Riassunto esame di inglese I

Appunti di inglese Università di Macerata

Lexicon

The term “Lexicon” is known in English from the early 17^th century, when it referred to a book containing a selection of a language's words and meanings arranged in alphabetical order. In linguistics, it refers to the total stock of meaningful units in a language (words, idioms, and parts of words which express meaning like prefixes and suffixes). To study the lexicon of English means to study all aspects of the vocabulary of a language (like how words are formed, how they developed over time, and how words are used now). It's a study carried on by lexicologists. Lexicographers are lexicologists who choose to write a dictionary, their calling is lexicography.

What is a lexeme?

A lexeme is the fundamental unit of lexical meaning which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain (for example: Fibrillate, rain cats and dogs, elephant... these are all lexemes). Headwords in dictionaries are lexemes!

Per esempio, su questa frase: “My friend and I walk to class together, because our classes are in the same building and we dislike walking alone” quanti “lexemes” ci sono? Io pensavo 21, ma invece no, perché è importante capire che: “the basis of dictionary entries; dictionaries typically have a single entry for each lexeme.”

Quindi, se dovessimo contare tutti i lessemi della frase, conteremo “class” e “classes”, “walk” e “walking”, “I” e “my”, “our” e “we” come lessemi singoli. Perciò la frase ha ben 16 lessemi.

(Questo esempio non l'ha dato il prof, l'ho solo scritto io per capire meglio cosa fossero i lessemi, e lo riscrivo qui perché magari può darvi una mano)

Lexeme: individual word

• We can find a lexeme as an individual word.
• Multiword lexemes: there are also multiword lexemes made up of more than one orthographic word such as: Phrasal Verbs (“Speak up”); an Open Compound (“fire engine”) and an Idiom (“throw in the towel” = it is usually used when you admit that you are defeated or when you can't do something anymore).

English has more words than any other language

Why? The reason is historical! English was originally a Germanic language related to Dutch and German. In fact, English shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. After the Norman Conquest (1066), English was influenced by Norman French and by Latin. So a lot of French and Latin words entered the language. Since English became an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources.

Sources of English vocabulary

• Anglo-Saxon base: Many lexemes have arrived with the Germanic invaders (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians) that settled in Britain in the 5^th and 6^th centuries and displaced the original Celtic speaking inhabitants. Many of the words we use in everyday conversations seem to be from Anglo-Saxon, and the words are:
  • Parts of the body like arm, bone, chest...
  • The natural environment like wood, land...
  • The domestic life like door, floor, home, house...
  • The calendar like day, month, moon...
  • Animals like cow, dog, fish, sheep...
  • Common adjectives like black, dark, good...
  • Common verbs like become, do, eat, fly...
• Celtic borrowings: Words of modern English come from Celtic, for example, Brock (tasso), and river names such as Avion, Thames.
• Scandinavian borrowings: The Norse invaders (Vikings) settled in Britain and had a great influence on English. Example of borrowings: everyday words, grammatical words (like the verb “are” (to be)) or the pronouns “their, them, they” and some of the commonest words in English: Bag, dirt, fog, flat, odd, ugly, want, trust, get, give, take, smile. Also, a good number of sc- and sk- words today are of Scandinavian origin: scorch, score, scrub, skill, skin, skirt, sky.
• French borrowings: Words in categories of:
  • Government: parliament, government, country, crown
  • Finance: treasure, poverty
  • Law: attorney, fraud, jury
  • War: battle, army, castle, tower
  • Religion: miracle, charity, saint, pardon
• Latin borrowings: Etc, et al.
• Greek borrowings: Words from Greek origin.

Word formation

In linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new word. Sometimes it is contrasted with “semantic change,” which is a change in a single word's meaning.

There are different types of word formation:

