Lecture
All the preceding description of the lexical units of modern English has been aimed at revealing their various properties: semantic, structural, combinatorial, etc. However, lexical units are realized in speech not in some of their separate characteristics, but appear as integral unities, whose properties closely interact, intertwine, and taken together determine the significance and place of the lexical unit within the overall system of the vocabulary. It is important, nevertheless, to note a certain interdependence of characteristics, which can be traced quite clearly between, for example, the semantic properties of a word and its structural parameters, between the etymological nature of a lexical unit and its stylistic markedness/unmarkedness, etc.
Linguists have long noted that there is a certain correlation between the polysemy of a word and its frequency. The more frequent a word is, the more meanings are found in its semantic structure, and conversely, rarely used words are, as a rule, monosemantic. Thus, words belonging to the first thousand most commonly used words, of the type head 'the topmost part of the body', hand 'the terminal part of the arm', leg 'a limb used for walking', make 'to produce, to construct', arrive 'to reach a destination', red 'of the colour of blood' and others, contain from 2 to 25 or more meanings in their semantic structures. Infrequently used words of the type furze 'a spiny yellow-flowered shrub', macabre 'gruesome, having death as a subject' and others, on the contrary, have only one meaning. And however conventional quantitative calculations in the sphere of meanings may be, they are nevertheless quite indicative and clearly testify to the tendency of frequent words toward polysemy. It is also noteworthy that such a characteristic of a word as its structure turns out to be connected with frequency and polysemy. It is not difficult to notice that frequent words are, for the most part, "short", monosyllabic or disyllabic words, simple in their morphemic and derivational structure, mono-morphemic and non-derived. Polysyllabic words are mainly borrowed words, and if polysyllabicity is the result of derivational processes, then the number of meanings inherent in a polysyllabic word is inversely proportional to the number of derivational steps and the morphemes making up the word.
Frequently used words, besides being polysemantic and simple in structure and native in origin, are also characterized by stylistic neutrality, which permits their use in the most varied functional styles, in the most varied situations of communication. Thus, in frequency of use are focused all the correlations that are established between one or another characteristic of a word. These correlations, however, are not of a strictly deterministic nature, but rather probabilistic. Thus, the assertion that frequent words are simple in their structure does not exclude the fact that many words simple in their phonemic, syllabic, or morphemic composition do not belong to frequent vocabulary (e.g. till 'a cash drawer, a cash register', pus 'a thick yellowish fluid formed at a site of infection', mole 'a small dark spot on the skin', whit 'the smallest conceivable amount' and others), just as it does not exclude the fact that some derived, polysyllabic words turn out to be among the frequent ones (e.g. beautiful 'lovely, pleasing to look at', wonderful 'marvellous, excellent' and others, which are far more common than the bases from which they are derived).
At the same time, it is possible to single out strata of vocabulary in which the outlined correlations are most probable and form a bundle of interdependencies that is most evident and most clearly traceable. These are the most stable strata of the vocabulary, which in linguistics have received the description of the "basic word stock" of a language. Although it is very difficult to determine the boundaries of the basic word stock of a language, just as it is difficult to determine the number of lexical units sufficient for communication within this or that linguistic community, it seems expedient not to reject the notion of the basic word stock, but to conduct research in which the features of the units composing it are established experimentally. It is hardly possible, moreover, to deny the existence of a core of the lexical system, represented by lexical units that are the least changeable, simple in their morphemic and derivational structure, as a rule monosyllabic, native or borrowed at the earliest stages of the existence of the English language, functioning as the nuclear members of the semantic fields that make up the semantic network of the language, and possessing the widest range of combinatorial possibilities. For the foreign-language learner, the basic word stock represents that part of the lexical composition of the language which must be studied first of all, since the units of the basic word stock play the most significant role in the processes of communication, naming the most important objects, things, phenomena and properties of the world around us.
