1. Language is social, while speech is individual.
2. The role of the speaker towards language is passive; he cannot change language, while his role towards speech is active, because he can use language as he likes to produce any kind of speech.
3. Language has an obligatory character, while speech is optional.
4. Language is ideal, it is a mental system of words and rules of using them to communicate between ourselves, while speech always takes a certain material form – be it a written text or an oral speech which takes the form of sound waves that may be recorded or reflected in writing.
5. Language is systemic, it is a system while speech is non-systemic.
2. Language as a system – its main levels, units and disciplines.
Language as a system of signs, consisting of subsystems, making the 5 main levels of language:
- level of functional sounds – phonemes (studied by phonetics),
- level of morphemes (studied by morphology),
- level of lexemes - words and stable word-combinations (studied by lexicology),
- level of sentences (studied by syntax),
- level of texts (studied by text linguistics).
3. Main ideas of F. de Saussure – paradigmatics and syntagmatics.
A paradigmatic relation is a relation that holds between elements of the same category, i.e. elements that can be substituted for each other. It contrasts with syntagmatic relation, which applies to relations holding between elements that are combined with each other.
- syntagmatic relations exist between neighbouring linguistic units of the same level in speech and concern their combinability – some units combine very often, while others are never met together. Syntagmatics implies some rules and limitations on combining language units: it is impossible to pronounce six consonants in a row, or to begin a word with a suffix, followed by a prefix, leaving the root out, or to make up a fully-fledged sentence without subject and predicate). Paradigmatics concerns itself with the choice among units on every level of a language. When speaking we make subconscious choices between variants of every sound, variants of morphemes, words, sentences and texts (saying unlikely we are choosing between variants of initial sound, between un-, dis-, non-, a-, in- as possible prefixes, between improbable, impossible, unlikely, unbelievable as variants of expressing the same idea; we also choose between grammatical forms). Sets of such variants are called paradigms.
4. Main ideas of F. de Saussure – synchrony and diachrony.
- Synchrony - considers a language analysis at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present.
- Diachronic studies it is easier to examine historical changes of a certain element of language. Language evolution.
5. Phonetics, its object and main branches. Phonetics is a linguistic discipline studying sound units (phonemes, sounds of speech, syllables, tacts, phrases), sound laws and phenomena, stress and intonation.
Sounds of language from the point of view of:
a) acoustics (from the point of view of the listener, studying sounds of human speech and sounds from nature) acoustics of speech,
b) articulation (from the point of view of the speaker, pronouncing words),
c) functional point of view, studying functions of sounds.
Three branches of phonetics – acoustic phonetics (acoustics of speech), articulatory phonetics (physiology of speech), phonology < branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages > (functional phonetics).
6. Acoustic phonetics. From the point of view of acoustics a speech sound is a sound wave caused by organs of articulation. Basic acoustic features of speech sounds - melodiousness, pitch, force, duration and timbre.
- Melodiousness is determined by the uniformity of the sound waves. As the result of the rhythmic vibrations we have melodious sounds – tones; uneven vibrations result in unmelodious sounds - noises, while a combination of rhythmic and uneven vibrations gives sounds consisting of tones and noises. According to melodiousness speech sounds are classified into vowels, which are pure tones; sonorous, or resonant consonants [l, m, n, r, w, j] in which the tone prevails above noise; voiced noisy consonants [v, z, d, g], in which the noise prevails above tone; and voiceless noisy consonants [f, s, Θ, h, p, t, k] – which are pure noises.
- Pitch sound determined by the frequency of vibrations, the higher the frequency, the higher the sound is.
- Force of a sound (loudness, measured in decibels), determined by the amplitude (the distance from the highest rise and lowest fall of the wave to the mean) of sound waves.
- Duration of a sound is the time of its sounding.
- Timbre, an individual quality of a sound is determined by the fact that the speech sound consists of the basic tone and overtones – higher tones with the frequency of vibration higher than in the basic tone.
7. Articulatory phonetics - pronouncing sounds. Vowel classification. Vowels pronounced with the front part of the mouth - front vowels
The back part of the mouth - back vowels
Central part of the mouth cavity - central vowels.
Pronounced with the tongue in the higher position - high vowels are produced,
The tongue in the lower position - low vowels are produced
The tongue in the middle position - mid vowels are produced.
8. Classification of consonants according to the manner of articulation
Consonants are divided into (All these sounds may be voiced or voiceless):
Stops - produced by closing the air passage completely and then the air stream being suddenly released. Stops are subdivided into plosives pronounced with an audible explosion, when the stop is released suddenly.
Fricatives - when the air passage is restricted and the air stream is pushed through the narrow opening, producing a sound of friction. The fricatives include fricatives proper - [f, s, θ, ] and their voiced counterparts [v, z, ð, ž’], and sounds named approximants and which include semi-vowels [w, j] and sounds [r] and [h].