• Abbreviations:
  • Initialism: A word abbreviated and pronounced by saying each letter one at a time, for example, BBC, USA, FBI.
  • Acronyms: A word formed from the first letter and pronounced as a single word: RADAR, NATO, UNESCO.
  • Clipping: The shortening of a longer word, often reducing it to one syllable: “ad” is a clipping form of “advertisement.”
  • Blends: Parts of words are taken and merged to form a new one. Example: Smoke + Fog = SMOG or Motor + Hotel = MOTEL or Breakfast + Lunch = BRUNCH. In most cases, the 2^nd element controls the meaning of the whole: a brunch is a type of lunch, smog is a type of fog, not a type of smoke.
  • Latin abbreviations: Etc (=and other things); et al (=and others). Da ricordare in caso ti chiedessero dei “Foreign borrowings”!
• Morphological derivation: (Different from Inflection) Process of forming a new word from an existing one by adding an affix (such as prefixes or suffixes).
  • Prefixes: Occur before the root of a word “un-”
  • Suffixes: Occur after the root of a word “-ness”
  • Example: root word “happy” + prefix -un: Unhappy
• Compounding: It's a process of word formation that creates compound lexemes, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one root. There are 4 types of compoundings:
  • Endocentric: A+B denotes a special kind of B, for example “DARKROOM.”
  • Exocentric: A+B denotes a special kind of unexpressed semantic head, it's a hyponym of an unexpressed semantic category (like person-plant-animal) and its meaning can't be deducted from its parts! For example “Skinhead” is a bald-headed man (uomo pelato) or “Paleface” is referred to a white person or “White-Collar” that is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing but it is referred to middle class.
  • Copulative: A+B denotes the sum of what A and B denote, example: “Sleepwalk” or “bittersweet.”
  • Appositional: A and B provide different descriptions of the same referent, for example: “player-coach” is a player and also a coach.
• Conversion: The creation of new lexemes (principally nouns, adjectives, and verbs) through changing the word class without the addition of an affix. For example:
  • A verb to a noun: to swim = a swim
  • A noun to a verb: bottle = bottle (something): imbottigliare
  • An adjective to a noun: Natural = Nature
  • A noun to an adjective: Brick = Brick (as in brick house, una casa di mattoni)
• Back-formation: A process in which a shortened form is created from a longer one by deleting a part of a word, like a prefix. For example: “to babysit” is a verb that comes from the noun “babysitter.”
• Neologism: A process of forming a new word by coining. There are 3 sub-categories of neologism:
  • Eponym: A proper noun that becomes commonly used for an idea it's associated with, by changing its part of speech, for example “Orwellian.”
  • Loanword: A word borrowed from another language, for example “clichés” is from French.
  • Onomatopoeic word: A word which imitates natural sounds like the bird name “cuckoo.”

Nonce words

A lexeme created for temporary use to solve an immediate problem of communication. For example, a woman attempting to describe the excess water on the road after a storm was heard to call it a “Fluddle,” she meant something bigger than a puddle (pozzanghera) but smaller than a flood (alluvione).

The structure of the lexicon

Semantic Field: A named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways. It's like having a box in which we can find words that all share the same meaning!

• Chair – Table – Bed: they are all part of the semantic field of Furniture;
• Brother – Sister – Mother: they are all part of the semantic field of Relation;
• We can also find some abstract words that are difficult to classify, like “Noise.”
• Some lexemes seem to belong to more than one field, like “Orange” can be part of the field of “color” and “fruit.”
• Some lexemes seem to fall midway between two fields, for example, “Tomato” could belong both to the “fruit” and to the “vegetable” field.

The thesaurus

The first thesauri was published in 1852 by Peter Roget (può chiederlo all'esame). It lists words grouped together according to similarity in meaning, it contains synonyms and sometimes antonyms. A thesaurus acts as a complement to the traditional dictionary. In the latter, we have a lexeme in mind and go check its meaning or use; by contrast, in a thesaurus, we have a meaning in mind and go check all the lexemes available to express it. But this method has a limitation because if we don't know the meaning of a lexeme in the thesaurus, we still need to look it up in a dictionary.

Collocation

It refers to a natural combination of words that are closely associated with each other. The meaning of a word is determined by its collocations. For example:

• Fast food
• Pay attention

When a collocation becomes so predictable that it is a fixed phrase, we talk about:

• Idioms: A group of words in a fixed order that have a particular meaning which is different from the meaning of each word on its own. Example: “Spick and Span” = Lindo e pinto
• Clichés: A phrase that is overused, like “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry” (Tizio, Caio e Sempronio)
• Proverbs: Common sayings that express a truth or piece of advice.

Lexical phrases

Remember!! There is a difference between idioms and lexical phrases! As said before, the meaning of an idiom can't be deduced from the meaning of the single word. The meaning of a lexical phrase is transparent; it can be deduced from the meaning of the single words.

There are 4 criteria that characterize lexical phrases (chiesto all'esame):

• Length
• Grammatical status
• Variable or fixed
• Continuous or discontinuous, it means whether it consists of an unbroken sequence of words or if it's interrupted by variable lexical fillers.

