted the discussion, in short, of African American
Vernacular English and of Chicano English, while viewing the matter from a social
angle brought forward details about Standard English and slang. Some remarks on
written and spoken English, with an emphasis on how electronic communication
has influenced the once clearly cut distinction between the two, close chapter six.
The last chapter of this book is dedicated to lexicography. After types of
dictionaries are introduced, the history of their making in Britain and America is
focused on, special attention being paid to landmark English monolingual
lexicographic works printed here. In the last part, general bilingual (English –
Romanian and Romanian – English) dictionaries and dictionaries for specific
lexical elements are brought to the fore. In order to illustrate the evolution of the
former, a comparison is drawn between two editions of (initially) the same general
dictionary, printed half a century apart, while two dictionaries of collocations are
referred to in more detail so as to demonstrate the usefulness of such instruments
not only for learners of English as a foreign language, but also for translators and
various categories of linguists.
The author’s hope is that the topics covered in the seven chapters of this
introductory course will arouse its readers’ interest in lexicology matters, will stir
their curiosity to find out more in the field, and, ultimately, will equip them with
information that may help them use English not only correctly, but also creatively.
Loredana Frăţilă
10
I. LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS
1.1. Lexicology
As its name shows (the term lexicology comes from the combination
of the Greek words lexis, meaning “word” and logos, meaning “science”),
lexicology is, broadly speaking, the science of words. Starting from this very
simple definition, attempts have been made at providing others, enlarging
upon various aspects connected either with its “word” part or with its
“science” part. Thus, some of the definitions of lexicology found in general
dictionaries of English include the following:
• “… the study of the form, meaning and behaviour of words” (The
New Oxford Dictionary of English, 2005);
• “… a branch of linguistics concerned with the signification and
application of words” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,
2003);
• “… the branch of linguistics that deals with the lexical component
of language” (American Heritage College Dictionary, 2002).
Numerous linguists have also provided definitions of lexicology in
their books. For Bejan and Asandei (1981: 110), lexicology is “the part of
linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of
words as the main units of language.” Mc Arthur (1992: 5) defines
lexicology as “an area of language study concerned with the nature,
meaning, history and use of words and word elements and often also with
the critical description of lexicography”, while Jackson and Amvela (2007)
suggest that it represents “the study of lexis, understood as the stock of
words in a given language, i.e. its vocabulary or lexicon (from Greek lexis,
“word”, lexikos “of / for words”)”.
Once we have seen that there is general agreement upon the fact
that words represent the object of study of lexicology, it would be useful to
answer the question of what words themselves are.
Unlike lexicology, the word has not been given very clear definitions,
the lack of clarity being due to the multitude of angles from which it has
been approached. Things have got more and more complicated since
Bloomfield suggested in 1926 that the word is “a minimum free form”,
meaning that it is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used
independently to convey meaning. For example, child is a word that cannot
be divided into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand
alone; if we contrast it with the word childish, we notice that the latter is
11
Words about Words
made up of the independent meaningful word child and the particle –ish,
which no speaker of English recognizes as capable of conveying some
meaning when used in isolation (though, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, it means something like ”having the qualities of”).
One of the endeavors to shed some light upon what is understood by
a word belongs to Katamba (2005), who bases his explanations on
recognizing a number of different senses in which the term “word” may be
used. Before proceeding with the explanations proper, he usefully
introduces the term “word-form”, “the physical form which realizes or
represents a word in speech or writing” (Katamba 2005: 11).
12
Lexicology – The Science of Words
each other, they come in a torrent, they overlap. Yet, even if individual
words do not stand out discretely in the flow of speech, separated by a
pause that could be equated to a space in writing, speakers are able to
identify them. There are hundreds of pages written on speech recognition
but, for the purpose of this book, it will suffice to say that the process of the
identification of a spoken word begins with the phonetic stage, when the
listener hears a number of noises. S he then goes through the phonological
stage, when s/he identifies what sound a particular noise represents and
then, on the basis of his / her linguistic competence (s he is unlikely to be
conscious of), the relevance of the sounds uttered for the actual context in
which they are produced and the syntactic-semantic environment of those
sounds, s he is able to instantaneously retrieve a word with the appropriate
meaning from the tens of thousands of vocabulary items stored in his / her
mental lexicon.
13
Words about Words
we notice that the verb pay is realized by the same word-form, namely
“paid” in both sentences, although in sentence (1), “paid”, as a grammatical
word, indicates that the action took place at a definite moment in the past,
while, in sentence (2), it indicates that the action has been completed
recently. In sentence (1), “paid” is described grammatically as the past tense
of the verb “pay”, in sentence (2), it is described as the past participle of the
same verb.
Syncretism does not characterize verbs only. It may be the attribute
of other word classes as well. Sentences (3) and (4) below illustrate the
phenomenon of syncretism in the case of nouns:
14
Lexicology – The Science of Words
15
Words about Words
16
II. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY
The first Old English (OE) manuscripts were nothing more than a
few inscriptions, unable to offer much information about the characteristics
of the language, brought by the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and the sixth
centuries. Only after the arrival of the Christian missionaries from Rome
(587), did the literary age modestly begin, with a number of glossaries of
words from Latin and their translation in OE, and a few inscriptions and
poems. The most important literary work that survived from this period is
the heroic poem Beowulf, written around the year 1000. Together with it, a
number of shorter poems, some with Christian topics, others reflecting
Germanic traditions, have been preserved.
Although a greater number of OE texts were written after 900, when
many Latin texts were translated, including Bede’s (731) Ecclesiastical
History, the corpus of such texts remains reduced. As Crystal (1995: 10)
points out, “the number of words in the corpus of OE compiled at the
University of Toronto, which contains all the texts, is only 3.5 million – the
equivalent of about 30 medium-sized novels”.
The alphabet used in these writings resembles the one still in use
today quite closely. Major dissimilarities are the absence of capital letters in
OE, the different shapes of a few letters and the inexistence of the letters j,
v, f, q, x and z in the older times. The spelling of OE was rather inconsistent,
with variations within the same text and even on the same page of a
manuscript.
OE is characterized by the frequent use of coinages, known as
“kennings”, a terms from Old Norse used to describe colourful figurative
descriptions often involving compounds. Sometimes, the meaning of
kennings is transparent, but there are cases when it is rather obscure and
its interpretation is not a straightforward endeavour. Famous kennings
include hronrad, “whale-road” for the sea, banhus, “bone-house” for the
body. Often, phrases and compound words are used as kennings. “God” is,
for example, described as heonfonrinces weard, i.e. “guardian of heaven’s
kingdom” or as moncynnes weard, i.e. “guardian of mankind”.
17
Words about Words
Latin OE
praepositio foresetnys
conjunction gedeodnys
unicornis anhorn
aspergere onstregdan
18
Sources of the English Vocabulary
the newly centralized monarchy. Having been written in Latin and French,
these are of a lesser documentary value for the evolution of English (the
only English data that can be selected refer to personal and place names).
Materials in English started to appear beginning with the thirteenth century
and increased in number in the next one hundred years, under the form of
translations of Latin and French texts and textbooks for teaching these
languages. Beginning with the fourteenth century, ME enriched under the
influence of the literary works written by authors such as John Gower, John
Wycliff, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland. It is this body of literature, in
the modern sense of the word, that bridged the transition from MidE to
Modern English.
Like in OE, spelling in MidE was quite diverse. Variation even
within the same text continued to be a feature of the language for some
time: variants of neuer, “never”, such as naure, noeure, ner, neure could be
found within the same text. However, the more the period progressed, the
more spelling changed to approximate that of Modern English.
Unlike OE, MidE is characterized by intensive and extensive
borrowing from other languages (in particular, the Norman Conquest, in
1066, paved the way for massive borrowing from French into the English
vocabulary). Loan words that entered English affected the balance of the
vocabulary in such a way that, while in early MidE, 90% of the words were
of Anglo-Saxon origin, at the end of the period, the native stock decreased
to 75%. However, loan words were by no means the only source that led to
the enrichment of the English vocabulary. Word formation processes, such
as affixation and compounding, already established in OE, continued to be
active and were extended in various ways.
19
Words about Words
20
Sources of the English Vocabulary
21
Words about Words
form of borrowings from the former into the latter. It is true though, that
British English and these other languages have also input words to
American English. This two-way transfer of words is due to the
improvement of the communication systems and the development of the
mass media beginning with the twentieth century, to the USA’s enhanced
involvement into the world affairs and to the opening of various countries
to the American culture.
Thirdly, a number of “new Englishes” have developed during the
modern period in the colonial area, as a result of the adaptation of British
English to the regional linguistic and cultural needs of the speakers in
countries such as India, the Philippines, Singapore, Cameroon, Ghana or
Nigeria. The part of the language in which the peculiarities of these new
varieties of English are best identifiable is vocabulary.
In addition to the geographical varieties of English, those based on
subject matter have also known an accelerated development in the ME
period. Of these, some, such as the language of computers or that of
telecommunication and business are relatively new, other such as the legal
and religious varieties originate in earlier periods.
22
Sources of the English Vocabulary
and adverbs. Native words denote, according to Crystal (1995: 124) parts of
the body (arm, bone, chest, ear, eye, foot, hand, heart), the natural
landscape (field, hedge, hill, land, meadow, wood), objects connected to
domestic life (door, floor, house), members of the family (mother, father)
divisions of the calendar (day, month, moon, sun, year), animals (cow,
dog, fish, goat, hen, sheep, swine), natural phenomena (rain), common
properties (black, dark, good, long, white, wide) and actions (do, eat, fly,
go, help, kiss, live, life, love, say, see, sell, send, think).
The words that arrived with the Germanic invaders and are still
used in modern English are usually short. According to Crystal (1995: 18),
the most frequent two hundred words, both in British (BrE) and in
American English (AmE), are monosyllabic. There are a few two-syllable
words (40 in AmE and 24 in BrE) and a handful of trisyllabic forms (3 in
AmE and 2 in BrE) which have a concrete meaning and a great word-
forming power. There is only one four-syllable item in AmE, the word
American itself, while, in BrE, there is none.
Native words are also concrete and have a great word-forming
power. They tend to be preferred in everyday speech due to their being
vague enough to convey many shades of meaning, as opposed to borrowed
words, which are more precise and concrete and less easy to handle.
Furthermore, as Jackson and Amvela (2007: 54) point out, native English
words “are considered more human and emotional, whereas many
polysyllabic loans from Greek, Latin or the Romance languages are
considered cold and formal. For example, in an informal everyday situation,
when faced with the choice between initiate, commence and start, or
between nourishment, nutrition and food, most people would opt for the
short, Anglo-Saxon word. In formal situations, however, it may seem more
appropriate to allude to a nauseating odour or even an obnoxious
effluvium rather than a nasty smell”.
23
Words about Words
24
Sources of the English Vocabulary
Latin and Greek words was found to be the solution for the improvement of
a prosaic language that lacked the sophisticated metrical resources and
poetic devices that the classical languages boasted of. One of those who
shared this concern was Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in his The Governor, a
book meant for training the gentlemen who were going to be employed at
court, enthusiastically introduced Latin and Greek words in order to
improve English. Some such words are: devulgate, describe, attempate,
education, dedicate, esteme. Others followed in his footsteps so that words
from the classical languages flooded in: commemorate, invidious,
frequency, expectation, thermometer, affable (Baugh and Cable 2002: 214-
215, quoted by Katamba 2005: 140).
Not all borrowings were from Latin or Greek in the Middle Ages.
Arabic was, for example, another rich source of words that passed into
English during this period, especially in the field of science and the Islamic
religion. Examples for the former category include alchemy, alcohol,
alembic, algebra, alkali, zenith, zero, while the latter category may be
illustrated with words such as Koran, imam, caliph, muezzin, mullah,
Ramadan, etc. Many of these have made their way into English via French,
which borrowed them itself from Spanish, a very important carrier of the
Arabic science and culture to Europe, since Spain was occupied by the
Moors.
For centuries, French was the language of politics, protocol,
diplomacy, the government and the military. Hence, a large amount of
words in these semantic fields that are used in English originate in French.
Katamba (2002: 141) provides the following examples to support this
statement:
25
Words about Words
English to describe all of the above, but importing the object together with
its name has proved a simpler and more appropriate solution.
The same way out was resorted to in situations when English had a
word or phrase to refer to a particular person, object, phenomenon or
abstraction, but this was considered insufficiently appropriate to render all
the features of its referent. This is how French words such as chic, flair,
esprit de corps, naïve, blasé or ménage a trois have been borrowed into
English. Any speaker of English would agree that the loan translations “a
feeling of loyalty that exists between the members of a group” for esprit de
corps or “a household with three partners” for ménage a trois lack the
flavoured connotation of the French phrases and do not quite “roll off the
tongue” (Katamba 2002: 142).
Last but not least, some of the English euphemisms are borrowed
lexical items. In their case, it seems that less embarrassment is caused when
awkward things are said using words from a foreign language. Decency lies
behind the use of the euphemistic words pudenda and genitalia, of Latin
origin, and it is also the rationale behind the importation of several words
used to talk discreetly about shady sexual activities and the participants in
them. Maison de randezvous and madame from French and gigolo and
bordello from Italian are illustrative of the latter.
The foreign words that are borrowed into English may undergo
changes under the influence of the recipient language or they may survive
in their original form. In the former case, depending on the degree to which
they change, we speak about completely and, respectively, partially
assimilated loan words. In the latter case, we speak about unassimilated
loans.
Completely assimilated loans have become fully integrated in the
system of English from an orthographic, phonetic and morphological point
of view, so that someone who is not particularly knowledgeable in the field
of etymology can no longer distinguish them from indigenous English
words. Many of the French loanwords are included in this category: animal,
aunt, chair, change, colour, cost, dinner, escape, flower, poor, table, etc.
On the other hand, completely unassimilated loans have preserved
all the characteristics they had in the language of origin. English has not
exerted any influence either on their spelling or on their pronunciation and
morphological peculiarities. If the recognition of the examples just quoted
as originally French words is problematic, no speaker of English would find
it difficult to identify words and phrases such as auberge, gendarme,
mistral, maitre d’hotel, mauvais sujet, facon de parler as being French
imports into English.
In between the completely assimilated and the fully unassimilated
loans, there are those which are not totally foreign but not totally Anglicised
26
Sources of the English Vocabulary
either. “Even after a long period of use in English, some words fail to
become fully adopted. Instead, they remain on the fringes, as tolerated
aliens with one foot in and one foot out of the English lexicon”(Katamba
2002: 145). Loanwords that have preserved their original grammatical
characteristics or spelling but have adapted to the English pronunciation –
Lat. radius-radii, bacterium – bacteria, Fr. reveille (pronounced /rivæli/
in English) - are such aliens.
27
Words about Words
hundred words passed from Latin into English during the entire period. As
Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain, this is a relatively small number if
compared with that of the Latin lexical items borrowed at later times.
Furthermore, many of the words borrowed from Latin in the OE period
were not widely employed and some of them fell out of use quite soon.
Some, however, were borrowed again later, sometimes with a slightly
different meaning. Modern English sign and giant seem not to be survivors
from the OE Latin loans sign and gigant, but rather recent borrowings from
French, where their original form is signe and geant.
Borrowings from Latin in the OE period are frequently split into two
categories in terms of register: popular and learned (Pyles, Algeo 1993:
288). The former, such as wine, plant, cat, street, were transmitted orally
and are part of the everyday vocabulary used in non-specialized
communication. The latter, such as clerk, demon, martyr, came into
English either through the church or through various classical written
sources which increased in number especially after 1000, “owing to
renewed interest in learning encouraged by King Alfred and the tenth
century Benedictine monastic revival” (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 40).
