Lexicología

Unit 1: The Lexicon

1.-The Lexicon
The lexicon is the mental dictionary that contains all the words of a
language such as lexemes, derived stems, affixes, clitics and longer
expressions, whose meaning cannot be guessed from the meaning of the
component word and the grammar called idioms. It has a perfectly
defined structure and shows the links between phonological forms and
meaning.
-Openness
The lexicon of a language is not corrected as it changes quite rapidly due
to social and technological changes; new terms are required for new
objects.

2.- Ways of making new words.

3.- Fixed expressions

-Idioms: a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not
deducible from those of the individual words.
Examples: Better late than never  Better to arrive late than not to come
at all.
Bite the bullet  To get something over with because it is inevitable.
-Collocation: the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another
word or words with a frequency greater than chance.
Examples: to make the bed, to do homework.
-Taboo words: a subject, word, or action that is avoided for religious or
social reasons. Thot, Dirty old man, bitch, slut, whore.

Unit 2: Meaning
1.- Meaning, semantics and pragmatics
Meaning refers to what is expressed through sentences, statements and
their components. Meaning is the content transmitted in communication
by language, thought in the mind of a speaker that is classified into the
language and sent to a listener who decodes it or a message.
The literal sense consists of taking the words in their most basic meaning,
without metaphors or extensions of the meaning. The figurative meaning
can be considered an extension of the literal meaning. There are 3
important processes of meaning extension:
-metaphor: the sense of expression extends to another concept from a
resemblance. It is a cognitive strategy that allows people to understand
one experiential domain, in terms of another. Example: there is a black
sheep in your family, His heart of stone surprised me.
-metonymy: The meaning extends to another concept through an action.
Example: Hollywood (represents associations with the movie industry),
Booze (represents associations with alcohol or liquor).
-synecdoche: Meaning extends through a part-whole relationship.
Example: "The captain commands one hundred sails" is a synecdoche
that uses "sails" to refer to ships.
Sentences that refer to the same conceptual event can have different
meanings when pronounced in different contexts. Therefore,
pronunciation can change the meaning of a word.
Semantics deals with the meaning of expressions taken in isolation, with
the meaning they have within the language system.
Pragmatics deals with meaning in relation to speakers and listeners in
context.
2.- Semantics
-Homophony: It is where 2 different lexemes share the same phonological
form. These words are said to be homophones.
-Polysemy: It is where identical shapes have related meanings.
-Vagueness: It is the failure to specify meanings.
Synonymy is the relationship of similarity; lexemes related in this way are
synonymous.
Antonymy is the relationship of opposite meaning, the lexemes related in
this way are antonyms. There are gradual antonyms that allow
intermediate degrees between the 2 opposites and non-gradual antonyms
that are polar opposites. Also, there are inverse antonyms that describe
the same relationship from contrasting points of view and inverse
antonyms that describe the contrast in the direction of movements.
Meronymy is the part-whole relationship” door and window are
meronyms of room”.
Hyponymy is where the meaning of one lexeme includes the meaning of
another. A hyponym includes the meaning of a more general word. The
relationship between the hyponym is called the co-hyponym. There is a
difference between the relations of hyponymy and metonymy: the
property of transitivity. Hyponymy is a transitive relationship, but
metonymy is not.

Unit 3: Lexicology
1.- Semasiological and onomasological approaches
Semasiology: is a lexical approach that describes the polysemy of a word
form and the relationship between these various senses. Sometimes the
same shape can actually represent two completely different words
(Homonymy).
Onomasiology: It is an approach to the lexicon that deals with three
different facts: That different words can express similar meanings
(synonymy) that words can express opposite meanings (antonymy) and
that the meanings of groups of words are related in lexical fields that they
name things in the same conceptual domain.
A Theasurus is a book in which words are grouped with other words that
have a related meaning, making it useful for developing onomasological
approaches. Therefore, the onomasological approach is a theasurus
passing from a concept or meanings to the various synonyms that can be
used to denote that concept.
2.- The semiotic triangle: Reference, Form and Meaning.
The semiotic triangle is a linguistic model that shows the relationship
between the three elements of the linguistic sign: form, meaning and
referent.
It is a further elaboration of the opinions of Ferdinand de Saussure, who
introduced 2 terms related to the referent: the form of the word is the
signifier and the signified is the signified.
3.- Radial Networks: Links between senses.

