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What is lexicology?
a continually growing branch of linguistics defined as a diachronic and synchronic study of the from and structure, origin and development, referential and contextual meaning and usage of words. the main task of lexicology is to provide the theoretical basis for lexicography
What is lexicography?
the main task of lexicology is to provide the theoretical basis for lexicography - the art of making dictionaries.
How many kinds of lexicology are there?
three, they are:
- general lexicology
- special lexicology
- contrastive lexicology
General lexicology is:
the study of words and vocabulary of a language irrespective of its specific features.
Special lexicology is:
a study of words which devotes its attention to the description of the peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language.
Contrastive lexicology is:
when the vocabularies of different languages are compared and described.
Who is the father of modern lingustics?
Ferdinand de Saussure
What did Ferdinand de Saussure do for linguistics?
he made a fundamental distinction between “synchronic” and “diachronic” linguistics.
Synchronic or descriptive lexicology is:
the study of the words and the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development. A “state” of a language vocabulary is described, disregarding whatever lexical changes might be taking place.
Diachronic or historical lexicology:
traces the words to their earliest determinable base, discusses the origin of various words,their change and development through time and investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic forces that modify their structure, usage and meaning of words.
What is sociolinguistics?
the branch of linguistics which best studies all these aspects of the relationship between language and society, that is the causal relations between the way the language works and develops and the facts of social life.
What is syntax?
Syntax is the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language. *
Distinguish between semantics and pragmatics.
- Semantics: system and the study of meaning in a language.
- Pragmatics: Deals with the contextual meaning of words. The words are studied from the point of view of the users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter when using words in social interaction, and the effects their use of words has on the other participants in the act of communication.
What is the etymology of “etymology” ?
“Etumon” (ἔτυμον): This word means “true sense” or “true meaning.”
“Logia” (λογία): This word means “study” or “knowledge.”
Discuss the relationship between lexicology and lexicography.
Lexicology is a continually growing branch of linguistics defined as the synchronic and diachronic study of the form and structure, origin and development, referential and contextual meaning and usage of words. Its main task is to create a technical base for lexicography: the art of making dictionaries.
What is a word?
A word is a major linguistic unit, stable and intuitively recognizable unit which belongs to the morphological, and to the syntactic and lexical levels of analysis.
What is a:
-lexeme
-word form
-citation
-grammatical words and examples
- a lexeme is a fundamental abstract unit of the lexicon of the language.
-word form is the phonological or graphic realisation of the lexeme - citations are the basic forms appearing as headwords of dictionary entries
-grammatical words are the representations of the lexemes associated with morpho-syntactic properties such as: noun, verb, adjective; number, tense, gender
What is a morpheme and syllable?
the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words. It’s impossible to try to analyze a morpheme into its constituents because it will lose its meaning.
Syllables are groupings of sounds for the purposes of articulation.
Morph and allomorph?
Morph: discrete unit, a physical form representing some of the morphemes in a language. (morpheme used to express indefiniteness in English - a, an)
Allomorph: when different morphs represent the same morpheme and they are grouped together. (-s (s,z,iz) (-ed(d,t,id)
We classify a set of morphs as allomorphs if they are in __________?
- complementary distribution (if they never occur in the same contexts but instead divide up some set of contexts between them and of course, they should represent the same meaning or grammatical function.
When do we say that a phoneme is phonologically conditioned?
When a morpheme has several allomorphs and the allomorph selected to represent the morpheme in a particular context is one whose phonological properties are similar to those of sounds found in its neighborhood.
(example: cats, dogz, judgiz)
Assimilation and their division:
-Assimilation is a phonological process in which a sound becomes more like a neighboring sound, usually a neighboring phoneme.
Progressive - if moving to the right, when the affix agrees with the root
Regressive- if moving to the left, when the consonant of the root tends to agree with the affix. (knife - knives)
Grammatically conditioned allomorph:
grammatically conditioned allomorphy is when the form of a morpheme changes based on the grammatical rules or structure of the language in which it appears.
cats
dogz
judgiz
Lexically conditioned allomorph:
an allomorph is lexically conditioned if its use is obligatory in the presence of a specific lexical word. (ex. realisation of plural in English)
* however this rule fails for the plural morpheme of the word ox - oxen.)
the choice of allomorph -en is lexically conditioned
* the allomorphy in the irregular past tense verbs in English, the change of the root vowel swim/swam; hang/hung is also lexically conditioned.