In the Middle English period, it was French that was the most
productive source of loan words into English. Though outnumbered by
French loans, Latin ones kept entering English. The latter belonged to fields
such as religion: mediator, redeemer, collect (short prayer); law: client,
conviction, subpoena; the sciences: dissolve, equal, essence, medicine,
mercury, quadrant; scholastic activities: library, simile, scribe. Seen from
a morphological perspective, the great majority of the words borrowed from
Latin in the Middle English period were nouns: meditation, prolixity;
adjectives: complete, imaginary, instant, populous; and verbs: admit,
commit, discuss, seclude.
A distinctive feature of Modern English is rooted in the process of
simultaneous borrowing from French and from Latin characteristic of the
time span under discussion: sets of three lexical items, all expressing the
same fundamental notion, but slightly differing in meaning or connotation.
Kingly – royal – regal; rise – mount – ascend; fast – firm – secure; holy –
sacred – consecrated are examples of such triplets. In these synonymic
series, the first element is a native word and it belongs to the common
language, the second is borrowed from French and it pertains to the literary
language, and the third comes from Latin and is considered more learned.
Borrowing from Latin continued into the Modern English period
(when words were borrowed from Greek via Latin, too). The avalanche of
Latin words that entered English between 1500 and 1800 includes:
abdomen, area, digress, editor, fictitious, folio, graduate, imitate, lapse,
medium, notorious, orbit, peninsula, quota, resuscitate, sinecure, urban,
vindicate (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 41).
The later Modern period was the time when English fashioned the
loans from Latin in an original way, under the form of neo-classical or neo-
28
Sources of the English Vocabulary
Latin words which are, at present, used not only in the international
vocabulary of science and technology, but also in other areas of modern life.
Examples of such coinages offered by Jackson and Amvela (2007: 41) are:
aleatoric meaning “dependent on chance” (from the Latin aleator meaning
“gambler”), circadian, meaning “functioning or recurring in 24-hour
cycles” (from circa diem, “around the day”), pax americana meaning
“peace enforced by American power” (modeled on pax romana),
vexillology, “study of flags” (from the Latin vexilum meaning “flag”).
29
Words about Words
ON dike OE ditch
hale whole
raise rise
sick ill
skill craft
skirt shirt
30
Sources of the English Vocabulary
The most far-reaching contact that English has had through the ages
has been with French. Undoubtedly, it was the period following the Norman
Conquest in 1066 that witnessed the greatest impact that French had ever
exerted over English. However, borrowing from French took place in an
anterior epoch and has been an active phenomenon in the modern times as
well.
Before 1066, the English and the French cultures got into contact
with the exile of Edward the Confessor to Normandy. Edward lived there
31
Words about Words
for twenty-five years and returned to England in 1041. Many of the French
nobles who accompanied him on his return were given high positions in
court when he acceded to the throne. Furthermore, the monastic revival
started in France and many of the English monks must have studied there.
The consequence of these upon the English language was that a number of
French words were imported into OE (though not very many). Among
them, there were: servian (“to serve”), bacun (“bacon”), arblast
(“weapon”), prison (“prison”), castel (“castle”), cancelere (“chancellor”).
Following William, Duke of Normandy’s accession to the English
throne, in 1066, French became the language of the government, the courts,
the church and the upper social classes. However, the lower classes of the
English society, which represented about 80% of the population, never
learned French. They continued to speak English which thus remained a
vibrant, though low-status language. In between the two ends of the social
scale, there used to be the middle echelons of the “lower level officials of
both church and state [who] needed to speak to the people in order to try to
save their souls, to exact taxes from them, to administer justice to them, to
make them work in the fields of the monastery or in the lord of the manor’s
household and so on” (Katamba 2005: 152). This relatively small group of
people were bilingual.
With the advance of the period, the situation changed. Many of the
nobles had properties both in Normandy and in England and had split
loyalties so that, in many cases, they were closer to France and the French
culture than to England and its culture. The Norman kings remained dukes
of Normandy and some of them were present in France for longer than they
were in England. Through marriage and conquest, their French possessions
expanded so much that Henry II (1154 – 1189), for example, was not only
king of England, but had become the ruler of almost two thirds of France.
However, gradually, through intermarriage and closer and closer contact,
the Normans were integrated into the English society.
For the upper classes, this resulted into their having learnt some
English, which however, they were able to use only within limits in the
beginning, and mostly in code-switching contexts.
Most of the borrowing took place after the middle of the thirteenth
century, “after French had been knocked off its perch as the most
prestigious language in everyday use in high places and had increasingly
become a written language” (Katamba 2005: 153). About 10,000 French
words made their way into English in The Middle Ages, most of them in the
area of government: president, government, minister, territory, counselor,
council, people, power; nobility: sovereign, royal, monarch, duke, prince,
count, princess, principality, baron, baroness, noble; law: assizes, judge,
jurisdiction, advocate, jury, court, law, prison, crime, accuse; war: “peace”,
“battle”, admiral, captain, lieutenant.
In the period 1200 – 1500, further steps towards reviving the
fortunes of English were recorded. Not least among them was King John’s
32
Sources of the English Vocabulary
loss of Normandy in 1204. Yet, it was the Hundred Year War between
England and France, which began in 1337, that put an end to the linguistic
hegemony of French. The ruling classes were forced to take on the task of
learning and using English properly, as a consequence of giving up their
French interests and becoming truly English having been imposed on them.
The adoption of French words that followed the Norman Conquest
continued unabated in contemporary English. The reasons behind this
phenomenon are talked about by Chirol (1973), quoted by Katamba (2005).
She suggests that using French projects upon the speaker or upon the
matter or object talked about a “positive image of France” (Katamba 2005:
155). In broad lines, this image is that “of the French way of life, of high
culture, sophistication in dress, food and social relations” (Katamba 2005:
155).
The French contribution to civilization as a whole is widely known
and acknowledged. France is perceived as the land of the arts – of
literature, music architecture, ballet, painting and sculpture. Therefore, it is
natural that many of the technical terms used in the vocabulary of arts
should be French. Examples of such terms in English include, in literature:
ballade, brochure, genre, denouement, résumé, dada, faux amis, pastiche;
in painting: critique, avant garde, art nouveau, collage, baroque,
renaissance, salon; in music: rêverie, ensemble, bâton, musique, concrete,
conservatoire, suite, pot-pourri; in ballet: ballet, pirouette, gavotte, pas de
deux, plié, tutu, jeté, etc.
Society, refinement and fashionable living are also believed to be
domains in which the French occupied a leading position. Hence, the
borrowing of words and phrases such as the following, which enabled
English speakers to take on the elegance of French: finesse, bizarre, tête-à-
tête, rendez-vous, élite, protégé(e), savoire-vivre, personnel, fiancé(e),
débutante, prestige, nouveau riche, élan, blasé, chauffeur, facile, c’est la
vie, touché, etc.
“Victorian values encourage the hypocritical ‘No-sex-please-we’re-
British’ mentality. Figures in public life in Britain are hounded out of office
and governments may collapse because of sexual peccadilloes. Probably this
is why there is a secret admiration for the French who do not have such
hang-ups about sex. The British admire the sexual prowess of the French –
or, more precisely, the French attitude to sex”, Katamba says (2005: 157).
This must be the reason for the borrowing of quite numerous words of
French origin connected to love and sexual life. Among these, there are:
amour, beau, belle, chaperon, liaison, affaire de Coeur, madame, etc.
The French have always been renowned for their cuisine, so, many
French words having to do with food and cooking have also been borrowed
along the ages. Some were anglicized, others preserved their original form.
On the menu, the latter “always add to the quality of the gastronomic
experience and are deemed to be worth an extra pound or two on the bill”
(Katamba 2005: 157). The “cuisine” French words and phrases that have
33
Words about Words
been imported into English count among them examples such as: mustard,
vinegar, beef, sauce, salad, cuisine, haricot, pastry, omelette, meringue,
haricot, cognac, crème caramel, pâtisserie, liqueur, éclair, flan, nougat,
glacé, sauté, flambé, garni, brasserie, à la carte, entrée, rôtisserie, hors-
d’oeuvre, etc.
French fashion has also been held in high esteem for centuries.
Therefore, the list of loans from French includes words in the area of
clothes, hair, cosmetics, etc, such as: coiffure, blonde, brunette, lingerie,
bouquet, béret, chic, boutique, haute couture, après-ski, culottes, brassière.
Some fashionable means of transportation get their names from
French as well: coupé, cabriolet.
34
Sources of the English Vocabulary
35
Words about Words
36
Sources of the English Vocabulary
philology, articles of dress and various other domains have also been
imported. Katamba (2005: 161) reproduces Rao’s (1954) table to
demonstrate the diversity and wealth of the Indian loan words:
37
Words about Words
38
III. WORD FORMATION
39
Words about Words
3.2. Root
The root is, Tătaru (2002: 22) says, “the necessary and sufficient
structural constituent for a word to exist”, the part common to all the words
in a word family (“the whole series of words and word-substitutes obtained
from one root by all possible word-forming mechanisms” (Tătaru 2002:
38)), which is not further divisible into smaller parts that have a meaning
(eg. care in the words careful, careless, carelessness, caring). 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). If, on the other
hand, they are totally barred from occurring independently, they are
considered bound roots (eg. sanct in sanctify, tox in toxic or loc in local).
3.3. Affix
The bound morphemes that are appended to the root are called
affixes. Depending on their position to the root, affixes may be prefixes,
if they are added before the root, suffixes, if they are added after the root
and infixes, if they are added somewhere within the root (modern English
has no infixes in its regular vocabulary; however, they may be employed in
expressive language such as absobloominglutely used by Alan Jay Lerner in
My Fair Lady and quoted by Adams (1973: 8) or cuck-BLOODY-oo, the way
the cuckoo sounds for Dylan Thomas (1940)).
Affixes may be derivational or inflectional, also called
functional. The former, which will be discussed in more details in what
follows, help to form completely new words (eg. –ful in beautiful or un- in
unimportant), while the latter, which Jackson and Amvela (2007) call
“relational markers”, help to build new grammatical forms of the same
basic word, according to the syntactic environment in which this word is
used (eg. –s in writes helps to form the present tense form of the verb “to
write”, when it is the predicate of a third person singular subject; -ed in -
loved is used for the formation of the past and past participle of “to love”,
while –er in cleverer is added to change the positive degree of the adjective
“clever” into its comparative of superiority; however, in all the previous
examples, the notional content of the root words remains unaltered).
Inflectional affixes are characterized by a number of features, the
most important of these being the fact that “they lend themselves to
paradigms which apply to the language as a whole. The paradigm of a major
word class consists of a single stem of that class with the inflectional
suffixes which the stem may take. The paradigm may be used as a suitable
way of defining the word class in the sense that, if a word belongs to that
40
Word Formation
class, it must take at least some of the suffixes characteristic of that set as
opposed to suffixes characterizing other paradigms” (Jackson, Amvela
2007: 84). The inflectional affixes of nouns, adjectives and verbs are
illustrated in a tabular form by Cook (1969: 122-3) as it is shown below.
Nouns display the following inflectional contrasts:
Verbs (except the verb to be and the modals) show the following
inflectional contrasts:
For some verbs, including the regular ones, the five-parts paradigm
has only four elements, since the past and past participle inflectional affixes
have the same form. However, since they confer the stem they are added to
different morphological characteristics, they should be considered different
morphemes with identical forms (homonyms).
Pronouns are a class of function words which do not add inflectional
affixes. Their forms fit the noun inflectional paradigm, as Jackson and
Amvela (2007) show:
41
Words about Words
can could
may might
shall should
will would
must
42
Word Formation
3.4. Stem
When affixes are stripped away from the word, what we obtain is the
stem or, conversely, the stem is the part of the word to which an affix is
added in order to form a new word (eg. in the word carelessness, care is the
root, -less and –ness are affixes, and careless is the stem).
A stem may coincide with the root of the new word (eg. small in
smaller). In this case, it is called a simple stem. If it contains other
elements as well, affixes or other simple stems in combination with which a
compound word is formed, it is considered a derived stem (eg. im-
probable in improbability or air-condition in air-conditioning).
3.5.1. Derivation
3.5.1.1. Prefixation
43
Words about Words
44
Word Formation
45
Words about Words
3.5.1.2. Suffixation
46
Word Formation
class of the elements to which they are appended, suffixes do. Therefore, the
handiest classification of suffixes would not follow semantic criteria, but
rather grammatical ones. According to the part of speech they generate,
suffixes fall into the subclasses below:
• nominal suffixes – nouns may be formed from other nouns,
from adjectives or verbs:
a1) suffixes denoting the doer of the action:
- -er (generally, it forms names of occupations from the
corresponding verbs): driver, teacher, singer, advisor;
- -ster: gangster;
- -eer / -ier: profiteer, pamphleteer, gondolier;
- -ist: typist, artist;
- -ent / -ant: student, attendant.
a2) feminine suffixes (in English, gender morphological markers are
quite rare; however, there are cases when the feminine is formed
from the masculine of nouns by means of suffixes):
- -ette: usherette;
- -ess: lioness, duchess, actress;
- -ix: aviatrix;
- -euse: chauffeuse.
a3) suffixes denoting nationality:
- -ese: Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese;
- -an / -ian: Korean, Hungarian, Estonian;
- - ard: Spaniard.
a4) diminutive suffixes:
- -ette: kitcinette;
- -let: booklet;
- -y / -ie: daddy, auntie.
a5) abstract noun-forming suffixes:
- -ing: breaking, reading, asking;
- -age: coverage, mileage, tonnage;
- -ance -ence: appearance, assistance, experience;
- -ism / -icism: criticism, Catholicism, post-modernism,
deconstructivism;
- -hood: boyhood, neighbourhood, childhood;
- -dom: freedom, martyrdom;
- -ment: nourishment;
- -ness / -ess: happiness, tenderness, prowess;
- -ty: certainty, honesty;
- -ship: kinship, friendship, leadership.
• adjectival suffixes – adjectives may be formed from other
adjectives, from nouns or from verbs. The most frequent of the
adjectival suffixes in English are the following:
- -ish: tallish, foolish, greenish, Turkish;
47
Words about Words
48
Word Formation
49
Words about Words
3.5.2. Compounding
Bloomfield (1973), Cook (1969) and Arnold (1966) are some of the
linguists who pointed out the importance of the phonic criterion of stress in
the case of compounds. Compounds usually have one main stress as any
other simple words, and lack juncture. Based on this criterion which,
according to Hulban (1975), shows the advanced level of the process of
integration of the two stems, it is possible to distinguish between
compounds such as ΄bluebell and ΄blackboard and their corresponding
phrases blue bell and black bird which have two heavy stresses and a
juncture. However helpful the phonological criterion may be in establishing
the difference between compounds and mere combinations of free lexemes,
it does not always clearly set the boundaries between the two. ΄All ΄Fools’
Day and ʹAll ʹSaints’ Day are compounds which contradict the above
mentioned rule.
50
Word Formation
51
Words about Words
such nouns include: box end wrench, heart-lung machine, bird’s eye view,
etc.
- verbal noun + noun: meeting place, writing desk, fishing rod;
- noun + verbal noun: air-conditioning, sleepwalking;
- adjective + noun. Several cases can be identified here:
o adjective proper + noun: blackbird, highlands, bluebell;
o participial adjective ending in -ing + noun: peeping Tom,
blotting paper, boarding card;
o participial adjective ending in past participle specific
endings + noun: built environment, bonded warehouse,
wrought iron.