By-pass sounds when the air stream by-passes the existing obstruction. The by-pass consonants are also subdivided according to the manner in which the obstruction is by-passed: nasals [m, n and ] when the air stream flows out through the nose; laterals [l] are formed by letting the air stream flow around the sides of the tongue and trills [r] when the tongue tip vibrates against the alveolar ridge.
Affricates – when the stop is released slowly, with friction resulting from the partial obstruction as in fricatives. Consonant sounds made up of a stop, like /t/, immediately followed by a fricative, like /s/. Example: /tʃ/and /dʒ/ consonant sounds are affricatives.
9. Classification of consonants according to the place of articulation.
Labial (pronounced using lips) - subdivided into bilabial (using two lips – p, b, m, w) and labiodental (using upper teeth and lower lip – f, v);
Lingual (pronounced using tongue) - subdivided into dental (the tip of the tongue is placed against the upper front teeth - θ, ð); alveolar (the tip or the front part of the tongue is placed against the alveolar ridge – t, d, n, l, r,); alveolo-palatal (the tongue is placed at the front of the palate near the alveolar ridge - ʃ); palatal (the tongue is placed in the middle of the palate - j) and velar (produced by the back of the tongue against velum – k, g, );
Uvular (pronounced by the back of the tongue against the uvula – French R);
Glottal (glottis is the space between the vocal cords) – h
10. Phonetic speech units. Speech is a stream of sounds divided into successive units:
Phrase has a certain intonation consisting of the rising and falling of the voice. In speech, phrases are separated by the pauses. Do not necessarily coincide with sentences – usually long sentences contain several phrases.
Tact is part of a phrase based on a stressed syllable. Tact contains several syllables, one of them stressed and several unstressed syllables which adhere to the stressed one. Tact may contain only one syllable – a stressed one.
Syllable - part of tact of one or more sounds. Syllables are formed by vowels, but in some languages syllables are formed by sonorous and even fricative consonants. Sometimes a syllable may contain more than one vowel (diphthongs).
Sound - part of a syllable that pronounced in one articulation (a process of producing a sound.
11. Phonetic processes. In speech, sounds are changed due to the general conditions of pronouncing (especially due to the position of a sound) or to the influence of other sounds with which they combine. Phonetic processes have two main categories:
Positional processes – changes of sound due to its position, mainly in unstressed syllables reduction.
Combinatory processes - accommodation, assimilation, dissimilation, elision, haplology, epenthesis (inserting) and metathesis (permutation).
12. Stress is an accentuation of a syllable in a group of syllables. Three main types:
Dynamic (also forced), when the expiration is produced on stressed syllable with a noticeable force.
Quantitative (also longitudinal), when the stressed syllable is noticeably longer (twice as long as the unstressed ones).
Melodious (also tonal or musical), when stress syllable is made prominent by the change of tone.
According to place of the stress in a word we distinguish fixed stress (always falls on the same syllable); free stress (or unfixed stress, fall on any syllable in the word).
Free stress immovable, when the stress is differently placed, but does not change place when the word changes (as in Italian) or movable – the stress may be on any syllable and may move with changes in the word – ‘photograph, pho'tographer, photo'graphic.
When a word has many syllables it may have more than one stress – the main and the auxiliary, as in - ,hesi'tation.
13. Reduction is a weakening of a sound due to its position, due to the stressed syllable. We pronounce unstressed syllables with less effort. Unstressed vowels become short - quantitative reduction or lose their features and become neutral sounds - qualitative reduction. In the cases of strong reduction, vowels disappear completely - as in nation, passion. Due to the usually weak position of endings, in some languages the consonants are also weakened and change their character - voiced consonants become voiceless, some final consonants disappear. Long consonants (double letters in writing) also are reduced and pronounced short. Sometimes because of reduction the whole final syllables are not pronounced and disappear.
14. Accommodation(changes of sounds due to the influence of other sounds with which they combine). Process of adjusting the articulation of the adjacent sounds between the different type of sounds (consonants or vowels). In different combinations sounds are pronounced slightly differently (if we compare consonants p in puppy we feel that the second sound is pronounced softer).
15. Assimilation and dissimilation(changes of sounds due to the influence of other sounds with which they combine).
Assimilation - process of adjusting the articulation of sounds between the same type of sounds (consonants or vowels) and results in closer similarity. In partial assimilation sounds acquire some of characteristics of their neighbours: becoming voiced or voiceless (nails, hands, brzydki – przykro). In complete assimilation sounds become exactly the same: Lat optimus – It ottime (fine). Assimilation of vowels can be seen i Turkish vowel harmony – in Turkish languages vowels of the same word must be the same, could be seen in words borrowed from Turkish langs. – atlas, bazar, halva, haracz.
Dissimilation - process of making easier articulation of the neighbouring similar sounds by making them different. In Spanish peregrino changed to pelegrino (pilgrim).
