Linguistics is the scientific study of language

1. THE OBJECT OF LEXICOLOGY

Linguistics is the scientific study of language

1. The object of Lexicology. Definition of the term "vocabulary". Theoretical and practical value of English Lexicology.

The term lexicology is of Greek origin (from lexis ‘word’ and logos ‘learning, science’). Lexicology is the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of the language and the properties of words as the main units of language. In other words, its basic task is a study and systematic description of vocabulary in respect to its origin, development, meaning and current use. The term vocabulary is used to denote the sуstem formed by the sum total of all the words and word equivalents that the language possesses. By word-equivalents we are going to mean morphemes, word-combinations and phraseological units.

Modern English Lexicology investigates the problems of word-structure and word-formation in Modern English, the semantic structure of English words, the main principles underlying the classification of vocabulary units into various groups, the laws governing the replenishment of the vocabulary with new vocabulary units. It also studies the relations existing between various lexical layers of the English vocabulary and the specific laws and regulations that govern development at the present time.

Distinction is naturally made between General Lexicology and Special Lexicology. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features of any particular language, is known as general lexicology. General lexicology studies properties common to all languages. Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language. It goes without saying that every special lexicology is based on the principles of general lexicology, and the latter forms a part of general linguistics.

There are two principal approaches, two basically different ways in which language may be viewed, the historical or diachronic (Gr dia ‘through’ and chronos ‘time’) and the descriptive or synchronic (Gr syn ‘together’, ‘with’). The distinction between a synchronic and a diachronic approach is due to the Swiss philologist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).

With regard to Special Lexicology the synchronic approach is concerned with the vocabulary of a language as it exists at a given time, for instance, at the present time. It is special Descriptive Lexicology that deals with the vocabulary and vocabulary units of a particular language at a certain time. A Course in Modern English Lexicology is therefore a course in Special Descriptive Lexicology, its object of study being the English vocabulary as it exists at the present time.

Historical or diachronic approach in terms of Special Lexicology deals with the changes and the development of vocabulary in the course of time. It is special Historical Lexicology that deals with the evolution of the vocabulary units of a language as time goes by. An English Historical Lexicology would be concerned, therefore, with the origin of English vocabulary units, their change and development, the linguistic and extralinguistic factors modifying their structure, meaning and usage within the history of the English language.

It should be emphatically stressed that the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic study is merely a difference of approach separating for the purposes of investigation what in real language is inseparable. The two approaches should not be contrasted, or set one against the other; in fact, they are intrinsically interconnected and interdependent: every linguistic structure and system actually exists in a state of constant development so that the synchronic state of a language system is a result of a long process of linguistic evolution, of its historical development.

Another discipline which finds its place within the framework of lexicological studies is etymology or historical lexicology. The object of historical lexicology or etymology is the evolution of any vocabulary, as well as of its single elements. This branch of linguistics discusses the origin of various words, their change and development and investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic forces modifying their structure, meaning and usage. We speak about extralinguistic forces, because language develops together with the development of the society. Etymology has been criticized for its atomistic approach – for treating every word a an individual isolated unit.

Closely connected with Historical Lexicology is Contrastive and Comparative Lexicology whose aims are to study the correlation between the vocabularies of two or more languages, and find out the correspondences between the vocabulary units of the languages under comparison. It aims to provide a theoretical basis on which the vocabularies of different languages can be compared and described.

The theoretical and practical value of English Lexicology. The Course of Modern English Lexicology is of great practical importance. The language learner will obtain much valuable information concerning the English word-stock and the laws and regulations governing the formation and usage of English words and word-groups.

The importance of English lexicology is based not on the size of its vocabulary, however big it is, but on the fact that at present it is the world's most widely used language. It is spoken as a native language by nearly three hundred million people in Britain, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and some other countries. The knowledge of English is widely spread geographically — it is in fact used in all continents. It is also spoken in many countries as a second language and used in official and business activities there. This is the case in India, Pakistan and many other former British colonies. English is also one of the working languages of the United Nations and the universal language of international aviation. More than a half world's scientific literature is published in English and 60% of the world's radio broadcasts are in English. For all these reasons it is widely studied all over the world as a foreign language.

The theoretical value of lexicology becomes obvious if we realize that it forms the study of one of the three main aspects of language, i.e. its vocabulary, the other two being its grammar and sound system. Lexicology studies the meaning of words. The theory of meaning was originally developed within the limits of philosophical science. The relationship between the name and the thing named has in the course of history constituted one of the key questions in gnostic theories.

