LEXICOLOGY – THE SCIENCE OF WORDS
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” (New Oxford Dictionary of English 1998);
“… a branch of linguistics concerned with the signification and application of words” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition);
“… the branch of linguistics that deals with the lexical component of language” (American Heritage College Dictionary, 4th edition).
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.
2. The word
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
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).
2.1. Orthographic words
The easiest way to recognize a word is to consider it the strings of letters (and orthographic signs) occurring between two blank spaces in written language. Seen from this perspective, the word may be considered an orthographic word.
However, as simple as this approach may seem, it is not universally valid. There is a degree of flexibility in the way words are written down. Being or not being separated by a space may in itself not be a sure sign of words status. Attention should be drawn upon the fact that, if, for example, compound words, either solid or hyphenated (e.g. blackboard, schoolboy, bedroom or mother-in-law, forget-me-not) may be correctly identified as single units of the vocabulary on the basis of the orthographic criterion, what are known in linguistics al clitic groups may not. A clitic group is made up of a host word and the clitic itself. There are two classes of clitics in English: the class 1clitic – the ‘s genitive and the class 2 clitics – the reduced auxiliaries ‘ll, ‘re, ‘m, ‘d coming from shall/will, are, am, had/would and the contracted negation n’t for not. All of these clitics are appended to full words, the host words, but do not function as words themselves. One more reason for which clitics do not qualify for word status is of a phonological nature – in order for a group of sounds to be qualified as a word in English, there must be a vowel among them. The requirement that words must contain vowels not being met, clitics cannot function as independent words.
2.2. Phonological words
Words as physical objects exist not only in writing, but also in speech. Seen from this perspective, they are known as phonological words.
The recognition of spoken words seems to be a more difficult task than their recognition in writing, primarily due to the fact that the readily identifiable breaks at the boundaries of a written word are no longer present in speech. When spoken, words are not separated distinctly from 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 it. 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.
2.3. Words as vocabulary items
Lexicology distinguishes between words as word-forms and words as lexical items or lexemes. The lexeme is an abstract entity with different variants that is found in dictionaries and that has a particular meaning. Word-forms are the concrete objects that we write (orthographic words) or utter (phonological words) whenever we use language. The relationship between a lexeme and its word-forms is, according to Katamba (2002: 20) one of realization, representation or manifestation. For example, the lexeme ring occurs in dictionaries as such and may be represented when language is actually used by one of the following word-forms: ring, rang, rung, rings, ringing. The lexeme good may manifest itself in actual speaking or writing as good, better, the best. The lexeme child may be realized as child or children, etc.
The distinction between word-forms and lexemes is not difficult to understand. It is a matter we, as language users, are aware of even at a very early age and it is the distinction on which word-play in puns and in intentional ambiguity in everyday life depends. In their Ladybird boo of Jokes and Rhymes, the Youngs (1981) suggest the following joke, illustrative in a very clear way of the difference between words as lexical items and words as word-forms:
‘Waiter, do you serve shrimps?’
‘We serve anyone, sir. We don’t mind what size you are!’
The humor lies in recognizing that the word-form shrimp can belong to two different lexemes with unrelated senses: one meaning “an edible, long, slender crustacean” and the other meaning, in colloquial English, “tiny person”. The word serve may also be given two interpretations: “to dish up food” and “to wait upon a person at table”. If we combine meanings 1 and 2 of each of these words we get completely different meanings of the short conversation. Thus, word-play exploits the lexical ambiguity arising from the fact that the same word-form represents two distinct lexemes with very distinct meanings.
2.4. Grammatical words
Seen from a grammatical perspective, words play an essential role in syntax, since sentences contain strings of words. A word as a lexical item with a particular meaning and certain morphological and syntactic characteristics is referred to as a grammatical word.
The same word-form of a lexeme may be used as different grammatical words, a phenomenon known in linguistics as syncretism. If we consider sentences (1) and (2) below
She paid the telephone bill yesterday.
She has paid the telephone bill.,
we notice that the verb “pay” is realized by the 838f59i 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:
I saw a sheep and a deer.
She saw two sheep and two deer.
Although the word-forms “sheep” and “deer” belong to the same lexemes and are unchanged in form in both sentences, in sentence (3), they realize the words with the grammatical properties [+noun, +singular], while in sentence (4), they represent the plurals of the same nouns.
According to Katamba (2002), grammatical words are characterized by positional mobility on the one hand, and by stability or internal cohesion on the other. By positional mobility, the author means that words can be shifted around in a sentence, without affecting the global grammatical meaning of that sentence, but with giving it somewhat different emphasis, as it can be seen from the sentences below that contain the same words, but have different word orders and slightly different grammatical features:
(5a) The Roman army started the war, unfortunately.
(5b) Unfortunately, the Roman army started the war.
(5c) Unfortunately, the war was started by the Roman army.
(5d) The war, unfortunately, was started by the Roman army.
However, if the position of words in a sentence may be changed to suit the speaker’s or the writer’s communicative intentions, the elements inside a word itself is rigidly fixed – e.g. in a word such as impossibility, the order of the component elements im-, possible, -ity cannot be reversed to out liking. *Possibleimity, *ityimpossible, *ityposisbleim are not acceptable words in English. This is what Katamba (2002) means by stability or internal cohesion of grammatical words.
Thus, a generally acceptable definition of the word, based on the four approaches mentioned above, may be that suggested by Bejan and Asandei (1981): “The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds [and letters] capable of a particular grammatical employment”.
3. Branches of lexicology
Lexicology has two main divisions, established according to the degree of generality in tackling phenomena specific of words. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language is known as general lexicology. Special lexicology concentrates on the description of the characteristic peculiarities of the vocabulary and its specific phenomena in a given language. This book is an introduction to such a study.
Both these major divisions of lexicology may be further divided into at least two other sub-branches. On the one hand, the approach of the vocabulary of a language from a diachronic point of view forms the domain of investigation of historical lexicology, which counts at length on etymology, the study of meaning, origin and development of individual words. Descriptive lexicology, on the other hand, operates synchronically, i.e. it deals with the characteristics of vocabulary at a given stage of its evolution. A third sub-branch of lexicology is considered to be lexicography, the compilation and writing of dictionaries.
4. The relationship between lexicology and other branches of linguistics
As Tataru (2002) points out, it is clear from the manner in which the word has been defined that lexicology relies heavily on other mainstream branches of linguistics: phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics. In addition to these, etymology, lexicography, pragmatics, dialectology, socio-linguistics and psycholinguistics may also be related to lexicology.
Phonology accounts for the ways in which words, both already existing and new coinages and borrowings, are spelt and pronounced. Morphology dictates the acceptable combinations of particles that generate words. Functionally, it accounts for the different morpho-syntactic values of words and, consequently, for their status as parts of speech. The relationships between words, both along the syntagmatic and along the paradigmatic axis (to be enlarged upon later in the book) can best be defined in context. Therefore, syntax also plays an important role in a lexicological study. Semantics deals with the meaning of words, a kind of study without which the compilation of dictionaries would be impossible. Etymology studies the history of words, with an emphasis on their origin, while lexicography, which Jackson (1988) considers “applied lexicology”, plays an undeniably important role in the study of words by the writing and compilation of dictionaries. Pragmatics goes beyond the surface level of words and teaches us, for example, how to infer the right meaning of a word in a particular context. Dialectology studies the peculiarities of words from a given region or from a given historical period, for example. Socio-linguistics shows, for instance, how the use of words is determined by the characteristics of the participants in a linguistic exchange, while psycholinguistics deals with matters such as how words are stored in our brains and how it is possible for language users to retrieve the right word at the right time from this warehouse.
These are only some of the possible ways in which lexicology interacts with other branches of linguistics. They are by no means exhaustive, but they suffice to demonstrate that an introduction to lexicology carries the advantage of offering insights into other areas of knowledge and investigation of words as well.
II. SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY
Historical development of the English vocabulary
The most important intervals in the development of the English vocabulary are the Old, the Middle, the Early Modern and the Modern periods. Each of these will be briefly described below, following Jackson and Amvela’s (2007) description.
1.1. The Old English period (450-1066)
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”.
Besides spelling and the extended number of kennings, OE exhibits a number of other characteristics that make it differ from the present day situation in the language.
On the one hand, the Anglo-Saxon preference for synonyms and the ingenuity of forming compounds exceeds by far that found in Modern English.
On the other hand, the absence of an extensive number of loanwords, forced OE to rely on word-formation processes based on native elements to build the lexical items needed. The consequence of this is the fact that OE had much larger families of morphologically related words than Modern English does.
Thirdly, late OE was characterized by the introduction of numerous calques or loan translations. These are lexical items obtained by word-for-word translation of words belonging to another language (eg. “superman” is a calque of the German “Ubermensch”). Examples of calques from Latin in OE include (as quoted by Jackson and Amvela 2007: 29):
Latin OE
praepositio foresetnys
conjunction gedeodnys
unicornis anhorn
aspergere onstregdan
Fourthly, grammatical relationships used to be expressed mainly with the help of inflections in OE (unlike they are today, mainly by word order). The explanation Jackson and Amvela (2007) offer for the disappearance of OE inflections is that it became increasingly difficult to hear them because of the way words came to be stressed with the evolution of Germanic languages. By placing the stress at the beginning of words, their different endings, especially the ones that were phonetically similar, became more and more inaudible until they disappeared completely (e.g. en, on, an in faren, faron, faran).
Finally, the OE corpus is believed to have numbered about 24,000 words which were, however, different from the words English speakers use today. About 85% of the OE lexical items have fallen out of use. Furthermore, only about 3% of the words in OE were borrowed from other languages, compared with over 70% in Modern English. While the OE vocabulary was predominantly Germanic, this is no longer the case in present day English.
1.2. The Middle English period (1066-1500)
As compared to OE, Middle English (MidE) has a much richer documentation. At the beginning of the period, the number of public and private documents increased due to the national and local surveys made by 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 places 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.
1.3. The Early Modern English period (1500–1800)
Early Modern English (EME) represents a period of transition from MidE to Modern English. However, while the existence of this period is generally acknowledged, there seems to be disagreement as to when its beginning should be set. Some consider an earlier date, around 1400 or 1450, others speak about a later date, around 1500 to mark its beginning. But many consider the printing revolution, initiated in 1476, when Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster, the safest starting point of Early Modern English.
The introduction of printing by Caxton lead, on the one hand, to more and more books being published and spread over wider areas and, on the other hand, to spelling and punctuation starting to become standardized. Furthermore, in the sixteenth century, scholars began to discuss language problems more seriously, making observations on grammar, vocabulary, the writing system and style.
EME encompasses the Renaissance (which runs from the middle of the fifteenth century to around 1650), a period of revived interest in the classical languages, rapid development of sciences and the arts and exploratory voyages to Asia, Africa and the Americas. All these factors had a major impact on the vocabulary of English, especially under the form of new loan words having been introduced from languages the Brits entered in contact with. Writers began to borrow from other European languages to refer to the new concepts, techniques and inventions originating in Europe. As explorations developed worldwide, words came into English from languages spoken on the other continents as well, some directly, some indirectly, via other European languages. Moreover, thousands of Latin and Greek words were introduced as a result of the English translators’ inability to find precise equivalents for these terms, especially in fields such as medicine and theology. The massive influx of foreign words was, in fact, considered the most prominent feature of English in the Renaissance, despite the opposition it was faced with on the part of purists supportive of the native stock of English.
The last decades of the Renaissance witnesses the two most important influences on the development of the English language in the EME period: the works of William Shakespeare and King James Bible of 1611. The former offers valuable information on areas such as pronunciation, word formation, syntax and language use and plays an important role in the development of the English lexicon by having introduced and promoted thousands of new words in the language. The latter, however, had an opposite impact. It contributed to the preservation of the native stock by opting for a more conservative style than Shakespeare’s and for older forms of the language, even when modern alternatives were available. Many phrases in King James Bible entered both literary and everyday English and have been preserved and extensively used ever since (at places, with minor changes): ”can the leopard change his spots”, “an eye for an eye”, “fight the good fight”, “if the blind lead the blind”, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, “money is the root of all evil”, “the skin of my teeth”, “new wine in old bottles”, a thorn in the flesh”, etc.
Between 1530 and 1660, the lexicon of English grew very fast. Borrowings continued to enter the language at an accelerated pace, new words were formed by various internal means and many of the existing ones underwent semantic changes. With such a rapid and extensive development, the need was felt to “stabilize” the language. Unlike in France and Italy, where linguistic norms were imposed by the Academy, neither Britain nor the United States resorted to such a body to preserve the stability and consistency of the English language. Instead, grammars, spelling and pronunciation guides and dictionaries were produced by various scholars.
In 1604, Robert Cawdrey published the first “dictionary of hard words”, which comprised about 3000 entries of difficult words in English, mostly borrowings. His work was followed by Nathaniel Bailey’s, in 1721, entitled A Universal Etymological English Dictionary. This represented an improvement as compared to its predecessor work, with more numerous and extensive entries. However, the definitions were still not relevantly enough illustrated and the author gave little guidance on usage.
The first really remarkable dictionary of English is Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. As Crystal (1995) points out, although this was a smaller book than Bailey’s, it is considered more wide-ranging. The preface to the alphabetical entries contains an outlining of the author’s aims and procedures, a short history of the language and a grammar, with sections on orthography and prosody. Johnson changed the earlier prescriptive approach into a descriptive one, since, as he himself pointed out in the preface to his dictionary, his aim was “not to form, but to register the language”, a principle which marked the beginning of a new era in lexicography. The 1755 Dictionary of the English Language, “the first attempt at a truly principled lexicography” (Crystal 1995: 75), remained an authoritative work for almost a century, until it began to be criticized.
1.4. The Modern English period (from 1800 onwards)
The Modern English (ME) period is characterized by three main features: an unprecedented growth of the scientific vocabulary, the establishment of American English as a dominant geographic variety and the emergence of other varieties known collectively as the “New Englishes”.
On the one hand, English scientific and technical vocabulary has been developing steadily since the Renaissance, but, in the nineteenth century, the rhythm of growth accelerated, as an outcome of the industrial revolution and the period of scientific exploration and discovery following it. With a higher and higher level of education, people became more and more interested in science and technology and, consequently, more knowledgeable of their specific terminology. By the end of the nineteenth century, one could speak of “the English of science” as a well-defined variety of the language, whose characteristics were highlighted quite often in grammar books and in the style sheets of scientific journals.
On the other hand, the strength American English gained may be explained, at least partly, by the fact that the United States became the leading economic power of the twentieth century. The assertion of American English is made even stronger by the fact that the Americans are the most numerous speakers of English as a mother tongue. In fact, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) point out, the USA has nearly four times as many speakers of English as a first language than the UK and, according to Crystal (1995), these two countries comprise about 70% of all the native English speakers in the world.
The impact of American English on British English as well as on other (European) languages is felt especially in the lexical area, under the 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-ways 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.
Braj Kahru (1989), quoted by Davies (2005), discusses these and other geographical varieties of English from a global perspective, describing its worldwide spread in terms of three concentric circles: the inner circle, circumscribing the territories where English is spoken as the first language; the outer circle, containing “the territories in Africa and Asia to which English was first transported in colonial contexts and where it has since existed alongside very different local languages” (Davies 2005: 46) and the expanding circle including the countries where English is spoken and taught more widely than other foreign languages. The examples Davies (2005) offers for each of the three circles are: American English for the inner circle, South Asian English for the outer circle and the English used in Japan for the expanding circle.
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.
2. Sources of the English Vocabulary
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, which includes the following: Hellenic, the mother of ancient Greek, Germanic languages (e.g. German, English, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic), Romance languages (e.g. French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian - all descendants of Latin), Celtic languages (e.g. Breton, Welsh, Welsh, Irish), Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Czech) and Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Kurdish, Persian).
Languages of the same family inherit from the parent language phonological, morphological and syntactic features as well as core lexical items (the more closely related two languages are the greater their resemblance).
Being a Germanic language, English has preserved its Germanic inheritance, which, together with the Old English and Anglo-Saxon elements, lie at the core of its present day vocabulary.
2.1. Native words in English
The native words are estimated to represent only 25-35% of the English vocabulary, but they form the bulk of the most frequently used lexical items. They include most of the form words such as auxiliary and modal verbs, some of the pronouns, numerals, prepositions and conjunctions and the majority of content words, nouns, adjectives, verbs 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”.
3. Borrowed words in English
Apart from the native stock, English is a mosaic of words borrowed from a number of other languages, in various moments along its development (reference will be made to the periods in its evolution mentioned above, when the most productive sources of borrowing into English are spoken in more details). Lexical items from other languages have been borrowed into English for various reasons, some of which are analyzed by Katamba (2005). His ideas in this respect will be summarized in the following section.
3.1. Reasons for borrowing
One of the reasons for borrowing vocabulary items from one language into another is identity. Language is not only a means of communication but also a symbol of its user’s identity. By using a particular language, a speaker suggests ways in which s/he perceives herself/himself and would like to be perceived by the others. Thus, if in a Spanish doctor’s surgery in Great Britain or the United States, a patient of the same nationality initiates a discussion in Spanish, s/he might want to signal solidarity, to emphasize their belonging to the same ethnic group. Alternatively, the two may resort to code-switching, i.e. to interspersing English with Spanish words. In mentioning the role played by code-switching in the process of borrowing, Katamba’s (2005: 139) opinion is that “if foreign words are used habitually in it, they may pass from one language into another and eventually become fully integrated and cease being regarded as foreign. That is probably how words like chutzpah (brazen impudence), schlemiel (a very clumsy, bungling idiot who is always a victim), schmaltz (cloying, banal sentimentality) and goyim (gentile) passed from Yiddish into (American) English. The fact that there is no elegant English equivalent to these Yiddish words was no doubt also a factor in their adoption”.