There are 3 types of lexical phrases:

• Polywords:
  • “Beside the point”: non avere niente a che fare, it means that something is not important or not related to the subject discussed.
  • “For that matter.”
• Institutionalised expressions:
  • “Be that as it may”: ad ogni modo, comunque sia, it means that you accept that information is true, but it doesn't change your opinion of the subject you are discussing.
• Phrasal constraint:
  • “To …up” as in “to tie this up,” used to summarize.
  • “A …ago” as in “a year ago,” used relating to time.

Synonyms

Words which differ in slight ways. Some words are synonyms, but only in a very restricted range of contexts. For example: RANCID is for butter or oil, while CURDLED is for milk.

Antonyms

A word that means the opposite of another word. Several words have more than one possible opposite (depending on the context). Two antonyms of “light” are “heavy” and “dark.”

There are also pairs of words where one word presupposes another like: “husband/wife,” “buy/sell.” These are often called converse terms.

Hyponym

“Horse” is a hyponym of “animal”: this means that in a hyponym, the meaning of a word is included within the other, it describes what happens when we say for example “a daffodil is a (kind of) flower.”

Hypernym

“Animal” is the hypernym of “Horse”: a word whose meaning includes a group of other words.

Incompatible

We talk about incompatibility when we want to exclude one meaning from another, different from the hyponym which is related to the inclusion of one meaning into another.

For example: apple, peach, and plum are hyponyms of fruit. However, an apple is not a peach, which is also not a plum. Thus, they are incompatible. But hyponyms are not necessarily incompatible in all senses. A queen and mother are both hyponyms of woman, but there is nothing preventing the queen from being a mother.

The loaded lexicon

Denotation: A meaning which everyone agrees on, for example, the fact that a “rose” is a “flower.”

Connotation: A personal meaning, for example, the “rose” could mean death, love, etc. Connotation varies according to the experience of individuals. When a lexeme is highly charged with connotation, we commonly refer to it as ‘loaded’. The language of politics and religion is full of such loaded expressions: capitalism, radical, dogma, pagan. In general, the more a domain or topic is controversial, the more it will contain loaded vocabulary, providing people with the lexical ammunition they need to reinforce their point of view.

Taboo words

These are words that people don't like to hear or say; they are related to religion, sex, and also going to the bathroom.

In translating, we can use instead of a taboo word:

• Euphemism: A word or phrase that talks indirectly about something unpleasant or offensive. For example, instead of saying “to die” we can use the euphemism “to pass away.”
• Jargon: Technical words or also called technical jargon: every subject has its own jargon: chemistry, maths, English language study, sport etc. Jargon helps specialists to be precise and adds not only precision but also economy to their communication.
• Doublespeak: The term derives from two concepts in George Orwell's “1984”: “Doublethink” + “newspeak” although the term is not used in the book. It's a language which pretends to communicate but really doesn't; it makes the bad seem good, and the negative seem positive. So it changes the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. "downsizing" for layoffs, "servicing the target" for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. In fact, doublespeak is closely associated with political language. Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell's classic essay “Politics and the English Language” (studiare bene perché lo chiede!!)
• Swearing words: They are the most powerful taboo words. Many people use religious names as swear words. In writing, taboo words would, in the past, never be used or they would be printed using dashes. Most linguists would maintain that swearing does not show a poor command of a language, but rather demonstrates that you know the language very well! (importante lo chiede!!)
• No two taboo words are used in exactly the same way grammatically:
  • "Damn!" cannot be used with a preceding personal pronoun (*You damn!)
  • “Arse” cannot be followed by one (*Arseyou!)
  • “Fart” cannot be followed by off or it
  • Bugger, however, can be used in all four of these contexts

There is just one rule of grammar only used with swear words (or their euphemisms). For example, look at: “Abso-bloody-lutely” instead of “ab-bloody-solutely,” the first one is easier to say. Or “Where's my sodding car?” Instead of “Where's sodding my car?” the first one makes more sense than the second one.

The living lexicon

Catch phrases: It is a phrase which is so appealing that people take pleasure in using it. It comes to be on everyone’s lips for a while. It is even possible for catch phrases to be so useful that they become permanent additions to the language, in the form of rather self-conscious and often jocular expressions whose origins people may have long forgotten. To identify catch phrases, we need to be part of the culture which gave rise to them.

Slogans

Slogans are used to form a forceful, catchy, mind-grabbing utterance which will rally people to buy something. In their linguistic structure, slogans are very like proverbs. Sentences tend to be short, with a strong rhythm: They often have a balanced structure, especially if they get at all lengthy: Make love, not war. Slogans are an essential part of all campaigns – political, safety, marketing.