- pronoun + noun. Generally speaking, these compounds help to
distinguish the masculine and the feminine from the common
gender: she-wolf, he-doctor;
- verb + noun: pickpocket, dare-devil;
- noun + verb. The verbal stem may take either the form of an
infinitive or that of an -ing participle: sunset, rainfall, body-
building, bird-watching, sight-seeing;
- verb + verb. Sometimes, the verbal stems are linked by
conjunctions: makeshift, make-believe, park-and-ride, pick-and-
mix, hit-and-run;
- adverb + noun: after-thought, back-talk, down-grade, yes-man,
outer space;
- adverb + verb: upkeep, upstart;
- verb + adverb: cut-back, turn-round;
- preposition + noun: afternoon, underworld;
- preposition + verb: undergraduate.
The compounds made up of more than two elements mostly belong
to the nominal class in English. These have a rather irregular structure and
include words such as: stick-in-the mud, rule-of-thumb, good-for-nothing,
mother-in-law, forget-me-not, merry-go-round, much-talked, about, all-
too-accurate, etc.
• compound adjectives:
- adjective + adjective: metallic-green, bitter-sweet;
- noun + adjective: duty-free, sea-sick, earth-bound. The linguistic
model of the comparative of equality (as…as) lies at the basis of the
stylistic device of simile as well. Some similies that have become
clichés due to overuse have also turned into compound adjectives:
pitch-dark, snow-white, blood-red, sea-green. As Tătaru (2002)
observes, the denominal stem self- also generates compound
adjectives, generally with an adjective of participial origin: self-
governing, self-effacing, self-educated, self-sustained, self-made,
self-controlled;
- adjective + noun + -ed: light-hearted, hot-blooded, evil-minded;
- noun + verb (participle): ocean-going, love-struck, storm-beaten;
52
Word Formation
53
Words about Words
54
Word Formation
order, objects usually follow their verbs in sentence structure, but not
necessarily in compounds such as knee-jerk.
According to Jackson and Amvela (2007: 93), “all compounds are
non-interruptible in the sense that, in normal use, their constituent parts
are not interrupted by extraneous elements“. The example they give to
illustrate this point is that of the compound dare-devil, in which, if the
article “the” is inserted, the stability of the whole structure is affected to
such an extent that the resulting string of words dare-the-devil is turned
into a phrase and can no longer be considered a compound.
The special type of modification and inflectibility that apply in the
case of compounds also help to set them apart from phrases. Modification
refers to the use of other words to modify the meaning of a compound.
Since the compound is a single unit, its components cannot be modified
independently. It is the compound as a whole which is modified by other
words. For instance, air-sick may not be modified either as hot air-sick,
with the component air being determined by the adjective hot, or as air-
very sick, with the component sick being determined by the adverb very.
However, a construction such as seriously air-sick is possible, with the
adverb seriously modifying the whole compound.
In terms of flexibility, as a lexical unit, a compound may be inflected
according to the grammatical class it corresponds to, while its constituents
cannot be inflected each in its turn. Thus, the compound nouns ash-tray,
fingerprint, textbook, dish-washer form the plural by adding a final –s to
the whole compound: ash-trays, fingerprints, textbooks, dish-washers.
Downgrade, sweet-talk, baby-sit as compound verbs become downgraded,
sweet-talked, baby-sat in the past tense.
55
Words about Words
3.5.3. Conversion
56
Word Formation
typical of the new part of speech that has been generated, which is not the
case with lexical polysemy. Hence, the necessity of analyzing the semantic
ties obtained between the converted item and its original, in order to
capture the essence of the phenomenon” (Tătaru 2002: 79). The most
frequent cases of conversion involve nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
The parts of speech that are most frequently converted into nouns
are adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.
• nouns converted from adjectives:
Since there is a great variety of adjectives in English, the nouns
obtained from them are very numerous and they present various
types of semantic relationships with their originals, thus making the
subclass they belong to highly diversified. Some of the types of de-
adjectival nouns are the following:
- collective nouns obtained from adjectives by definite articulation:
the good, the bad, the cripple, the young;
- nouns denoting characteristic features, obtained by the same
mechanism: the beautiful, the ugly, the absurd;
- proper collective nouns denoting nationalities, obtained by definite
articulation as well: the English, the Dutch. Other such nouns are
obtained by adding the plural ending –s to the adjective, the article
becoming then optional: (the) Romanians, (the) Americans, (the)
Italians;
- nouns denoting “the presence of the quality in a person”: an
academic, an alarmist, an anarchist;
- nouns denoting “the presence of the quality in an object”: an acid,
an adhesive, an adverbial, an absolute.
As Tătaru (2002: 82) suggests, “the attempt at grouping various
types of meanings should not ignore the possibility of the nominalization of
any other adjective by conversion: a red reminding of Titian (=kind, type of
red); in the dark (=confused), or: Don’t go out after dark! a bitter of very
good quality (=type of drink)…”
57
Words about Words
by the –ing nouns which name the action implied by the verb:
falling, driving, swimming;
- the patient of the action denoted by the verb: a castaway, a catch;
- the instrument of the action denoted by the verb: a lift, a ransom,
a cover, a wrap;
- the state corresponding to the action denoted by the verb: wish,
want, desire, doubt, envy;
- the place of the action denoted by the verb: retreat (“cumpăna
apelor”), turn, rise.
• nouns converted from adverbs, prepositions and
interjections:
There are rather few nouns originating in adverbs in English. Some
of the basic directional adverbs, such as front, back, behind, aside,
left, right have been nominalised, sometimes by being used with a
definite article. Other times, directional adverbs may be marked for
the plural and used nominally in binominals such as the ups and
down, the ins and outs. However, the fact that these nouns are not
used outside set phrases or in the singular demonstrates that the
conversion of the adverbs is not yet a fully completed process.
Tătaru (2002) mentions another category of adverbs that have
undergone nominalization: the adverbs relating to the frequency of
musical tempo (at their origin, simple adverbials of frequency in
Italian which became internationalisms with a specialized
meaning): an andante, an allegro, an adagio.
The adverb altogether may also be used figuratively as a noun in a
phrase such as to be in the altogether (“to be completely naked”).
The examples of prepositions that have been turned into nouns are
even fewer: the pros and cons (where pros comes from the Latin
preposition pro and cons has been obtained by adding the plural
inflection –s to the abbreviation of counter). Pro may be used
nominally with the definite article a, then meaning not “argument
for”, but “person favouring a certain idea, view, option”.
All interjections may be nominalised by articulation either with a
definite or with an indefinite article, their meaning becoming “name
of the sound, noise”: a bang, a screech, the squeal, the Hm Hm. It
may happen that, by nominalization, the meaning of the initial
interjection changes completely via a transfer from a proper sense to
a figurative one. This is the case of the interjection gobbledygook,
initially denoting the sound made by the turkey which has now come
to mean “very complicated or technical language that you cannot
understand” or “nonsense”.
58
Word Formation
According to Tătaru (2002: 85), “it could be said that anything that
fulfils an attributive and / or a predicative function is an adjective in
English”.
Nouns, for example, can function both as descriptive adjectives: girl
friend, technology boom, trail-and-error judgment and as limitative
adjectives: family duties, trial match, songbird.
Pronouns can also engender adjectives by conversion. All
compounds built with the personal pronouns he and she, which generate
the masculine and the feminine from the common gender, can be
considered to reflect this phenomenon. Demonstrative, relative-
interrogative, indefinite and reflexive pronouns may function as adjectives
without any change in their form.
Numerals also take up adjectival functions when they are used in
adjectival distribution: three books, nine point seven percent, the second
answer.
However, the part of speech that is most frequently converted into
adjectives is the adverb. Directionals such as above, front, back, upstairs,
outdoors may function both as adverbs and as adjectives (sometimes, in a
noun and converted adjective group, they follow the noun): the above
statement (the statement above), the front gate, the back door, the rooms
upstairs, the furniture outdoors. Adverbs of time such as yearly, monthly,
weekly, daily may become adjectives when used in adjectival distribution:
yearly event, monthly seminar, weekly meeting, daily routine.
Phrases and idiomatic expressions can undergo conversion to adjectives: a
do-it-yourself manual, a cut-and-dried speech, a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-
his-mouth attitude.
Verb forms other than the participle converted into adjectives are
quite infrequent.
59
Words about Words
60
Word Formation
such a distinction is the semantic dependence of one item upon the other.
For example, the meaning of the verb to net may be explained by means of
the noun net as “to put into a net” and, therefore, the verb may be said to be
the converted form. Another criterion is the ability of the word to serve as
the root for derivatives and to form compounds. If the word has such
ability, it is considered the base word, if it lacks it, it is usually regarded as
the converted word. According to this approach, the noun water, as the root
for derived words such as watery, waterless, and as one of the elements in
compounds such as waterbed, waterborne, watercolour, watercourse,
waterfall, waterline is seen as the base word, while the verb water, which
cannot yield either derivatives or compounds is regarded as the converted
lexical item.
When the period when a particular word entered the language is
known, it is easier to establish that the “older” word is the base form, while
the “younger” one is the converted item.
Converted words may be common vocabulary items, with a reduced
stylistic potential, or, by conversion itself, they may have acquired
expressive force and become poetic. Hulban (1975) quotes a number of
examples of converted words in the latter category:
3.6.1. Clipping
1
„Portmanteau words” is a term coined by Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass.
The author introduces it for the first time when, Alice, the main character of the book, asks
Humpty Dumty to explain to her what the words in the Jabberwocky poem mean. Among
these words, there are “slithy” and “mimsy”, which Humpty Dumty explains as follows,
pointing at how they have been formed:
“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lith and slimy’. ‘Lith’ is the same as ‘active’. You see, it’s
like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word… Well
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3.6.2. Contraction
Clipping occurs not only in the case of compound words, but in the
case of isolated words as well. When words are shortened to just a part of
them, they are said to be contracted. Contraction may be performed in three
ways:
• by aphaeresis, which is the elimination of the beginning of the
word: cello (from violoncello), bus (from omnibus), plane (from
airplane), pike (from turnpike), phone (from telephone);
• by syncope, which is the elimination of the middle part of the
word: ma’am (from madam), o’er (from over), don’t (from do not),
fancy (from fantasy), specs (from spectacles);
• by apocope, which is the elimination of the final part of the word:
fab (from fabulous), caff (from café), bicarb (from bicarbonate),
exam (from examination), cinema (from cinematopgraph), memo
(from memorandum), gas (from gasoline), etc.
then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).”
(Carroll 1980: 271)
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Word Formation
3.6.3. Back-formation
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3.6.5. Deflection
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Word Formation
cutting, beating or knocking down”), lie – lay (“to put or set down”). Verbs
have also been turned into nouns by deflection: bleed – blood; break –
breach; feed – food; sing – song; speak – speech.
Ablaut combinations illustrating the voiced – voiceless consonant
alternation include: advise – advice; prove – proof; devise – device;
believe – belief.
3.6.7. Abbreviation
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3.6.8. Alphanumerics
3.6.9. Eponyms
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Word Formation
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The item invented may be very simple, but, if it proves useful, its
name spreads quickly into the common language. Sandwich is derived from
the name of the Earl of Sandwich, a keen gambler who is said to have once
spent a whole day and night at the gaming-table, eating nothing else but
pieces of meat placed in between two small slices of bread. Articles of dress
may derive their names from those of famous people who once wore them.
Thus, the raglan, a kind of overcoat without shoulder seams, was named
after the commander of the British forces in the Crimean War, Baron
Raglan. The Earl of Cardigan gave his name to the cardigan, a knitted
woolen jacket buttoned at the front. The wellingtons, knee-high rubber
waterproof boots, took their name from that of the Duke of Wellington.
Place names have been as productive as people names in
contributing to the enrichment of English with eponyms. They may be
recognized as the origin of the names of various wines and varieties of
cheese. Examples include chablis, made near the small town of Chablis,
burgundy, from the ancient province of Burgundy, champagne, originally
the sparkling beverage made in the region of Champagne, now any kind of
beverage made according to the initial Champagne method, gorgonzola, the
cheese originally made in the town by this name in Lombardy, camembert,
deriving its name from that of a village in France and cheddar, which
acquired its name from that of the village where it was first made, Cheddar,
in Somerset.
Finally, (though this is not a comprehensive approach, as extensive
as it may be), breeds of dogs are frequently named after their real or
supposed places of origin. Thus, the alsacian comes from Alsace, the
dalmatian, from the Dalmatian Coast and the saint bernard from the
Hospice of the Great St. Bernard, a pass in the Alps.
Words formed from proper names may behave just like the rest of
the lexical items in the vocabulary of English. They may undergo shortening
as in strad for Stradivarius and they may serve as the basis for derivatives,
as in macadamize, from the root macadam, an eponym connected to the
name of John Macadam, the inventor of the pavement with cubic stones.
Eponyms may also be blended with other words, as in gerrymander,
meaning “to divide a region in which people vote in a way that gives a
particular political group an unfair advantage”. The word is a blend of
salamander with gerry, from Elbridge Gerry, who, at a certain moment,
used this device to make sure that the Republicans remained in power in
Massachusetts.
Some of the types of eponyms discussed here will be mentioned in
the chapter dedicated to word meaning, more exactly, to metonymy, as an
instance of transfer of meaning. Justifiably, transfers such as the use of the
name of the inventor for the thing invented or that of the place name for the
product coming from there are considered by some linguists kinds of
metonymy.
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Word Formation
There are words in English, as in any other language, that have been
coined by various users (fiction writers and journalists especially) but are
not yet accepted by the whole English speaking community. These are
called nonce words.
Diachronically, nonce words may remain just a fashion of the
moment and drop out of use or they may come to enter the accepted
vocabulary and be mentioned in dictionaries. This was the case of words
attributed to Shakespeare such as auspicious, to accost (somebody), to
dwindle, nayward, dauntless.
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IV. WORD MEANING
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Word Meaning
successive elements. The principle is based on the fact that the speakers of a
language cannot produce a multitude of sounds at the same time.
To summarize, for Saussure, the linguistic sign is a binary mental
entity, abstracted both from its users and from the extra-linguistic object
denoted by it. However, if the object in reality the linguistic sign refers to
plays no role in Saussure’s theory, it does in the triadic model developed by
Ogden and Richards (1923).
THOUGHT or REFERENCE
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72
Word Meaning
73
Words about Words
74
Word Meaning
75
Words about Words
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Word Meaning
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follows I shall survey the types of such links, under the general heading
“sense relations”.
4.5.1. Synonymy
•
Although this is the generally accepted point of view, linguists such as Jones (2002)
suggest that antonymy may hold between words that belong to different word classes. For
example, in Lighten our darkness, we pray, the verb lighten and the noun darkness form an
antonymic pair. In She remembered to shut the door but left the window open, the verb to
shut and the adjective open are in a relation of antonymy.
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Word Meaning
I give you up. You are factproof. I am lazy; I am idle; and I am breaking
down from overwork. Don’t you like these dear old-world places? I do.
I don’t. They ought all to be rooted up, pulled down, burnt to the ground.
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Tell Mummy when Playschool begins and she’ll watch it with you. (+)
Tell Mummy when Playschool commences and she’ll watch it with you. (-)
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Word Meaning
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belongs to standard English and the other to English slang. The following
examples illustrate this type of stylistic synonyms: astonished –
gobsmacked, crash – prang, destroy – zap, drunk - sloshed, face – phizog,
heart – ticker, insane - barmy, money – rhino, steal – nick.