Closely connected to identity is prestige. The desire of some to signal that they are related to a fashionable foreign culture, they are modern, the “crème de la crème”, etc. manifests itself in these people’s using words belonging to the language of that culture. French, for example, has been a source of such loan words for English as well as for other European languages. Katamba (2005: 139) quotes the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, who, in his parody of the pardonnez-moi brigade, emphasizes this point succinctly: “Why, is not this a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers, these pardonnez-moi, who stand so much on the new form that they cannot sit at ease on the old bench? O, their bons, their bons!” (Romeo and Juliet, II, iv).
Another reason for borrowing is to fill a gap created by the unavailability in English of a word to refer to a particular concept, creature, artefact, institution, religion initially belonging to a foreign culture. At various periods in history, different civilizations have been in leading positions in a particular domain and, as a normal consequence of this, their language in that domain has become the lingua franca of the field.
Thus, in the late medieval and early modern periods, when many voices raised against the inadequacy of English for poetry, an infusion of 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:
Military: cordon sanitaire, barrage, hors de combat, materiel, reveille;
Diplomacy and protocol: corps diplomatique, charge d’affaire, communiqué;
Government and politics: ancien regime, dirigiste, coup d’etat, laissez-faire, agent provocateur, etc.
Names of people, animals, birds and plants have entered English from all kinds of languages spoken around the world: “Sherpa”, “Gurka” (Nepal), “chimpanzee” (Angola), “panda” (Nepal), “koala” (Australia), “zebra” (Congo). The arts and culture domain is represented in terms of borrowings by words such as “samba” (Brazil), “rhumba” (Cuba), “tango” (Argentina), didgeridoo (Australia). Numerous words referring to food have been imported in English, as the range of foreign foods eaten in the countries where English is spoken as a first language has increased and diversified: “goulash” (Hungarian), “enchiladas”, “tacos”, “nachos” (Mexican Spanish), “moussaka” (Greek), etc. The interference of English culture with other cultures of the world has resulted into the former’s having borrowed foreign words referring to articles of dress as well. Included in this category are “sarong” (Malay), “parka’ (Aleutian), “anorak” (Greenlandic Eskimo), “kimono” (Japanese), “shawl” (Persian), etc. In principle, new words may be coined in 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.
3.2. Adaptation (nativisation) of loanwords
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 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.
3.3. Direct and indirect borrowing
If a language takes a word directly from another, as English has taken “omelette” from French, we talk about direct borrowing. If, on the other hand, a word is passed from one language to another and then to another and to another, as it is the case of the English “coffee”, taken from the Dutch “koffie”, arrived here from the Arabic “kahva”, itself an adaptation of the Turkish “kahveh”, the process is called indirect borrowing (we may consider the English “coffee” an indirect loan word of the Turkish “kahveh”).
If words are borrowed indirectly, a distinction must be made between the source and the origin of the borrowing. The source is the language from which a particular word or phrase has entered another language, while the origin is the language to which the etymon of the loan lexical item can be traced back. Thus, in the above example, the source of the English “coffee” is the Dutch word “koffie”, while its origin is the Turkish word “kahveh”.
In the case of direct borrowing, since there is no intermediary means between the donor and the recipient language, the source and the origin of the loan words coincide.
3.4. Latin words in English
To varying degrees, Latin has exerted a major influence on English from the OE period up to the modern times.
The first borrowings from Latin date from the very beginning of the Anglo-Saxon period and are the result of the contacts the Anglo-Saxons had with the Roman population and, especially, with the Roman armies, on the continent. Some of the Latin words that the former brought back to their island were concerned with the military domain, commerce and agriculture. Others were related to plants, animals, clothing, the domestic life, legal institutions and religion (the last penetrated English beginning with 597, the year that marks the introduction of Christianity in England). Examples include: “cheese”, “pepper”, “wine”, “butter”, “dish”, “beet”, “pear”, “lily”, “lion”, “ass”, “candle”, “shrine”, “monk”, “nun”, abbot”, “bishop”, “belt”, “shirt”, “shoemaker”, “city”, “wall”, “tile”, etc.
The process of borrowing Latin words in the OE period has modest beginnings and it cannot boast a tremendous enlargement up to the end of this interval either. It is generally estimated that a total of around five 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-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’).
3.5. Scandinavian words in English
The second major influence on a foreign language on the vocabulary of English was the result of the Vikings’ (mainly Danees, but also Norwegians) raids on Britain, which began in 787 and continued intermittently for about two hundred years. By the mid ninth century, the Danes came to control most of the north and eastern part of England which was named, after the invaders, the Danelaw. Further invasions in the tenth century culminated in 991, with the English king having been forced to take the way of exile and the throne having been taken by the Danes. England remained under Danish rule for 25 years after this event.
The prolonged contact between the native population and the Danish settlers had, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain, a threefold linguistic consequence. First, a large number of Scandinavian place names entered English. Second, many proper names of Danish origin were borrowed and third, a lot of Danish common words became part of the everyday English vocabulary.
Examples of place names of Scandinavian origin include words ending in –by, the Scandinavian word for “farm” or “town”: “Derby”, “Grimsby”, “Rugby”, “Naseby”. Other such words end in –thorpe, meaning “village” (Baugh, Cable 2002: 98): “Althorpe”, “Astonthorpe”, “Linthorpe”, while still others have –thwaite, “clearing” or –toft, “homestead” in their composition: “Braithwaite”, “Applethwaite”, “Storthwaite”, “Lowestoft”, “Eastoft”, “Sandtoft”, etc.
A strong Scandinavian influence on proper names is felt especially in the north and east, in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, where over 60 percent of these seem to be the result of the native and foreign cultures having been in contact for so long. The majority of proper names of Scandinavian origin end in –son: “Davidson”, “Jackson”, “Henderson”.
When the Vikings settled in England, they did so largely as equals of the natives, a fact which resulted in “adstratum influence” (Allegrini 2003: 4). i.e. neither of the two languages was politically or culturally dominant. They were supposedly mutually intelligible and bilingualism was most likely fairly spread among the Scandinavians (Kastovsky 1992: 329). This, together with the fact that the English and the Scandinavians had pretty similar cultures, enabled a close unity between them. Moreover, Scandinavian was mostly a spoken language in the conquered territories, usually banned from writing on the grounds of the existence of equivalent English forms used on paper, which were considered more formal and more literary and, therefore, more appropriate for this variant of the language. Consequently, many of the Scandinavian loan words were informal everyday lexical items, belonging to the core of the vocabulary, which is, according to Barber (2000: 133), one of the most obvious of their characteristics.
Most of the words of Scandinavian origin were made to conform to the English sound and inflectional systems. For example, as Pyles and Algeo (1993) emphasize, very common verbs such as “get” and “give” came to be used in Modern English not as variants of the OE “gitan” and “giftan”, but as survivors of their Scandinavian cognates. The personal pronouns “they”, “them”, “their” replaced earlier native forms. In addition, “the replacement of sidon by are is almost certainly the result of Scandinavian influence, as is the spread of the third personal singular –s ending in the present tense in other verbs” (Crystal 1995: 25).
Numerous words beginning with the consonantal cluster sc-/sk- are of Scandinavian origin: “scathe”, “scorch”, “score”, “scowl”, “scrape”, “scare”, “scrub”, “skill”, “skin”, “skirt”, “sky”. Sometimes, the process of borrowing from Scandinavian languages involved the mere substitution of the native word or phrase with the foreign one (as in the case of “window” which replaced “vindauga”). Other times, however, loan words were introduced to fill in a lexical gap in the recipient language – this was, for example, the case of Scandinavian legal terms or words denoting Viking warship. A large number of duplicates (pairs of words having the same referent, of which one was native and the other was borrowed) also arose from the contact of English with the Scandinavian languages. In some cases, the loan word was preserved, while the native one was discarded: “egg” vs. OE “ey”, “sister” vs. OE “sweoster”, “silver” vs. OE “sealfor”. In others, the OE word survived, while the Scandinavian was lost: “path” vs. ON “reike”, “sorrow” vs. ON “site”, “swell” vs. ON “bolnen”. There were situations, however, when both words made their way in the language up to the modern times, but developed a difference in meaning. Below are a few examples of such pairs (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 43):
ON dike OE ditch
hale whole
raise rise
sick ill
skill craft
skirt shirt
Sometimes, in cases of duplicates that survived, one member of the pair is used in the standard language, while the other is restricted to dialectal use. In the following examples, the former word, of OE origin, is considered standard and the latter, a loan from ON, is dialectal: “cast – werpan”, “yard – garth”, “church – kirk”, “leap – laup”, “no –nay”, “true – trigg”.
After the 11th century, Scandinavian languages ceased to be a rich source of borrowings for English. However, modest influences continued to be felt along the centuries up to the period of Modern and present day English, when words such as “muggy”, “rug”, “scud”, “ski”, “geyser”, “rune”, “saga”, “ombudsman” have been imported.
3.6. Greek words in English
Though less influential than Latin, which was the language of literature, science and religion as well as the medium of instruction for about fifteen centuries (even longer in some parts of the world), Greek played its role in the evolution of the English vocabulary.
Initially, words of Greek origin were imported into English indirectly, mostly via Latin, before the Norman conquest, in 1066 and via French and Latin from the Middle English period onwards. It was only at the beginning of the Early Modern English period, after 1500, that English started borrowing directly from Greek. This must have been the consequence of the boost that Greek studies received with the coming of the Greek scholars to Europe after Constantinopole was conquered by the Turks, in 1453.
Greek provided English with a considerable number of technical terms from almost all branches of human knowledge. Greek words that were borrowed via Latin include: “allegory”, “anaesthesia”, “chaos”, “dilemma”, “drama”, “enthusiasm”, “history”, “metaphor”, “paradox”, “phenomenon”, “rhythm”, “theory”, “zone”. “Center”, “character”, “chronicle”, “democracy”, “ecstasy”, “harmony”, “machine”, “tyrant” came from Greek via French, while “acronym”, “autocracy”, “idiosyncrasy”, “pathos”, “telegram”, “xylophone” were taken directly from Greek.
As representatives of technical vocabulary mainly, the majority of the words of Greek origin in English are considered learned and are restricted to the specialized varieties of the language. A smaller part of them managed to pass into the stock of everyday vocabulary.
3.7. French words in English
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 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 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 the choice 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”, “baton”, “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. If 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 been imported into English count among them examples such as’ “mustard”, “vinegar”, “beef”, “sauce”, “salad”, “cuisine”, “haricot”, “pastry’, “omelette”, “meringue”, “haricot”, “cognac”, “crème caramel”, “patisserie”, “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”.
3.8. Words from other European languages in English
Besides French, English has borrowed from a number of other modern European languages.
Starting with its Early Modern period, it has taken over words from Dutch and German, in the context of the commercial relationships that have been established between the Flemish/Dutch and the English-speaking peoples. As a consequence of the Dutch’s skillfulness in seafaring activities, English enriched with terms connected to sea life and navigation such as: “bowline”, “bowsprit”, “buoy”, “commodore”, “cruise”, “deck”, “skipper”, “smuggle”, “yacht”. The Dutch and the Flamish have also been famous for their cloth making and the commercial activities connected to it so that English borrowed terms in this area as well: “cambric”, “duck”, “jacket”, “nap”, “spool”. Loanwords from other Low German dialects include: “boor”, “broke”, “isinglass”, “luck”, “snap”, “wagon”, etc.
The contact of the Americans with the Dutch settlers, especially in and around New York, resulted into a number of words referring to Dutch American food items having been imported into English. Among these, there are; “coleslaw”, “cookie”, “cranberry”, “waffle”. Lexical items from various other fields may be added to the list: “boodle’, “boss”, “caboose”, “dope”, “Santa Claus”, “spook”, from Dutch spoken in America, and “apartheid”, “commandeer”, “commando”, “kraal”, “outspan”, “spoor”, “trek”, “veld”, from Dutch spoken in South Africa (Afrikaans).
Unlike Low German, High German has had a less poignant impact on English. A number of words have been borrowed in specialized fields such as geology and mineralogy: “cobalt”, “feldspar”, “gneiss”, “nickel”, “quartz”, “seltzer”, “zinc”. Some food and drink terms have been imported together with the items they designate: “delicatessen”, “frankfurter”, “noodle”, “schnapps”, alongside a small miscellanea of other borrowings, including “angst”, “ersatz”, “Gestalt”, “hinterland”, “leitmotiv”, “rucksack”, “umlaut”, “waltz”, etc.
Of the Romance European languages, English has borrowed from Italian, Spanish and Portuguese mainly.
Words from Italian started their way into English as early as the sixteenth century, with the adoption of items pertaining to the vocabulary of music, one of the arts particularly representative for the Italians. Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) quote a number of words dating from that period. Their examples include: “duo”, “fugue”, “madrigal”, “violin”. These were followed, they say, in the seventeenth century by “allegro”, “largo”, “opera”, “piano”, “presto”, “sonata”, “solo” and, in the eighteenth century, when the interest of the English for Italian music reached its peak, by “adagio”, “andante”, “aria”, “cantata”, “concerto”, “crescendo”, “duet”, “finale”, “forte”, “oratorio”, “trio”, “trombone”, “viola”. The process continued in the nineteenth century, with the adoption of alto”, “cadenza”, “legato”, “piccolo”, “prima-donna”.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Italians immigrated in large numbers to the United States. Many of them went into the food business and popularized Italian cuisine. Consequently, many Italian words connected to food and cooking entered American English and subsequently spread to other dialects of English as well. Some such words are: “pizza”, “pasta”, “spaghetti”, “macaroni”, “ciabatta”, “cannelloni”, “lasagna”, “zucchini”, “pesto”, “tagliatelle”, “macaroni”, “scampi”.
Italian words from areas other than music and cuisine that have been borrowed include: “balcony”, “balloon”, “carnival”, “dilettante”, “fresco”, “ghetto”, “regatta”, “stiletto”, “studio”, “torso”, “umbrella”, “vendetta”, “volcano”.
Spanish and Portuguese became suppliers of words to English in the sixteenth century. The former has been a rich direct source of loans, while the latter was less so. In addition, many non-European words from the colonies found their way into English via Spanish and Portuguese. As Jackson and Amvela (2007: 48) point out, “many of these loanwords came from the New World: alligator, avocado, barracuda, canoe, chocolate, cigar, cockroach, domino, embargo, mosquito, peccadillo, potato, sombrero, tobacco, tomato, tornado, tortilla, vanilla”.
The nineteenth century seems to have been the period when loans from Spanish penetrated English, especially its American variety, in large numbers. Among the words adopted then, there are: “bonanza”, “canyon”, “lasso”, “mustang”, “patio”, “ranch”, “sierra”, “siesta”, “stampede”. The twentieth century is characterized by loan translations such as “moment of truth”, a linguistic calque of the Spanish “momento de la verdad”, referring to the moment when the bull is killed by the toreador in the arena.
As far as the loans from Portuguese are concerned, though the process of borrowing started much earlier, the great majority of them entered English during the modern period. This majority included: “albino”, “copra”, “flamingo”, “Madeira”, “mango”, “marmalade”, “molasses’, “palaver”, “teak”.
From other European languages, English has borrowed few words. “Sable” came into English in Middle English times via French from Slavic languages; “polka” came via French in the nineteenth century from Czech, alongside later borrowings such as “howitzer”, “pistol”, “robot”. “Mammoth” was borrowed in the eighteenth century directly from Russian. Other more recent borrowings from Russian have not become completely naturalized: “bolshevik”, “czar”, “glasnost”, “intelligentsia” (ultimately from Latin), “perestroika”, “tundra”, “vodka”. From Hungarian, English has borrowed directly “goulash” and “paprika”; while “coach” came via French from Hungarian “kosci”. Turkish and Tatar words in English include: “bosh”, „caique”, „coffee”, „cossack”, „divan”, „fez”, „horde”, „kaftan”, „kavass”, „kebab”, „khan”, „kumiss”, „mammoth”, „pasha”, „shish”, „Tartar”, „turkey”, „turquoise”, „yoghurt”.
3.9. Words from non-European languages in English
With the expansion of the British Empire, which facilitated the spread of English to all continents between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries and with the ascendancy of the United Stated immediately after the Second World War, when the British Empire started its decline, English came in contact with many languages around the world. The result of this contact has been two fold: English has influenced these languages to a lesser or a greater degree and has itself been affected by them.
In North America, English borrowed from the Native American languages common words such as “avocado”, “barbecue”, “buccaneer”, “cacao”, “cannibal”, “canoe”, “wampum”, “toboggan”, “iguana”, “maize”, “moccasin”, “papaya”, “tomahawk”, “skunk”, “squash”, “tobacco”, “coyote”, “caribou”, “poncho”, “tomato”, “yucca” and a number of proper nouns such as mountain names: “Appalachians”, “Alleghenies”, the names of the Great Lakes: “Erie”, “Ontario”, “Huron”, “Michigan”, “Superior”, names of states: “Oklahoma”, “Massachusetts” and names of cities: “Chicago”, “Saratoga”, “Tallahassie”.
On the other side of the world, the languages spoken in what are now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have been a source of verbal source to English that cannot be overlooked. Rao (1954), quoted by Katamba (2005) gives a quite comprehensive account of the Indian loans in English.
He points out that the nature of the borrowed words has changed with the centuries, mirroring the developments outside the language. There are a few words designating trade goods which predate de Raj: “copra”, “coir”, “pepper”, “sugar”, “indigo”. Most of these words entered English indirectly, via Latin, Greek or French.