2. Word as the basic unit of language. Word / word-combination / morpheme. Types of lexical units (words, lexical morphemes, set expressions). = the size-of-unit problem.

Types of lexical units. The term unit means one of the elements into which a whole may be divided or analyzed and which possesses the basic properties of this whole. The units of a vocabulary or lexical units are two-facet elements possessing form (sound) and meaning.

The basic unit forming the bulk of the vocabulary is the word. Being the central element of any language system, the word is a sort of focus for all levels of linguistic analysis - phonology, lexicology, syntax, etc.

Other units are lexical morphemes, that is parts of words, into which words may be analyzed, and set expressions or groups of words into which words may be combined. Wогds are the central elements of language system, they face both ways: they are the biggest units of morphology and the smallest of syntax.

The word has many different aspects. It has a sound form because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes; it has its morphological structure, being also a certain arrangement of morphemes; when used in actual speech it may occur in different word forms, different syntactic functions and signal various meanings.

The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language which unites a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment. A word therefore is simultaneously a semantic, phonological and grammatical unit. For example, in the word “boy” the group of sounds is associated with the meaning  “a male child up to the age of 17 or 18” and with a definite grammatical employment – a noun which has a plural form ‘boys’…

The words thus are to be kept distinct from morphemes, on the one hand, and from word-combinations, on the other.

Unlike words, morphemes cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units. Besides, they function in speech only as constituent parts of words. Morphemes cannot be used as separate utterances. Words can be separated in an utterance by other such units and can be used in isolation.

Words are thought of as representing a concept, feeling or action or as having a single referent. The meaning of morphemes is more abstract and more general than that of words and at the same time they are less autonomous.

In difference to a morpheme, the word is a unity of both lexical and grammatical meaning, while morpheme can possess either lexical or grammatical meaning. Morphemes of the first kind are called lexical, of the second type – grammatical.

We mean that the word has a unified grammatical shape for all its constituents (whole-formedness). The application of the criterion can be illustrated in the following way. The word “sun” has both the lexical meaning expressed by the stem “sun-” (the star that shines in the sky during the day) and the categorial meaning of the noun, the part of speech it belongs to. Otherwise stated, it is grammatically formed.

Let's compare it with 'sun' in sunflower or sunstroke. It doesn't carry any grammatical meaning and in this respect differs from the word 'sun'.

The most general description of the word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterized by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity

The integrity is manifest in its indivisibility – when we deal with a compound it is impossible to insert another word or word-combination between its elements. (for example sunlight – we can only insert a word between the article and the noun – the bright sunlight – it is a separate word).

To illustrate “positional mobility” and “uninterruptability” we segment into morphemes the following sentence:

the - boy - s - walk - ed - slow - ly - up - the - hill

The sentence may be regarded as a sequence of ten morphemes, which occur in a particular order relative to one another. There are several possible changes in this order which yield an acceptable English sentence: slow - ly - the - boy - s - walk - ed - up - the – hill / up - the - hill - slow - ly - walk - ed - the - boy - s

Yet under all the permutations certain groups of morphemes behave as ‘blocks’  — they occur always together, and in the same order relative to one another. There is no possibility of the sequence s - the - boy, ly - slow, ed - walk. “One of the characteristics of the word is that it tends to be internally stable (in terms of the order of the component morphemes), but positionally mobile”

Set expressions are word groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integrated so that they are introduced in speech, so to say, ready-made as units with a specialized meaning of the whole that is not understood as a mere sum total of the meanings of the elements. ((a group of words which exists in he language as a ready-made unit and has the unity of meaning and unity of syntactic function)). Word equivalents are divided in spelling but are in all other respects equivalent to words.

To show the difference between the word and the word-combination we can compare two sequences: place-name and the name of the place. It does not require a close examination to see that they are identical in terms of their lexical meaning, they denote basically the same thing. But grammatically they are different. In the word place-name both elements form one global whole, and together possess the categories of case and number, whereas in the word-combination each component is grammatically independent, i.e. names of places.

If we deal with syncategorematic words we have to use the criterion of residual separability. To state that the definite article 'the' is not a morpheme but an independent word it is necessary to compare it with 'the place', 'the name', 'the sun'. If we put aside these independent words, what we are left with are not parts of the words but separate words of their own. In a way, this is a negative separability.

3. Lexical variation of the word. Phonetic variants. Morphological variants. Lexical-semantic variants. Stylistic variants. = The identity-of-unit problem.