Thus, the complex interweavings and interdependencies of the various properties of the lexical units of a language determine the significance of the unit in the processes of communication and in the overall lexical system. At the same time, this pattern of interconnections and interdependencies, reflecting the concrete manifestations of characteristics that are universal in their types, also determines the distinctiveness of the lexical system of a particular language. All languages possess the same properties, but their concrete manifestations are highly specific. With regard to the word, it can be said that in all languages the word possesses phonemic, morphological, etymological, semantic, combinatorial, stylistic-functional and other properties, but in each particular language they take on their own form and embodiment. On this basis it becomes possible to single out certain characteristic features and peculiarities of the lexical system of this or that language. For modern English, these features and the distinctiveness of its vocabulary are seen in the following.
1. Compared with other languages, for example German, Russian, etc., English vocabulary is characterized by a simpler structure. This means that the number of monosyllabic units in it, in percentage terms, is considerably greater than in other languages. There is no doubt that the simplicity of the syllabic structure of the words of modern English is conditioned by its historical development, by the specific nature of its morphological system, by the poverty of inflections, the presence of which in other languages considerably complicates the material shell of the word. Cf., for example, Eng. ask - Germ. fragen - Rus. спрашивать (sprashivat'), Eng. answer - Germ. antworten - Rus. отвечать (otvechat'), Eng. bring - Germ. bringen - Rus. приносить (prinosit'), Eng. bird - Germ. Vogel - Rus. птица (ptitsa), Eng. boy - Germ. Knabe - Rus. мальчик (mal'chik), where the monosyllabic English words correspond to disyllabic and longer words in German and Russian.
2. Phonetic simplicity as a characteristic feature of a considerable number of English words finds its counterpart in morphemic simplicity, and the number of morphemically simple, or mono-morphemic, units in English also turns out to be greater than in other languages. Even many derived words, owing to the specific nature of word-formation processes and the specific nature of such a mode of word-formation as conversion, turn out to be morphemically simple. For example, bite 'a bite; a wound or mark left by biting', bird 'to hunt or shoot birds', gas 'to fill, to saturate with gas' etc.
3. Connected with phonetic simplicity as the most important characteristic of the lexical system of modern English, distinguishing it from other languages, is also a semantic peculiarity of the words of modern English. The degree of polysemy, or the number of meanings in the semantic structure of polysemantic words, turns out for many lexical units of the English language to be greater than for their correlates in other languages. A comparison of the semantic structures of correlates of the type of names of body parts, verbs of motion, of creation, and many other groups, in purely quantitative terms, confirms this regularity.
4. Interconnected with the structural simplicity of a considerable number of lexical units in modern English also appears to be a greater degree of homonymy compared with other languages, the abundance of lexico-grammatical homonyms and homonymous word-forms, which is quite uncharacteristic of, for example, the Russian language.
5. Yet another distinctive feature of the lexical units of modern English is their combinatorial possibilities, and here we are speaking not so much of the individual combinatorial characteristics of separate words as of whole classes. As a result of the distinctive nature of the syntagmatic connections of word classes in modern English, specific nominative constructions have formed, of the type of the well-known construction stone wall 'a wall made of stone', complex verbs with postpositions of the type bring up 'to raise, to rear', give up 'to abandon, to renounce' and others.
The main distinctiveness of the system of lexical units, however, lies in the very inventory of nominative means of modern English and in the relations that are established between them. A theoretical description of the lexical system cannot reflect the whole diverse linguistic picture, the specific nature of which is grasped when even individual fragments of it are compared, while a general scholarly description, to varying degrees of approximation, is given in lexicographic sources. As the learner of English gains mastery, he penetrates ever more deeply into this distinctive construction, grasps the nuances of the semantics and functioning of the components of the vocabulary, and in this constant and continuous process of his linguistic advancement, the structural, semantic, functional, etc. regularities and aspects described above
of lexical units and their peculiarities as constituents of the vocabulary of modern English must become guidelines conducive to a conscious mastery of the English language.
REVIEW ASSIGNMENTS
Determine the relationship between:
a) the frequency and polysemy of a word,
b) the frequency and structure of a word,
c) the derivational structure and polysemy of a word,
d) the frequency and stylistic characteristics of a word. Give examples.
Indicate the main characteristics of words belonging to the basic word stock.
Name the characteristic features of the vocabulary of modern English.
Give examples proving the distinctiveness of the lexical system of modern English as compared with the lexical systems of other languages.
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