Besides the formal – informal, standard – slang pairs of synonyms,
distinctions such as technical – non-technical, neutral – poetic, speech –
writing may also be made as in: incision (technical) – cut (non-technical),
lesion (technical) – cut (common), happiness (neutral) – bliss (poetic),
merry (neutral) – jocund (poetic), you’re (speech) – you are (writing).
A particular stylistic synonymic relationship is established between
a taboo word and its corresponding euphemistic words or expressions. A
euphemism is a mild, indirect or less offensive word or expression
substituted when the speaker / writer fears that more direct wording might
be harsh, unpleasantly direct or offensive (when resorted to by officials such
as members of the Parliament, officers, lawyers, etc., the use of
euphemisms is known as “doublespeak”). Thus, the verb to die enters a
stylistic synonymic relationship with the following euphemistic (idiomatic)
phrases: to breathe one’s last (breath, gasp), to depart this life, to pay one’s
debt to nature, to go to one’s last home, to go the way of all flesh, to kick
the bucket, to hop the twig, to join the majority, to be no more, to buy a
pine condo, to cross the river to reach the eternal reward, to go to the
other side, etc. A stupid person has a couple of eggs shy of a dozen, a few
beers short of a six-pack, a few clowns short of a circus, a few bricks short
of a wall, a kangaroo loose in the paddock, s/he is not the sharpest knife in
the drawer, not the brightest light in the harbour / on the Christmas tree,
not tied too tight to the pier, knitting with only one needle, not firing on all
cylinders, s/he is as useful as a wooden frying pan, as a screen door on a
submarine or as tits on a bull, s/he is a person whose elevator stuck
between floors, who got into the gene pool when the lifeguard wasn’t
watching, who fell out of the family tree or who goes fishing in Nebraska.
Somebody who is old is mature or a senior, surveillance is a stylistic
euphemistic synonym of spying, a theft is an inventory shrinkage or a
property redistribution, a jail is a secure facility, public donation and
shared sacrifice refer to paying taxes, a sanitation worker is a trash
collector and a drug addict is euphemistically called a substance abuser.
No matter what useful and innovative linguistic elements
euphemisms might be, they are short-lived. Their presence in the language
is conditioned by social and cultural conventions which are continuously
changing so that what is considered taboo at a certain moment might be
soon accepted and the need for the euphemisms referring to it might well
fall out of use. What might save them from disappearing from the language
is their stylistic potential.
Dysphemisms, roughly the opposites of euphemisms, are coarser
and more direct words and phrases that are used to replace both more
refined and quite common lexical items, for humorous or deliberately
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Word Meaning
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Native French
swine pork
ox beef
calf veal
body corpse
ghost spirit
friendship amity
help aid
ship vessel
world universe
room chamber
end finish
ask request
answer reply
buy purchase
player actor
wire telegram
bodily corporeal
heartly cordial
brotherly fraternal
learned erudite
happy fortunate
hard solid
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Word Meaning
4.5.2. Antonymy
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(1) Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which
forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
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Word Meaning
(2) Your friends are the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they
are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched.
They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dresses. They are not
educated: they are only college passmen. They are not moral: they are only
conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not
even vicious: they are only frail. They are not artistic: they are only
lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal:
they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not courageous, only
quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only
domineering, not self-controlled, only obtuse, not self-respecting, only
vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not
considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated… liars everyone
of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
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hold. If the two previous questions had been How young are you? and How
short is the way to the museum?, the implications had been that the person
asked about his / her age was young and the way to the museum was short.
The class of ungradable or contradictory antonyms comprise
pairs such as asleep – awake, dead – alive, on – off, permit – forbid,
remember – forget, win – lose, shut – open, true – false. Unlike in the case
of gradable antonyms, the semantic relationship between the two members
of an ungradable antonymic pair is of the “either – or” type, i.e. the
assertion of one member always implies the negation of the other, with no
options in between (in the case of adjectives, this is proven by the fact that
they do not allow degrees of comparison). Thus, an animate being may be
described as either dead or alive, but not as some degree of these or as
being more one than the other. If certain behaviour is permitted, then it is
not forbidden; if one lost a contest, then one has not won it; if a switch is
off, then it is not on.
The following are examples of converse antonyms (as quoted by
Jackson and Amvela 2007: 116): above – below, before – after, behind – in
front of, buy – sell, give – receive, husband – wife, parent – child, speak –
listen. The meanings of the two antonyms are like the two sides of the same
coin, one member of the pair expresses the converse meaning of the other.
Buy and sell describe the same transaction, the difference lying in the
vantage point from which it is viewed. If the transaction is seen from the
point of view of the person who gives up the goods in exchange for money,
we speak about selling, if it is seen from the point of view of the person who
receives the goods upon paying a sum of money for them, we speak about
buying.
If we take into consideration the form of the antonyms, we may
speak about root and affixal antonyms.
• root or radical antonyms are different lexical units with
opposite meanings: warm – cold, kind – cruel, open – shut;
• affixal antonyms are words having the same root, the relation of
oppositeness of meaning between them being established by means
of negative (and positive) affixes which are added to the common
root: careful – careless, important – unimportant, to believe – to
disbelieve, to entangle – to disentangle.
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Word Meaning
features (they are four legged omnivorous animals, kept as pets or for
guarding buildings, etc.). Similarly, as Jackson and Amvela (2007: 118)
point out, “a pain in the foot and a pain in the toe may refer to the same
phenomenon; the second is merely a more specific way of designating the
location of the pain.”
Both dog and spaniel and foot and toe are related to each other by a
general – specific type of semantic relationship. However, the two pairs of
words mentioned illustrate slight differences in this relationship. In the
case of dog and spaniel, the relationship is of the “kind of” type – a spaniel
is a kind of dog. This is the relation of hyponymy. The more general term
that can be used for a number of more specific terms is the superordinate
term, while its directly subordinate terms are its hyponyms. Mc Arthur
(1981) exemplifies the semantic relation of hyponymy with a simplified
variant of the taxonomies of natural elements, reproduced by Jacskon and
Amvela (2007: 118):
Fig. 4. Hyponymy
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Fig. 5. Meronymy
Read from the bottom to the top, what this hierarchical model
suggests is that petal and stem are meronyms of flower, as are cap and
hair to root and stalk and blade to leaf. One more level up, leaf, bud, stem,
root, flower and shoot are meronyms of plant.
Part – whole relationships like the one that has just been mentioned
exist between numerous words in the English vocabulary. Most of the
objects around us are made of parts that have their own names. A knife is
made of a blade and a handle, the parts of a day are the dawn, the morning,
the noon, the afternoon and the evening, while the head, the trunk and the
limbs constitute the human body.
4.5.4. Homonymy
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Word Meaning
Why did the teacher wear sunglasses? Her students were too bright.
Waiter, will the pancakes be long? No, sir, round.
(www.firstschoolyears.com)
A family of three tomatoes was walking downtown one day when the little
baby tomato started lagging behind. The big father tomato walks back to
the baby tomato, stomps on her, squashing her into a red paste, and says
‘Ketchup!’” (www.ahajokes.com, reproduced by Katamba (2005: 122)
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There are three major phenomena which account for the existence
of so many homonyms in English: phonetic convergence, semantic
divergence and conversion.
Phonetic convergence or convergent sound development lies at
the basis of etymological homonyms, words that can be traced back to
different etymons and that have come to be identical in form as a result of
sound changes. These changes have been frequently accompanied by the
loss of inflections. Thus, the verb bear (I can’t bear to be talked to so
impolitely) comes from the Old English (OE) beran, while the noun bear
(There’s a big bear behind that tree) comes from the OE bera. The adjective
fair has a Common Teutonic etymon which gave in OE fæger, meaning
“beautiful, blond” (My sister is a fair woman), the noun fair, meaning “a
periodical market sometimes with various kinds of entertainment” (There’s
a fair in the village every two weeks) comes from the Old French (OFr)
feire, which is itself a transformed variant of the Latin feria, meaning
“holiday”.
Semantic divergence or disintegration / split of polysemy leads
to semantic homonyms. The cause of this phenomenon in English is found,
as one of its names suggests, in polysemy. Semantic homonyms have the
same etymon and are the result of a process by which some meanings of
polysemantic words have deviated so far from each other that they have
gained an existence as completely separate words. Hulban (1975: 175)
quotes a number of examples of such semantic homonyms. The Latin
etymon capitalia, for instance, has given in English the homonymous
adjectives capital (1), meaning “relating to the head”, “punishable by
death”, “deadly, mortal” (The criminal received the capital punishment for
his deeds) and capital (2), meaning “standing at the head, upper case”
(Names of countries are spelt with capital letters), when referring to letters
or words and “chief, important, first-rate” (This capital error will make you
lose much money) in other contexts. The OE gesund gave sound (1),
meaning “free of disease, infirmity, having bodily health” (He looked
perfectly sound after he had taken those medicines) and sound (2),
meaning “in accordance with fact, reason, good sense, free from error”
(This is a sound statement). Another example that may be added to those
offered by Hulban (1975) is that of the pair flower – flour, which were
originally one word, the Latin florem. In France, the word became variously
flur, flour and flor and passed into English as flur, “the blossom of a plant”.
During the Elizabethan period, the term flower came to mean “the best”.
Millers of the era were still using a crude process to grind and sift the meal
and only the finest of it was able to pass through a cloth sieve. This top
quality wheat was reserved for the gentry and the royalty and was known as
“the flower of the wheat”. Since, during that period, English used to be
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Word Meaning
pretty flexible in spelling, the word was often spelled flour. Around the
1830’s, the two words were officially differentiated.
Conversion, the process by which one lexical item changes its
morphological class without changing its form, accounts for a great number
of homonyms. The pairs ship (noun), meaning “large boat for longer
voyages on the sea” - ship (verb), meaning “to send goods or people by ship”
and answer (noun), meaning “a spoken or written reply to a question” -
answer (verb), meaning “to give s spoken or written reply to a question” are
examples of homonyms obtained by conversion.
4.6. Polysemy
Though not a sense relation between words, polysemy may be
introduced here in order to later emphasize its connection with homonymy.
Unlike monosemantic words (very few in English and mainly
technical or scientific words such as saline, dioxide, ontology),
polysemantic words are words which have more than one meaning. The
noun box, for example, is mentioned in the Macmillan English Dictionary
for Advanced Learners (2002) with the following meanings: (1) “a
container with straight sides, a flat base, and sometimes a lid” – Read the
instructions before taking it out of its box.; (1a) “the things in a box or the
amount that a box contains” – Jim gave us some chocolate and we ate the
whole box.; (2) “a space on a printed form, in which you write” – Tick the
boxes that apply to you.; (2a) “a space on a computer screen, where you can
read or write a particular kind of information” – the dialog / error box; (3)
“a small enclosed space with seats in a theatre or sports ground, separate
from where the rest of the audience is sitting” – a corporate entertainment
box; (4) BrE informal for “television” – Is there anything on the box
tonight?; (5) “an address that some people use instead of having letters
delivered to their houses” – My PO Box address is…; (6) “a tree with small
shiny leaves that people grow especially around the edges of their gardens”
– a box hedge; informal for “coffin for a dead body” – The box was lowered
into the grave.; BrE for “a hard cover worn by men to protect their sex
organs when playing sports” – Footballers always wear a box when
playing.
Most English words are polysemantic, the number of meanings
ranging from three to about one hundred. The commomer the word, the
more meanings it has.
Polysemy may be approached diachronically and synchronically.
From a diachronic point of view, polysemy may be considered a
change in the semantic structure of a word, resulting in new meanings
being added to the one or ones already existing. Diachronically, we speak
about primary meaning, the meaning of the word when it first appeared
in the language, and secondary meaning(s), the meaning(s) that
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appeared after the primary one. Thus, the primary meaning of the word
table is “flat slab of stone or wood”, corresponding to the OE period, when
it was borrowed from Latin. All the other meanings one can find in a
present-day dictionary are later additions and, therefore, secondary
meanings: “a piece of furniture that consists of a flat surface held above the
floor, usually by legs”, “the people sitting at a table”, “a way of showing
detailed pieces of information, especially facts or numbers, by arranging
them in rows and lines across and down a page”.
From a synchronic point of view, polysemy represents the co-
existence of various meanings of the same word, at a certain moment in the
development of the language. The meaning having the highest frequency is
usually representative of the semantic structure of the word and is
considered the central or basic meaning. The other meanings are minor or
marginal meanings. Synchronically then, the central meaning of table, the
most widely used and the most general, is “a piece of furniture”. All the
other meanings are marginal.
If approached synchronically, the meanings of a polysemantic word
may be split into direct and figurative meanings. A word is used with its
direct meaning when it clearly nominates the referent out of a particular
context, and with its figurative meaning when the referent is named and, at
the same time, described through its similarity with something else. For
example, in He got undressed behind the screen, it is the direct meaning of
the word screen that is involved (“a movable piece of furniture used to
protect or hide something or somebody”), while in He was using his
business as a screen for crime, I could not see anything because of the thick
smoke screen and Behind her house, there was a screen of trees, it is the
figurative meaning of screen that is employed – “something that protects
and hides”.
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Word Meaning
consider flower as part of a plant and flour, the powder made by crashing
grain, a single word with two senses, since they have, as I have already
mentioned, a common etymon, namely the Latin word florem. Lyons (1977:
550) points out that port, meaning “harbour” and port, meaning “fortified
wine”, which are most probably considered separate words by the majority
of the speakers of English, should, according to the etymology principle, be
treated as two senses of a polysemantic word, since they both derive from
the Latin portus, only that the latter entered English via the Portuguese
Oporto, the name of the town where the wine used to be produced.
Based on the last two examples and on other pairs of etymologically
related words such as person – parson, grammar – glamour, shirt – skirt,
catch – chase, which would rather be viewed as separate words, the
conclusion might be drawn that etymology is not always a useful and
reliable criterion for distinguishing between polysemy and homonymy.
The second criterion is that of formal identity or distinctness of
the words. Hansen et al (1985), quoted by Lipka (2002), speak about
complete homonymy only in the case of spoken, written and grammatical
identity of two words. Thus, for them, the identical form bat clearly has two
different meanings and can be assigned to two separate lexemes, bat (1),
noun, meaning “a specially shaped stick for kicking the ball in cricket” and
bat (2), noun also, meaning “a flying mouse-like animal”. For them,
distinctions in spelling or pronunciation that lead to homographs or
homophones cancel homonymy.
On the other hand, different morphological and syntactic
characteristics of two words with the same form, but dissimilar meanings
will lead to their being considered separate homonymous lexemes. As Lipka
(2002: 156) exemplifies, “we can clearly distinguish between can (1), can
(2) and can (3) because we have a modal auxiliary in one case, a noun in the
second and a transitive verb with the meaning “put into a can” in the third
case”.
As far as the third criterion, close semantic relatedness, is
concerned, Hansen et al (1985) suggest that we should opt for polysemy in
two cases: when there is a semantic relation of inclusion or hyponymy
between the two words under discussion or when semantic transfer under
the form of metaphor or metonymy has been made between them. Thus, the
lexeme man contains the lexical units man (1), meaning “human being, in
general” and man (2), meaning “adult male human being”, but not man (3),
meaning “to furnish with man”. Consequently, man is a polysemantic word
with senses (1) and (2) and a homonym of man (3). In the case of the
lexeme fox, we can distinguish fox (1), meaning “wild animal”, the
metaphoric fox (2), meaning “person as sly as a fox” and the metonymic fox
(3), meaning “the fur of the fox”. Transfer of meaning having taken place
between fox (1) and fox (2) and (3) as illustrated above, fox may be said to
be a polysemantic word.