Indian became a direct source of loan words starting from the very early years of the British colonization of India. Quite understandably, the words borrowed at this time were a reflection of the commerce between Britain and the newly colonized territory and included terms such as “calico”, “chintz” and “dungaree”.
As time passed, the range of Indian words borrowed into English widened so that, besides words referring to mundane trade goods which continued their way into English, lexical items in the areas of religion, 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 loans:
“Hinduism: Buddha, Brahmin, karma, pundit, yoga, yogi, mantra, nirvana, sutra
Food: chutney, chapatti, curry, poppadom
Clothing: cashmere, pyjamas, khaki, mufti, saree
Philology (19th century): sandhi, bahuvrihi (compounds), dvandva (compounds)
People and society: Aryan (Sanskrit), pariah, mem-sahib, sahib, coolie
Animals and plants: mongoose, zebu, bhang, paddy, teak
Buildings and domestic: bungalow, pagoda, cot
Assorted: catamaran, cash, chit, lilac, tattoo, loot, polo, cushy, juggernaut, tom-tom”.
Though a smaller number of words coming from farther east have entered English, at least some of them cannot pass unnoticed since they have come to be used quite frequently. Thus, the AskOxford website mentions the following as loan words from Chinese languages: “china”, „chin-chin”, „chopsticks”, „chopsuey”, „chow chow”, „chow mein”, „dim sum”, „fan-tan”, „feng shui”, „ginseng”, „gung-ho”, „kaolin”, „ketchup/catsup”, „kowtow”, „kung fu”, „lychee”, „loquat”, „mahjong”, „pekoe”, „sampan”, „tai chi”, „taipan”, „Tao”, „tea”, „yang”, „yen”, „yin”. According to the same source, aikido”, „banzai”, „bonsai”, „bushido”, „futon”, „geisha”, „haiku”, „hara-kiri”, „judo”, „jujitsu”, „Kabuki”, „kamikaze”, „kimono”, „koan”, „mikado”, „sake”, „samisen”, „samurai”, „sayonara”, „Shinto”, „shogun”, „soy(a)”, „sushi”, „teriyaki”, „tofu”, „tycoon”, „yen”, „Zen” have been taken from Japanese, while „lama”, „Sherpa”, „yak”, „yeti”, now present in English, originate in Tibetan.
Languages from south and south-east Asia, though less known
to non-linguists, have also given words to English. Hindi/Urdu is the source language for „bungalow”, „crore”, „dacoit”,
„deodar”, „dinghy”, „dungaree”, „ghee”, „gymkhana”, „jodphurs”, „lakh”, „loot”,
„paisa”, „pakora”, „Raj”, „samo(o)sa”, „shampoo”, „tandoori”, „tom-tom”, „wallah”.
„Bantam”, „batik”, „gamelan”, „junk” come from Javanese. Malay has contributed „amok”, „bamboo”,
„caddy”, „camphor”, „cassowary”, „cockatoo”, „dugong”, „durian”, „gecko”, „gingham”,
„gong”, „kampong/compound”, „kapok”, „kris”, „lory”, „mangosteen”, „orangutan”,
„paddy”, „pangolin”, „rattan”, „sago”, „sarong”. From Sanskrit, mainly indirectly, English received „ashram”, „avatar”, „banya”,
„banyan”, „beryl”, „brahmin”, „carmine”, „chakra”, „cheetah”, „chintz”, „chutney”,
„crimson”, „guru”, „juggernaut”, „jungle”, „jute”, „karma”, „lacquer”, „mandarin”,
„nirvana”, „palanquin”, „pundit”, „sapphire”, „sugar”, „suttee”, „swastika”,
„yoga”, etc. From Sinhala, it
enriched with „anaconda” and „tourmaline”.
and from Tagalog with boondock,
ylang-ylang. Tamil has given „catamaran”,
„cheroot”, „curry”, „mango”, „mulligatawny”, „pariah”.
3.10. Recent loans in English
English is borrowing words on a regular basis. The process of importing lexical items from other languages has never stopped, it has only changed its characteristics lately. The main features that are peculiar to it at present are the fact that the frequency of borrowing is considerably reduced and that English seems to be spreading its tentacles and borrow from less and less known languages. To prove this, Jackson and Amvela (2007) quote Pyles and Algeo (1993: 310) who mention a study by Cannon (1987) of more than a thousand recent loan words from almost one hundred languages, which shows that “about 25% [of these] are from French, 8% each from Japanese and Spanish, 7% each from Italian and Latin, 6% each from African languages, German and Greek, 4% each from Russian and Yiddish, 3% from Chinese, and progressively smaller percentages from Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Afrikaans, Malayo-Polynesian, Vietnamese, Amerindian languages, Swedish, Bengali, Danish, Indonesian, Korean, Persian, Amharic, Eskimo-Aleut, Irish, Norwegian, and 30 other languages.”
With all this diversity of sources, as the study itself demonstrates, the largest supplier of loan words to English remains, at present, French. This may be because of the geographical proximity of France and England. A reason of the same kind, Mexico’s vicinity with the United States, might lie behind the frequent borrowing from American Spanish by American English. The increase in importance of Japanese as a source of loans might be the consequence of Japan’s having gained more and more power on the global market in general. As far as Latin, a former rich source of loans, is concerned, Jackson and Amvela (2007) explain its decline as a provider of words to English both by the fact that, since English borrowed from it so extensively in previous ages, there is relatively little left to be borrowed and by the fact that, rather than borrowing directly from Latin, English often now creates new Latinate words from English morphemes originally from Latin.
The discussion so far about the sources of the English vocabulary has taken into account the native stock of the language and the various sources of borrowing, in different periods of time. Besides importing words from other languages, the English vocabulary has been continuously enriching by another means, namely by forming new lexical items. The next chapter will explore word forming processes in more detail.
III. WORD FORMATION
Before surveying the techniques of word formation that have given birth to new words in English, the introduction of the main concepts involved in such a presentation - free and bound morphemes, root, affix, and stem – might prove useful.
Free and bound morphemes
Originally, “morphology” meant the study of biological organisms. But nineteenth century students of linguistics borrowed the term and applied it to the study of word structure, so that, in linguistics, morphology came to mean the study of the formation and internal organization of words.
The basic concept morphology operates with is the morpheme, “the smallest unit that has meaning or serves a grammatical function in a language. Morphemes are the atoms with which words are built” (Katamba 2005: 29). However, they are just theoretical constructs since, in practice, it is the variants of a morpheme that are used to form new words. These variants are called allomorphs and they are in a relation of mutual exclusiveness, i.e. only one allomorph can occur in a given context. For example, im-, in-, il-, ir- are variants of the same morpheme, employed on phonetic principles, according to the starting sound of the element to which they are added: im-possible, in-cautious, il-literate, ir-responsible; the selection of the morpheme –(e)s, the marker of the regular plural of nouns, is also determined by phonological factors so that it may be realized under the form of one of the following allomorphs: /s/ in hats, /z/ in games and /iz/ in oranges. The morphemes that constitute the core for the formation of new words are less sensitive to the phonetic environment and more so to the grammatical context in which they occur. This is obvious for irregular verbs morphemes, whose allomorphs differ on grammatical grounds: eg. the allomorphs drove and driven correspond, respectively, to the past simple and the past perfect of the morpheme drive.
According to their distribution, morphemes fall into two broad categories, free and bound morphemes. The former can appear independently in an utterance and have a meaning of their own, while the latter cannot be used independently and do not have a notional or full meaning, but a functional or derivative one. Bound morphemes are always appended to free forms (eg. drive is a free morpheme, while –er is a bound one; if the latter is added to the former, we obtain the word driver which, in its turn, is another free morpheme, according to the above definition).
Root
The root is, Tataru (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 (Tataru 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).
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 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:
Base form stem + plural stem + possessive stem + plural + possesive
boy boys boy’s boys’
child children child’s children’s
student students student’s students’
Mono- or disyllabic gradable adjectives show the following inflectional contrasts:
Base form stem + comparative stem + superlative
cold colder coldest
happy happier happiest
sad sadder saddest
Verbs (except the verb to be and the modals) show the following inflectional contrasts:
Base form stem + stem + stem + stem+
3rd pers. sg. past tense past part. present part.
eat eats ate eaten eating
sing sings sang sung singing
work works worked worked working
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 for5ms fit the noun inflectional paradigm, as Jackson and Amvela (2007) show:
child children child’s children’s
I, me we, us mine ours
you you yours yours
he, him his 
she, her they, them hers theirs
it, it its
The forms listed in each column of the paradigm are in complementary distribution, i.e. they are context dependent (where one occurs the other ones do not). For example, I occurs before the verb, as the grammatical subject in sentences such as I wrote a letter. or I shall buy flowers., while me occurs after the verb, as the direct, the indirect or the prepositional object as in My friend gave me the book.; He wrote me a letter.; My father explained the theory to me. The possessive pronoun mine replaces the whole nominal phrase “my + noun” as in This is my book. – This book is mine.
The auxiliary verbs pertain to the class of function words as well. They constitute a closed sub-class of verbs which can take certain forms in the verbal paradigm, though not all. While most of the verbs have four or five forms, most of the modal auxiliaries have two, the modal must has only one form, while the auxiliary be is the most polymorphic of all such verbs, with eight different forms. The paradigm of auxiliaries is described by Jackson and Amvela (2007: 85) as it is shown below:
Base form stem + stem + stem + stem+
3rd pers. sg. past tense past part. present part.
eat eats ate eaten eating
be am/is/are was/were been being
can could
may might
shall should
will would
must
Some mono- and disyllabic adverbs (with the exception of those formed with the suffix –ly) show the same inflectional contrasts like the gradable mono- and disyllabic adjectives:
Base form stem + comparative stem + superlative
fast faster fastest
soon sooner sonnest
Finally, Jacskon and Amvela (2007) also distinguish between regular and irregular inflections. The former are formed following a regular pattern, e.g. –s for the plural of nouns, -ed for the past and past participle of regular verbs, -er for the comparative of gradable mono- and disyllabic adjectives, etc. However, even within the class of regular inflectional affixes, variation may be present, in spelling, e.g. the addition of e before the plural suffix –s (masses, classes), and pronunciation, e.g. compare the pronunciation of the plural –(e)s in rats, cows, houses and that of the past tense inflection –ed in talked, clogged, glided. Irregular inflections do not follow a regular pattern and usually apply to only some of the members of a morphological class. For example, the following nouns form their plural irregularly: child – children, man – men, woman – women, ox – oxen, mouse – mice, louse – lice, tooth – teeth, deer – deer, salmon – salmon, etc. The umber of verbs that form their past tense and their past participle irregularly is even greater: run – ran – run, see – saw – seen, lie – lay – lain, write – wrote – written, etc.
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).
5. Main means of word-formation
The most productive means by which new words are brought into being in a language are derivation, compounding and conversion. Separate sections are dedicated to each.
5.2. Derivation
Derivation is the process of forming new words in a language by means of adding prefixes and/or suffixes to roots or stems.
5.2.1. Prefixation
By prefixation, prefixes are added in front of roots or stems so that new words are created. Prefixes do not usually carry functional meaning, i.e. they do not change the morphological class of the roots or stems to which they are appended, though they change their meaning. The classification of prefixes should, therefore, be made on semantic grounds primarily. Thus, according to the meaning they convey, English prefixes fall into the following main categories:
a) negative prefixes, by far the largest group of prefixes in English, express various shades of negative meaning:
de-/dis- (“not”, “the contrary of”): depress, disapprove, dishonour;
in-/il-/ir-/il- (allomorphs of the same bound morpheme that are employed according to the initial sound of the root or stem to which they are added – “not”, “the contrary of”): insane, impossible, irrelevant, illiterate;
non- (“not”): non-stop, non-resident, nonsense, nonconformist. The basic word stock of English includes a number of quite old words built with the prefix non-, in which the prefix is not identifiable in full: nowhere, nothing, never, nobody, neither, nor, etc.
mis – (“bad(ly)”, “wrong(ly)”): mislead, mistrust, misfortune, misunderstanding;
un- (“the opposite of”, “not”): unfair, unwise, unexpected, unbalanced;
mal- (“bad(ly)”, “wrong(ly)”): malfunctioning, malformation, malpractice.
b) reversative and privative prefixes
un- (“the deprive of” “the reverse the action”, “to release from”): unveil, unlock, unleash;
de-/dis- (“to reverse the action”, “to get rid of”, “to deprive of”): defrost, decentralize, deforestation, disconnect, discoloured.
c) prefixes of degree and size
arch- (“supreme”, ‘chief”, “most important”): archenemy, archbishop;
hyper- (“extra”): hypersensitive, hypertension, hyperinflation;
mini- (“little”, “small”): miniskirt, minicomputer, mini-vacation;
over- (“too much”): overreact, overdone, overdressed, overconfident;
out- (“more”, “better”, “faster”, “longer”): outnumber, outstanding, outrun, outlive;
super- (“above”, “more than”, “better”, “bigger”): supernatural, superhuman, superman, supermarket;
sub- (“less than”): subhuman, substandard, subnormal;
under- (“too little”): underdeveloped, underestimate, undercharge;
ultra- (“beyond”, “extremely”): ultrasonic, ultraviolet, ultra-revolutionary.
d) prefixes of attitude
co- (“accompanying”, “with”, “together”): cooperation, coordination, co-author, co-produce;
pro- (“for”, “on the side of”): pro-democratic, pro-European;
anti- (“against”): antiwar, antifreeze, anticlimax, anti-imperialist;
counter- (“against”, “in opposition”): counteract, counter-productive, counterblast.
e) prefixes of time and order
ante- (“before”): antenatal, anteroom, antediluvian, antepenultimate;
fore- (“before”): forearm, forehead, foretell, fore-mentioned;
pre- (“before”): prehistoric, preheat, precondition, pre-election;
ex- (“former”): ex-wife, ex-president, ex-friend;
post- (“after”): post-war, post-date, post-position;
f) prefixes of space, direction and location (the majority of these prefixes originate in prepositions and adverbs of place that still function as such in English):
in- (“going in”, “being in”): influx, income, intake, inmate,
out- (“going out”, “being out”): outflow, output, outdoors;
up- (“in an ascending direction”): uphill, uptown, upstairs;
down- (“in a descending direction”): downhill, downstairs, downfall;
super- (“over”, “above”): superstructure, superellevation;
sub- (“under”): subway, suborbital, subsoil;
inter- (“between”, “among”): international, interface, interactive;
trans- (“across”, “into another place”): transatlantic, transmigration, transcontinental.
g) the iterative prefix re- (“one more time”, “again”): reread, rebuild, redecorate, reconsider.
English prefixes have the following main origins:
a) Germanic
be-: besprinkle, bewilderment, become;
for-: forbid, forbear;
mis-: mislead, misinterpret, miscalculate;
out-: outlive, outgrow, outstanding;
over-: overeat, overloaded, overhear;
un-: unfriendly, uncommon, unbelievable;
up-: upright, upshot, uptake;
with-: withstand, withdraw, withhold;
b) Latin:
bi-: bimonthly, bifocal, bidirectional;
de-: decompose, deconstruct, declutch;
dis-: disagree, disadvantage, discontinue;
em-/en-: empower, enslave;
inter-: interlocutor, intergalactic, intercontinental;
non-: non-success, non-resistant, non-payment;
pre-: prerequisite, prepaid, preadmission;
pro-: pro-ally, pro-British;
super-: superman, superfrequency, superheated;
trans-: transformer, transmutation, transpose.
c) Greek
a-/an-: anomalous, analphabet;
anti-: antibody, antithesis, anticlerical;
hyper-: hypercritical, hypermetrical.
According to their productivity, English prefixes may be classified as:
a) productive prefixes (involved into the process of new words creation at the present stage in the development of English):
re-: retake, rethink, rewind, review;
un-: unbelievable, unnecessary, undo;
non-: non-verbal, non-stop;
de-: deconstruct, denominalization, defrost;
dis-: disengage, dismiss, disconnect;
out-: outome, outright, outstanding;
re-: reconstruct, refine, re-establish;
mis-: misunderstanding, misfire, mislaid.
b) semi-productive prefixes (at present, relatively inactive in the formation of new words in English:
co-: co-author, co-editor, cooperation;
counter-: counteractive, counteract, counterattack;
sub-: subway, submarine, sublet;
up-: upward, update, upload;
vice-: vice-president, vice-rector;
c) unproductive prefixes (at present, no longer used in the process of forming new words in English, though they might have been productive at earlier stages of the evolution of the language):
be-: beloved, becalm, besprinkle;
with-: withholder, withdraw, withstand.
Finally, prefixes may also be approached from the perspective of the phonological changes they trigger in the roots or stems to which they are attached. Prefixes which cause such changes are known as non-neutral, while those which do not, are considered neutral. Most of the English prefixes fall within the latter category.
