Lecture 1. Lexicology.

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics studying the vocabulary of a given language, It treats
words, their structure, history and meaning.
Lexicologyis a part/branch of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the
properties of words as the main units of a language.
Two notions are important - language and vocabulary.
Language is central to everything we do. Our understanding of its nature is key to our
understanding of ourselves and our place in society it is a guide to social realicy and builds up a
real world through the language habits of a group.
All the words in a larguage make up what is generally called the vocabulary of the language.
The volume and the character of the vocabulary are determined be the social economic and
cultural history of the people speaking the language. Social, political and cultural changes in
human society cause changes in the vocabulary of the language.
Words are the necessary tools with which we convey thoughts and feelings. When a new
product or a new conception comes into the thought of people, it finds a name in the language.
The main objective of the course – to provide tools of reference to understand the phenomenon
of language, how vocabulary influence the communication on a description of the word stock of
Modern English including structure, etymology, semantics and more.
The main task of course – to provide a systematic description of the word stock of Modern
English – etymologically, morphologically, semantically, praseologically, lexicographically,
lexico-stylistic layers of Eng vovabulary.
Lexicon – 17th century, it reffered to a book containing a selection of a words arranged in
alphabetical order.
Morphology. Words are made of morphemes – prefix+base+suffix.
Semantics the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.
Lexicography the activity or occupation of compiling dictionaries.
Types of lexicology
- General lexicology
- Special lexicology
- Historical lexicology
- Descriptive lexicology
- Contrastive lexicology
Syntagmatic relation and paradigmatic relation are introduced by Saussure (1974) to distinguish
two kinds of signifiers: one concerns positioning (syntagmatic) and the other concerns
substitution (paradigmatic).
On the syntagmatic level, the semantic structure of the word is observed, described and studied
on the basis of its typical contexts.
On the paradigmatic level, the word is studied in its relationships with other words in the
vocabulary system.
The word is a fundamental unit of language. The definition of this basic notion is a very hard
task because word has many different aspects:
- it has a sound form because it is a certain arringement of phonemes;
- it has its morphological structure, being also a certain arrangement of morphemes;
- it may occur in different word forms when used in actual speech;
- it may signal different meanings.
Being the central element of any language system, the word is in the focus of attention of
phonology, lexicology, morphology, syntax.

Several essential aspects of the nature of the word (Prof. G.B.Antrushina [2001:77)
1. as a unit of speech the word serves the purposes of human communication;
2. the word is perceived as the total of the sounds which comprise it;
3. the word, viewed structurally, possesses several characteristics: external and internal
structures.
By external structure its morphological structure is meant (suffixes, root, prefixes).
The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is referred to as the word's semantic
structure and certainly is the main aspect of the word.
4. The unity of the word, which possesses both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity.
The formal unity is illustrated by comparing a word and a word-group comprising identical
constituents, e.g., blackbird, characterized by unity has a single grammatical framing: blackbird
where black can't be changed. In the word-group a black bird each constituent can acquire
grammatical forms of its own: the blackest birds I've ever seen.
Semantic unity: The word blackbird conveys only one concept: the type of bird. This is one of
the main features of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many morphemes
it has in its structure. In the word-group a black bird each word conveys a separate concept: bird
- a living creature, black - a color;
5. susceptibility of the word to grammatical employment: in speech most words can be used in
different grammatical forms.
Summing up, the working definition of the word: the word is a speech unit used for the
purposes of human communication, materially representing a group of sounds, possessing a
meaning, susceptible to grammatical employment and characterized by formal and semantic
unity.
A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may
have or the number of words it may contain. Thus, snowing, rain cats and dogs, and come in are
all exemes, as are elephant, happiness, put up with, face the music, and hundreds of thousands of
other meaningful items in English. The headwords in a dictionary are all lexemes. David Crystal