16. Elision, haplology, epenthesis (inserting), metathesis (permutation)(changes of sounds due to the influence of other sounds with which they combine). Elision - elimination of a sound from a cluster of sounds (friendship, castle, empty). Haplology is elimination of syllables in cases of similar neighbouring syllables in a polysyllabic word: tragico-comedy > tragicomedy, mineralo-logy > mineralogy. Epenthese (inserting) – is the process of inserting between the similar sounds another sound with the aim of making articulation easier - bushes, kisses,boxes, Pol zeskoczyć. Metathese (permutation) – is the process of interchanging sounds in a word – O.Eng hros > horse.
17. Phonology - functional aspect of speech sounds. Main unit of phonology is - phoneme (minimal unit of language), a sound having two main functions – constructing meaningful language units and distinguishing the meaningful units (words). In speech a phoneme is a sound, but it may take the form of several various sounds – in Korean sounds s, z, and š are variants of one phoneme. A phoneme may consist of two sounds (diphthongs), or two phonemes may be heard as one sound (i.e., the long m in immature).
Each phoneme - combination of features (E.g phoneme d is a consonant - as distinct from the vowels, as voiced – in contrast to the voiceless t, as a stop – in contrast to fricative ž, or ŕ, a plosive – in contrast to affricate dž, as hard – in contrast to d’, as devoid of nasality – in contrast with n, as devoid of laterality – in contrast with l, as devoid of trill – in contrast with r, as lingual – in contrast with b and as alveolar – in contrast with g). Those features are used to distinguish words in a particular language and are called distinctive features (shortly, DF).
To find out what phonemic features are distinctive for a certain language we compare words which are quite identical except for a contrast in one sound; such words are called minimal pairs and this comparison – a binary opposition. If changing the vowel to a short sound leads to a change of meaning (sheep – ship), then the length of sound is a distinctive feature. In speech there may be different variants of pronouncing a phoneme, called allophones of that phoneme. Classification of allophones distinguishes the following types:
1.The main variant of phoneme (in the strong position where distinctive features are clearly seen)
2.Secondary allophones: positional; combinatory; dialectal (i.e. r is pronounced in various manners in England, Scotland, the USA); idiolectal (or individual) allophones (individual manner of pronouncing certain sounds).
18. Morphology studies forms of words and their structure. Words are divided into smaller parts having different types of meanings. Such parts of the word which are the smallest meaningful language units called - morphemes. Morpheme consists of a class of the speech variants, allomorphs, e.g. please, pleasant, pleasure have different pronunciation. Types of morphemes. Morphemes divided into two groups: lexical morphemes and grammatical morphemes. Morphemes are also divided into free morphemes (roots, could be used as single words), bound morphemes, which cannot be used as separate words, usually attached to other morphemes.
Free grammatical morphemes are function words, i.e. articles, conjunctions and prepositions.
Bound lexical morphemes - root morphemes that cannot be used as single words (e.g. Fri-day, cran-berry). Bound grammatical morphemes (affixes) are derivational.
19. Affixes - bound grammatical morphemes fixed to the root. Positional types of affixes. Affixes may be classified according to their place:
- prefixes (preceding the root) are placed at the beginning of the word (disorder, rewrite, unlike);
- postfixes (following the root) are placed at the end of the word and are subdivided into suffixes and inflexions;
- interfixes (between the roots) are used to join the root morphemes in compound words and are placed between the roots (blisk-o-znaczny);
- circumfixes (around the root) are combinations of prefix and postfix which come together: pod-brod-ek, za-les-ić;
- infixes (in the root) – affixes inserted in the root: Latin fidere – findo (split);
- transfixes (through the root) – are affixes passing through the root, in Arabic root ktb (writing) – kataba (wrote) – kutiba (was written) – aktib (I write) – kitabu (book).
20. Functional words (free grammatical morphemes, auxiliary parts of speech) words that have no lexical meaning, have the same function as affixes. They denote relations between words or their properties:
Prepositions are functional words that are used with nouns and show relations between words. In English: of –. Prepositions are used to show time and space relations (in, at, by, before, near), causal relations (due to, because of) and others.
Conjunctions functional words that show mostly coordinative relations between words. They express connection (and,also), division (but,or), opposition (although,though) and some other relations.
Articles functional words - show the noun, indicate the difference between a definite object, that is something already known and something unknown, any object; in some languages they serve to indicate the gender of the noun and the number.
Auxiliary verbs play a key role in English where because of the absence of ending, the conjugation of verbs is done mostly with the help of auxiliary verbs.
Words of degree functional words, show degrees of comparison in adjectives (more, the most)
Particles functional words, to express the attitude of the speaker towards what is being said.
Empty words functional words, have no meaning of their own but serve to show the gender of the noun when it is not expressed by the form of the noun, i.e. Tom-cat and pussy-cat), he-wolf – she-wolf, etc. or to make a diminutive form when it is not possible to do this by suffixation: Pol domek – Eng small house.