5.2.2. Suffixation
By suffixation, suffixes are added to roots or stems in order to create new words. Unlike prefixes which do not change the morphological 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:
a) 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
b) 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;
-y/ly: cloudy, silky, manly, brotherly, womanly;
-less: sugarless, harmless, flawless;
-ful: joyful, useful, delightful, eventful;
-ed: wooded, pointed, horned;
-able/-ible: readable, understandable, adaptable, accessible;
-ive: progressive, possessive aggressive;
-some: handsome, cumbersome, tiresome;
The suffixes forming the comparative of superiority and the relative superlative of the mono and some disyllabic adjectives –er (cleverer, smarter) and –est (cleverest, smartest) respectively should be mentioned here as well. In the case of disyllabic adjectives, there is oscillation between the synthetic way of forming the comparative and the superlative and the analytical one, by using the adverbs more and the most in front of the adjective in the positive degree. The latter way seems to be taking over the former, as a proof of the tendency to regularize this area of the vocabulary as well.
c) verbal suffixes – verbs are formed mainly from nouns and adjectives. In modern English, the number of verb-forming suffixes are rather reduced; however, those that are still in use today are highly productive and therefore, extremely frequent:
-ise/-ize: utilize, fertilize, Latinize, organize;
-ify: intensify, simplify, diversify
-en: brighten, enlighten, deepen, widen.
d) adverbial suffixes – derived adverbs are formed by adding suffixes to nouns and adjectives mostly:
-ly (added to most of the adjectives): happily, strangely, badly, beautifully;
-wise: likewise, clockwise, crabwise;
-ward/-wards: northward(s), westward(s), backward(s), foreward(s).
e) numeral suffixes:
-teen (it generates the cardinal numerals between 13 and 19): thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, nineteen;
-ty (it is used to form the cardinal numeral designating multiples of 10): thirty, forty, sixty, ninety;
-th (it is the suffix forming ordinal numbers others than one, two, three and those that have these in their structure; it may be appended either to simple numerals, to already derived ones or to compound ones): fourth, sixth, twentieth, fiftieth, twenty-fourth, eighty-seventh.
English suffixes are of the following main origins:
a) Germanic
-er: Londoner, worker, poker;
-art: drunkard, braggart;
-hood: boyhood, brotherhood;
-ing: learning, reading, interesting;
-man: gentleman, townsman;
-ness: hardness, cleverness;
-ship: friendship, authorship;
-ed: wooded, added;
-some: handsome, twosome;
-ward: backward, foreward;
-wise: likewise, clockwise;
-en: darken, deepen, whiten;
-ish: selfish, reddish, boyish;
-y: dirty, silky, hairy;
-ly: manly, slowly, hardly;
-th: tenth, growth.
b) Romance (Latin, French and Italian):
-ette: kitchinette, usherette, novelette;
-or: actor, inspector;
-ee: employee, payee, trainee;
-ess: lioness, actress, hostess;
-age: marriage,
-al: arrival, betrayal, dismissal;
-ance/ence: assistance, resistance, dependence;
-ery/ry: flattery, bakery, dentistry;
-ment: acknowledgement, movement, amazement;
-ant/ent: claimant, correspondent;
-fy/ify: signify;
-ize/ise: modernize, organize, moralize;
c) Greek:
-ist: modernist, classicist;
-ism: communism, colloquialism, organism;
Like prefixes, suffixes may be grouped, according to their ability to create new words at the present stage in the development of English into:
a) productive suffixes (which are, at present, active in terms of new words formation):
-able: profitable, regrettable, understandable;
-ed: loved, grouped, played;
-ing: interesting, clearing, meaning;
-less: sugarless, harmless, speechless;
-ness: calmness, brightness, happiness;
-y: edgy, bloody, cloudy;
-ly: scarcely, evenly, likely;
-ish: selfish, childish, Turkish.
b) semi-productive suffixes (at present, less active in the process of word formation):
-dom: kingdom, freedom, boredom;
-ful: spoonful, mouthful, hurtful;
-hood: boyhood, childhood;
-ee: employee, trainee, payee;
-ship: kinship, relationship;
c) unproductive suffixes (at present, no longer used to form new words):
-ance: deliverance, acceptance;
-age: coinage;
-ment: movement, development;
-some: handsome, gruesome;
-th: tenth, eleventh.
5.3. Compounding
Compounding or composition is the process of coining new words by grammatically and semantically combining two or more roots or stems (i.e. of at least two constituents that occur or can, in principle, occur in isolation). Compound words may be described from the point of view of their orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics.
5.3.1. Orthographic characteristics of compounds
Compounds in English may be spelt in three different ways: solid (in one word): bullfighter, theatergoer, colorblind, whetstone, etc; hyphenated (in words separated by a hyphen): self-determination, heart-breaking, man-made, high-born, easy-going, grass-green, etc; and in completely separate words: tea bag, nail brush, oil well, price cut, etc.
5.3.2. Phonological characteristics of compounds
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.
Compounding is driven by phonological factors in the case of reduplicatives such as pooh-pooh, goody-goody, roly-poly, wishy-washy, flip-flop, sing-song, harum-scarum, bow-wow. These are examples of words created on the basis of reduplication,”the repetition of the base of a word in part or in its entirety” (Katamba 2005: 72).
According to Bauer (1983), there are two main types of reduplicatives in English: rhyme motivated – nitwit, teeny-winny, hurly-burly and ablaut motivated – riff-raff, tittle-tattle, mish-mash. Rhyme should be understood here as it is understood in poetry – the vowel and the consonant(s) that occur after it in the final syllable of a word are identical, while ablaut means a change in the root vowel (which usually signals a change in grammatical class, eg. the o – e alternation in the pairs long – length, strong – strength marks the difference between the adjective and its corresponding noun respectively). The labels Bauer (1986) suggests for the two categories of reduplicatives highlights the fact that the repetition of the base in compounds of this kind involves either copying the rhyme, in the case of the so-called rhyme motivated reduplicatives, or copying the consonants and altering the vowel in the so-called ablaut motivated reduplicatives. The two elements that alternate in the structure of a reduplicative may be both bases that exist independently in English – Black-Jack, brain-drain, or one or both of the elements may be pseudo-stems that are not recognizable as independent units of the language – ding-dong, wibble-wobble, zigzag, ping-pong. In the case of the latter, many of the components are onomatopoeic words.
5.3.3. Morphological characteristics of compounds
Compounds may be classified according to the morphological class to which they belong (a finer subclassification, introduced by Marchand (1969), is made according to the presence or absence of a verbal element in the compound. This leads him to speak about “verbal nexus combinations” as opposed to “non-verbal nexus compounds”). Basically, all morphological classes may have compound members.
a) compound nouns:
noun + noun. According to Tataru (2002), possible semantic relationship between the two nominal elements may be, among others, of:
purpose: baby carriage, bachelor flat, backpack;
place: city-dweller;
resemblance: bullfrog, swordfish;
Sometimes, one of the nominal stems may be in the genitive as in tailor’s dummy, barber’s itch/rash. The two nominal stems may also be linked by prepositions or conjunctions as in bird of paradise, father-in-law, bed-and-breakfast, lily-of-the-valley. Quite often, nominal compounds in English are made up of more than two stems. Examples of 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:
adjective proper + noun: blackbird, highlands, bluebell;
participial adjective ending in -ing + noun: peeping Tom, blotting paper, boarding card;
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 a gerundial -ing: 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.
b) 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 Tataru (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;
noun + noun + -ed: lion-hearted, honey-mouthed;
adverb + verb (participle): ill-behaved, well-meant, everlasting;
adverb + adjective: evergreen;
c) compound verbs:
noun + verb: hen-peck, baby-sit, house-keep;
adjective + verb: white-wash, dry-clean, sweet-talk;
verb + verb: dive-bomb, drop-kick, blast-freeze;
adverb + verb: overhear, underestimate, down-grade;
Composition proper in the case of the English verbs is rather poorly represented. A deeper analysis on what are at first sight considered compound verbs reveals a mixture of composition with other word-formation mechanisms. To blackmail, for example, is formed by both composition and conversion, to baby-sit, stage-manage or vacuum-clean are the result of both composition and back-formation.
d) compound adverbs:
adverb + adverb: throughout, hereabout(s);
adjective + noun: uphill, downhill, outdoor;
adverb + preposition: wherefrom, thereby, hereby.
e) compound numerals
All cardinal numerals between round figures, starting with twenty-one, are compound words. From one hundred upward, round figures are denoted by compound numerals built with the help of the copulative conjunction “and”: two hundred and four, nine hundred and fifty-eight, ten thousand three hundred and forty. Distributive numerals are obtained by reduplicative composition along with the insertion of the preposition “by”: two-by-two, nine-by-nine, twenty-by-twenty. Fractions are compounds, too: 2/3=two thirds,6/8=six eights. When the fraction is preceded by a full number, the compound numeral is obtained using the conjunction “and” between the full number and the fraction proper: 4 2/3=four-and-two-thirds. If there is a decimal comma in its structure, the compound numeral is read using the word “point” between the full numbers in front and after the comma: 56.4=fifty-six point four.
f) compound pronouns:
Compound pronouns are pretty old in the language. They occurred in the Middle Ages and have remained unchanged since then. There are several structural models according to which they were formed:
possessive adjective + the noun self: myself, yourself, ourselves;
personal pronoun in the accusative + the noun self: himself, herself, themselves;
the predeterminers some-, any-, no-, or the adjective every + the nouns body, thing: nothing, anybody, something, everybody;
the relative-interrogative words who, what, when, which, where + the adverb ever: whoever, whatever, whenever, etc. In archaic and more emphatic forms, so was inserted between the components in some of the compound pronouns of this kind: whatsoever, whosoever.
g) compound prepositions:
Tataru (2002) suggests several morphological patterns according to which compound prepositions have been obtained. Generally, she says, they contain one or several prepositions grouped around:
a nominal nucleus: in the middle of, in spite of, thanks to, on the other side of;
an adverbial nucleus: underneath, close to, faraway from, ahead of, in front of, prior to, previous to;
a verbal nucleus, where the verb may be either in a finite or in a non-finite form: as concerns, due to, owing to, notwithstanding;
a prepositional nucleus: but for, onto, as to.
g) compound conjunctions
Both among coordinating and among subordinating conjunctions there are compounds which fall in the same structural classes as the compound prepositions. Thus, they can be grouped around:
- a nominal nucleus: for the reason that, in spite of, for fear that, despite the fact that;
- an adverbial nucleus: as well as, along with, never again;
- an adjectival nucleus: long before, for all that;
- a verbal nucleus: seeing that, supposing that, provided that;
- a prepositional nucleus: but for, after which, what with.
Compound relative pronouns may also function as conjunctions when they introduce relative clauses. Since they function jointly, the correlatives either…or, neither…nor, both…and may be considered compound conjunctions.
h) compound interjections
English compound interjections follow a number a morphological patterns. The most frequent of these are:
- reduplicatives: blah-blah, pooh-pooh, puff-puff, hush-hush;
- ablaut combinations: ticktack, bow-wow, boo-hoo;
onomatopoeia: cook-a-doodle-doo, gobbledygook.
5.3.4. Syntactic characteristics of compounds
Together with their phonological features, the syntactic characteristics of compounds contribute to their being different from phrases. Thus, word order, i.e. the position of the different constituents of a compound in relation to one another, is sometimes ungrammatical or at least unusual in English. For example, the “noun + adjective” construction is not a usual pattern. However, it occurs in compounds such as home-sick, sea-sick or weather-sensitive. Similarly, the structure “verb + preposition” is regular for verbs and rather surprising in the case of nouns, but it does occur in the case of the compound noun splashdown. In normal, unemphatic word 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” 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 also help to set the boundaries between compounds and 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.
Inflectibility refers to the use of inflections to modify the grammatical function of words. 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.
5.3.5. Semantic characteristics of compounds
From a semantic point of view, compounds may be grouped in two major classes: compounds with an idiomatic meaning and compounds with a compositional meaning. The former tend to acquire a rather specialized meaning which cannot be grasped on the basis of the meaning of its constituents: a turnkey for example, is a person who, in the past, used to hold the keys of the prison, while a turncoat is a traitor. The meaning of the compounds in the latter class is transparent and easier to understand, since it is arrived at by adding the meanings of their constituents: a bulldog is a breed of dog, an easy chair is a type chair. In between the two classes, there is a third, comprising compounds in whose case the meaning of at least one of the constituents is somehow obscured. We may include here words such as dustbin, which is a container not restricted to the collection of dust alone, or blackboard, the object one writes on which may have colours other than black and may be made of materials other than wood.
As Katamba (2005: 67) suggests, “an interesting property of most compounds is that they are headed. This means that one of the words that make up the compound is syntactically dominant”. Quite frequently, the syntactic head is the semantic head of the compound as well, while the non-head element usually indicates some of its characteristics. The two examples above, bulldog and easy chair help to illustrate this as well: a bulldog is a dog with short hair, a short neck, a large head, and short thick legs, while an easy chair is a large comfortable chair. If a compound contains a semantic head, i.e., if its meaning incorporates the meaning of at least one of its components, it is called an endocentric compound. If it has no semantic head, i.e., if its meaning is idiomatic and therefore different from the meanings of its constituents, like the meanings of turnkey and turncoat above, the compound is an exocentric compound.
Hulban (1975) approaches the semantic relationship between the constituents of a compound from a different perspective. He describes them as restrictive and relational, with a series of nuances existing in between the two. Thus, the material something is made of is revealed in compounds such as paper bag, lather jacket, ironware. Place relationships are implied in downtown, upstream, seashore. Purpose is obvious in blow-pipe, looking-glass, goldfield, while comparison is present in good-for-nothing, larger-than-life. In words such as male-doctor, she-wolf, womankind, boy-friend, woman teacher, the idea of gender is involved. Purpose and comparison show relationships, while material and gender show restrictions. Place may indicate both restriction – sunset and relation – sea shore. An example of a compound whose internal semantic organization may be viewed from more than one perspective is eye-glasses which, depending on the point of view, may express purpose, material or the idea of place.
5.4. Conversion
Conversion is the process of forming new words by means of transferring them from one morphological class to another, without any changes, either in their form or in their pronunciation. The procedure is extremely productive in English. In fact, this technique is so frequent that many scholars see it as a matter of syntactic usage rather than as a word-formation device. Among them, there are, for example, Pyles and Algeo (1993), who use the term “functional shift” to refer to the process and to highlight the fact that, by it, words are converted from one grammatical function to another, without their form being affected in any way. Cristina Tataru (2002) follows the same line of thinking in calling what is traditionally known as “conversion” “functional polysemy”, as opposed to “lexical polysemy” which involves only a change in lexical meaning, leaving the grammatical class of the words unaltered. She further explains that, even if, at first sight, the type of polysemy implied by conversion is clearly a functional one, lexical polysemy is accompanies the process as well. “The new meaning, although semantically related to the first, contains markers 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” (Tataru 2002: 79). The most frequent cases of conversion involve nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
5.4.1. Nouns obtained by conversion
The parts of speech that are most frequently converted into nouns are adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions.
a) 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, anarchist;
nouns denoting “the presence of the quality in an object”: an acid, an adhesive, an adverbial, an absolute.
As Tataru (2002: 82) draws our attention, “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)…”
b) nouns converted from verbs
De-verbal nouns may express:
the result of the action denoted by the original verb: an abstract, a drive;
the process to which the original verb referred: an ache, an alert, an arrest;
the agent of the action denoted by the verb: an advocate, an ally, an affix, a cheat, a bore ;
the name of the action denoted by the verb: a hunt, a cry, a jump, an attempt. This subcategory of converted nouns is best represented 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 (“cumpana apelor”), turn, rise.
c) 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.
Tataru (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”.
5.4.2. Adjectives obtained by conversion
According to Tataru (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 judgement 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.
5.4.3. Verbs obtained by conversion
This is the most productive area in which conversion manifests itself. Very many English verbs have been obtained by conversion, from nouns especially.
a) verbs obtained from nouns
The semantic relationships between the nouns and their converted verbal counterparts are very diverse and, therefore, quite difficult to classify. Consequently the patterns of meaning which can be identified form a rather non-homogenous class:
action resulting in the situation designated by the noun: to rain, to snow, to frost;
action generating the notion designated by the noun: to point, to spot, to drop, to stripe;
instrumental meaning: to finger, to elbow, to shoulder, to saw, to hammer, to screw, to gun, to nail;
agentive meaning (to be/to act like what the nouns designates): to wolf, to ape, to monkey, to parrot, to pig, to nurse, to father;
locative meaning: to pocket, to corner, to garage;
to put in what the noun designates: to bottle, to catalogue, to list;
to deprive of what the noun designates: to peel, to skin, to scalp;
to send/go by what the noun designates: to mail, to ship;
to provide with what the noun designates: to cover, to wrap, to plaster, to coat.
b) verbs obtained from adjectives
The basic meaning of the de-adjectival verbs is “to bring about the characteristic expressed by the adjective in an object”: to calm, to dirty, to square, to round, to alert, to aggregate, or “to make a subject suffer the instatement of the quality expressed by the adjective: to wrong, to dry, to wet, to sour, to clean.
c) verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions, interjections
Verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions or interjections are pretty rare in English. Nevertheless, verbs such as to forward, to but (“But me no buts!”), to chirp, to squeal, to hum, to meow are present in the language.
5.4.4. Adverbs obtained by conversion
Quite frequently, adverbs are obtained from adjectives by derivation with the suffix –ly, therefore the cases of adverbs converted from adjectives are rather rare. Sometimes, in non-literary language, forms homonymous to adjectives occur in adverbial distribution, but, as Tataru (2002: 88) points out, “it is rather doubtful whether these are cases of conversion or simply manifestations of the tendency to drop the ending in the adverb”. Awful rare used instead of awfully rare is such a case.
However, the use of augmentatives such as pretty, mighty, jolly of adjectival origin, in order to form the absolute superlative (besides very) could be more readily interpreted as instances of conversion.
Since conversion does not imply any changes in the form of words, it is sometimes difficult to tell which item should be treated as the base and which as the converted form. One criterion lying at the basis of drawing 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 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: “The sun is yellowing to decline.” (D.H. Lawrence); “… you wolf down great mouthfuls of lamb and green peas…” (S. Maugham); “How does it pay a man of your talent to shepherd such a flock as this…?” (G.B. Shaw); “Whatever it is, don’t blue it.” (S. Maugham).
6. Minor means of word formation
Besides derivation, conversion and compounding described above, there are a number of minor means of word formation in English.
6.1. Clipping
Clipping compounds, blends or portmanteau words[1] are lexical items that have come into being by combining two other words of which at least one is fragmentary.