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The main directions in which the meaning of words may change are
extension, narrowing, degradation and elevation (some of which
have already been hinted at in the previous section).
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4.8.3.1. Metaphor
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4.8.3.2. Metonymy
Metonymy consists of the use of the name of one thing for that of
something else, with which it is usually associated. This association is not a
mental process that links two independent entities, like in the case of
metaphor, but one that brings together entities which are in a certain
proximity or contact.
According to the type of relationship established between the two
elements in a metonymy, the following types of associations are possible
(partly as indicated by Loos, Day, Jordan (1999), who quote examples from
Kovecses (1986) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980)):
• the use of the symbol for the thing symbolized: From the cradle to
the grave, one has always something new to learn, The Crown
visited the soldiers on the battle field;
• the use of the material an object is made of for the object itself:
iron, glass;
• the use of the holder for the thing held: The gallery applauded, He
is fond of the bottle, You should save your pocket if you want to buy
a new computer;
• the use of the maker’s name for the object made: I like the
Rembrand on that wall, Put that Dickens away and listen to me, I
hate reading Heidegger, He bought a Ford;
• the use of the place name where the object is or was originally
made for the object itself: At dinner, they served the soup in their
best china;
• the use of the instrument for the agent: They answered the door /
phone, The sax has the flu today, The gun he hired wanted 50
grants;
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• the use of the concrete for the abstract and of the abstract for the
concrete: They dedicated their pens to a just cause, He is of noble
blood; The leadership took action against thefts;
• the use of the name of an organization or an institution for the
people who make a decision or work there: Exxon has raised its
prices again, The Senate thinks abortion is immoral;
• the use of the place name where an event was recorded for the
event itself: Do you remember the Alamo?, Pearl Harbour still has
an effect on America’s foreign policy;
• the use of a place name where an institution is located for the
institution itself: The White House voted against entering war, Wall
Street has been in panic these days;
• the reference to the behaviour of a person experiencing a
particular emotion for the emotion itself: She gave him a tongue-
lashing, I really chewed him out good;
• the use of the part for the whole (also called synecdoche) and of
the whole for the part: They hired ten new hands, We don’t accept
longhairs here, She is wearing a fine fox.
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V. MULTI-WORD UNITS IN ENGLISH
5.1. Collocations
5.1.1. Definition
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The elements of a collocation are the node, i.e., the lexical item that
is being studied and the collocate(s), i.e. the lexeme(s) that co-occur with
the node. “Each successive word in a text is both node and collocate, though
never at the same time”, Sinclair (1991: 115) posits. When a is a node and b
is a collocate, Sinclair (1991) speaks about downward collocations, the
collocations of a with some less frequent bs. On the other hand, when b is a
node and a is collocate, the linguist speaks about upward collocations.
He illustrates this distinction with an analysis of the collocational pattern of
back. Thus, according to him, its upward collocates may be:
• prepositions / adverbs / conjunctions: at, from, into, now, on,
then, to, up, when;
• personal pronouns: her, him, me, she, them, we;
• possessive pronouns: her, his, my;
• verbs: get, got.
Downward collocates of back include:
• verbs: arrive, bring, climb, come, cut, date, draw, drive, fall, fly,
fling, hand, hold, lay, lean, pay, pull, run, rush, sink, sit, throw,
trace, walk, wave, etc;
• prepositions: along, behind, onto, past, toward;
• adverbs: again, forth, further, slowly, straight;
• adjective: normal;
• nouns: camp, flat, garden, home, hotel, office, road, village, yard
/ bed, chair, couch, door, sofa, wall, window / feet, forehead, hair,
hand, head, neck, shoulder, car, seat / mind, sleep / kitchen, living
room, porch, room.
The number of lexemes a node may have represents its range.
If the range of a node is taken into consideration, one may speak
about various types of collocations. Fixed, unique or frozen
collocations occur when a node can combine with one collocate only. This
is the case of the adjective auburn which can collocate with the noun hair
only. When the node may combine with a limited number of collocates, one
speaks about restricted collocations. Rancid, which may modify nouns
that refer to objects that contain fat, such as fat, butter, lard, lipstick, is
illustrative for this type of collocations. Finally, when a node can combine
with a large number of collocates, one speaks about unrestricted or
multiple collocations, a sub-category whose existence some linguists do
not recognize, on the grounds that the semantic relationship between the
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node and its collocate(s) are too vague to help distinguish unrestricted
collocations from free word groups. One example will suffice to illustrate
this last sub-class: anxious / worried / close / curious / strange /
disapproving / meaningful / grim / pleading, etc look.
The restricted and the unrestricted collocations are discussed by
Fernando (1996) in comparison with idioms. What she suggests is that,
although closely related, the two are not identical. Idioms are a narrow
range of word combinations, viewed as “indivisible units whose
components cannot be varied or can be varied only within definable units”
(Fernando 1996: 30). Restricted and unrestricted collocations, on the other
hand, rather represent a scale of different degrees of habitual co-occurrence
of lexical items. Idioms, conventionally fixed in a specific order and lexical
form, or having only a very limited number of variants, lie at the top of this
scale.
Somewhat lower on the scale of idiomaticity are the “habitual
collocations” (Fernando’s term which encompasses both restricted and
unrestricted collocations), some of which share characteristics with certain
sub-classes of idioms. The salient feature of such collocations is that all
their components show variance – restricted as in the semi-literal explode a
myth / theory / notion, catch the post / mail, or in the literal addled eggs /
brains, potato / corn chips, unrestricted as in the semi-literal catch a bus /
plane / ferry, etc., run a business / company, or in the literal smooth /
plump / glowing / rosy, etc. cheeks, beautiful / lovely / sweet, etc. woman.
The comparison of collocations with idioms prompts another
remark. While, in the case of idioms, meaning is holistic, i.e., it belongs to
the group of words forming the idiom as a whole and cannot be arrived at
by adding the individual meanings of these words, in the case of
collocations, meaning is additive, i.e. it is the sum of the meanings of its
components and it can be arrived at step by step, while advancing element
by element of them. This is obvious in a collocation such as to blink one’s
eyes as opposed to an idiom such as to make eyes at somebody.
Besides considering the range of nodes, collocations may be
classified, from the point of view of the linguistic rules that govern them,
into grammatical and lexical structures.
A grammatical collocation is, according to Benson, Benson and
Ilson (1991: ix), “a phrase consisting of a dominant word (noun, adjective,
verb) and a preposition or grammatical structure such as an infinitive or
clause”. Chomsky’s (1991: 191) examples are helpful starting points in
illustrating this definition. His opinion is that decide on a boat, meaning
“choose (to buy) a boat” contains the collocation decide on (in his
terminology, decide on is a “close construction”), whereas decide on a boat
meaning “taking a decision while embarked on a boat” is a free combination
(in his terminology, a “loose association”). Any native speaker of English
would feel that the components of decide on, when it means “choose”, and
of other fixed phrases such as account for, accuse (somebody) of, adapt to,
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agonize over, aim at, etc collocate with each other. S/he would reject
violations of collocability such as *decide at a boat, *account over a loss,
*accuse (somebody) on a crime, *adapt towards new conditions.
That decide on a boat, when referring to making a choice of a boat,
is a collocation becomes even more evident when comparing it to the
countless free combinations of decide, whose elements are joined in
accordance with the general rules of English syntax and freely allow
substitution. Such free combinations include, among others: decide after
lunch / before breakfast / at nine o’clock / at the meeting / on the spot / in
the library / on the bus / with a heavy heart / immediately / quickly /
reluctantly / happily / unhesitatingly, etc.
The Bensons and Ilson (1991) describe eight major classes of
grammatical collocations, designated G1, G2, G3, etc, included in their BBI
Combinatory Dictionary of English.
The G1 class contains collocations which consist of “noun +
preposition” combinations: apathy towards, abstinence from, blockade
against, blight on, cry for, dig into, epilogue to, fellowship with, graduate
in, hope for, inferiority to, leadership in, method for, prologue to,
sympathy for, etc. Combinations with the genitive preposition of and the
agential preposition by are excluded from the group.
The G2 class comprises “noun + long infinitive” (or an –ing verb
form) collocations such as effort to, genius to, impulse to, need to, problem
to, right to, found in a number of typical syntactic patterns:
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107
Words about Words
his brother the book and he sent the book to him – he sent him the book.”
(Benson, Benson and Ilson 1991: xiv). Other verbs that may be part of G8A
collocations are: bring, explain, give, grant, make, offer, promise, etc.
Pattern B verbs, though transitive like those in pattern A, do not
allow the dative movement transformation. Thus, we have They described
the book to her, They mentioned the book to her, They returned the book to
her, but not *They described her the book, *They mentioned her the book”
or *They returned her the book. Examples of verbs that fit pattern B
include: babble, bark, cry, divulge, growl, introduce, shout, yell, etc.
The transitive verbs in pattern C, used with the preposition for,
allow the dative movement transformation, i.e. the deletion of the
preposition and the movement of the indirect object (usually animate)
before the direct object: She bought a shirt for her husband – She bought
her husband a shirt. Many of the verbs that collocate with a direct and
indirect object in the way just illustrated are “culinary verbs” such as bake,
boil, brew, chop, cook, fry, grill, grind, peel, scramble, slice, toast.
In pattern D, verbs form collocations with specific prepositions
followed by objects. Free combinations such as to walk in the park and
combinations of verbs and prepositional objects preceded by by or with,
when they denote the means or the instrument by which the actions are
performed, are not part of the class, according to the authors of the BBI
Combinatory Dictionary. Transitive D-pattern verbs used with to and B-
pattern verbs produce the same constructions. The verbs that are normally
used with an animate indirect object are assigned to class B – We described
the meeting to them, while verbs normally occurring with inanimate
indirect objects are considered elements of class D – We invited them to the
meeting. Examples of pattern D verbs include: brood about/over,
capitulate to, drill for, extract from, feature as, glow with, hamper in,
improve in, join for/in/with, lead against/by/from, move from/into/to,
notify about/of, open by/with, point at/to, rehearse for, scream at/for,
turn into/off/to/towards, etc.
Pattern E is illustrated by collocations formed of verbs followed by
long infinitives, if these infinitives do not express purpose (they are nor
replaceable by “in order to”): begin, continue, decide, endeavour, forget,
hope, like, mean, need, offer, promise, remember, swear, want, etc.
Pattern F includes the small number of collocations formed by the
modal verbs followed by short infinitives: can, could, may, might, shall,
should, will, would, must. The verbal phrases had/would better,
had/would rather also fit this pattern.
In pattern G, the collocations are made up of verbs followed by
gerunds. Typical examples of verbs that usually collocate grammatically
with gerunds are: avoid, keep, recommend, remember, start, suggest, etc.
Some of the verbs in pattern G that collocate with gerunds may be
found in pattern E as well, as nodes collocating with long infinitives. Thus,
sentences such as The baby began crying – The baby began to cry, The
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Multi-Word Units in English
teacher asked the pupil a question, Our neighbours envy us our new house,
She punched him one in the eye, I tipped the waiter ten dollars, etc. Verbs
pertaining to the semantic field of gambling may be heads of pattern O
collocations. Some of them, such as bet, lay and wager are able to take in
effect three objects – one referring to a person, one to an amount and one
denoting the point of the bet, as in We bet him ten pounds that the train
won’t arrive in time. Of the three, bet can be used with any of the three
objects alone, lay seems to require the second and the third, while wager
may be accompanied by either the second or the third alone. O-pattern
verbs may be passivized. In most cases, at least one of the objects may
become the subject of the passive construction: The pupil was asked a
question (by the teacher)/a question was asked (by the teacher), He was
punched one in the eye, The waiter was tipped ten dollars.
Verbs in pattern P collocations are either intransitive, reflexive or
transitive and their sense must always be completed by an adverbial – an
adverb, a prepositional phrase, a noun phrase or a clause. Without such an
adverbial, sentences like the following would sound incomplete in English:
*The meeting lasts, *A strange woman was lurking, *She puts pressure,
*The box weighs, etc. Once an adverbial is used together with the verb,
these sentences become acceptable: The meeting lasts two hours, A strange
woman was lurking in the dark, She puts pressure on her children, The
box weighs ten kilos.
Pattern Q collocations are built around a verb followed by a wh-
interrogative word – what, where, when, which, who, why - or by how.
Quite frequently, the “verb + wh- word” construction precedes an infinitival
phrase or a clause: She could not decide which car to choose, My sister
knows how to drive, He wonders where to go, The man asked us what the
time was, Guess where the money is, We had to infer what she meant by
that, We discussed how to do it. Of the pattern Q verbs, most do not need to
be used with an object, some may be used with or without one and some,
such as tell, inform, must always be accompanied by an object.
In pattern R collocations, transitive verbs (often expressing
emotions) are preceded by a “dummy” it subject and are followed by a long
infinitive or by a that clause (sometimes, following an object). Examples
are: It amazed me to learn that he had been promoted, It burned me up to
hear her lying, It hurts to see my sister crying, It puzzled us that they
never answer the phone, It surprised them that their suggestion was
rejected.
Lexical collocations, in contrast to grammatical ones, “normally
do not contain prepositions, infinitives or clauses. Typical lexical
collocations consist of nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs” (Benson,
Benson, Ilson 1991: xxiv).
Just like in the case of grammatical collocations, lexical collocations
differ from free combinations, the elements of which do not freely co-occur
and are not bound specifically to each other. Thus, as explained in the
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5.2. Idioms
5.2.1. Definition
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discourse: When both my parents were out of work, we lived from hand to
mouth. / The economic crisis left us jobless and we are now living from
hand to mouth. / They have been living from hand to mouth from quite
some time now. (to live from hand to mouth – “to live in poor
circumstances”), etc. However, there are cases, such as that of proverbs,
when verb idioms normally retain their original form. In none of the
following sayings can the tense of the idioms in question be changed: A
watched pot never boils; A stitch in time saves nine; As they brew, so let
them bake; If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
Number varies in idioms with the same freedom as tense does.
Fernando (1997: 44 - 45) illustrates this type of variation with the following
examples:
We went there one evening. I twisted Richie’s arm. I said he’s your
brother-in-law too but they weren’t in.
If you can’t turn up, let us know – if necessary I can twist the arms of a few
friends and get them to come.
Rudyard Kipling took the art world bull by the horns when he wrote ‘It’s
clever, but is it art’? (The Sydney Morning Herald 4 December 1978: 16)
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Professor McDonald also suggested (with his tongue only partly in his
cheek) that the current state of Australia’s economy could be attributed to
analysts not able to interpret data… (Macquarie University News Nov/Dec
1987: 16)
It is very easy for those academics to look out of their carpeted ivory
towers across the quagmire of business stagnation. (The Australian 8
December 1975)
This fellow thought the Professor would drop him like a hot potato so he
preferred a bird in the hand. (a bird in the hand is obtained through
deletion from a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush)
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Multi-Word Units in English
there is little hope for a good life here.). To draw a blank may refer to
“getting no response”, to “finding nothing” (I asked him about John’s
financial problems and I just drew a blank.) or to “failing to remember
something” (It was a very difficult test, with only one question to answer
and I drew a blank.), while to give someone a start may mean one of the
following: 1) “to help start someone’s car” (My friend gave me a start when
my car was stalled.); 2) “to give someone training or a big opportunity in
beginning one’s career” (My career began when my father gave me a start
in the car industry.); 3) “to startle someone, to make someone jerk or jump
from sudden fright” (I didn’t mean to give you a start. I should have
knocked before I entered.).