21. Morphemes-operations analogues of affixes and auxiliary words. There are three:
Significant sound changes a means of discriminating grammatical forms are used to produce plural forms of some nouns: goose – geese, woman – women; to form a verb from a noun: house [haus] – to house [hauz], to produce verb tenses: think – thought, sing – sang – sung; to produce Perfect tenses: wybielać – wybielić.
Stress shift used as means of discriminating noun and verb: im’port, in’crease, pro’gress (verbs) – ‘import, ‘increase, ‘progress (nouns) and to distinguish the composite words and the free word combinations: ‘blackbird – black ‘bird, ‘blackboard – black ‘board.
Reduplication of a root morpheme or a part of it is used to produce plural forms – in Chinese zhen’ (man) – zhen’-zhen’ (people); in Bushman tu (man) – tu-tu (people) – tu-tu-tu (a crowd); or to intensify the meaning - in Hawaian lii (small) – lii-lii (very small); in English – a blue-blue sky; in Slavonic languages only the plural forms of the verb “to give” retained reduplication: Pol da – dadzą.
22. Word order, intonation and suppletion. Word order means of expressing grammatical meaning - the meaning of a word combination or a sentence may be completely changed if we change the word order: brick building and building brick; daughter loves mother and mother loves daughter.
Intonation means of grammatically expressing doubt, question or an order. It is also used to distinguish between simple and composite sentences, and also between coordination and subordination relations of words in a sentence, and to mark out parenthesis.
Suppletion is usage of different roots as grammatical variants (allomorphs). Used in the system of pronouns: I – me - we, ja – mnie – my; to produce degrees of comparison: good – better / bad – worse; dobry – lepszy / zły – gorzsy. Some old verbs also combine quite different forms as variants of roots: go – went, ide – szedl. Used in auxiliary verbs: be – am – is;forming the plural in some nouns: rok – lata, or forming gender: ox - cow (compare lion - lioness). The change from cardinal into ordinal numerals is also often done in this way: one – first, jeden – pierwszy.
23. Grammatical means of expressing meaning. Affixation, usage of functional words, morphemes-operations (meaningful sound interchange, stress shift, reduplication), word-order, intonation and suppletion comprise the grammatical means of expressing meaning.
24. Typological classification of languages. Two main principles of typological classification – the primary ways of expressing grammatical meaning within the word and outside of the word, within the sentence. The first principle: languages may be divided into isolated, inflexional and agglutinative.
Isolated languages have words mainly consisting of root morphemes (Korean) inflexional languages extensively use inflexions, agglutinative languages grammatical meanings are expressed by suffixes or prefixes which are glued to the root morpheme in a strict order. The second classification: Analytic languages (English) use mainly grammatical means outside of words - auxiliary words, word order and intonation. Synthetic (Latin, German, Russian) languages use mainly grammatical means within words – affixation, morphemes-operations, reduplication and suppletion. In polysynthetic (chukcha) every word consists of a number of roots and affixes, and in fact is a sentence.
25. Main parts of speech. Characterised by the three main aspects: semantic (the general meaning), formal (particular grammatical forms), functional (typical role in a sentence). Nouns denote objects, have declination, are subjects or objects; adjectives denote qualities of objects, have particular declination forms and are used as attributes; verbs denote processes, have conjugation and are predicates; adverbs denote qualities of qualities (utterly fantastic) or qualities of processes (swiftly ran); pronouns used as substitutes for other main parts of speech and take on their characteristics.
26. Predication, purpose of the sentence, modality. Predication - grammatical formalisation of logical statements establishing relations between the two concepts, the first being an object and the second - either process, quality or another object: A girl is studying – A girl is studious – A girl is a student. Predication presupposes obligatory consideration of tenses and moods. Tenses co-ordinate the statement with a certain time (present, past or future), while moods are connected with the purpose of speech.
The purpose of the utterance – communicating information, expressing emotions, requesting information, expressing a will – sentences may contain a plain statement, an outburst of emotions, a question, an order or a request and divided into indicative, emphatic, interrogative or imperative.
Concept of syntax – modality. Shows attitude of the speaker towards what is being said, i.e. his assessment of the statement. We distinguish between the objective modality - estimation of probability of the stated facts on the part of the speaker and the subjective modality – expressing personal attitude towards the stated facts (approval - disapproval, necessity, emotional evaluation, etc.)
27. Functional perspective of the sentence. Besides the logical structure every sentence has a psychological structure that involves the idea of functional perspective of the sentence. From the psychological point of view, every sentence divided into two parts – the theme (psychological subject of the sentence) – part of the sentence containing the already known information, and the rheme (psychological predicate.) – containing new information.
28. Text linguistics, its main problems and branches.
General text linguistics – text and its properties; extralinguistic factors of communication, which influence the realisation of the text; classification of texts.
Text grammar – levels of text composition; units of text linguistics; means of text cohesion.