According to where the clipping occurs, this type of compounds may be classified as:
a) clippings having a full former element and a clipped latter element: cablegram = cable + telegram, mailomat = mail + automat, dumbfound = dumb + confound;
b) clippings having a full latter element and a clipped former element: Eurasian = Europe + Asian, paratroops = parachute = troops, telescreen = television = screen;
c) clippings having both the former and the latter elements clipped: brunch = breakfast = lunch, motel = motorist + hotel, Oxbridge = Oxford + Cambridge.
Clipping has been very productive, giving birth both to words that are easily recognizable and that have entered the everyday vocabulary of English (such as camcorder = camera + recorder, Bollywood = Bombay + Hollywood, used for the Indian film industry, brunch = breakfast + lunch) and to words that are either rather technical and recognizable by scientist more readily than by the non-specialists or coined by journalists and meaningful for a limited number of readers (edutainment = education + entertainment, agitprop = agitation + propaganda). The technical fields and the newspapers are areas in which the high rate by which clippings are formed is fully justified – in the former, the shortness of clippings help scientists avoid the confusion using too many words to designate a concept might create, in the latter, novelty brought by clippings is a reader-attraction strategy.
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.
6.3. Back-formation
If clipping is a special type of compounding, back formation might be considered a special instance of derivation (regressive or back derivation). Back formation is a process based on the analogy between words that contain affixes and words that have component parts homonymous to affixes. These parts are removed in order to restore (or back-form) what is believed to have been the “original”. For example, baby-sitter did not appear in English by adding the suffix –er to the verb compound baby-sit, but rather –er was first added to the sit part of the compound and only after the verbal noun sitter was obtained, did the word baby-sitter come into being. By back formation, the verb baby-sit was formed as if the compound noun baby-sitter had been obtained from this verb by suffixation. Likewise, peddle is back-formed from peddler, while edit is a back formation from editor.
As Tataru (2002: 95) points out, certain words were borrowed into English that already had suffix-like components in their structure. This is the case of the word puppy, for example, borrowed from the French poupee. Its original being presumed to have been obtained by derivation with the diminutive suffix –y, pup was back-formed.
Active since the 19th century, back-formation is a process that has proved productive especially in the case of compound verbs, an area not very well represented in Modern English. Recent back-formed verbal compounds include force-land, blood-transfuse, sleepwalk, housekeep, electrocute, etc. It has also been much used in technical terminology where one encounters terms such as aerodyne from aerodynamic, lase from laser or hydrotrope from hydrotropic.
6.4. Folk etymology
Like back-formation, folk etymology is based on analogy as well, this time, a partial or total analogy in pronunciation between borrowed words and words already existing in the language. As Katamba (2005: 136) observes, “false etymology” as he calls the process, plays an important role in the phonological adaptation of foreign words to the English sound system. “People tend to rationalize; they want a reason for the imported word sounding the way it does. So they link it with a plausible real word in their language”, distorting the actual etymon of the word borrowed by English from another language.
Thus, crayfish, meaning “crab” was formed as a consequence of the misinterpretation of the French etymon ecrevisse which was believed to be a kind of fish. The Greek word asparagus came to be borrowed into English as sparrowgrass, while the Latin appenditium finally gave penthouse in English. Hulban (1975: 103) explains that the meaning of penthouse, at present, “a very expensive and comfortable apartment or set of rooms on the top floor of a building”, used to be “a subsidiary structure attached to the wall of a main building, usually having a sloping roof”. Its etymon, appenditum, meant “a small building dependent upon a large church” and gave apentis in Old French. As the building is a house which has a roof with a slope, the word was associated with the French pente, meaning “slope”, hence penthouse in Modern English.
Though not as frequent as the major means of word formation, folk etymology is not all that rare. In English, there are a number of words formed by combining pseudo-roots to affixes. This is the case of trimaran, “a vessel with three hulls”, which seems to be formed from catamaran, “a twin hulled sailing boat”, as if –maran were a root meaning “hull”. Conversely, a form may be considered an affix that may be attached to roots. –holic, for example, has been attached to work and gave workaholic and to ice-cream and gave ice-cream-a-holic, on the basis of the pattern represented by alcoholic. It follows from here that –holic has been treated as a suffix meaning “someone who overindulges in something”, although that was not its original meaning.
Folk etymology is a process that works in the opposite direction as well, i.e. other languages that have borrowed words from English have adapted them to their system altering the original to suit the regularities in them. The more indirect the borrowing, the greater the alterations are likely to be. For instance, as Katamba (2005) exemplifies, Luganda borrowed pakitimane from Swahili which, in turn, borrowed it from English – pocket money. Pakitimane means “wallet” rather than “pocket money”. When words pass from one language to another, there is always the danger of misunderstanding what exactly these words denote or what aspects of an object they specifically pick out. “A degree of drift is almost inevitable when a game of Chinese whispers is played” (Katamba 2005: 137).
6.5. Deflection
Deflection, also called sound interchange or root derivation consists of a sound (vowel, consonant or both vowel and consonant) change in the root of a word, thus a new word being obtained. The process is not very productive at present, but it used to be one of the major means by which grammatical categories were marked and by which new words were formed in Old English. It affected words belonging to the word stock which survived up to now in the language.
The Indo-European ablaut change in the root vowel of strong verbs, due to differences in stress, has been preserved in Modern English in irregular verbs such as sing – sang – sung; drink – drank, drunk; speak – spoke; abode – abide; bit – bite; ride – road.
A number of causative verbs have been formed from other verbs by this means: sit – set (“to cause too sit”), fall – fell (“to cause to fall by 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.
6.6. Change of accent
By this mechanism, in a pair made up of noun and its homograph verb, the two elements (generally, of Romance origin) differ from one another by distinctive accent. Thus, the noun accent is stressed on the first syllable, while its corresponding verb is stressed on the second syllable. Such pairs of words are pretty numerous in English: ‘attribute – a’ttribute, ‘torment – tor’ment, ‘contract – con’tract, ‘import – im’port, ‘permit – per’mit, ‘present – pre’sent.
6.7. Abbreviation
At least two things may be understood by abbreviation: the reduction of a word to several letters and the reduction of a group of words designating a notion to the initials of these words.
According to Tataru (2002), the former is due to the discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation in English, as well as “to the unusual length of some words as against the majority of the other words, especially those in the basic word stock” (Tataru 2002: 91). It is a phenomenon that is quite frequent in English, especially in its American variety, and it tends to become very productive. Examples of words abbreviated by reduction to several letters in their structure include: brolly for umbrella, hanky for handkerchief, nighty for nightgown or p.j’s for pyjamas.
The latter type of abbreviation is extremely productive in Modern English. Some words obtained by reduction to the initial letters of the component elements of a multi-word notion have become so common in the language that speakers do not recognize or do not know what these abbreviations stand for. Some of them are pretty transparent (UFO – unidentified flying object, NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization), while others require a scientist’s knowledge to be traced back to what they stand for (HTML – hypertext mark-up language, http – hypertext transfer – or transport – protocol).
There are several ways in which these abbreviations may be read:
a) by pronouncing the letters connected as if they formed a word proper: AIDS – Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Nasdaq – The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, laser – light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. When abbreviations are pronounced this way, they are known as acronyms;
b) by pronouncing the letters in their structure in isolation: pm – post meridian, MP – Member of the Parliament, B&B – bed and breakfast, bpi – bits per inch;
c) by reading the word of group of words that has been abbreviated: dr, Ms. Mr., BTW (by the way), Mt. (mount), St. (saint), Rd. (road).
Abbreviations from Latin that have an international character are found in English as well, both in the everyday and in the specialized language: am – ante meridian, i.e. – id est (that is), e.g. – exempli gratia (for example), ap. – apud (according to), sup. – supra (above), etc.
6.8. Alphanumerics
Alphanumerics are a special case of abbreviations – combinations of letters and numbers - which have gained in importance with the advance of the email and the SMS language, due to the fact that they meet the requirements of small space and expedient communication. They have penetrated the language of advertising as well, since they are striking and informal at the same time. Alphanumerics are to be read component by component, being based on homophony with other words in the language. Examples include: CUL8R (see you later), BU (be you), 4U (for you). Alphanumerics combine with abbreviation to letters in words such as B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-consumer).
6.9. Eponyms
Eponyms are words derived from proper names. If considered from the point of view of the morphological class to which they belong, eponyms are best represented by nouns. They are the most numerous, more so than adjectives and verbs put together.
As demonstrated by Brook (1981), the sources that gave English proper names that became eponyms are extremely varied.
Many of them have passed into the language from names in the Greek and Roman mythology, some as derivatives. Antropos was, for example, one of the three Fates who had the task of cutting the thread of life to the required length. “Atropine”, the eponym derived from it, became a picturesque term for the poisonous substance found in the deadly nightshade. Another word derived from Greek legends in procrustean, meaning “tending to produce uniformity by violent methods”. Its origin lies in the name of a violent robber of Attica, Procrustes, who used to stretch or amputate his victims to make them fit his bed. Eros, the Greek god of love has given “erotic”, while “hermetic” is derived from Hermes, a versatile god whose responsibilities included alchemy. It is used today mainly in the phrase “hermetic seal”, to refer to an airtight closure that alchemists initially made use of. From Roman mythology, English has “cereal”, derived from Ceres, the name of the goddess of agriculture. The name of Cupid, the god of love, is clearly related to “cupidity”. Fortuna, the goddess of chance as a power in human affairs, gave “fortune”, while Gratia, one of the three goddess sisters who bestowed beauty and charm, gave “grace”.
Literature (both British or American and worldwide) was another rich source of eponyms. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was the origin of “Man Friday” sometimes meaning “an aboriginal”, but also “a cheerful, hard-working and versatile assistant”. Brook (1981: 41) suggests that “the phrase has become so much a part of [our] language that newspapers sometimes contain advertisements from would-be employers of Girl Fridays”. “Gargantuan”, meaning “enormous” comes from Gargantua, Rabelais’ giant character in La Vie tres horrifique of Grand Gargantua, while “quixotic” is well established in English to denote people, ideas or plans that are not practical and rarely succeed, by analogy with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a generous, but unworldly and self-deluding character, in the book by the same name.
The names of real life persons which have evolved into common nouns in English may be grouped into a few quite large categories.
Many names of flowers have been formed by derivation with the suffix –ia from the name of the botanist who discovered them or of someone the explorer wanted to honour. Examples include well-known words such as “begonia” after Michel Begon, an administrator in the West Indies who discovered the flower, “dahlia”, after the Swedish botanist Anders Dahl, “forsythia” after the English botanist William Forsyth, “lobelia” after the Flemish botanist Matthias de Lobel and “magnolia”, named by Linnaeus in honour of Pierre Magnol, a French physician.
Products have often preserved the name of their inventors. “Bakelite” is a synthetic resin invented by a Flemish chemist named Leo Baekeland. The “chesterfield”, a sofa with padded seat, arms and back, was named after a nineteenth century Earl of Chesterfield, while the “bunsen burner”, a piece of equipment that produces a gas flame and is used in laboratories, received its name from Robert Wilhelm von Bunsen.
In electrical engineering, the names of various measurement units are taken from the names of the scientist who first used them. The most familiar are “volt”, the unit of electric force, from Count Alessandro Volta, an Italian physicist, “watt”, the unit of power, from James Watt, a Scottish engineer, and “amp”, the unit of electric power , from Andre Amper, a French scientist. Others, less frequently used in everyday language, are “ohm”, the unit of resistance, from the German physicist Georg Simon Ohm, and “coulomb”, the unit of electric charge, from the French engineer Charles de Coulomb.
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 of famous people who once wore them. Thus, the “raglan”, a kinf 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’s 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.
6.10. Nonce words
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 glossed in dictionaries. This was the case of words attributed to Shakespeare such as auspicious, to accost (somebody), to dwindle, nayward, dauntless.
IV. WORD MEANING
Before introducing the problem of word meaning, briefly talking about the evolution of the theories of the linguistic sign from Saussure to Buhler, to which the former is closely connected, might prove useful.
1. Saussure’s approach to the linguistic sign
In modern linguistics, Saussure (1916, 1965) was the first scholar to consider language a system of signs. For him, the linguistic sign and the system it is part of are mutually dependent, since the former functions only within the latter, on the basis of its relations to the other signs.
For the French scientist, the linguistic sign has two sides: a given notion (“concept”) that is associated in the brain with a certain phonic image (“acoustic image”). The two, just like the system and the sign, are mutually conditioning, they evoke or call each other up.
In his famous course in general linguistics, Saussure (1916, 1965) repeatedly stresses the idea that the linguistic sign is a mental unit and that it does not establish a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a phonic image. This image is for him nothing material or physical, but the mental impression of a sound. The connection between the concept and the phonic image represents the linguistic sign for Saussure, who later replaces the notions “concept” and “acoustic image” by “signifie” and “signifiant”, which have since become internationally accepted technical terms.
Saussure (1965) postulates two principles connected to the linguistic sign: its arbitrariness and its linearity. For him, the relationship between the two sides of the linguistic sign is fundamentally arbitrary, non-motivated or conventional. Even in the case of interjections and onomatopoeic words, he sees no motivation and considers that they are acquired conventions of a specific language system, a point of view to which many have objected since it was suggested. Saussure (1965) himself rethinks his definite opinion concerning the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign and speaks about degrees of arbitrariness and about the transition from arbitrary to motivated formations. Thus, the principle of arbitrariness holds only for simple linguistic signs, while complex structures may be morphologically motivated by their constituents. Saussure (1965: 181) considers the components of a compound structure “transparent formative elements”, though it would be more logical to view the whole construction as transparent.
According to Saussure’s second principle, that of the linear character of the linguistic sign, this is made up of a chain of temporally 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, in other words, on the syntagmatic dimension of the language, at a phonetic and phonological level.
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. 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).
2. Ogden and Richards’ “Semiotic Triangle”
The model of the linguistic sign developed by Ogden and Richards (1923) is represented below:
THOUGHT or REFERENCE
SYMBOL (“word”) stands for (“thing”) REFERENT
The “semiotic triangle”, the “triangle of signification” or the “referential triangle”, as it is called in the literature, suggests that there is no direct relationship between the word or the symbol and the extra-linguistic thing or the referent it denotes (this is indicated by the dotted line connecting them). The two are linked indirectly, by means of the abstract thought or reference in our brains (“reference” is used by Ogden and Richards in a different way than in most of the more recent linguistic theories, where it denotes either the relationship between a full linguistic sign and an extralinguistic referent or the action of a speaker/writer referring to an extra-linguistic object by means of a linguistic sign). According to Ogden and Richards, there is then no direct relationship between the word or the symbol “dog” and a particular class of living beings or a specific element of this class. They stress the point that the meaning of the linguistic symbol (sign), as a concept or thought, has to be clearly distinguished from the extra-linguistic object denoted by it. Words, as linguistic signs, are therefore indirectly related to extra-linguistic referents.
Saussure’s binary model is thus expanded into the three-sided model of the semiotic triangle, which, however, still excludes the users of the linguistic sign – the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader. In 1934, Karl Buhler gave the model of the linguistic sign a pragmatic dimension and included the two in the theory.
3. Buhler’s “Organon Model”
Buhler’s theory, following Plato, who sees language as a tool (“organon”) is represented in a simplified form in the diagram below (cf Lipka 2002: 58):
The picture above has to be understood in the following way. The sign in the center links a sender (normally the speaker) with an addressee (normally the hearer) and the represented objects and relations. The connecting lines between the sign and the three elements just mentioned symbolize the three most important functions of the complex linguistic sign, i.e. of the language: expression (also called “the emotive function”), representation (also called “the referential function”) and appeal (also called “the conative/vocative function”). The linguistic sign, as an instrument, is an expression of the sender (speaker or writer) who uses it to appeal to the addressee (hearer or reader). At the same time, it serves for the representation of objects, states of affairs and relations, i.e. for the representation of extra-linguistic referents.
As an expression of the speaker or writer, in other words, being dependent on the sender, the linguistic sign is, according to Buhler (1934), a “symptom”. Because of its correlation with an extra-linguistic referent, it is also a “symbol”. Seen from the point of view of its relation to an addressee, whose behaviour it is meant to direct and control, the sign is, finally, “a signal”. These three approaches to the linguistic sign may be correlated with the language functions suggested by Buhler in the following way:
EXPRESSION (speaker, writer) ____________ symptom
REPRESENTATION (referent) ____________ symbol
APPEAL (hearer, reader) ____________ signal
4. Word meaning
The discussion of the three successive models above hinted at aspects connected to word meaning. Word meaning is a pretty controversial issue in linguistics, which has been dedicated thousands of pages and has been approached from hundreds of angles. It is beyond the scope of this book to attempt at summarizing the available theories of meaning. However, instead of going into the intricacies of the various aspects of meaning, a concise overview of the most common terms associated with word meaning would be useful. Denotation, reference, sense and connotation will be considered in what follows.
4.1. Denotation and reference
The relation of denotation links a lexeme, as it was defined in the introductory chapter, with a whole class of extra-linguistic objects. As Lyons (1977: 207) puts it, the denotation of a lexeme is “the relationship that holds between that lexeme and persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system”. He uses the term “denotatum” “for the “class of objects, properties, etc., to which the expression correctly applies” (Lyons 1977: 207).