As indicated above, idioms may be grouped into classes according to
the field of activity to which they refer or to the image they call to mind.
Thus, the largest of these classes are connected to:
• the body and bodily functions: to be all ears (“to be interested
in hearing about something” – Tell me what you know about this
actress, I’m all ears.); to be all fingers and thumbs (“to be too
clumsy to properly do something that requires manual dexterity” –
Let me plant these small seeds, you’re all fingers and thumbs.); to
spend an arm and a leg (“to spend a fortune” – My brother spent
an arm and a leg on his new car.); to have a bad hair day (“to have
a time when things are not going the way one would like or has
planned” – I have quarreled with my mother-in-law and I have
locked the keys inside my car, I am definitely having a bad hair
day.); not to bat an eyelid (“not to react or show emotion when
surprised, shocked, etc.” – I didn’t bat an eyelid when he told me
about the accident.); to beat one’s brains out (“to think hard about
something, but cannot solve, understand or remember it” – I’m
beating my brains out to tell you her name. I’m sure we have been
introduced to each other.); to bite someone’s head off (“to criticize
someone angrily” – My boss bit my head off for not having finished
the report in time.); to have a close shave (“to nearly have a serious
accident or get into trouble” – I had a close shave, I almost got
bitten by a snake.); to give somebody the cold shoulder (“to ignore
or to reject somebody” – She gave him the cold shoulder when he
asked her to the party.); as dry as a bone (“completely dry” – Our
lawn is as dry as a bone; let’s hope it will rain tomorrow.); to fight
tooth and nail (“to fight energetically and with determination” –
The police fought against the criminal tooth and nail.); to give
someone a leg up (“to help one achieve something that one couldn’t
have done alone” – My friend handed in the documents in time only
because I gave him a leg up with their translation.); to have a
hollow leg (“to eat more than one’s stomach seems to be able to
hold” – Tom has already eaten ten sandwiches, he must have a
hollow leg.); a kick in the teeth (“bad news or sudden
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today.); to back the wrong horse (“to give one’s support to the
losing part in something” – You’re backing the wrong horse, the
local team will never win the championship.); to be on the pig’s
back (“to be happy / content / in fine form” – I was on the pig’s
back when they told me that I had won a trip to Hawaii.); to have a
bigger fish to fry (“not to be interested in something because there
are more important things for one” – I won’t bother investing in
this small business, I have a bigger fish to fry.); to lead a cat and
dog’s life (“not to get along, to argue constantly” - They have lead a
cat and dog’s life for some time now, they simply can’t stop
quarrelling.); to throw somebody to the wolves (“to abandon
somebody when s/he is in a difficult situation” – I shall never
forgive her for having thrown me to the wolves when I most
needed her help.); like a bull in a China shop (“very clumsy” – He
was like a bull in a china shop with our clients and they
complained to our manager.); a calf lick (“a parting where one’s
hair grows in a different direction” – I can’t do my hair the way I
want because of this calf lick.); to cast pearls before swine (“to offer
something of value to someone who doesn’t appreciate it” –
Offering her books for her birthday is just casting pearls before
swine, she has never liked reading.); to put / let / set the cat among
the pigeons (“to create disturbance and cause trouble” – Jane let the
cat among the pigeons when she announced she was going to join
the army.); dog days (“very hot summer days” – I’d rather be in the
mountains these dog days.); to have one’s ducks in a row (“to be
well-organized” – My boss always has his ducks in a raw, he can
find whatever document you need in seconds.); from the horse’s
mouth (“directly from the person concerned or responsible” – You
have to believe me, I have heard it from the horse’s mouth.); the
lion’s share (“the biggest or best part of something, often obtained
by unfair means” – If my partner gets the lion’s share again, I’m
out of this business immediately.); pecking order (“the order of
importance or rank” – Don’t forget to place the guests at tables in
the pecking order.); a bird’s eye view (“a view seen from high
above” – We got a bird’s eye view of New York as the plane began
its descent; “a brief survey of something” – All you need is a bird’s
eye view of the events of World War II to pass the test.), etc;
• plants: to bark up the wrong tree (“to have misunderstood
something, to be totally wrong” – You’re barking up the wrong
three; I’ll move on to the next question before you give me another
incorrect answer.); the apple of one’s eye (“one’s favorite person” –
Tom is the apple of Mary’s eye. She thinks he’s great.); to clutch at
straws (“to try anything to get out of serious trouble” – Applying for
credit at a bank that nobody trusts was just clutching at straws.);
to come up smelling of roses (“to emerge from a situation with one’s
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Thank you for having us to stay for dinner. It has been a lovely evening.
It was my pleasure. (thanks and acknowledgement)
5.3.1. Definition
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cannot occur between the particle and the main verb): call for (John), look
at (him), ask for (an invoice), believe in (justice), care for (pets), deal with
(emergencies), refer to (an event), write about (a painter), etc.
Phrasal verbs consist of a main verb and an adverb. They may be
either transitive (followed by an object expressed by a noun or a pronoun) –
bring up (the matter), look up (a place) - or intransitive (not accompanied
by any object) – give in, sit down, shut up, blow up, catch on, stand up,
play around, take off. By contrast with prepositional verbs, transitive
phrasal verbs may be accompanied by mobile objects. These may occur
either after the particle or between the main verb and this, without giving
birth to grammatically unacceptable structures: bring up the children /
bring the children up, look up the word / look the word up. However, the
particle cannot precede personal pronouns: *they switched off it, *roll back
this, *sew up it, etc. In the case of intransitive phrasal verbs, normally, the
particle cannot be separated from the verb it accompanies – phrases such
as brake again down, stand now up, give soon in, etc. are ungrammatical.
Nevertheless, particles referring to directions may be modified by
intensifiers which split the “verb + particle” sequence: come right back, go
straight ahead, go straight on.
Phrasal-prepositional verbs are a bridge class between the two
categories just mentioned. Since they can easily be identified as a
consequence of the fact that they have two particles, transitivity is not
necessarily considered a distinctive feature on the basis of which these
multiword verbs are recognized: check up on (a friend), get away with
(that), stand up for (one’s rights), get on with (Jane), put up with
(smokers), give up on (the cinema), get down to (work), jump out at (the
reader), make up to (her), stay away from (danger), keep out of (trouble),
etc.
Some prepositional, phrasal and prepositional-phrasal verbs are
more idiomatic than others. In the case of multiword verbs such as ask for
(“request”), refer to (“talk about”), get in (“enter”), breathe out (“exhale”),
divide up (“separate into groups or parts”), lie down (“move into a
horizontal position”), stay away from (“avoid”), the individual meanings of
the constituents are preserved in the combination and contribute each to its
sense. However, in cases such as go into (“investigate”), come by (“obtain”),
give in (“surrender”), catch on (“understand”), turn up (“appear”), double
up (if two people double up, they share something), pull up (about a
vehicle; “slow down and stop”), put up with (“tolerate”), walk out on (“leave
somebody suddenly and end the relationship with him / her”), grow away
from (“develop different views and opinions”), it is difficult, if not
impossible to derive the meaning of the verbal construction from that of its
component elements.
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5.4. Binominals
5.4.1. Definition
5.4.2. Characteristics
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other contrastives: by fair means or foul, come rain or shine, flotsam and
jetsam, etc.
Some conjoined antonyms, with a dynamic meaning, imply
repetition: back and forth, come and go, in and out, on and off, push and
pull, stop and start, etc, while others, which can be considered fixed
expressions based on antonymic relationships, imply the idea of strong
contrast: apples and oranges, chalk and cheese, oil and water. Pairs whose
elements are linked with or provide even more obvious contrasted
alternatives: feast or famine, black or white, sink or swim, trick or treat,
publish or perish, all or nothing, sooner or later, etc.
Linked synonyms or cases when the same word is repeated
inevitably have an emphatic function or emphasis as part of their meaning:
alive and kicking / well, bits and pieces, done and dusted, dead and gone,
fair and impartial, far and away, by leaps and bounds, last will and
testament, nooks and crannies, out and out, etc.
Though less numerous than binominals, trinominals, strings of
three elements belonging to the same morphological class, linked by a
grammatical element and occurring in a fixed order, are also to be
mentioned as illustrative as a type of multi word lexical units in English:
cool, calm and collected (“not angry or emotional”), lock, stock and barrel
(“everything”), coffee, tea or milk (“a choice of beverage”), here, there and
everywhere / hither, thither and yon (“everywhere”), every Tom, Dick and
Harry (“anybody”), hook, line and sinker (“without reservation,
completely”), a hop, skip and jump (“a short distance”), tall, dark and
handsome (about men; “very attractive”), etc.
5.5. Proverbs
5.5.1. Definition
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5.5.2. Characteristics
128
VI. LEXICAL STRATA IN ENGLISH
6.1.1. Archaisms
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surprising in these contexts (since such words refer to something that has
disappeared from man’s life, they are called historisms). “A similar desire
to evoke a former age justifies the use of relative archaisms in
circumstances where doing so has political or emotional connotations, or
when the official new name of a country, city or province is not generally
accepted (such as Persia instead of Iran, Bombay rather than Mumbai, and
Madras as the older variant of Chennai). So, a restaurant seeking to conjure
up historic associations might prefer to call itself Old Bombay or refer to
Persian cuisine, avoiding the employment of the newer place names. A
notable contemporary example is the name of the airline Cathay Pacific,
which uses the archaic Cathay for China”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaism). In science and technology, fields
of continuous and dynamic development, some specialized words or
meanings may follow the trend and fall into disuse quite quickly. However,
the emotional associations that some of these presuppose have kept them in
use, even if within very narrow limits – this is, according to the
explanations in Wikipedia, the case of the meaning “radio” that the
generation of Brits that lived through the Second World War still associate
with the word wireless. Phrases associated with religion, rituals and
traditions, though not considered common if they occur in general speech
or writing, continue to be used in the circumstances in which they appeared
long in the past. “For example, thou shalt and thou shalt not are considered
archaic in general use, but being part of the common English translation of
the Ten Commandments, they continue to be repeated and used in that
context without calling attention to themselves”
(http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-archaisms.htm). Similarly, the
archaic I thee wed is perfectly consonant with a present day wedding
ceremony.
6.1.2. Neologisms
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items or meanings, but rather words, phrases and senses that, at the
moment when they occurred in a language (in this case, in English, but in
any other language for that matter), had a considerable impact on its users.
As Volceanov (1998: 7) points out, British dictionaries of neologisms
contain items such as acid rain, dating since 1850, greenhouse effect, born
in 1920, misfortuned, first documented in 1881 and the three century-old
condom. Such words and phrases are living their “second youth” now, at
times when environmental protection and health care are issues on
everybody’s lips. Similarly, the Romanian senat, camere parlamentare,
interpelare, jandermerie, used initially during the two World Wars, have
been brought back into usage recently and may, therefore, be considered
neologisms.
Neologisms appear in a language as the result of the evolution of the
historical, political, social and cultural context. In the introduction to her
report on the evolution of the English vocabulary at the beginning of the
second millennium, Susie Dent (2007) highlights the main events and
concerns that this time span covered and that played a role in the creation
of new words and phrases: the dramatic wars in the Middle East (which
were the source of lexical items such as degrading, deconflicting or
attriting for “killing in a battle”, unlawful combatant for “prisoner of war”,
extraordinary rendition or irregular rendition for “apprehension and
transfer of a person from one state to another, the latter frequently a place
where torture is practiced”, etc.), “the realities of global warming … and
preoccupations with our carbon footprint” (Dent 2007: 3) (reflected at the
level of the lexicon in the appearance of new phrases such as carbon budget
– “the sum of all exchanges, inflows and outflows, of carbon compounds by
a firm or country”, carbon credit – “a certified carbon dioxide emission
displacement credit, supposed to be equal to one ton of CO2 removed from
the environment”, carbon offsetting – “investment in a project or activity
that reduces greenhouse gas emissions or removes carbon from the
atmosphere (eg. solar energy) to compensate for the emissions attributable
to another process or activity (eg. an air flight)” – all defined as such in
various online dictionaries), the evolution of online technology, the Internet
and mobile phones especially (due to which English has enriched with
neologisms such as blog – “a web page that serves as an individual’s
electronic diary to which pubic access is permitted”, cyberbullying – “the
use of e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, cell phones or other forms of
information technology to deliberately hares, threaten or intimidate
someone”, spam – explained in Wikipedia as “the use of electronic
messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately”),
the rap and hip-hop music gaining ground outside the Afro-American
community (responsible for idioms such as ghostriding the wip - explained
in Wikipedia as “when a person puts a vehicle’s transmission in gear, then
exits the vehicle while it is still rolling to dance beside it or on the hood or
roof” and catching the vapours – “being caught up in someone else’s
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popularity”), and last, but not least, “the rise of a distinct ‘us and them’
mentality which led to a new register of social labels” (Dent 2007: 4)
(including words such as chavs – a derogatory term used to describe white
teenagers of working class background, who frequently engage in anti-
social behaviour, the returning Sloanes – “rich young men and women of
the upper class” and U and non-U, for “upper class” and “middle class”
respectively, not long ago revived in the context of Prince William’s
extensively talked about love relationship with Kate Middleton, a
representative of the average social class in Britain).
The linguistic phenomena mainly associated with the creation of
neologisms are borrowing and word formation by various techniques.
They will be illustrated in what follows with examples selected from
Volceanov’s (1998) dictionary of neologisms.
As far as English is concerned, it has recently enriched its
vocabulary with loan words from French (aestheticienne – “beautician”,
aromatherapy - “a type of health treatment in which nicely smelling oils
are rubbed into somebody’s skin to make the person feel relexaed”, ballotin
– “small pacakage”, bustier – “a piece of clothing for women that does fits
close to the body and does not cover the shoulders and the arms”,
diamantaire – “diamond seller”), Spanish (aficionado – “supporter”,
huaquero – “robber of ancient thombs in Chile, Peru and Bolivia”, morcilla
– “a special type of sausages that contain pig blood”, mucho – “much”),
Russian (Afghantsi – “former Soviet soldier in Afghanistan”, khozraschrot
– “economic liability”, demokratizatsiya – “process of democratization of
society and its institutions”, perestroika – “ample process of social, political
and economic reform initiated in 1987 by M. Gorbaciov in the USSR”),
German (bedienung – “mention on a bill that the final amount indicated
contains the waiter’s tip”, kletten prinzip – “means of supervising hooligans
in a crowd so as to prevent their riotous intentions”), Japanese (basho –
“traditional Japanese fight championship”, karaoke – “the singing by
amateurs of the lyrics of songs against recorded tunes”, mawashi – “the
competition attire of sumo fighters”, Nikkei – “index of the relative prices of
stocks at the Tokyo Stock Exchange”), Czech (eyelyser – “optical apparatus
for measuring the level of alcohol in one’s blood”, colourization – “process
of colouring a film initially made in black and white”), Italian (libero – “the
last player at the back of the football field”, mascarpone – “Italian cottage
cheese”), etc. Borrowing from foreign languages apart, transferring words
and phrases from one regional dialect into another has also contributed to
the enrichment of the recipient variety with neologisms. Speaking of
English, it is the American dialect that has mostly acted as donor to the
British one, to which it has lately transferred words and phrases such as:
cliffhanger – “TV series of which each episode finishes with a scene full of
suspense”, ecodoomster – “supporter of the idea that life on earth will
perish as the result of environmental degradation”, Joshua – “test for
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make it into current dictionaries, what are the determining factors in their
success?