Text interpretation – author’s intention and means of its realisation; text categories; special features that linguistic units acquire in particular types of texts.
Applied text linguistics – principles and methods of creating a text; principles and methods of appraising a text; principles and methods of transforming a text.
29. Text, its properties. Text - document consisting of logically ordered unities, united by lexical, grammatical bonds and co-reference, having a definite modality and purpose. Its properties are in logical order, cohesion, co-reference, grammatical unity, modality and purpose.
30. Act of communication (speech), its extra-linguistic elements. It is common to view as extra-linguistic factors of the act of communication the following 5 main components of speech event: the communicative situation (conditions of communication), the participants of communication (author and reader), referent (the subject of message) and the purpose.
31. Participants of communication. Author characterized by social role, situational role, age, sex, number, background knowledge, including the four components – a) knowledge-of-the-world (or the cultural competence), b) special (or professional) knowledge, c) situational context awareness, necessary to understand the content of the text, and d) language competence; and intention. The reader, addressee has the same type of characteristics (excluding intention) and additionally, inference.
32. The purpose of the text. Two aspects of the text purpose: function of the text - is based on the expected reaction of the reader and the genre of the text. Depends on their function text divided into two groups – informative texts (aim at presenting information and do not expect an immediate response of the reader) and activating texts (presupposes immediate reaction of the receiver of information); Informative texts subdivided: Factographic texts (manuals, encyclopaedias, telephone directories and other reference books) present information irrespective of the ways of its usage, and Normative texts (legal codes, traffic regulations) contain norms which the reader is supposed to take into consideration and follow in future. Activating texts subdivided into two groups: mobilising texts containing orders, requests, suggestions and persuading texts (advertisements, propaganda leaflets, etc.) which are aimed at forming new opinions or changing the views of the reader / listener and usually contain various arguments.
33. The referent is the object of communication. It has several aspects – the scope (varying in broadness from unimportant episodes to epic deeds or from highly specialised to universal subjects), the time orientation, the areal (place) orientation, and the character (abstract or concrete).
Conditions of communication include time; place; sphere of communication (science, production, public relations, education, journalism, etc.), character of the occasion (writing for a newspaper, informal letter, a course paper, routine seminar work) and presupposition - the amount of the common (shared) background knowledge, which facilitates the communication.
34. Composition, its levels. Content composition. Text composition - arrangement of a text combining its parts into a single whole. Three main levels of analysing a text to which correspond three types of composition: content composition, linguistic composition and formal composition.
Content composition includes content structure (characteristics of the main parts of the text - introduction, body and conclusion) and content distribution (accentuation of subordinate points of the central thought and the topic framework; lexical features of the text: prevalence of terminology, clichés and emphatic devices).
35. Linguistic and formal composition. Linguistic composition two aspects – linguistic structure, meaning hierarchy of the text units where every unit of a higher level consists of units of a lower level, and means of text cohesion.
Concept of linguistic structure of text presupposes that every text comes apart into smaller texts and thus may be viewed as macrotext consisting of microtexts. The smallest microtext is The supra-phrasal unity (or SPU) - a combination of syntactically and semantically connected sentences elaborating one idea. In the text supra-phrasal unities take the form of paragraphs.
Cohesion means fall into two categories – grammatical means of cohesion ("uniting means") - unity of time and person, modality, the same code of message and lexical means of cohesion - the connectors. We may use as connectors various lexical means:
- repeating names,
- pronouns;
- synonyms;
- variants, abbreviations;
- hyperonyms (words with broader meaning);
- hyponyms (words with narrower meaning).
By formal composition we mean division of the text into formal parts – volumes, parts, chapters, and paragraphs.
36. Stages of creating a text. The process of creating a text main stages:
- conception and forming a text outline;
- collecting material and preparing a draft text;
- analysing and improving the draft text;
- designing a final text.
37. Lexicology. Part of linguistics, deals with the vocabulary and lexemes (words and word-combinations), their forms, meaning, origin and functioning. Main branches of lexicology - onomasiology, studies the forms of lexemes; word-building, studies ways of producing new words; semasiology studies the meaning of lexemes; phraseology, studies word-combinations; historical lexicology, studies the evolution of vocabulary, origin of words and word-groups, and development of their sound form and meaning; dialectology, studies regional variants of language; terminology science, studies special lexemes of science and technology; lexicography, studies the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries.
38. Chronological types of lexemes. Some new lexemes appear and other come out of use and disappears. Process of losing lexemes starts with some words or word combinations becoming obsolescent (coming out of active use in speech, though understandable when met in earlier texts) and then turning into obsolete(divided into archaisms and historic words.
Archaisms words no longer used in everyday speech and ousted by their synonyms. Historic words (historisms) words no longer used in everyday speech but have no contemporary synonyms. It happens due to the fact that in comparison with archaisms denoted the objects that still exist, historisms denote objects that disappeared and belong only to the history.