The linguist characterizes the denotatum of the word “cow”, for example, as a particular class of animals and adds that the individual animals in this class are its denotata. He further points out that the denotation of a lexeme is independent of the concrete context of an utterance. However, expressions such as “the cow”, “John’s cow”, “those three cows over there” may be used to establish a relationship of reference with individual elements in the class generally denoted by “cow” as their referents (the reference of the above expressions containing “cow” is partly determined by the denotation of the lexeme “cow” in English). Reference is thus defined as “the relationship which holds between an expression and what that expression stands for on particular occasions of its utterance” (Lyons 1977: 174). Since, for Lyons, reference depends on concrete utterances and not on abstract sentences, it follows that single lexemes cannot be related to extra-linguistic objects by means of reference, or, to put it in his own words, “reference … is an utterance-dependent notion. Furthermore, … it is not generally applicable in English to single word-forms; and it is never applicable to lexemes” (Lyons 1977: 176).
Reference
- Referent
Lyons’ use
of the term “reference” is summarized and illustrated by Lipka (2002: 75) as follows:
expression
RELATION: specific
object
definite description
the man over there, the cow, Napoleon,
the queen, the king of France
4.2. Denotation and sense
Denotation having been defined following Lyons, for consistency of approach, I shall introduce the notion of “sense” according to his views as well. Thus, initially, he (1968: 427) defined the sense of a word as “its place in a system of relationships which it contracts with other words in the vocabulary”. Later, still regarding sense from a relational perspective, he redefines it as the relationship which holds between “the words or expressions of a single language independently of the relationship, if any, which holds between those words or expressions and their referents or denotata” (Lyons 1977: 206). What we understand from here is that sense is a language-internal relationship, bearing no connection with the extra-linguistic world.
Both individual lexemes and larger expressions have denotation and sense, while only the latter have reference. As Jackson and Amvela (2007: 66) explain, “the sense of an expression is a function of the sense of the lexemes it contains and their occurrences in a particular grammatical construction. The sense of the word table will vary in the following sentences: ‘Don’t put your feet on the table!’ and ‘It will be finalized under the table.”
A comparison between denotation and sense indicates that the two are equally basic relationships that are dependent on each other. According to Lyons (1977: 210), there are some words which do not have denotation, i.e. they cannot be associated will a class of real objects, but, nevertheless, have sense, i.e. they establish relationships with the other words in the language system. This is the case of the word “unicorn”, which Lyons (1977: 210) illustrates by suggesting the following pairs of sentences:
There is no such animal as a unicorn.
There is no such book as a unicorn.
The former sentence is perfectly acceptable, while the latter is semantically odd. They demonstrate that, while the lexemes “book” and “unicorn” are incompatible, “animal” and “unicorn” are “related in sense”.
Of denotation, reference and sense, it is the last that will lie at the basis of the discussion of sense relations between words later in this chapter.
4.3. Denotation, connotation and markedness
In lexical semantics, some linguists (though there is no total agreement on the matter) make a binary distinction between denotation and connotation, or denotative and connotative meaning (Kastovsky 1982, Hansen et al 1985, Ullmann 1962, etc). Approaching meaning in terms of denotation and connotation is closely linked to synonymy (which shall be detailed upon later) in that synonyms are regarded as having the same denotation, i.e. the same cognitive or conceptual meaning, but different connotations (in other words, synonyms may be specifically marked by connotations). This additional aspect of meaning, as opposed to the central denotational core, may be illustrated with the following examples of “stylistic” or “social and affective meaning” from Leech (1981: 14), as they are reproduced by Lipka (2002; 80):
(a) steed (poet.) (b) domicile (leg.) (c) cast (lit.)
horse residence (fml.) throw
nag (sl.) abode (peot./old)
gee-gee (baby l.) home chuck (sl.)
The twofold distinction between denotation and connotation may be justified by the fact that denotation refers to the relationship holding between a linguistic sign and its denotatum. Connotations are, however, additional characteristics of lexemes. Leech marks “steed” as poetic, “nag” as slang and “gee-gee” as baby language. Various dictionaries label them differently: “steed” may be, according to them, literary/rhetorical/humorous, “nag” may be colloquial, while “gee-gee” may be used by or when spoken to children. “Domicile” is considered very formal, official by Leech, while, in dictionaries, it is labeled formal or legal. “Abode” is viewed as poetic by Leech, and old/literary/legal by various dictionaries, etc.
It follows from here that the words in each of the three columns above have the same denotation, but differ in connotation, in other words, they are marked, or instances of marking or markedness (cf. Lyons 1977: 305). Lyons characterizes the words written in italics as “general”.
The notion of marking or markedness is derived from phonology, where the marked member of a pair of phonemes has some additional features as compared to the other member (/d/ in the pair /t/ - /d/ is voiced, for example, while /t/ is not; consequently, /d/ is considered marked). By analogy, the words “horse”, “home” and “throw” in Leech’s example may be considered unmarked, while the others are marked in one way or another. The unmarked lexemes are neutral and not restricted to a particular instance of use, while de marked ones are most readily used in some contexts and excluded from others.
Connotatively marked lexemes in a language may be subcategorized in various ways. As Lipka (2002: 82) indicates, certain aspects of linguistic variation may serve to distinguish between regional, temporal and social connotations. Besides stylistically, affectively, or emotionally marked lexemes, we could furthermore group lexical items according to regional or dialectal, archaic or neologistic, and sociolinguistic variation (cf. Lipka 1988a). We could draw on parameters like ‘medium’, ‘field, mode, tenor’, or, like Leech on ‘province, status, modality’”.
Some of these approaches to connotations are comprised in the system suggested by Hansen et al (1985). Its most important points are indicated below in a diagrammatic form, though with much fewer examples than those offered by the authors. The three main classes of connotations are, according to them, the following:
A. stylistic: edifice, swain, apothecary, bakshees, buddy, bugger;
B. expressive: niggard, bastard, dolly bird;
C. regional: elevator, streetcar, truck, wee.
These are further sub-classified by the authors as represented in the following diagrams:
Lipka 83
high
A. stylistic
low
Regional variation is not divided into other sub-classes by Hansen et al (1985). However, the authors mention varieties such as British, American, Scottish, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, South African, Indian English and also point at interior differentiations within these (eg. Northern English). They only give examples of Americanisms, stating that American English is currently exerting a great influence over British English and that the process of fluctuation of words from one of these two varieties into the other is, at present, very active.
What I understand from the taxonomy of connotations suggested by Lipka and his colleagues (1985) is that, according to them, the same referent may be referred to by using different words, with different connotations. Thus, they seem to neglect the fact that even the same word, used to refer to a single referent, may gain various connotative dimensions depending on the context of its being used. A simple word such as “home” may carry connotations of joy, excitement, sadness or boredom, depending on who utters it and when (somebody saying “I’ll stay home tonight doing nothing” may attach the idea of boredom to it, while somebody else exclaiming “We are back home!” after a long journey may link joy to it, etc.).
5. Sense relations between words
As it was pointed out in 4.2., sense is a relational concept, referring to the links between the lexemes and expressions of a language. In what follows I shall survey the types of such links, under the general heading “sense relations”.
5.1. Synonymy
5.1.1. General characteristics of synonyms
Synonyms are words belonging to the same morphological class which have the same core meaning, though they may differ in shades of meaning, connotation, distribution, collocation and idiomatic use. Synonyms are interchangeable at least in some contexts if not in all contexts of use. Thus, for example, “busy” and “occupied” are synonyms in “I’m afraid Mr. Brown is busy/occupied”, but “busy” cannot substitute “occupied” in “This seat is occupied.” “Liberty” and “freedom” are interchangeable in “They fought for their liberty/freedom.”, but one can only say “I’m not at liberty to tell you the truth” in English. “To start” and “to begin” may both be used in “She started/began to cry upon hearing the news”, but only “start” may correctly collocate with “car” (“I started my car”). In the same way, one can either “win” or “gain” a victory, but one can only “win” a war. When synonyms are interchangeable in particular contexts, they are considered to be in “equipollent distribution” (Hulban 1975: 155). “Alone” may be used only predicatively, while its synonyms “solitary” and “lonely” may be employed both as attributes and as predicative adjuncts. In the grammatical contexts which are not shared, words such as “alone”, “solitary” and “lonely” are considered “grammatical distributional opposites” (Hulban 1975: 156).
Synonyms may be arranged in synonymic series containing two or more elements. In such series, one of the terms acquires a dominant position, being the most general among the others and the most frequently used in the language. This term is labeled the synonymic dominant and it becomes the head word in dictionaries. To illustrate, in the synonymic series “to leave – to depart – to clear out – to retire”, it is “to leave” that is the synonymic dominant, since it is neutral stylistically and can replace any of the other members of the group.
Going back to the matters connected to connotation, I may say that the synonymic dominant is the unmarked term of the series, while all the other terms are marked in terms of connotations of various kinds.
Simple words may establish correlative synonymic relationships with collocations, phrases or idioms as in the pairs “to win – to gain the upper hand”, “to decide – to make up one’s mind”, “to hesitate – to be in two minds”, “to swing the lead – to exaggerate”, “neck and crop – entirely”, “to laugh – to give a laugh”, “to prefer – to show preference”, “to go after – to follow”, “to go on – to continue”, “to give in – to surrender”.
As Hulban (1975) observes, correlative synonymic relations are also met in the case of some special stylistic synonyms, in which the name of a writer, inventor, etc. is replaced by a descriptive phrase, as in “Chaucer – the father of English literature” or “Shakespeare – the sweet swan of Avon”.
Correlative synonymic relations may also be recognized in certain phrases that are made up of two synonyms linked by the copulative conjunction “and”: “with might and main”, “lord and master”, “stress and strain”, “each and every”, “liberty and freedom”, “really and truly”, “last will and testament”, “exiled and banished”, etc. As Cruse (1986) points out, synonyms occur together in another type of expressions, namely when a synonym is employed as an explanation or clarification of the meaning of another word. The relationship between the two words is frequently signaled by something like that is to say, or a particular variety of or as in: “He was cashiered, that is to say, dismissed” and in “This is an ounce, or snow leopard”.
When synonyms are used contrastively, as they sometimes are, it is customary to indicate the fact that it is their different peripheral meanings which must be attended to, by phrases such as more exactly or rather as in the following examples offered by Cruse (1986: 267): “He was murdered, or rather executed”, “On the table there were a few grains or, more exactly, granules of the substance”.
Polysemantic words have different synonymic series for each of their senses. For example, “ill” in the sense of “not in full physical or mental health” is synonymous with “ailing”, “indisposed”, “sick”, “unwell”. If it means “bad”, possible synonyms for it are “evil”, “wicked”, “wrong”.
Synonyms occur in a number of idioms and proverbs in English. Examples of the former include “to be on pins and needles”, while the latter may be illustrated by “It never rains but it pours”. They may also be employed as stylistic devices contributing to giving more expressive force to a particular description or to nuancing it, as Hulban (1975: 162 -164) illustrates quoting G.B. Shaw:
“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.”
5.1.2. Types of synonyms
There are several types of synonyms, such as:
a) strict/perfect/absolute synonyms. Two lexical units would be perfect synonyms (i.e. would have identical meanings) “if and only if all their contextual relations were identical” says Cruse (1986: 268). The linguist adds that it would be “impracticable” to prove that two lexical items are perfect synonyms following this definition, since that would mean checking their occurrences in all conceivable contexts, a thing that is surely impossible, the number of such contexts being infinite. However, proving that absolute synonymy remains at the level of theory and does not practically exist in real contexts of language use (a point of view expressed by numerous other linguists) should not be very difficult, since a single discrepancy in the pattern of the contextual relations of the candidates to absolute synonymy would be sufficient proof in this sense. Cruse (1986: 268)) chooses to demonstrate the practical impossibility of absolute synonymy starting from his opinion that “equinormality in all contexts is the same as identity of meaning”. Based on this approach, two lexical items that are not equally normal in at least one syntactic context cannot be considered strict synonyms. This is the case of the pairs “begin – commence”, “munch – chew”, “hate – loathe”, “scandalous – outrageous” for which discriminating contexts can be found, though they might seem perfectly interchangeable in all instances of use (Cruse (1986: 269) marks the “more normal” contexts with + and the “less normal” ones with -):
Tell Mummy when Playschool begins and she’ll watch it with you. (+)
Tell Mummy when Playschool commences and she’ll watch it with you. (-)
Arthur is always chewing gum. (+)
Arthur is always munching gum. (-)
I don’t just hate him, I loathe him. (+)
I don’t just loathe him, I hate him. (-)
That is a scandalous waste of money. (+)
That is an outrageous waste of money. (-)
Besides the test of normality, there are other arguments brought against perfect synonymy. One of these is, for example, the fact that the economy of language would not tolerate (except, perhaps, for a very limited period of time) the existence of two lexical items with exactly the same meaning. Another one is of a historical nature. If absolute synonyms do occur at a certain moment in the development of a language, what happens is that, usually, one of the items falls into obsolescence and is, ultimately, no longer used, it remains to be used in particular dialects or stylistic varieties only or it begins to be employed in contexts from which the other is excluded. Thus, Jackson and Amvela (2007: 109) offer a list of archaic or obsolete words which have fallen out of use and been replaced by the items mentioned in brakets: culver (pigeon), fain (willing), divers (various), levin (lightning), dorp (village), trig (neat), warrener (gamekeeper), wight (human being), erst (formerly). On the other hand, when “enemy” was imported into English from French too, its Anglo-Saxon correspondent “foe” began to be used more in the literary than in the everyday language. In the same way, “mutton” (from the French “mouton”) and “sheep” were perfect synonyms for a very limited period of time, up to the moment when the former specialized to designate the meat of sheep, while the latter got restricted to refer to the animal itself.
The discussion of synonymy so far has suggested and attempted at demonstrating by arguments that perfect synonymy is rejected by actual language use. “When we speak of synonymy, then, we mean varying degrees of ‘loose’ synonymy, where we identify not only a significant overlap in meaning between two words, but also some contexts at least where they cannot substitute for each other” (Jackson, Amvela 2007: 109). Loose synonymy is illustrated by at least two types of synonyms, ideographic and stylistic.
b) ideographic synonyms. This class comprises synonyms which share the core meaning but differ in shades of meaning in that certain notes characteristic of the notion, phenomenon, object denoted by these words are accented. They may also differ in connotation, collocation patterns and idiomatic use. In the pair of synonyms “to love – to adore”, for example, “to love” is rather neutral, while “to adore” bears connotations of worship or passion. “Crowd” refers to a disorganized group of people, while its synonym, “mob” refers to the same group, but connotes the idea of riotous intentions as well. As it is pointed out in the Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1991: 141), quoted by Jacskon and Amvela (2007: 108), “Beg, entreat, beseech, implore, supplicate and importune all signify the making of an appeal which is likely to be refused or demurred at. A person begs for what s/he cannot claim as a right; beg suggests earnestness, insistence, and sometimes self-abasement. By entreating someone, one hopes to persuade him/her by earnest pleading and reasoning. . Beseech and implore convey eager anxiety which seeks to inspire sympathy or pity. Implore may be stronger than beseech, with a suggestion of tearfulness or evident anguish. Supplicate adds to entreat a humble, prayerful attitude <invite, entreat, supplicate to accompany you - Lord Chesterfield>. Importune denotes persistence with one’s requests to the point of annoyance or even harassment.”
c) stylistic synonyms. The category of stylistic synonyms includes words having the same notional components of meaning, but differing in their stylistic reference or degree of formality. Jackson and Amvela (2007: 111) offer examples of synonym pairs in which one of the members is used in informal or less formal contexts, while the other is used in more formal contexts. Such examples include: archer – toxophilite, argument – disputation, beauty – pulchritude, cross – traverse, die – decease, give up – renounce, letter – missive, praise – eulogy, warning – caveat, western – occidental. They also mention pairs of synonymous words of which one 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, spondulix, prison – clink, 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 euphemism 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 offensive purposes. The relationship between the euphemism and the common word designating its referent may be considered stylistic synonymy as well. Thus, a “bean counter” is an accountant, a “grease monkey” is a mechanic, a “sawbones” a surgeon and a “quack” a doctor. “Brain bucket” is the dysphemism for motorcycle helmet, “Jesus juice” for wine and “muffin top” for the flesh that “erupts” over the sides of low-rider tight jeans. A “dead tree edition” is the paper edition of an online magazine, while somebody who has become “worm flesh” has actually died. Like euphemisms, dysphemisms cannot boast but a momentary presence in the language, conditioned by cultural and social conventions. A word or phrase that is, at a certain moment, used as a euphemism may evolve into an unacceptable taboo itself and the need of replacing it by a new euphemism arises. The process has been called the “euphemism treadmill” by Steven Pinker (2002: 212) and may be illustrated by examples of successive replacements of euphemisms such as: “imbecile – mentally retarded – developmentally disabled/mentally challenged/with an intellectual disability/with special needs” or “lame – crippled – handicapped – disabled – differently abled”. Similar to the concept of euphemism treadmill, a complementary “dysphemism treadmill” exists, though it is more rarely observed. In its case, words and phrases once considered offensive are later described as “objectionable”, then as “questionable”, and, in some cases, as nearly or outright acceptable in the end. One modern example, according to Wikipedia online, is the word “sucks.” “That sucks” began as American slang for “that is very unpleasant,” and is a shortened version for “Oral sex/Fellatio”. It developed over the late-20th century from being an extremely vulgar phrase to lower-class, nearly mainstream slang. The same may be said of the use of “screw,” often used as slang for sexual intercourse, in such usages as “to screw up”, meaning “to make a major mistake”.
5.1.3. Sources of synonymy
English is a language that is very rich in synonyms. The main reason for the abundance of synonymous words is connected with the history of the language, in particular, with its having borrowed an impressive number of lexical items from other languages.
In a pair of synonyms made up of a native and a borrowed word, it is the native element that is felt to be neutral and therefore it is this element that is used most frequently. In literature, however, many of the words for which there is a native correspondent are French, while in the scientific jargon, terms of Greek and Latin origin are preferred.