Very roughly speaking, there are five primary contributors to the survival of
a new word: usefulness, user-friendliness, exposure, the durability of the
subject it describes, and its potential associations or extensions. If a new
word fulfils these robust criteria, it stands a very good chance of inclusion in
the modern lexicon” (Dent 2007: 8).
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return to the initial North – South separation, though with a “Lower North”
and “Upper South” subdivision.
A number of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary
characteristics of regional dialects, as compared to General American
English, are highlighted by Davies (2005).
In terms of pronunciation, for example, in the Eastern dialects,
rhotic /r/ is lost after vowels, while it is maintained in all positions in
General American, a rounded vowel has been preserved in these varieties in
words such as top and dot, while the standard language uses an unrounded
vowel. The “Southern droll” is specific of Southern dialects. It is “produced
largely through a combination of slower enunciation and diphthongization
of stressed vowels, so that a word like class is pronounced like [klӕis] or
[klӕjəs]. Final consonant clusters may also be weakened in words like kind,
fast and slept. No distinction occurs in much of the South between words
like pen and pin, the mid vowel /e/ being raised to a high front vowel before
nasals” (Davies 2005: 49).
Of the grammatical peculiarities of Southern dialects, Davies (2005)
mentions the use of the special pronoun you-all, [jal], for the second person
plural, the use of a-prefixing, as in She’s a-working, “the use of done with
an adverbial function meaning ‘already’, as in He done got fired (restricted
to working class speech), and the combination of two modal verbs, as in He
might could bring the truck. One rather unusual non-standard feature
found in informal usage in a number of American regional dialects is the
use of anymore in positive sentences to mean ‘nowadays’, as in this
example from Encarta World English Dictionary: We always use a taxi
anymore” (Davies 2005: 49).
American dialects differ in terms of vocabulary, too. They have
distinctive regional words, many of which are connected to food specific to
the areas where they are used: as quoted by Davies (2005), corn chowder (a
soup) and cruller (doughnut) for the North-Eastern parts of the USA, grits
(boiled cornmeal) and gumbo (a soup or stew) for the South.
“Much of the lexicon of American English reflects a non-rooted
spirit and the mobility associated with both the American past and the
contemporary way of life. The arrival of train travel in the 19th century
brought a large number of new words and expressions into the language, as
can be seen in this second extract from the novel On the Road” (Davies
2005: 50):
‘During the depression’, said the cowboy to me, ‘I used to hop freights at
least once a month. In those days, you’d see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or
in a boxer, and they weren’t just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work
and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering. It was
like that all over the West. Brakemen never bothered you in those days…’
(Kerouac 2004: 35)
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acest look – “how you can preserve this look”; masculine: este
noul superstar al rockului – “he is the new superstar of rock”);
• nouns obtained by derivation with Romanian suffixes, from
English roots (diploma de cea mai bine îmbrăcată coolgirliţă –
“diploma for the best-dressed ‘coolgirliţă’”; o fashionistă
precum actriţa K.B. – “a ‘fashionistă’” like the actress K.B.”; Eşti
cea mai dulce maroonică – “You are the sweetest ‘maroonică’”);
• adjectives used in the Romanian comparative and superlative
degrees (cea mai cool pereche de balerini – “the coolest pair of
shoes”; foarte simplu şi foarte cool – „very simple and very
cool”);
• verbs conjugated according to the Romanian pattern (poţi
uploada fotografii – „you can upload photographs”; nu ştiu să
managerieze problemele sufleteşti – “they cannot manage soul
problems”; pe unde am mixat, lumea s-a distrat – “people had
fun wherever I mixed music”).
The stable status that some English words already have in Romanian
may be proven by the fact that they are used in the host language with more
than one of their meanings. This is the case of the word net, for example,
which circulates in Romanian both with its “the thing that tennis players hit
the ball over” meaning and with the “online network” meaning. Similarly,
modeling occurs both as “the activity of making models of objects” and as
“the job of working as a model”.
Besides borrowings proper, at least two other aspects that my
research on Anglicisms in Romanian youth magazines uncovered may be
considered illustrative of the influence English, as the major foreign
language in Romania, has exerted on our language. On the one hand,
phrases that adopt both the meaning and the structure of corresponding
English phrases have occurred in Romanian. Some such phraseological
calques are cod de bare (“bar code”), a avea fluturaşi în stomac (“to have
butterflies in one’s stomach”) and a ţine prima pagină (“to keep the front
page”). On the other, a number of Romanian words have been identified
whose meanings seem to have enlarged under the influence of English
words they share at least one sense with. For example, chimie - “the
scientific study of substances and of the way they react with other
substances”, got the extra meaning “affective relationship between people”,
under the influence of the English chemistry, while scândură – “flat piece
of wood”, has come to also mean “board with four wheels that one stands on
and rides”, influenced by its English partial synonym skateboard.
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use. In the case of English, at least two ethnic varieties are very well-
established: the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and Chicano
English.
The former is spoken by about 90 percent of the black population of
African origin in the United States, the majority of which comes from inner-
city and working class backgrounds.
AAVE exhibits a number of peculiar linguistic features.
As Davies (2005) indicates, in its phonology, there are certain
characteristics that are shared with Southern US English - the use of the
monophthong /a/ rather than the diphthong /ai/ in words like hide, I and
time, particularly before voiced consonants, and the merging of the short
vowels /e/ and /i/ before nasals, the phonemic distinction between words
such as ten and tin being thus lost. As far as its consonantal system is
concerned, for example, post-vocalic /r/ is not pronounced in word-final
position, before a consonant or in between vowels (in words such as door,
short or Carol). “Another distinctive feature is the reduction of word-final
clusters (through the loss of the final consonant) in words like rest, child,
cold (pronounced as if spelled res’, chil’, and col’), although this does not
apply where there is a cluster of voiced followed by voiceless consonants, as
in felt or pump… Aspects of the rhythm and intonation of AAVE are also
distinctive. One rhythmical feature that is often reflected in written
representations of the variety is the deletion of the first syllable in words
like about or remember, shown as ‘bout and ‘member” (Davies 2005: 67).
From a grammatical perspective, the use of the verb in AAVE seems
to be the most interesting, in terms of its divergence from Standard English
or other US dialects. The verb, to be, for example, is often deleted, both as a
copula (except for cases when it agrees with subjects of the first person) and
as an auxiliary verb, so that sentences like She a doctor, instead of She is a
doctor and He gonna leave instead of He is going to leave are common in
AAVE. When referring to habitual, recurrent actions or lasting
characteristics of things, an invariant form of be is used, so that a statement
like This room is often warm becomes This room be warm. “In AAVE,
there is a contrast in aspect between the forms subject+be+verb-ing and
subject+verb-ing without be: for example, she be singin’ means ‘she often
sings’, whereas she singin’ means “she’s singing now’” (Davies 2005: 68).
In addition, as Davies (2005) points out, non-standard subject-
predicate agreement is also peculiar of AAVE (They is there, She don’t like
it), alongside the use of ain’t in negative clauses, together with other
negative words sometimes (She ain’t got a car, He ain’t got no money) and
the inversion of the subject and the auxiliary in declarative sentences with a
negative word as subject (Didn’t nobody hear her – Nobody heard her;
Wasn’t nobody there – Nobody was there).
Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of AAVE contains words of African
origin (juke, okra, tote, banjo) and words from English to which Afro-
American speakers have attached meanings that differ from those of these
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the media and the official social, scientific, political, cultural, etc. settings,
on the other. SE is also the variety taught to learners of English as a foreign
language. However, it should not be understood that it is spoken by
members of the upper social classes and in the previously mentioned
contexts only – it is spread, admittedly, in a non-uniform way, across the
whole social spectrum and it is encountered in less formal environments as
well.
Trudgill’s (1999) attempt at describing SE, in terms of both what it
is and what it is not, resulted in highlighting the fact that, on the one hand,
SE is not an accent. It can be identified mainly by its vocabulary, grammar
and orthography, but not by its pronunciation. In Britain, there is “a high
status and widely described accent known as ‘Received Pronunciation’
(RP)”, referred to during the former half of the 20th century as “King’s
English”, “Queen’s English” and “BBC English” also, “which is
sociolinguistically unusual when seen from a global perspective in that it is
not associated with any geographical area, being instead a purely social
accent associated with speakers in all parts of the country, or at least in
England, from upper-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds” (Trudgill
1999: 118). There seems to be wide agreement, though, on the fact that,
while users of RP also speak SE, not all speakers of SE speak it with an RP.
According to Trudgill and Chesire (1998), about 10% of the population in
Britain speak SE with some form of regional accent, even if this is not very
distant from RP. Therefore, it is justified to say that “while RP is, in a sense,
standardized, it is a standardized accent of English and not Standard
English itself. This point becomes even clearer from an international
perspective. Standard English speakers can be found in all English-
speaking countries, and it goes without saying that they speak this variety
with different non-RP accents, depending on whether they came from
Scotland or the USA or New Zealand or wherever” (Trudgill 1999: 118).
SE is not a style either (style being regarded as a language variety
that can be placed on a continuum, ranging from very formal to very
informal). Trudgill (1999) considers it appropriate to assert the
independence (at least theoretical, if not always practical) of the parameter
standard – non-standard from the parameter formal – informal. According
to him, a sentence like The old man was bloody knackered after his long
trip may be considered a clear instance of SE, though “couched in a very
informal style” (Trudgill 1999: 120), while a sentence like Father were very
tired after his lengthy journey would be, for most, an example of non-
standard English (due to the grammatically incorrect agreement between
the subject and the verb), “couched in a rather formal style” (Trudgill 1999:
120). What follows from here is that, even if SE tends to be used at the
formal end of the continuum mentioned (a fact imposed by context), it is
not impossible for it to be employed in an informal way, too. Stylistic
switching occurs within the variety in question and not between it and
another one.
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6.2.3.2. Slang
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communication channels such as the email, mobile phones and online chat
rooms. Thus, new varieties of English, specific to electronic communication,
have evolved and deserve the same amount of attention as the language
used in traditional oral and written settings.
Spontaneous speech, one form of oral communication, occurs
when people talk naturally and informally, without having planned in
advance what they are going to say. This is not to mean that spontaneous
talk is just “small talk” for the sake of talking, that the interlocutors have no
conscious aim in their talk whatsoever, but rather that “linguistically, they
have not already worked out what form of the language they are going to
use to express what they want to say. In their heads, they may well have
quite clear intentions, but they will actually express these intentions
spontaneously, if and when they get the chance to in the course of the
conversation” (Davies 2005: 92).
Although informal conversation does not seem to be closely
controlled, a set of rules is still applied by the speakers, even if
unconsciously most of the times. These are connected to the use of formulas
to open or close a dialogue, of greetings or pragmatic idioms (adjacency
pairs of the kind I’m George. / Nice to meet you; I’m sorry! / No problem.;
Have some more cake! / No, thank you, I’ve had enough, etc.), to giving
feedback (by using, for example, discourse markers such as yes, I know,
exactly, sure, etc.), asking and answering questions, making and
responding to suggestions, signaling the intention to keep or to yield the
floor (in the former case, by, for instance, pausing at a moment when the
sentence is still incomplete and when, therefore, the interlocutor feels
discouraged to take over; in the latter, by pausing when an idea has been
completely expressed, directly asking for the interlocutor’s opinion or
displaying suggestive body language – looking more steadily to the person
to whom the speaker is willing to give the floor, nodding, etc).
Davies (2005: 92) lists some of the non-fluency features that are
characteristic of spontaneous talk as follows:
• “abandoned / incomplete words such as thi-this and abandoned
and / or reformulated sentence structure, such as I could always get
the tickets from … there’s a new box office down … you know, when
you go through that new shopping archade…
• syntactic blends, where the structure of the sentence changes ‘in
mid-stream’, e.g. About two hundred years ago we had ninety-five
percent of people in this country were employed in farming.
• mispronunciations and slips of the tongue, e.g. par cark for car
park (syllable-onset consonants swopped); win a pin for with a pin
(where an anticipated consonant is articulated early).
• fillers like er, erm.
• repetition (often combined with hesitation), such as
it’s…it’s…n…not that I want to be critical but…”
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It’s a shame that the film marketing has had a detrimental effect on its
critical reception. In my opinion it was incredibly over-hyped which naturally
caused critics to analyse it more pessimistically than they normally would.
Although it doesn’t quite fill the shoes its makers boast, the movie is still a visually
epic and narratively engaging film I can’t help loving!
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VII. WORDS IN DICTIONARIES
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Words in Dictionaries
Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French”. There are around 2500 words in this
dictionary, for which synonyms or explanations “in plaine English words”
(Cawdrey, cited in Jackson 2002: 33) are provided.
John Bullokar’s An English Expositor followed A Table
Alphabeticall in 1616, with more numerous and diverse entries and more
extensive explanations. Both these publications led the way to Henry
Cockerman’s The English Dictionarie, first published in 1623. Though
inspired by the two previous publications, Cockerman’s dictionary differed
from them in some respects. On the one hand, it addressed a larger
audience, of which the learners of English as a foreign language were part.
On the other, besides the lists of “hard words” with their explanations, it
also contained “a list of ‘vulgar’ words together with their ‘refined or
elegant’ equivalents, as an aid to writing with good style and, … following
the practice of some Latin-English dictionaries, … a list of Gods and
Godesses’” (Jackson 2002: 35).
Monolingual dictionaries continued to expand, mostly in the
direction of lexemes outside the everyday vocabulary. Etymology began to
be of concern to English lexicographers so that, by the end of the
seventeenth century, two etymological dictionaries had been published:
Stephen Skinner’s Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae (1671) and the
anonymous Gazophylacium Anglicanum (1689).
The beginning of the eighteenth century brought changes as far as
the focus in monolingual English dictionaries is concerned. Dictionary
compilers began to show a more consistent interest in including in their
works, besides borrowings, as numerous native words as possible. Such
interest, together with that already manifested for etymology, is obvious in
the two dictionaries that dominated the period, Nathaniel Bailey’s An
Universal Etymological English Dictionary, published in 1721, and his
Dictionarium Britannicum, of 1730, the latter, a rich source of inspiration
to Samuel Johnson. Largely similar, these publications had a more
extensive scope and addressed a wider group of users than their
predecessors. As the author described the former dictionary (quoted by
Jackson 2002: 37), it was meant for “comprehending the derivations of the
generality of words in the English tongue, either antient or modern, from
the antient British, Saxon, Danish, Norman and Modern French, Teutonic,
Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages, each in their
proper characters … and also a brief and clear explication of all difficult
words … and terms of art … together with a large collection and explication
of words and phrases us’d in our antient statutes … and the etymology and
interpretation of the proper names of men, women, and remarkable places
in Great Britain; also the dialects of our different countries. To which is
added a collection of our most common proverbs, with their explication and
illustration”.
Lexicographers’ attempt at introducing native words rather than so
many borrowed ones in their dictionaries was paralleled in the eighteenth
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century by the scholars’ and authors’ concern for the state of the English
language, especially for its being spoiled, as they considered, by loan words.
The example of the Academie francaise, who thought of dictionaries as
instruments that could help in codifying the French language and in
prescribing what was acceptable in it, prompted similar opinions on the
part of the English scholars. Of them, Samuel Johnson embodied, in a
monumental work, his awareness of the important role a dictionary may
play in ascertaining and fixing a language.
His Dictionary of the English Language, printed in 1755, “remained
the foremost dictionary of the English language for a century, and its author
was acclaimed as the one who had done for English single-handedly what it
had taken forty French academicians to do for their language. Johnson not
only produced a monumental dictionary by a method, involving the
collection of evidence (citations) and using the evidence to construct the
entries, which became standard lexicographical procedure, but he also
reflected in the Plan … on the nature of the dictionary compiler’s task and
the issues that face lexicographers” (Jackson 2002: 46).