FLOWER

object   referent

mind   notion

sign   word “flower”  has meaning (content) and form (expression)

It is often implied that the word is a 'sign' - pure and simple - and has two planes: the expression plane and the content plane. While the expression plane may be the same [boy and бой], the content plane is very different. Or vice versa with the same content [часы] has two expression planes in English watch and clock, the meaning of which is slightly different. The identity of a word requires that in every concrete case the plane of content should be in 1-to-1 correspondence with the plane of expression. This is also called the law of the sign. In reality this law is hardly ever observed in natural human language. For example we will discuss polysemy - different words which are identical in their expression planes - or synonymy - when words have nothing in common as far as their expression is concerned, but the meaning of which can be almost the same.

Thus, we are going to dwell on types of variations as violations of the law of the sign.

First comes phonetic variation which is of 3 kinds:

- automatic,- accentual, - emic.

1) Automatic variation comprises the phonetic variants due to assimilative processes on word-boundaries. For example, [now and then] or [bread and butter]. This kind of variation depends on tempo and immediate phonetic context. This kind of variation is most frequently observed in the case of syncategorematic words. They are prone to vary their expression plane under the influence of their immediate phonetic environment. This doesn’t destroy their lexical and semantic globality.

2) The second type is found in the case of several co-existent accentual patterns of the same word = different stresses. Sometimes different stresses are attributed to the difference between British and American variants of pronunciation, like in ['dictionary - dictio'nary] or ['necessary - nece'ssary].

It can be used in poetry. And sometimes even within British English a word can be stressed differently. For example of particular interest in this connection is the fact that in English there exist even-stressed words like upstairs, blue-eyed, Chinese. In the flow of speech this stress is influenced by the environment. Can you speak Chi’nese? This is a ‘Chinese grammar.

3) Emic variation depends on the co-existence of several emic versions of the word. The word –emic means belonging to the system. For example, direct [di'rekt], [dai'rekt] or usage ['ju:zidg], ['ju:sidg], expression [eks] and [iks]

Next comes morphological variation. By morphological variant we mean those cases in which one of the morphemes within a word becomes meaningless, that is does not carry the meaning which is normally assumed to belong to it. Smirnitsky distinguishes two kinds of morph. variation:

1) Grammatical morphological. Examples: learn - learned / learnt, bandit - banditi / bandits.

2) Lexical morphological. Examples: pairs in - ic / ical = stylistic / stylistical, mathematic / tical, romantic/ical, anabasnyj / ananasovyi.

To reiterate, in the case of morphological variation we are confronted with the situation when generally a bilateral unit becomes unilateral (no content, only expression plane) and the difference between words ceases to be morphological. In these examples the suffix –ic carries no meaning of its own as compared with pairs: economic- economical. As a result we can no longer regard these units as separate words and must treat them as morphological variants of one and the same word while economic-economical are synonyms.

Now we should turn to the last type of lexical variation - the semantic one. So far we have dealt with the expression plane. Semantic variants are modifications of the content plane. Basically we are confronted with polysemy.

To illustrate semantic variation let's consider the following examples: 1) Do you like your tea sweet? 2) What a very sweet name.

Sweet1 means 'tasting like sugar or honey' while sweet2 means 'pleasant or attractive'. Both variants are registered by dictionaries as belonging to the same entry. Although there is a slight semantic difference between the 2 variants it is not big enough to split up the word into 2 lexical units.

Note that there is a correspondence between semantic and prosodic variants. The difference in the expression plane is emphasized by the opposition of prosody: What a very sweet (slowly) name.

The pastry melted in the mouth. // my heart melted as I sorted him out.

Allo- -emic principle underlying the whole science. –Emes are constant entities, invariants and allos being variants, variable entities.

Thus lexical morphology is  morphic and  semic

Grammatical morphology is  allomorphic and  sememic

The suffix –emic means belonging to the system, seme – carrier of some concrete meaning.

Allomorphes are variants of morpheme. For example [s] and [z] are the allomorphs of the morpheme of the 3d person singular when attached to a verbal stem taken in isolation [s] and [z] don’t convey a distinct grammatical meaning, for it becomes clear only against the background of the entire system of grammatical opposition.

With lexical morphemes the situation is quite different. The suffix –less, for example, is morphemic because there are no variants, no allomorphs. On the other hand its meaning is understood as such without recourse to the emic level. They are understood very much in the same way as words are. Lexical morphemes therefore are described as semic.