When described, such synonyms are usually organized on a double or a triple scale, in which the source of borrowing into English is indicated and not the language to which the etymon of the words can be traced back.
Hulban’s (1975; 158-159) examples of double and triple scales of synonymy include:
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
Native Latin/Greek
player actor
wire telegram
bodily corporeal
heartly cordial
brotherly fraternal
learned erudite
happy fortunate
hard solid
Native French Latin
strength power energy
time age epoch
forerunner herald precursor
bond bail security
outstanding glorious splendid
end finish conclude
ask question interrogate
In literary language, especially in the case of abstract notions, synonymic series may be detected that are formed only of words borrowed from French or Latin:
pushing (Fr.) assertive (L.) militant (L.)
assent (Fr.) agree (Fr.) consent (Fr.)
cherish (Fr.) prize (Fr.) treasure (Fr.)
Besides borrowings, another source of synonymy in English, seen from a diachronic perspective, is represented by archaisms. Many of these are at present used only in dialectal speech, having been replaced in the common language by various synonyms. Thus, as Hulban (1975: 159) illustrates, “king-stool” has been substituted for “throne”, “book-hoard” for “library”, “leechcraft” and “leechdom” for medicine, “seamer” for “tailor”, “to betake” for “to deliver over” and “to occupy”.
Neologisms often lead to synonymy. An interesting phenomenon sometimes takes place in their case: the neologism is replaced by an earlier word which undergoes transfer of meaning, the two words eventually becoming synonyms: “automobile” is very frequently replaced by “motor-car”, shortened to “car”. However, not all attempts that linguists in favour of preserving the native stock of English made to replace neologisms have been successful. Saxonists failed with such words as “wheelman”, “word-hoard”, “folk-wain” which had been meant to replace “cyclist”, “vocabulary” and “omnibus”.
The existence of ideographic and stylistic synonyms of the kind discussed in the previous sections prove that the geographical and stylistic varieties of English are a rich source of synonymy. Thus, “charm”, “chest” and “church” in standard British English may be paired with “glamour”, “kist” and “kirk” in Scottish English, to add to the examples of ideographic synonyms already given. The British words “autumn”, “tin”, “lorry”, “insect”, “sweet” and “maize” as synonyms of the American words “fall”, “can”, “truck”, “bug”, “candy” and “corn” respectively may enlarge the same category as may Cockney words and phrases such as “trap”, “chap” or “ill speed” together with their standard English synonyms “sailor”, “friend” and “bad luck”. As far as stylistic synonyms are concerned, it is already obvious that euphemisms are another important source of synonymy as in the pairs of words: “illiterate – uneducated”, “chaotic – unformed”, “sterile – unfruitful”, “short – vertically challenged”, etc. The belonging of words to various styles in the language may lead to synonymy as well. For instance, “lazy” is the standard neutral word for which the colloquial “lazybones” may be substituted, “trousers” is neutral, while its synonym “pants” is colloquial, “evening”, “morning”, “valley” and “sorrowful” are neutral, while their synonyms “eve”, “morn”, “vale” and “doleful” are poetic, “heart attack” and “headache” belong to the everyday language, while their synonyms “myocardial infarct” and “cephalalgia” are medical technical terms.
5.2. Antonymy
Antonymy is the sense relation holding between words belonging to the same morphological class and having opposite meanings.
5.2.1. General characteristics of antonyms
Antonymy is possible only if the words entering this semantic relationship share a common component of their senses. Thus, “old” and “young” share the component “age”, “long” and “short” share the component “length”, while “deep” and “shallow” both refer to depth.
Antonyms are found in certain typical configurations in English:
A and B: “Young and old were present at the meeting”, “a matter of life and death”, “the long and the short of it”;
A or B: “wanted dead or alive”, “We’ll she if she was right or wrong”, “Good or bad, I’ll take it”;
neither A nor B: “neither friend nor foe”,
A not B: “He was alive, not dead as they thought”,
X is A and Y is B: “Youth is wild and age is tame” (Shakespeare)
Another context in which antonyms are typically employed is when reference is made to a change of state as in “The exhibition opens at nine and closes at noon” or “The poet was born in 1924 and died in 1991”.
I have previously mentioned that polysemantic words have a synonymic series for each of their meanings. They also have different antonyms according to their different senses. Thus, if “even” refers to numbers and means “devisible by two”, its antonym is “odd”; if it refers to character or mood and means “calm”, its antonym is “agitated”; for its meaning “dull”, it enters an antonymic relationship with “interesting”, while “sharp” may be considered its antonym when it means “unable to cut”. On the other hand, ploysemantic words may have a number of antonyms for some of their meanings and none for others. Thus, “criticism” in the meaning of “blame” has the antonyms “praise”, “approval”, while in the meaning of “writing critical essays” it has no opposite meaning correspondent.
Antonyms appear in a great number of idioms (“to make neither head nor tail of something”, “to see something in black and white”, “night and day”) and proverbs (“What soberness conceals, drunkness reveals”, “What is done cannot be undone”, “A small leak will sink a great ship”, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, “One man’s loss is another man’s gain”) , as well as in several figures of speech extensively used in literature. Of the last, among which there are oxymoron, irony, and anticlimax, antithesis is the one that relies most heavily on antonymic relationships. Hulban (1975: 169 – 170) quotes two excerpts selected from G.B. Shaw’s writings. In the former, contrast is established by using quite predictable antonyms. In the latter, however, the antonymic associations are not revealed through the semantic features of the words used, but rather thorough the innovative context in which they are used:
(1) “Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing”.
(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.”
5.2.2. Types of antonyms
If we refer to the type of oppositeness of meaning, we may speak about three major classes of antonyms (finer subclassifications are made by linguists such as Cruse (1986); they are, however, too detailed to be reproduced in a book on general lexicology): gradable antonyms, ungradable or contradictory antonyms and converses.
a) the class of gradable antonyms includes pairs of words such as: “beautiful – ugly”, “small – big”, rich – poor”, “wide – narrow”, “fast – slow”, “increase – decrease”. As their name suggests, the semantic relationship between gradable antonyms is not of the “either – or” type, but rather of the “more – less” type. They represent the end-points of a continuum or a scale. The “more – less” relationship is made obvious by a number of characteristic features of gradable antonyms. They allow comparison: “My dress is longer than yours”, “The tree is less tall than the building”. Gradable antonymic adjectives may be modified by intensifying adverbs: “very good”, “extremely bad”, “extraordinarily beautiful”.
The assertion containing one of the gradable antonyms in a pair implies the negation of the other, but not always vice-versa. Thus, as Lipka (2002: 164) exemplifies, “John is good implies John is not bad. But John is not good does not necessarily imply John is bad. The negation of one term does not necessarily imply the assertion of the other. Using a further example, The water is not hot does not necessarily imply The water is cold. However, from The water is cold, the negation The water is not hot does follow. Furthermore, The water is hot logically implies the negation The water is not cold.”
In a pair of gradable antonyms, one of the terms is unmarked, while the other one is marked. The unmarked member is the one that is normally expected as in “How old are you?” or “How long is the way to the museum?”. When this is used, the speaker/writer does not prejudge anything whereas, when the marked member is used, certain presuppositions 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.
b) 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”.
c) 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.
a) root or radical antonyms are different lexical units with opposite meanings: “warm – cold”, “kind – cruel”, “open – shut”.
b) 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”.
5.3. Hyponymy and meronymy
This section is dedicated to a pair of sense relations that relate words hierarchically. Its starting point is the fact that some words have a more general meaning, while others have a more specific meaning, while they refer to the same entity. Thus, for example, “dog” and “spaniel” may be both used to refer to the same creature, but “spaniel” is a more specific designation than “dog” and may be employed to refer to breeds other than the spaniels, which, however, share with them a number of essential 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 phenomena, reproduced by Jacskon and Amvela (20027: 118):
plant
fungus lichen shrub creeper tree
mushroom toadstool ivy bindweed conifer deciduous
pine spruce oak ash
According to this branched scheme, “fungus”, “lichen”, “shrub”, “creeper” and “tree” are the hyponyms of “plant”. In their turn, all but one of them may function as the superordinate terms of other hyponyms: “fungus” is the superordinate of “mushroom” and “toadstool”, “creeper” is the superordinate of “ivy” and “bindweed”, while “tree” is the more general term for the more specific “conifer” and “deciduous”. At the bottom level of the scheme, there are “pine” and “spruce” as hyponyms of “conifer” and “oak” and “ash” as hyponyms of “deciduous”. If there is a direct connection between terms at lower levels of the scheme and terms at upper levels, the former may be considered hyponyms of the latter even if they are more than one level apart: for example, “oak” and “ash” are hyponyms of “tree”, “pine” and “spruce” are hyponyms of “plant”.
In the case of “foot” and “toe”, the relationship is of the “part of” type – the toe is part of the foot. Cruse (1986) calls it meronymy. Jackson and Amvela (2007: 120) illustrate it schematically, under the form of a hierarchy of superordinate and subordinate (meronym) terms:
plant
leaf bud stem root flower shoot
stalk blade cap hair petal stamen
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.
5.4. Homonymy
Homonymy, a pervasive phenomenon in English, is a relation of lexical ambiguity between words having different meanings, or, as Katamba (2005: 122) sees it, it is “a situation where one orthographic or spoken form represents more than one vocabulary item”.
5.4.1. Types of homonyms
If their pronunciation and spelling are taken into consideration, homonyms may be one of the following:
a) perfect homonyms or homonyms proper. These are words identical in both spelling and pronunciation: “light (adjective) – light (noun)”.
b) homophones. These are words that have the same pronunciation, but differ in spelling: “air – heir”, “I – eye”, “buy – bye - by”
c) homographs. These are words that have the same spelling, but differ in pronunciation: “wound [wu:nd] – wound [waund]”, “bow [b u] – bow [bau]”, “lead [led] – lead [li:d]”.
As the examples below demonstrate, homonyms are a rich source of humour. They are as well a source of confusion for users of English who do not master the language and, sometimes, even for proficient speakers of it:
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)
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case (www.macmillandictionary.com)
In the first two sentences, humour arises from the homonymy between “bright” meaning “intelligent” and “bright” meaning “full of light” and, respectively, between “long” referring to time in the phrase “to be long” and “long” referring to shape, extension in space. In the paragraph cited by Katamba, it is the homophones “catch up” and “ketchup” that produce a hilarious effect, while in the last quotation, a headline from a newspaper, due to the homographic relationship between “case” meaning a legal matter presented before a court and “case” meaning container, it is not clear, at a quick reading, whether the drunkard was sentenced for a crime connected to the violin’s box or to the violin itself. Not to mention that a person with an imaginative mind and the sense of humour might as well see the criminal squeezed in a violin box for nine months.
According to the type of meaning that helps to differentiate words that have the same sound and/or form, homonyms may be grouped in three categories:
a) lexical homonyms are homonyms which belong to the same grammatical class and have different lexical meanings: the noun “seal” meaning a kind of sea animal and the nouns “seal” meaning the special mark put on documents to prove that they are authentic.
b) grammatical homonyms are homonyms which belong to different grammatical classes and have different lexical meanings: the noun “bear” referring to a particular kind of large wild animal with thick fur and the verb “bear” meaning inability to accept or to do something.
c) grammatical homonyms are homonyms which differ in grammatical meaning only: “that” as a demonstrative noun and “that” as a demonstrative adjective, “played” as the past tense of the verb “to play” and “played” as the past participle of the same verb.
5.4.2. Sources of homonymy
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 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 “flower” and “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 meal 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 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” and “ship” (verb) meaning to “send goods or people by ship” and “answer” (noun) meaning “a spoken or written reply to a question” and “answer” (verb) meaning “to give s spoken or written reply to a question” are examples of homonyms obtained by conversion.
6. Polysemy
Though not a sense relation between words, polysemy may be introduced here as well in order to later emphasize its connection with homonymy.
Unlike momosemantic words which have only one meaning (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 glossed 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 coffin 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 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 be 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” is “a piece of furniture”, the most widely used and the most general meaning. 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 in its direct meaning when it clearly nominates the referent out of a particular context. It is used figuratively when the referent is named and, at the same time, described through its similarity with another object. For example, in “He got undressed behind the screen”, the direct meaning of the word “screen” is involved (“a movable piece of furniture used to protect or hide something or somebody”). 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 (anything) that protects and hides.
7. Polysemy and homonymy
Difficulties arise when having to distinguish between polysemy, i.e. between one word with several meanings, and homonymy. i.e. two separate words with the same form and unrelated meanings. Though, according to Lyons (1968: 406), “the distinction between homonymy and multiple meaning is, in the last resort, indeterminate and arbitrary”, there are three criteria that may constitute the staring point in drawing a demarcation line between the two: etymology, formal identity or distinctness and close semantic relatedness.
One of these is the etymology of the words. Words with different etymons that coincide phonetically only accidentally are considered homonyms. This is the case of the pair “ear” meaning “organ of hearing” and coming from the OE “eare” and “ear” meaning “the part at the top of a cereal plant which contains the grains”, coming from the OE “ear”. Following this argument, we would have to 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 one 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, meaning “a flying mouse-like animal”. For them, distinctions in spelling or pronunciation that lead to homographs or homophones cancel homonymy. However, the distinction between homograhy and homophony is not always made and “homonymy” is used in its wider sense to cover them as well.
On the other hand, different morphological and syntactic characteristics of two words with the same form, but different 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). Within 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.
8. Semantic change
In the evolution of a language, its vocabulary is continuously changing. Some words are added while others disappear, their grammatical and phonetic features might change as might their meaning. It is the last of these phenomena that the discussion in this subchapter focuses on.
8.1. Causes of semantic change
There are a number of reasons due to which the meanings of words do not remain stable in time. They may be grouped in two major categories: extra-linguistic and linguistic causes.
8.1.1. Extra-linguistic causes of semantic change
Extra-linguistic causes leading to change of meaning are determined by the close connection between language and the evolution of human society. Being the most dynamic and flexible part of a language, vocabulary reacts to almost every change in the outer reality it helps to picture. Thus, “torch” was used in Middle English (ME) to designate a piece of cloth damped in oil, lit and held in hand in order to make light. With the advance of technology, the word has come to also refer to the small electric lamp that runs on batteries and serve the same purpose in modern times. The noun “mill” was initially used for a building with machinery for grinding corn. Industrial developments influenced its meaning and extended the reference of the word to factory - any kind of building with equipment for manufacturing processes (we now have saw/cotton/silk/paper mills).
Some of the present-day names of institutions are the result of change of meaning of older words, due to the evolution of culture and society. Hulban (1975) quotes the term “academy” in this respect. When the word was borrowed in the 15th century, it was used as the name of a garden near Athens where Plato used to teach. Two centuries later, it referred to the school system of Plato, while, beginning with the end of the 17th century, it has been used to designate an institution for the promotion of art or science.
Social causes display a large variety of forms. One of them is the need for specialized terms in each branch of science that deals with specific phenomena and concepts. As Hulban (1975) exemplifies, the word “cell”, whose general meaning is “compartment”, has come to mean “the space between the ribs of a vaulted roof” in architecture, “the space between the nerves of the wings of insects” in entomology and “a vessel containing one pair of plates immersed in fluid to form a battery” in electricity.
Two other important reasons that have lead to changes in the meanings of certain lexical items are the need of expressiveness, taboo and euphemisms in language. The last two have already been discussed. One way of achieving expressive effects in everyday language is through the use of slang words. In slang, “baby” is used for “girl” or “sweetheart”, “the bread basket” is the “stomach”, “to lamp” means “to hit”, “a bag” is an ugly woman or an objectionable unpleasant person, “to rabbit” is used for “to talk unceasingly”, “gear” refers to “illicit drugs” and “choice” is used as an adjective meaning “best, excellent”.
8.1.2. Linguistic causes of semantic change
The extra-linguistic causes responsible for semantic change go hand in hand with the linguistic ones, factors acting within the language system such as ellipsis, analogy, discrimination of synonyms and borrowings.
Ellipsis consists of the omission of one part of a phrase. Quite frequently, the remaining part takes on the meaning of the whole: “sale”, obtained by ellipsis from “cut-price sale”, has come to be used with the meaning of the initial phrase – “an event or period of time during which a shop reduces the prices of some of its goods”.
Analogy occurs when one member of a synonymic series acquires a new meaning and this new meaning is extended to the other elements in the series as well. In the synonymic series “to catch – to grasp – to get”, the first verb acquired the meaning “to understand”, which was later transferred to the verbs “to grasp” and “to get”.
The discrimination of synonyms is the result of the evolution of the meanings of certain synonyms. In OE, “land” meant both “solid part of the earth’s surface” and “territory of a nation”. Later on, in ME, the word “country” was borrowed from French and it became a synonym of “land”. In short time, however, “country” restricted its meaning to “territory of a nation”, while “land” remained to be used in everyday language for “solid part of the earth’s surface” (when “land” is used to refer to an area with recognized political borders, it bears connotations of mystery, emotion or obsolescence).
Borrowings from other languages may also lead to semantic changes. “Deer” used to mean “animal” up to ME, when, under the pressure of the borrowed words “beast”, “creature”, “animal”, it restricted its meaning to “a large brown wild animal with long thin legs”.
8.2. Results of semantic change
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).
a) Extension or widening of meaning is the process by which the sense(s) of a word is/are enlarged or enriched.
The word “journal” originally meant, as Hulban explains (1975: 117), “a daily record of transactions or events”. Through extension of meaning, at present, it means both “a daily newspaper” and “any periodical publication containing news in any particular sphere”. The early meaning of “butler”, “a male servant in charge of the wine cellar” was later extended to “a male servant in charge of the household”.