Neologisms are new words and word combinations.
39. According to the nature and the number of morphemes constituting a word, different structural types of lexemes:
Simple words consist of one root morpheme and an inflexion (in many cases the inflexion is zero), e.g. seldom, chair-s, long-er, ask-ed. Affixal words consist of one root morpheme, one or several affixes and an inflexion, e.g. teach-er-s, like-ly, un-employ-ed. Compound words consist of two or more root morphemes and an inflexion, e.g. baby-moon-s, wait-and-see (policy). Compound-affixal words consist of two or more root morphemes, one or more affixes and an inflexion, e.g. middle-of-the-roader-s, job-hop-per. Word-combinations are word-groups that exist in the language as ready-made units.
40. Nomination - forming new lexemes. Four main groups of means of nomination: semantic nomination changing meaning of the existing word, morphologic nomination changing form of the existing word, syntax nomination (producing word combinations), morpho-syntactic nomination (producing words shortening word combinations and after this model).
41. Semantic means of nomination – producing new words changing meaning of the existing word - include: generalisation of the meaning of the existing word; metaphoric transfer of the meaning of the existing word (leg /table/); metonymic transfer of the meaning of the existing word; specialising the meaning of the existing word (meat); borrowing.
42. Borrowing. Classified according to aspect which is borrowed, and according to degree of assimilation by the receiving language.
Material borrowings subdivided into lexical borrowings, which are borrowed with their spelling or pronunciation and meaning (labour, autumn, chair), formal borrowings borrowed form acquires a new meaning; and morphological borrowings (borrowing of root and derivation morphemes to produce new words: bio /Gr/ + logy /Gr/).
Translation loans subdivided: word translation loans (morpheme-for-morpheme translations of foreign words): garden-er – ogrod-nik, phrase translation loans (word-for-word translations of foreign word combinations), semantic borrowings (a new meaning appearing in a native word under the influence of the similar word in a different language), as in computer terminology - file – plik, memory – pamięc.
Mixed borrowings subdivided: hybrid borrowing, when one part of a word is a material borrowing and the other is translation: Eng hyperlinks – Pol hiperlącze, and half-borrowings, when one part of a word is borrowed and the other is native – Pol model + arz.
Assimilation - process of bringing the borrowed word into correspondence with the graphic, phonetic, grammatical and lexical norms of the acquiring language.
43. Morphological means of nomination (by changing form of the existing word) affixation (suffixation and prefixation); conversion; phonetic transformations and clipping (truncation).
43. Syntactic means of nomination - producing stable word combinations, phrases - nowadays became the most productive in enriching vocabulary. Phraseology studies such word combinations that exist in the language as ready-made units. Form: phrases are stable and recurrent, have limited combinability: cannot change higher school into more high school. Origin: ready-made and reproduced. Meaning: have a unity of meaning which often is not the sum of the meaning of words that comprise it – sitting room does not mean that you can only sit there. Function: belong to language, are included in the dictionaries alongside with words.
44. Classification of phrases. Phraseological units, phrases can be classified according to the degree of motivation of their meaning into:
- fusions, where the degree of motivation is very low, we cannot guess the meaning of the whole from the meanings of its components, e.g. to kick the bucket (to die);
- unities where the meaning of the whole can be guessed from the meanings of its components, but it is transferred (metaphorical or metonymical), e.g. to play the first fiddle (to be a leader in something), old salt (experienced sailor);
- collocations, where words are combined in their original meaning but their combinations are different in different languages, e.g. cash and carry (self-service shop), still water, in a big way (to a great degree), etc.
- expressions where words are combined in their original meaning – department store, precipitation level, mineral water, lexical unit.
45. Morpho-syntactic means of nomination Three types of forming words out of word-combinations:
- ellipsis (syntactical shortening) when a word-combination with a semantically strong attribute loses its semantically weak noun, e.g. a grown-up person is shortened to a grown-up.
- composition joining two or more stems to form one word - classroom, bed-sitting-room,
- abbreviation – shortening of word-combinations, e.g. helicopter airport - heliport, ampere meter - ammeter, motor hotel - motel, including acronymy (initial abbreviation) - self-containing underwater breathing apparatus - scuba
46. Semasiology. Semasiology deals with meaning of the lexemes and changes of meaning. The structure of the meaning. Signification, denotation, connotation. Word-meaning is based on the fact that words are used to denote (to name, to point to) various objects, processes, properties, and some words denote emotions, e.g. Alas! (disappointment). This type of meaning is called denotation. At the same time words signify certain notions associated with the denoted objects and this type of meaning is called signification. Some lexemes have the same denotation, point to the same denotate, but have different signification, for example expressions Old Slavonic, Old Church Slavonic and Old Bulgarian denote the same language, but they signify quite different notions. There are also words that besides denotational meaning also express emotions or evaluation. This auxiliary meaning, which accompanies the main one, is called connotation. Considering the fact that many words have several denotational meanings we can speak of the semantic structure of words.