Etymology.

It is a matter of common knowledge that the vocabulary of any language is never stable,   never  static, but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The changes in the vocabulary of a language are due both to linguistic and extralinguistic causes or to a combination of both. The extralinguistic causes are determined by the social nature of the language. In this respect there is a tremendous difference between Lexicology, on the one hand, and Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, on the other. Words, to a far greater degree than sounds, grammatical forms, or syntactical arrangements, are subject to change, for the word-stock of a language directly and immediately reacts to changes in social life, to whatever happens in the life of the speech community in question,

The part played by borrowings in the vocabulary of a language depends upon the history of each given language, being conditioned by direct linguistic contacts and political, economic and cultural relationships between nations. English history contains innumerable occasions for all types of such contacts. It is the vocabulary system of each language that is particularly responsive to every change in the life of the speaking community. Nowhere, perhaps, is the influence of extra-linguistic social reality so obvious as in the etymological composition of the vocabulary. The very fact that up to 70% of the English vocabulary consist of loan words, and only 30% of the words are native is due to specific conditions of the English language development. The Roman invasion, the introduction of Christianity, the Danish and Norman conquests, and, in modern times, the specific features marking the development of British colonialism and imperialism combined to cause important changes in the vocabulary.

As far as the origin of the word is concerned, the word-stock may be subdivided into two main sets. The elements of one are native, the elements of the other are borrowed.

A native word is a word which belongs to the original English stock as known from the earliest available manuscripts of the Old English period. The native words are further subdivided into those of the Indo-European stock and those of common Germanic origin. Words of Indo-European stock form the oldest layer and readily fall into definite semantic groups (kinship: father, daughter, nature: wind, water, animals, parts of the human body, some of the most often used verbs – sit, stand, some numerals – two, three).

A much bigger part of this native vocabulary layer is formed by words of the Common Germanic stock, i.e. of words having parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch. Together with the words of the common I-E stock they form the bulk of the most frequent elements used in any style of speech. They constitute no less than 80% of the 500 most frequent words.

Words from the native word-stock are for most part characterized by a wide range of valency, high frequency value and a developed polysemy, often monosyllabic, show great word-building power and enter a number of set expressions.

For example, watch<OE waeccan is one of the 500 most frequent English words. It may be used as a verb in more than ten different sentence patterns, with or without object and adverbial modifiers and combined with different classes of words. Its valency is thus of the highest. Examples (to cite but a few) are as follows: Are you going to play or only watch (the others play)? He was watching the crowd go by. Watch me carefully. He was watching for the man to leave the house. The man is being watched by the police.

The noun watch may mean ‘the act of watching’, ‘the guard’ (on ships), ‘a period of duty for part of the ship’s crew’, ‘a period of wake-fulness’, ‘close observation’, ‘a time-piece’, etc.

Watch is the centre of a numerous word-family: watch-dog, watcher, watchful, watchfulness, watch-out, watchword, etc. Some of the set expressions containing this root are: be on the watch, watch one’s step, keep watch, watchful as a hawk. There is also a proverb The watched pot never boils, used when people show impatience or are unduly worrying.

A loan (or a borrowed word) is a word taken over from another language and modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the standards of the English language.

Alongside loan words proper, we distinguish loan translation and semantic loans. Translation loans (кальки) are words and expressions formed from the material already existing in British, but according to patterns taken from another language, by way of literal morpheme-for-morpheme or word-for-word translation. (goes without saying = va sans dire, wonder child = Wunderkind). In this case the notion is borrowed from a foreign language but is expressed by native lexical units: collective farm (Russian) – колхоз. Some translation loans appeared in English from Latin  already in the Old English period, e.g. Sunday – solis dies.

The term "semantic loan" is used to denote the development in an English word of a new meaning due to the influence of a related word in another language. The English word pioneer meant ‘explorer’ and ‘one who is among the first in new fields of activity’; now under the influence of the Russian word пионер it has come to mean ‘a member of the Young Pioneers’ Organization’.

Although the mixed character of the English vocabulary cannot be denied and the part of borrowing in its development is indeed one of great importance, the leading role in the history of this vocabulary belongs to word-formation and semantic changes patterned according to the specific features of the English language system. This system absorbed and remodelled the vast majority of loan words according to its own standards, so that it is sometimes difficult to tell an old borrowing from a native word. Examples are: cheese, street, wall, wine and other words belonging to the earliest layer of Latin borrowings. Many loan words, on the other hand, in spite of the changes they have undergone after penetrating into English, retain some peculiarities in pronunciation, spelling, orthoepy, and morphology.’