Extension of meaning may sometimes involve the evolution of a word from concrete to abstract. “Branch”, for example, was used with the meaning “a portion or limb of a tree or other plant”. From this initial meaning, several abstract meanings have evolved and are recognized today: “one of the portions into which a family or race is divided”, “a component portion of an organization or system”, “a part of a particular area of study or knowledge”.
b) Narrowing or restriction of meaning is the process opposite to extension. By it, a word with a wider meaning acquires a narrower meaning that comes to be applied to some of its previous referents only. Very frequently, narrowing goes hand in hand with specialization of meaning.
“Mare”, for example, meant “horse” up the moment in the evolution of English when its meaning was restricted to the female horse only. Likewise, any kind of dog was considered “a hound”. Nowadays, “hound” is used as such only poetically or archaically, its specialized meaning in the common language being “dog used by hunters for chasing the game”. “Fowl” is another example of narrowing of meaning. It was used to refer to any kind of bird, while now, it is only the domestic birds that are called “fowls”.
Specialization of meaning, accompanying narrowing, is very clear in the case of trade names that originated in common nouns: “Sunbeam”, “Thunderbird”, “Caterpillar”.
c) Degradation of meaning or pejorative development is the process by which a neutral word either loses its original meaning completely and acquires a new, derogatory one, or it preserves it and develops a new pejorative meaning in addition.
The former case may be illustrated by means of the word “quarrel”, which meant “complaint”. By a first semantic change, as Hulban (1975: 120) indicates, it came to mean “a ground or occasion of complaint against a person, leading to hostile feelings”. The meaning of the word degraded even further from this and reached the point of “a violent contention or altercation between persons, a rapture of friendly relations”. “Knave” underwent the same process. It initially meant “boy” and later lost this meaning in favour of “dishonest man”.
The word “suburban” is illustrative of the latter case. From the initial meaning, “of or belonging to the suburbs of the town”, a new deregotary one evolved, the fomer still being preserved. Today, “suburban” is used not only for what is not “in the city”, but also for “typical of the attitudes and way of life of people who live in the suburbs, which some people consider rather boring, conservative, involving inferior manners and narrower views”.
Analogy plays an important role in the process of degradation of meaning. This is very obvious in the following examples of zoosemy, metaphors that implicitly compare humans with animals. Thus, besides the animal itself, a “sheep” is “a poor-spirited, stupid or timid person”. “A fox” is a cunning person, “a monkey” or “an ape” is one that “plays the ape, an imitator, a mimic”.
d) Elevation of meaning is the reverse of degradation, implying the process by which a newly evolved meaning of a word acquires a “higher” status as compared to the initial one. “Fame”, for example, originally meant “rumour”, but later on, became “celebrity, good reputation”. “Bard” was initially a term of contempt, designating a ministrel-poet. Later, when ministrels started to be idealized, the word referring to them suffered an elevation of meaning, quite obvious in Shakespeare himself having been called “The Bard”. Hulban (1975: 121) quotes the word “piquant” as an example of elevation of meaning. From the initial meaning, “that pierces or stings; keen, severe, bitter”, it has passed through two stages of elevation. First, it acquired the meaning “agreeable pungent of taste; sharp, stinging, biting; appetizing” and then, that of “that stimulates or excites keen interest or curiosity; pleasantly stimulating” (both of these elevated meanings are in use today).
In some cases, elevation of meaning is partial only. Hulban (1975: 122) supports this claim by the example of the verb “to blame”, meaning “to find fault with”. A weakening in the original force of the word can be sensed if we consider its etymon, namely the Greek word for “blaspheme”. The etymological doublet of “to blame”, “to blaspheme”, is much stronger, meaning “to talk profanely, to speak evil of, to calumniate”.
8.3. Transfer of meaning
Many of the cases of extension and narrowing of meaning mentioned in the previous section are based on transfer of meaning. There are two main types of such transfer, according to the kind of association that is made. Associations based on similarity lead to metaphor, while those based on contiguity, i.e., on the condition of being in contact, in proximity, in a broad sense, lead to metonymy. Unlike extension, narrowing, elevation and degradation, transfer of meaning is not a gradual process, but rather the result of a sudden change from one field to another on a particular occasion of use (both metaphors and metonymies may be one-time only creations in language).
8.3.1. Metaphor
The generally accepted definition of metaphor is that indicating that its essence is “understanding and experiencing one kind of things in terms of another” (Lakoff, Johnson 1980: 5). In other words, metaphor involves an implicit comparison of two entities, based on an alleged resemblance between them. This implicit comparison is contained in the meaning of a word or phrase that has come to be different from its original meaning.
There are several types of metaphor. Of them, the live metaphors, conscious creations used by writers as stylistic devices are of less interest here. Instead, two sub-categories of linguistic metaphors will be discussed in more detail. One of these sub-categories is that of standardized lexical metaphors in whose case the idea of similarity is lost. They are usually considered “dead” metaphors and include examples such as “daisy”, whose origin is the OE “daeges aege” (“the day’s eye”) and “wind”, coming from the OE “windes aege” (“the wind’s eye”). The other sub-category includes the “degrading” or “fading” metaphors in whose case the idea of similarity is till evident. As Hulban points out (1975: 126), such metaphors may rely on:
similarity of shape: “the head of the pin”, “the mouth of the river”, “the foot of the hill”, “ball-point-pen”;
similarity of position: “head-word”, “headstone”;
similarity of colour: “red-admiral”, “blue-bell”, “blue-wing”;
similarity of destination or purpose: “blood bank”, “data bank”;
space and duration in time: “long run”, “long-lived”, “shortcircuit”, shortcoming”, short-dated”;
physical sensations: “cold war”, “warm congratulations”, “sweet dreams”, “bitter remark”;
Ulmann (1970) offers another classification of degrading linguistic metaphors. According to him, they may grouped into:
anthropomorphic metaphors, involving the transfer of meaning from the human body and its parts to inanimate objects: “the mouth of the river”, “the lungs of the town”, “the heart of the matter”;
animal metaphors: “dog’s tail” (a plant), “cat-o’-the-nine-tails”. People can also be called “foxes”, “lions”, “doves” or “donkeys”;
metaphors that translate abstract experiences into concrete terms: “to throw light on”, “to enlighten”, “brilliant idea”;
synaesthetic metaphors, involving the transposition from one sense to another: “cold voice”, “loud colours”, “piercing sounds”.
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.”;
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.”
V. MULTI-WORD UNITS IN ENGLISH
In the previous chapter, meaning relations between words have been approached from a paradigmatic point of view. That is, the focus lied on words as alternative items in some contexts. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on syntagmatic sense relations, that is, on the “meaning relations that a word contracts with other words occurring in the same sentence or text” (Jackson and Amvela 2007: 131). What is highlighted is meaning arising from co-occurrence, more specifically, from predictable co-occurrence, manifested in what is known as multi-word units of the language.
Multi-word units or fixed expressions form a class which covers a wide range of lexical items. What these items have in common is that they are often used as full units by native speakers of English, with varying degrees of change sometimes allowed, sometimes not. “They appear to be learnable only as complete chunks of lexical – semantic – syntagmatic matter as they are seldom reducible to their component parts” (Alexander 1989: 16).
The two major sub-classes of fixed expressions are collocations and idioms, to which phrasal verbs, binominals, trinominals and proverbs are added as minor members of the class.
1. Collocations
1.1. Definition
Collocations are groups of words that co-occur in a language in a way that sounds natural to a native speaker. They are connected to “the mutual expectancy of words, or the ability of a word to predict the likelihood of another word occurring” (Jackson and Amvela 2007: 106). In English, the presence of the verb “to flex”, for example, signals the potential occurrence of the words “muscles”, “legs” or “arms” as its objects, the adjective “maiden” predicts a limited number of nouns, among which there are “voyage”, “flight” and “speech”, while “blond” or “brunette” are expected to go together with “hair”.
Halliday and Hasan (1976) argue that collocations as meaning relations of predictable co-occurrence may be found across sentence boundaries. The example that Jackson and Amvela (2007: 131) give to support the former’s point of view is:
Would you mind filling the kettle and switching it on?
I need boiling water for the vegetables.
Here, “fill” and “switch on” collocate directly with “kettle” in a “verb + object” structure, but “boil”, while collocating directly with “water” in an “adjective + noun” structure, also collocate across the sentence boundary with “kettle”, though less directly.
1.2. Characteristics and classification
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 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 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 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”, “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:
1. It was a struggle (pleasure, mistake) to do it.
They had the foresight (instructions, an obligation, permission) to do it.
They felt a compulsion (an impulse, a need) to do it.
They made an attempt (a promise, a vow) to do it.
He was a fool (an idiot) to do it.
The nouns that are followed by infinitives normally associated with the whole sentence rather than with the nouns itself, usually expressing purpose – ”They closed the window to keep the flies out”, “The sold their house to cut down on expenses”, “She is wearing a fur coat to impress her boyfriend” - are not considered member of the class. Neither are phrases such as “a procedure to follow”, “a book to read”, “a place to eat”, “a way to do it”, in which the infinitives may be replaced by relative clauses, and constructions containing nouns preceded by a descriptive adjective of the kind “an interesting book to read”, “a difficult person to understand”, “a clever thing to say”.
In the G3 group, the linguists include collocations made up of a noun and a that clause following it, if this clause is not a relative one (“that” should not be replaceable by “which”). Nouns that can be followed by a clause only when they are objects of a preposition are not included in the class; “it was by chance that we met”, “it was with pride that he presented his findings”. Examples of G3 collocations include: “agreement that (he should represent us in court)”, “chance that (she will win)”, “decision that (the taxes will be cut)”, “hunch that (they will not come)”, “myth that (their army was invincible)”, “rumour that (she was back to town)”.
G4 collocations consist of “preposition + noun” combinations. Examples are: “by accident”, “in confidence”, “on/off duty”, “”in effect”, “without fail”, “at hand”, “within limits”, “by mistake”, “in need”, “under oath”, “in/within sight”.
G5 collocations are “adjective + preposition” collocations. Combinations of past participles of transitive verbs and the agential preposition “by” are excluded from this class. The G5 pattern may be illustrated by: “afraid of”, “blind with”, “careful about/of”, “demanding of”, “efficient in”, “frightened about/at/of”, “hopeful of”, “irate about”, “keen on”, “literate in”, “peripheral to”, “qualified for”, “soft on”, “talented at/in”.
G6 collocations consist of adjectives followed by long infinitives. The adjectives included in this class occur in two basic configurations with the infinitives: constructions with “dummy” it subjects of the type “it was necessary to work” and constructions with “real”, both animate and inanimate subjects such as “she is ready to go” and “the machine was designed to operate under high pressure”.
Adjectives preceded by “too” and followed by “enough” + a long infinitive (“it was too easy to give a simple answer”, “it was embarrassing enough to tell the truth”) and past participles used in passive constructions and followed by long infinitives (“she was chosen to represent us”, “the colonel was asked to lead the army on the battle field”) are not considered members of the G6 class.
Of the G6 collocations, the following may be quoted: “advantageous to (wait)”, “charming to (watch them)”, “dangerous to (play in the street)”, “evil to (kill)”, “frustrating to (work in a place like that)”, “healthy to (walk in dump weather)”, “irrational to (react in that manner)”, “mystified to (find her watch gone)”, “outrageous to (permit such behaviour)”, “practical to (do that)”, “stimulating to (read Science fiction books)”.
G7 collocations are built on the “adjective + that clause pattern” (many of the adjectives that occur in these collocations are found in G6 as well): “(she was) afraid that she will fail de examination”, “(it is) deplorable that such corruption exists”, “(it is) incredible that nobody pays attention to the dreadful news”, “(it is) lucky that we got here before dark”, “(it is) obvious that he is drunk”, “(it is) remarkable that the streets are so clean after the festival”.
G8 collocations consist of nineteen verb patterns, which the Bensons and Ilson (1991) designated by the letters A to S.
“Pattern A verbs allow the dative movement transformation, i.e. allow the shift of an indirect object (usually human) to a position before the direct object, with deletion of to when both objects are nouns and when the direct object is a noun: he sent the book to his brother – he sent 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 ambassador continued speaking” – “the ambassador continued to speak”, “my mother suggested to get the train” – “my mother suggested getting the train” are approximately synonymous constructions. Several verbs that occur as nodes in collocations both in G and in E have a different meaning in each pattern. As the Bensons and Ilson (1991) explain, the sentence “he remembered to tell them” means that ‘he intended to tell them and told them’; “he remembered telling them” means that ‘he remembered the act of telling them’. In a similar manner, the construction “he forgot to tell them” means that ‘he intended to tell them, but forgot to do so’; “he forgot telling them” means that ‘he forgot the he had told them’. Note also the difference between the pattern G construction “she stopped chatting” – ‘she terminated her chat’ and “she stopped to chat” – ‘she interrupted whatever she was doing in order to chat’, containing an infinitival phrase of purpose.
The pattern H grammatical collocations consist of transitive verbs followed by an Accusative + long infinitive construction. Most of these verbs, though not all, may be passivized, the result being a Nominative + infinitive construction built around the verb in the passive voice. Examples of pattern H collocations include: “ask me to come”, “force John to confess”, “get the television to work”, “invite Mary to join (us)”, “permit the children to play”, “set them to write”, “tell them to leave”, etc.
Pattern I collocations resemble those in class H, the difference being that the infinitive that is used with the verbs is short. Unlike the verbs in the pattern H collocations, those in pattern I collocations cannot be, most of the times, used in the passive voice. Examples that illustrate class I are: “hear them leave”, “help us move”, “let the children go”, “make the criminal talk”, “see her cry”, etc.
In pattern J, transitive verbs are followed by an Accusative + participle construction and can, in their great majority, be passivized (some of these verbs are found in class H as well, so that approximately synonymous constructions occur: “(she) heard them leave” – “(she) heard them leaving”; “(we) watched the actors play” – “(we) watched the actors playing”, etc.). Typical examples of class J collocations are: “catch the thieves stealing”, “feel one’s heart throbbing”, “keep them waiting”, “leave me crying”, “set me thinking”, “watch the rain falling”, etc.
Pattern K collocations contain a transitive verb followed by a possessive (noun or pronoun) and a gerund (some of these constructions are close to those in pattern J) such as: “excuse my saying (this)”, “imagine his coming late”, “(they) remembered Bill’s having made a mistake”, etc.
In pattern L collocations, transitive verbs are followed by a clause introduced by “that”: “(they) admitted that they were wrong”, “(he) denied that he had told her lies”, “(the travelers) hope that the train will arrive (on time)”, “(we) suspect that she is guilty”, “(mother) hopes that I will graduate (this year)”, etc. Some of these verbs take an obligatory noun or pronoun object before the “that” clause, others may be used with or without such an object, while still others (often belonging to pattern G as well) may be followed by a prepositional phrase with “to”. In the first category, there are: “to assure” – (she) assured me that she would join (the party)”, “to convince” – “(the rector) convinced the students that he would consider (their suggestions)”, “to inform” – “(I) was informed that I would be promoted”, etc. The second category contains verbs such as: “to bet” – “(she) bet that it would snow”; (she) bet me that it would snow, “to promise” – “(John) promises that he will learn (more)”; “(John) promises his parents that he will learn (more)”, “to show” – “(we) showed that we were (good) teachers”; “(we) showed everybody that we were (good) teachers”, etc. “(He) explained to us that he would come later” and “(the man) swore to his wife that he would stop drinking” are illustrative of the third category.
Some verbs in the pattern L collocations are followed by “that” clauses containing an analytical or synthetic subjunctive. Examples of such verbs are: “(he) demanded that we (should) be there tomorrow”, “(the captain) ordered that the soldiers (should) clean (their guns)”, “(the manager) suggests that a new department head (should) be appointed”, etc. A few L-pattern verbs regularly take dummy “it” as their subject: “(it) appears that they will not be here”, “(it) follows that the results are wrong”, “(it) seems that you didn’t understand”, “(it) turns out that he was lying”, etc.
In pattern M, transitive verbs can be followed by a direct object, the infinitive “to be” (verbs that combine freely with infinitives other than “to be” are part of pattern H collocations) and either an adjective, a past participle or a noun/pronoun. In most cases, the same verb may be followed by any of these three forms. Examples of pattern M collocations are: “(we) consider her to be very polite/well trained/our leader”, “(the engineers) found the roads to be excellent/paved properly/a (national) problem”, etc.
Pattern N collocations are made up of a transitive verb followed by a direct object and an adjective, a past participle or a noun/pronoun. Examples of this construction include: “she dyed her hair red”, “we found them interesting”, “the police set the prisoner free”, “the man had his car repaired”, “we heard the song sung in Italian”, “we appointed Bob president”, “my friends call me Dana”, etc. Some of the verbs in pattern N collocations may be used in pattern M constructions as well: “we consider her (to be) a competent engineer”, “the court declared the woman (to be) guilty”, “we found the streets (to be) cleared of snow”, etc. On the other hand, some of the N-pattern collocations are fixed or restricted, in the sense that the verb in their structure can be accompanied by either only one or a limited number of adjectives. Thus, for example, the verb “to paint” accepts adjectives denoting colours only: “I painted the walls blue/green/orange, etc.”, while “to shoot” may be used in “to shoot somebody dead” only.
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Online resources
www. peevish.co.uk
www.askoxford.com
https://en.wikipedia.org
Portmanteau words” is a
term coined by Lewis Carroll in his Through
the Looking Glass. The author introduces it for the first time when,
“Well, ‘slithy’ means ‘lith and slimy’. ‘Lith’ is the same as ‘active’. You see, it’s like a portmanteau – ther are two meanings packed up into one word… Well then, ‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you).” (Carroll 1980: 271)
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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