47. The structure of meaning. Componential analysis. Signification meanings of words divided into the ultimate meaningful units – the sememes. The meaning of the word uncle may be represented as a combination of sememes: a human being, a male, a relation, of the elder generation, one level senior, collateral (side branch) and one level to the side. Dividing word meaning into components is called componential analysis. Sememes are like phonetic differential features and they are singled out by means of binary oppositions with closely related words: uncle – aunt (sex), uncle – father (side branch), uncle – nephew (generation), etc.
48. Polysemy and homonymy Polysemy means “plurality of meanings”. A word which has more than one meaning is polysemantic. Homonyms - words different in meaning but identical in sound or spelling. According to their spelling and sound forms there are perfect homonyms, that is words identical in sound and spelling, such as school – “education institution» and “group of fish”; homographs - words have same spelling but pronounced differently, e.g. bow - greeting and weapon; homophones - words pronounced identically but spelled differently, e.g. night and knight.
49. Motivation. Some words have forms that point to their meaning; such words are called motivated. There are three types of motivation:
- phonetic motivation occurs in words that represent some sound by imitating it, like buzz, crack, boom, roar, hiss, bang;
- structural motivation occurs in words consisting of meaningful parts, such as penknife, railroad, singer, truthful; their structure points to their meaning;
- semantic motivation occurs in words with secondary meaning which can be guessed on the basis of the primary meaning. In the combinations aeroplane wing, aeroplane tail, head of a mountain, leg of a table the words wing, tail, head and leg have secondary meaning. Using generally-known meaning we can guess where the wings and tail in an aeroplane are even if we see these objects for the first time.
50. Synonymy. Words different in their form, but similar in their meaning. We divide synonyms - absolute (or full) synonyms, relative (or partial, near) synonyms, and equivalents, when they belong to different languages. Absolute synonyms subdivided - doublets (subdivided into regional: Br. lift – Am elevator; lingual (coming from different languages): answer – reply; temporal: brow – forehead; stylistic: horse – steed) and variants (variations of form of the same word which, especially in computer systems, are treated as different words). Partial synonyms include quasi-synonyms (which are not the same, but may be used as absolute): chair – stool, red - scarlet – crimson and denotational synonyms, referring to the same object, but naming different notions cellulose nitrate – cellophane.
In each group of synonyms there is a word with the most general meaning, which can substitute any word in the group and is called synonymic dominant. The verb to look at is the synonymic dominant in the group to stare, to glance, to peep.
51. Antonymy, paronymy, hyponymy. Antonyms words belonging to same part of speech, identical in style, expressing contrary or contradictory notions. Paronyms words have formal resemblance: adaptation – adoption and are, often confused. Sometimes they are semantically connected, such as status and statute, it makes discriminating them more difficult. Hyponymy - hierarchical relation between lexemes. Usually one of the members of this relation has a broader meaning and stands higher in hierarchy. It is called hyperonym. Other members have narrower meaning and are called hyponyms.
52. Origin of language Classified in three groups:
- Divine theories - gift of language given by the gods. Another is belief that the names of objects reflect their inner character, their nature – so this theory iscalled “(names are given) by nature (of things)”. Middle Ages had a similar theory – so-called realism. The supporters of this theory believed that only names are real, because given by God and therefore eternal and important, while objects are not important, being only reflections, or shadows of the names.
- Biological theories - biological aspects of the outer world or inner life. First of them - onomatopoetic theory - speech was started by imitating natural sounds (like bang, boom) of various living beings (buzz, hiss). Second theory(shared by Darwin) concerned with involuntary emotional shouts of pain, hunger, amazement, etc., with time developed into words of speech. Shouts were conditioned by reflexes and so theory was called the reflex theory. Third theory starts with involuntary interjections in the process of co-operative labour as the source of speech and language. It is therefore called the theory of labour shouts.
- Social theories connected with social factors of human life. First of them - by agreement – originated in Old Greece and maintained in pre-historical times human beings lived in misery because they could not communicate, but one day came to an agreement as to how to name surrounding things, and language came into existence. In middle Ages similar views were shared by nominalists who opposed realists and maintained that things were real and their names were secondary. In 18th century the same ideas of mutual treatise were presented as theory of social agreement by French philosopher J.J. Rouseau. At the end of the 19th century F. Engels put forward labour theory of the origin of language where the main cause of language was the necessity to communicate in the process of labour.
53. Main stages of language development.
1. tribal language spoken by a small number of people, mostly relations. Such languages usually are spoken in small settlement, villagers neighbouring settlements hardly understanding each other.
2.nationality language spoken by a comparatively larger community of people living in the same region. Characterised by the difference in spoken and written language because writing is done in some other language. It was the case in Middle Ages with Germanic tribes that used Latin, Slavonic tribes using Church Slavonic and Turkish tribes using Arabic.