Thus, the initial position of the sounds [v], [dz], [z] is a sign that the word is not of native stock. Examples are: vacuum (Lat), valley (Fr), voivode (Russ), vanadium (named by a Swedish chemist Selfstrom from ON Vanadis, the goddess Freya), vanilla (Sp), etc. The sound [dз ] may be rendered by the letters g and j: gem<Lai gemma and jewel<OFr jouel. The initial [з] occurs in comparatively late borrowings: genre, gendarme (Fr). The letters j, x, z in initial position and such combinations as ph, kh, eau in the root indicate the foreign origin of the word: philology (Gr), khaki (Indian), beau (Fr). Some letters and combinations of letters depend in their orthoepy upon the etymology of the word. Thus, x is pronounced [ks] and [gz] in words of native and Latin origin respectively, and [z ] in words coming from Greek: six [siks] (native), exist [ig’zist] (Lat), but xylophone (Gr) is pronounced [’zailafoun].

The combination ch is pronounced [tS ] in native words and early borrowings: child, chair; [S] in late French borrowings: machine [me’Si:n], parachute I’paeraSu:t], and [k] in words of Greek origin: epoch [’i:pok], chemist t’kemist], echo [’ekou].

The term “assimilation of a loan” word is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic system. The degree of assimilation depends upon the length of period during which the word has been used in the receiving language, upon its importance for communication purpose and its frequency. Oral borrowings due to personal contacts are assimilated more completely and rapidly than literary borrowings.

According to the degree of assimilation:

1. completely assimilated loan words

They are found in all the layers of older borrowings (street from stratum, husband from Scandinavian, table, face, animal…). Completely assimilated French words are extremely numerous and frequent. Suffice it to mention such everyday words as table and chair, face and figure, finish and matter. A considerable number of Latin words borrowed during the revival of learning are at present almost indistinguishable from the rest of the vocabulary. Neither animal nor article differ noticeably from native words. The number of completely assimilated loan words is many times greater than the number of partially assimilated ones.

They follow all morphological, phonetical and orphographic standards. They are frequent, stylistically neutral, active in word-formation, morphologically analyzable, indistinguishable phonetically.

Moreover, their morphological  structure and motivation remain transparent, so that they are morphologically analysable and therefore supply the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in series of loan words that contain them. Such are, for instance, the French suffixes -age, -ance and -ment,  and  the English modification of French -esse and -fier, which provide speech material to produce hybrids like shortage, goddess, hindrance, speechify, and endearment. The free forms, on the other hand, are readily combined with native affixes, e.g. pained, painful, painfully, painless, painlessness, all formed from pain<Fr peine<Lat poena >Gr poine ‘penalty’.

Completely assimilated loan words are also indistinguishable phonetically. It is impossible to say judging by the sound of the words sport and start whether they are borrowed or native. In fact start is native, derived from ME sterten, whereas sport is a shortening of disport vt<OFr (se) desporter ‘to amuse oneself, ‘to carry oneself away from one’s work’ (ultimately derived from Lat portare ‘to carry’).

2. partially assimilated can be subdivided into subgroups. Not assimilated:

• semantically as denote objects, notions peculiar to the country from which they come (sombrero, sherbet, rouble)

• grammatically, for example nouns from Latin or Greek which keep their original plural forms (phenomenon-na, formula – lae, crisis - crises)
• phonetically. Alongside with peculiarities in stress, the words may contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language and do not occur in native words. The examples are: [з] — bourgeois, prestige, regime, sabotage. Words with the initial sounds (v), (z) as in voice or zero testify to their foreign origin. In many cases it is not the sounds but the whole pattern of the word’s phonetic make-up that is different from the rest of the vocabulary, as in some of the Italian and Spanish borrowings: confetti, incognito, macaroni, opera, sonata, soprano and tomato, potato, tobacco. Some French borrowings have retained stress on the final syllable – police, cartoon.
• graphically (for example, some keep diacritic mark – café, cliché or in Greek borrowings y can be spelled in the middle of the word, ph, ch, ps). The letters j, x, z in the initial position indicate the foreign origin of the word, e.g. jewel, zest, xylophone. French borrowings that came into English after 1650 retain their spelling, e.g. consonants p, t, s are not pronounced at the end of the word (buffet, coup, debris).