The methodological aspects that the author addresses in the Plan of
a Dictionary of the English Language (1747) and which he adhered to in
the making of the dictionary proper concern the selection of the words to be
included, their orthography and pronunciation, their etymology,
morphology, syntax and “interpretation” (i.e. definition) and the use of
citations to support his statements. The chief intent of the dictionary was,
the author declared (quoted by Jackson 2002: 42), “to preserve the purity
and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom”, in other words, to include
as many native words as possible, without completely excluding loans
(those belonging to the professional jargons were considered of special
interest to the users of the dictionary). In terms of orthography, Johnson
suggested that no major changes away from the then practice should be
made where this was clear and that innovation should be introduced only if
it could have been given sound reasons for, while, in respect of
pronunciation, “the stability of which is of great importance to the stability
of a language, because the first change will naturally begin by corruptions in
the living speech” (Johnson cited by Jackson 2002: 43), he proposed to
“determine the accentuation of all polysyllables by proper authorities” and
to “fix the pronunciation of monosyllables, by placing them with words of
correspondent sound” (Johnson cited by Jackson 2002: 43). As far as
etymology is concerned, Johnson distinguished between “simple” and
“compound” words and, within the former category, between “primitive”
and “derivative” ones. Primitive words were necessarily traced back to their
original form, and those for which this could not be determined were
excluded from the dictionary, in a declared attempt to “secure the language
from being over-run with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the
spawn of folly or affectation” (Johnson quoted by Jackson 2002: 43). The
inflections of English words being irregular, they were “diligently noted” in
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still survive; what new uses have since arisen, by what process, and when;
to illustrate these facts by a series of quotations ranging from the first
known occurrence of the word to the latest, or down to the present day; the
word being thus made to exhibit its own history and meaning; and to treat
the etymology of each word strictly on the basis of historical fact, and in
accordance with the methods and results of modern philological science”.
The editors followed this initially stated goal very closely, though not all the
common words of the language were included - to observe Victorian
sensibilities, coarse slang vocabulary was left aside and so were some
scientific and technical terms.
Words in the OED are divided into three classes: “Main” words,
“Subordinate” words and “Combinations”. The first class includes single
words – simple, derived or compound – which “from their meaning, history
or importance, claim to be treated in separate articles” (Murray qtd. by
Jackson 2002: 53). Subordinate words are “variant and obsolete forms of
main words, and such words of bad formation, doubtful existence, or
alleged use, as it is deemed proper, on any ground, to record” – eg. afforse
(obsolete variant of “afforce”); afforest (obsolete variant of “athirst”), etc.
(Murray qtd. by Jackson 2002: 53). Both Main and Subordinate words are
headwords in the dictionary, the latter being printed in smaller letters than
the former. Combinations are derived or compound words that do not need
to be defined or which can be briefly explained on the basis of their
cognates. They are dealt with under the main word that represents their
first element.
The entry for a Main word consists of four parts: Identification
(where spelling, pronunciation, grammatical class, inflections for irregular
nouns and verbs and the particular domain or subject area to which the
word belongs are mentioned), Morphology (where the “form-history” of the
words is charted, by reference to their etymology, to subsequent changes of
their form in English and to other various facts about their history), the
Signification (where the focus falls on the meaning(s) of words) and the
Illustrative Quotations (at least one for each century during which the
meaning of a word was known to have been in use).
Although the first edition of the OED might have had flaws, it was
for sure a monumental accomplishment in the field of lexicography, a
valuable tool for students of English and scientists who explored its content
for all kinds of scholarly endeavors.
Some of these flaws were eliminated in the two supplements (1933
and 1972-1986) and the second edition of the dictionary, which was
published both in print (1989) and in electronic format (1992): a wide range
of colloquial expressions and words belonging to regional dialects (English
spoken in North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, etc)
were added alongside specific terminology in the fields of sociology,
linguistics, computer science (the use of subject labels was significantly
extended), the distinction between “main” and “subordinate” words was
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1960 2005
amintire s.f. 1. (memorie) memory. 2. amintire sf 1 remembering;
(aducere aminte) memory, reminding, mentioning etc. v. aminti;
remembrance, recollection. 3. (suvenir) mention, insinuation; recollection;
keepsake, token, souvenir. b) ca ~ for a rememebrance; memory 2 (memorie)
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for livresc / bookish and P for popular / folk (maţ (furtun) – ←P flexible
tube). The arrow symbols ← and → have been taken over to the newer
edition - the former, to indicate that the Romanian equivalent does not
correspond to the stylistic indication in English, the latter, to show that the
English word or phrase does not have the same stylistic value as the one in
Romanian. An arrow pointing down, ↓, was added to the list of symbols in
the 2005 edition, for “especially” (agonale - ↓ la vechii greci agons,
libertate - ↓ ca lipsă de constrângere freedom, ↓ în sens abstract liberty,
răzbuna - ↓ pe cineva to revenge).
Additions were made to the 2005 edition of Leviţchi’s dictionary
from a grammatical point of view, too. Nouns in Romanian are included
both with their singular and with their plural form (wherever the latter
exists) and, like in the older edition, the fact that some nouns have forms
for the plural only and different forms for the two genders has been
highlighted. If, in the first edition, it is only the masculine singular form of
adjectives that is mentioned, in the 2005 dictionary, all possible forms of
adjectives are indicated (as the case may be): masculine and feminine
singular, masculine and feminine plural. In the case of verbs, besides the
bare infinitive, the first person singular forms for the present, “perfect
simplu” (approximately simple past in English) and past participle
indicative are specified.
Hard copies apart, the Internet has lately offered the possibility of
working with online general dictionaries that are available on sites such as
www.dictionare.com, www.dictionarromanenglez.ro, www.engleza-
online.ro/dictionar-roman-englez.php, etc. Unfortunately, many of these
need obvious improvement in terms of both the number of words and
phrases included and the way the existent ones are defined and described.
The number of specialized dictionaries for English and Romanian,
in the field of the science of linguistics, has remained much more reduced
so far, by comparison with the quite numerous general bilingual
dictionaries, some of which have been enumerated above. Among those that
cover specific areas of linguistics, there are the following: Dicţionar de
neologisme ale limbii engleze (Volceanov 1998), a collection of about 6000
words and phrases that, as the author indicates, entered English during the
last two decades of the twentieth century (the entries are in English, while
the explanations are given in Romanian); Dicţionar de argou, eufemisme şi
expresii familiare englez-român (Balaban 1999), comprising slang selected
from various regional varieties of English, for which Romanian equivalents
are provided, special attention being paid to multiple meanings, synonyms,
specific usages and examples that clarify certain senses; and a number of
phraseological dictionaries such as Dicţionar Englez – Român, Român –
Englez frazeologic (Nicolescu et al. 2005), Dicţionare Englez – Român de
exprsii şi locuţiuni (Hulban 2007), The Great English – Romanian
Dictionary of Idioms (Săileanu, Poenaru 2007), Dicţionar de colocaţii
169
Words about Words
170
Words in Dictionaries
duty (a-şi face datoria). There are also situations when English uses only
one verb and Romanian uses several. For instance, the following
collocations with the verb to brush are translated using different verbs in
Romanian: to brush one’s clothes – a-şi peria hainele, to brush one’s nails
– a-şi freca unghiile, to brush one’s teeth – a se spăla pe dinţi. Sometimes,
the entire English collocation is translated by a single verb in Romanian –
to take a hit – a lovi, to give odds – a avantaja – or it is rendered into
Romanian by paraphrase – to split an infinitive – a intercala un adverb
între elememtele infinitivului. Also, the verb, the noun or the adverb in the
English collocation finds itself an equivalent in a Romanian phrase – to file
an interrogatory – a pune la dosar un interogatoriu, to run a relay – a
alerga în proba de ştafetă, to spread thinly – a întinde un strat subţire,
etc.
Specialized bilingual dictionaries for English and Romanian, outside
the area of linguistics as a science, have also been printed in quite large
numbers during the last decade. Examples of such dictionaries include:
Dicţionar englez-român pentru personalul medical (Brudaşcu 2008),
Dicţionar de chimie şi industrie chimică englez-român (Dobre 2009),
Dicţionar economic englez-român şi român-englez (Niculescu 2009),
Dicţionar juridic englez-român şi român-englez (Lister, Veth 2010), etc.
171
REFERENCES
172
References
173
Words about Words
174
References
175
Words about Words
176
References
ONLINE RESOURCES
Danet, Brenda. 2002. ‘The Language of Email’. Lecture delivered at the European
Union Summer School, University of Rome, June 2002. Available at
http://www.europhd.eu/html/_onda02/04/ss8/pdf_files/lectures/Danet
_email.pdf.
Loos, E., D. Day and P. Jordan (Eds.) 1999. P. Jordan (Eds.) 1999. Metonymies in
English. Available at http://www. pnlanguages.org.
Partridge, E. 1933. Slang. To Day and Yesterday. London: Routledge. Quoted in
Fox, Kelly. ‘Why People Use Slang’. Available at
http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/1914/language/slang.ht
m.
Varanakov, Anatoliy. ‘Slang and Rock. On the Material of Lyrics of Rock Groups of
Different Times’. Available at
http://www.google.ro/#hl=ro&biw=1280&bih=814&q=characteristics+of+
slang.
Whitney, W.D. 1889. The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia. New York: The
Century Company. Available since 2001 at
http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/.
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/cat/31.html
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com
http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/idioms-sports.htm
http://www.etymonline.com/
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-are-archaisms.htm
http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/
http://www.insideprison.com/glossary.asp
http://www.le.ac.uk/ee/glossaries/2006/studentslang/index.html
http://www.phespirit.info/cockney/english_to_slang.htm
www.peevish.co.uk
www.askoxford.com
www.dictionare.com
www.dictionarromanenglez.ro
www.engleza-online.ro/dictionar-roman-englez.php
177
INDEX
A D
Abbreviation, 65 Deflection, 64
acronyms, 66 denotation, 9, 73, 74, 75
adjectives, 22, 28, 41, 42, 47, 48, 52, 57, derivation, 9, 43, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 133,
59, 60, 66, 88, 92, 107, 110, 111, 113, 139
138, 139, 167, 169 Diachronic lexical strata, 129
Adverbs, 59, 60 dictionaries, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 69, 75,
affixes, 40, 41, 42, 43, 63, 64, 88 78, 116, 131, 133, 156, 157, 158, 159,
allomorphs, 39, 44 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 171
Alphanumerics, 66
American lexicography, 163
analogy, 63, 67, 76, 97
E
antonyms, 86, 87, 88, 126, 127, 156 Early Modern English, 19, 31
antonymy, 9, 78, 157 Eponyms, 66, 68
archaisms, 85, 129, 130, 167, 177 ethnic varieties, 140
expanding circle, 10, 134, 137
B
Back-formation, 63
F
binominals, 9, 58, 103, 126, 127 folk-etymology, 9
borrowed words, 23, 36, 63, 64, 97, 138 French words, 26, 31, 32, 33
borrowing, 19, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33,
35, 38, 64, 83, 132
borrowings, 20, 22, 25, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, G
85, 97, 137, 139, 159
geographical varieties, 22, 134, 164
British lexicography, 158
grammatical words, 14, 15
Greek words, 11, 20, 25, 31
C
Change of accent, 65 H
Clipping, 61, 62 historisms, 130
code-switching, 24, 32
homographs, 90, 95
collocations, 9, 10, 78, 103, 104, 105, 106, homonyms, 41, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 138,
homonymy, 9, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95
166, 168, 170 homophones, 90, 91, 95
compound, 12, 17, 37, 43, 48, 51, 52, 53,
hyponymy, 9, 89, 95
54, 55, 56, 62, 63, 70, 160, 162
compounding, 9, 19, 43, 61, 63, 133
compounds, 17, 18, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, I
56, 59, 61, 62, 63, 131, 141
connotation, 9, 26, 28, 73, 75, 77, 78, 81, idioms, 9, 78, 79, 86, 103, 105, 114, 115,
114 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 131, 150, 170,
Contraction, 62 177
conversion, 9, 43, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, Indian loan words, 37
61, 92, 93, 116 infixes, 40
converted, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 153, 154 inflections, 18, 42, 92, 138, 160, 162
Inner circle, 10
interjections, 54, 58, 60, 70
178
Italian words, 35 Portuguese words, 35
prefixation, 43
prefixes, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49
L prepositions, 22, 45, 51, 54, 57, 58, 104,
Latin words, 27, 28, 29 108, 111, 153
Lexical strata, 9, 129
lexicography, 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 158, 162, R
164, 165
lexicology, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 87 Recent loans, 38
linguistic sign, 9, 70, 71, 72, 75 reduplicatives, 51, 54
reference, 10, 23, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 86,
96, 102, 129, 133, 137, 156, 157, 162,
M 177
markedness, 9, 75, 76 Richards, 71
meaning, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 23, 28, root, 20, 39, 40, 43, 44, 51, 61, 64, 68, 88,
29, 30, 39, 40, 43, 44, 49, 55, 56, 58, 90
59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71, 73, roots, 40, 43, 46, 50, 64, 139
75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88,
91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, S
101, 103, 105, 109, 112, 113, 114, 116,
118, 125, 126, 127, 130, 135, 139, 142, Saussure, 9, 70, 71, 175
147, 149, 151, 156, 160, 161, 162, 165, Scandinavian words, 29
166, 170 semantic change, 9, 96, 97, 98, 99
meronymy, 9, 88, 89 Semiotic Triangle, 9, 71
metaphor, 9, 31, 95, 100, 101, 117, 128 sense, 9, 19, 40, 55, 58, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79,
metaphors, 99, 100, 101 80, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 101,
metonymy, 9, 68, 95, 100, 101, 117 103, 110, 111, 114, 117, 125, 133, 139,
Middle English, 18, 28, 31, 35, 96, 156, 143, 161
174 slang, 10, 75, 82, 83, 97, 146, 147, 148,
Modern English, 18, 19, 21, 28, 30, 63, 149, 152, 162, 166, 168, 169, 177
64, 65, 129, 157, 173, 176 Spanish words, 24, 35
morpheme, 39, 44 Standard English, 10, 140, 141, 142, 143,
morphemes, 38, 39, 40, 41, 113 144, 145, 146, 176
multi-word units, 103 stem, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 90
suffixation, 46, 63
suffixes, 40, 43, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 139
N Synchronic lexical strata, 134
native words, 22, 159, 160 synonyms, 18, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83,
neologisms, 9, 85, 130, 131, 132, 133 85, 97, 127, 156, 159, 166, 169
Nonce words, 69 synonymy, 9, 75, 80, 81, 83, 85, 157, 166,
Nouns, 41, 57, 59, 106, 113, 169 168
O T
Ogden, 9, 71 trinominals, 103, 127
Old English, 17, 22, 64, 92, 156, 158, 175
orthographic words, 13 V
outer circle, 10, 134, 136
Verbs, 41, 59, 60, 65, 111, 124, 157, 176
P
W
phonological words, 12, 13
phrasal verbs, 103, 124, 125, 170 word, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20,
polysemy, 9, 56, 92, 93, 94, 95 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39,
179
40, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 61, 134, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 148, 152,
62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 153, 156, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169
77, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 94, 95, word meaning, 68, 70, 73
96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 111, WORD MEANING, 70
113, 114, 125, 126, 127, 130, 132, 133, Words as vocabulary items, 13
words from Dutch and German, 34
180