3.national language spoken by a large community, such as Welsh in earlier England. Characterised by the presence of literature in national language, therefore the everyday and the literature languages are practically the same.
4.state language officially confirmed by a state constitution.
5. international language used in other states – English in Ireland, Canada, etc., or as an officially accepted working language of regional international organisations, such as the official working languages of the UN, UNESCO.
54. Genealogical classification of languages – main language families
Indo-European family consist:
Indian group (96 languages) to which belong Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit (dead), Gypsy, etc.
Iranian (Persian) group (10 languages) to which belong Persian, Afghan, etc.
Slavonic group (11 languages) – Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian.
Baltic group – Lithuanian, Latvian, Prussian (dead).
Germanic group (8 languages) - Danish, Swedish, English, Dutch, German, etc.
Romance (Italic) group (11 languages) includes French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Latin (dead).
Celtic group (4 languages) includes Irish, Scotch (Gaelic), Welsh and Breton
Greek group includes Old Greek and New Greek
Caucasian family includes Chechen, Georgian, etc.
Ural family includes Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, etc.
Altaic family includes Turkish, Azerbaijan, Tartar, Kazakh, Uzbek, Yakut, Mongol.
Far Eastern family includes Japanese and Korean
Afro-Asian family includes Arab, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Egyptian (dead), Somali.
African family includes Bantu, Swahili, Bushmen, etc.
Sino-Tibetan family includes Chinese, Burma, Thai, Laos, Vietnamese, etc.
Austronesian family includes Indonesian, Polynesian, etc.
Indian family includes Maya, Hopi, Navajo, etc.
Paleo-Asiatic family includes Eskimo, Chukchi, etc.
55. Indo-European language family
56. Germanic, Slavonic and Romanic groups
Germanic group (8 languages) is divided into three subgroups – southern (Gothic /dead/), northern, or Scandinavian (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic) and western (English, Dutch, German)
Slavonic group (11 languages) is divided into three subgroups – southern (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian), western (Polish, Czech, Slovak) and Eastern (Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian), also Old Slavonic (dead)
57. History of writing. The most ancient form was pictography (picture-writing) dating from 30-40 thousand years ago. In time pictures acquired a constant meaning and a simplified form, and about 5,5 thousand years ago turned into ideograms - thus emerged ideography. 3,5 thousand years ago the Phoenicians started using signs to denote syllables. Such syllabic systems of writing are the first step towards phonetic writing. The syllables usually consisted of one consonant and one vowel. Vowels are usually less stable in pronunciation and gradually the signs were used to denote only consonant sounds, so about three thousand years ago appeared consonant writing. About 2,8 thousand years ago the Greeks added signs for the vowel sounds and thus achieved full phonetic writing where signs denote sounds.
58. Principles of writing. In the phonetic writing proper (apart from the syllabic and the consonant systems), there are three main principles of representing sounds. The most natural phonetic principle could be expressed by the formula "as heard" - every sound is represented by a definite letter, as e.g. in words like trip, fog, net. The phonemic principle is aimed at representing in writing of phonemes and not sounds, and presupposes representing all of the allophones with the same letter, corresponding to the sounding of the main variant of phoneme. The historic (or traditional) principle which is probably the leading in the English orthography, presupposes reflecting in spelling the earlier pronunciation. All the three principles are used in various proportions in many European languages.
59. Semantic fields groups of lexemes which all relate to the same subject or notion. We differentiate between concept fields, organised around a certain concept and lexical fields based on lexical relations of a group of lexemes. Concept fields are subdivided into logical (hyponymic) which are based on hierarchical relations (disease – hereditary disease, professional disease, inflectional disease) and psychological (associative) based on psychological associations (disease – symptoms, curing, physician, prophylactics). Lexical fields are subdivided into synonymic, antonymic, derivational, combinability, etc. In the structure of a field we may distinguish the centre to which belong the most well-known and frequently used lexemes and periphery to which belong rarely used less known lexemes.
60. Lexicography is the theory and practice of compiling dictionaries. The history of compiling dictionaries for English goes back to the Old English period, where we can find glosses of religious books (interlinear translations from Latin into English). Regular bilingual dictionaries began to appear in the 15th century (Anglo-Latin, Anglo-French, Anglo-German). Dictionaries are divided into general and specialised. To general dictionaries two most widely used types of dictionaries belong: explanatory and translation dictionaries. Specialised dictionaries include dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, collocations, word-frequency, neologisms, slang, pronouncing, etymological, phraseological, and others.
All types of dictionaries (excepting translation ones) can be monolingual if the explanation is given in the same language, bilingual if the explanation is given in another language and multilingual.
Words are usually given in alphabetical order, though there are dictionaries in which entries are presented in thematic (divided into subject groups with alphabetical order within groups), systematic (in accordance with a system of named notions), chronological order, according to the frequency of occurrence in speech, etc.