3. non-assimilated borrowings (the so-called barbarisms)

= words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way and for which there are corresponding English equivalents (ciao – goodbye, coup d’Etat – sudden seizure of state power by a small group).

The changes a loan word had had to undergo are the main cause for the existence of the so-called etymological doublets. These are two or more words of the same language which were derived by different routes from the same basic word. They differ to a certain degree in form, meaning and current usage.

Etymological doublets are pairs of words which have one and the same original form, but which have acquired different forms and even different meanings during the course of linguistic development. Ex: the words shirt and skirt etymologically descend from the same root. Shirt is a native word, skirt is a Scandinavian borrowings. Their phonetic shape is different, and yet there is a certain resemblance, which reflects their common origin. Their meanings are also different but easily associated: they both denote articles of clothing.

As an example of the same foreign word that has been borrowed twice at different times the doublets castle and château may be mentioned. Both words come from the Latin castellun ‘fort’. This word passed into the northern dialect of Old French as castel, which was borrowed into Middle English as castle. In the Parisian dialect of Old French, on the other hand, it became chastel (a Latin hard c regularly became a ch in Central Old French). In modern French chastel became chateaux and was then separately borrowed into English meaning ‘a French castle or a big country house’.

Another source is borrowing of different grammatical forms of the same word. Thus, the comparative of Latin super ‘above’ was superior ‘higher, better’, this was borrowed into English as superior ‘high or higher in some quality or rank’. The superlative degree of the same Latin word was supremus ‘highest’. When this was borrowed into English it gave the adjective supreme ‘outstanding, prominent, highest in rank’.

As the process of borrowing is mostly connected with the appearance of new notions which the loan words serve to express, it’s natural that the borrowing is seldom limited to one language. Words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowings from one ultimate source are called international words. They play an especially prominent part in various terminological systems including the vocabulary of science, industry and art. The international word-stock is growing due to the rate of change in society (football, tennis, tweed, film come from English; concert, piano, opera come from Italian).

The term "source of borrowing" should be distinguished from the term "origin of borrowing". The first should be applied to the language from which the loan word was taken into English. The second, on the other hand, refers to the language to which the word may be traced. Thus, the word paper<Fr papier<Lat papyrus<Gr papyros has French as its source of borrowing and Greek as its origin. It may be observed that several of the terms for items used in writing show their origin in words denoting the raw material. Papyros is the name of a plant; cf. book<OE boc ‘the beech tree’ (boards of which were used for writing).

There are questions and tasks for the first seminar below.

Test Questions

1. What does lexicology study?
2. What is the theoretical and practical value of lexicology?
1. What types of lexical units do you know?
2. What is the difference between word and word-combination, word and morpheme?
3. What lexical variants do you know? Give examples.
4. What languages and when influenced the English vocabulary?
5. What ways of borrowing do you know? Give examples.

Written Tasks

1. Read the passage given below. 1) Comment on the difference between the noun "floor" and the stem "floor-“ using examples, taken from the text. 2) Find other examples illustrating the difference between words and morphemes.

Lying on the floor of the flat-car with the guns beside me under the canvas I was wet, cold, and very hungry. Finally I rolled over and lay flat on my stomach with my head on my arms. My knee was stiff, but it had been very satisfactory. Valentini had done a fine job. I had done half of the retreat on foot and swum part of the Tagliamento with his knee. It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more. The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself, the head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember.

I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little, only about her with the car going slowly clickingly, and some light through the canvas, and by lying with Catherine on the floor of the car. Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only feeling, having been away too long, the clothes wet and the floor moving only a little each time and lonesome inside and alone with wet clothing and hard floor for a wife.

You did not love the floor of a flat-car nor guns with canvas jackets and the small of vaselined metal or a canvas that rain leaked through, although it is very fine under a canvas and pleasant with guns; but yon loved someone else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there; you seeing now very clearly and coldly - not so coldly as clearly end emptily. You saw emptily, lying on your stomach, having been present when one army moved back and another came forward. You had lost your cars and your men as a floorwalker loses the stock of his department in a fire. There was, however, no insurance. You were out of it now. You had no more obligations. If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an accent they had always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be expected to return when the store opened again for business. They might seek other employment; if there was any other employment and the police did not get them.

. (E. Hemingway)

2. Look up the following words in an etymological dictionary and indicate the languages they are borrowed from:

analysis, ballet, bandit, bloom, canoe, diet, duke, embargo, Koran, liquor, Mammoth