Unit 4: From Idioms to Construction Grammar

1.- Construction Grammar
The cognitive linguistic approach to syntax is called construction grammar.
It arose from the concern to find a place for idiomatic expressions in the
speaker's knowledge of a language grammar.
Construction grammar emphasizes the need to represent linguistic
knowledge in construction form. These concerns caused all grammatical
knowledge to be represented in the same way. Construction grammar
arose as a response to the grammatical knowledge model proposed by the
versions of generative grammar, in which the grammar knowledge of a
speaker is organized into components that describe the dimensions of the
properties of a sentence.
There are 3 components: The phonological, syntactic and semantic.
All versions of Chomsky's grammar have further broken down the
syntactic component as levels and modules.
Apart from these components, there is a lexicon that combines
information from these 3 components. Also, there must be some binding
rules to map information from a component to 8.
Chomsky's position on the generality of syntax and the irrelevance of
constructions for the analysis of grammar complements his view that all
arbitrary aspects of grammar should be restricted to the lexicon.
Chomsky's minimalist theory apparently does away with the internal
organization of the synthetic component and reformulates the
phonological component with an "Articulating - Perceptual Interface" that
links the language faculty with the perceptual - motor system and the
semantic component as a "Conceptual - International Interface "which
links the faculty of language with other human activities.
The relational grammar and the arc-pair grammar included multiple levels
in the syntactic component but retained component separation.
The lexical-functional grammar, the generalized sentence structure
grammar and the categorical grammar reject the concept of multiple
levels but still retain the separation of components.
2.- The Problem of Idioms
Idioms are another class of syntactic phenomena. They are grammatical
units larger than a word that are idiosyncratic in some respects.
Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow provide a definition of an idiom prototype with
a required characteristic and a series of typical characteristics. The
necessary feature is conventionality. Typical traits are Inflexibility,
figuration, proverb, informality, and affection.
Nunberg, Sag, Wasow distinguish between idiomatic combination
expressions in which parts of the idiosyncratic meaning can be matched
with parts of the literal meaning, and idiomatic phrases in which this
correspondence cannot be made.
Idioms can be characterized in many different ways Fillmore proposed
these characteristics:
-The first is the distinction between encoding idioms and decoding.
· An encoding idiom is one that is interpretable by the standard rules for
interpreting sentences, but is arbitrary for this expression with this
meaning.
· A decoding idiom is one that cannot be decoded by the listener: a
listener will not be able to decipher the meaning of the whole at all from
the meaning of the parts of it.
-The second is the distinction between grammar and extragrammatical
idioms.
· Grammatical idioms can be parsed according to the syntactic rules of the
language, but they are semantically irregular.
· Extragrammatical idioms cannot be parsed with language rules.
-The third is the distinction between substantive and formal idioms.
· Substantive idioms are those that fix all the elements of the idiom.
· Formal idioms are idioms in which part of the language can be filled with
the usual range of expressions that are syntactically and semantically
appropriate for space.
-The fourth is the distinction between idioms with a pragmatic point and
without a pragmatic point.
· Idioms with a pragmatic point, in addition to having a meaning in the
usual sense, are also used in certain pragmatic contexts.
· Idioms without a pragmatic point cannot be used in pragmatic contexts.
Fillmore uses these characteristics for a final 3-way categorization of
idioms.
LEXICALLY SYNTACTICALLY SEMANTICALLY
Unfamiliar pieces/ Irregular Irregular Irregular
Unfamiliarly
arranged(certain
words only occur
in idioms)
Familiar Regular Irregular Irregular
pieces/Unfamiliarly
arranged
Familiar pieces/ Regular Regular Irregular
Familiarly arranged
Regular syntactic Regular Regular Regular
expressions

(NO CAE) UNIT 5-LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND MEANING

CROSS-CULTURAL SEMANTICS

1-UNGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND UNIVERSALISM

A try question is whether language influences thought or thought
influences language. Both positions have been advocated. The first is
known as linguistic relativity and the rim position is known as universality.
It assumes that human thought is significantly similar across all cultures
and that since language is a reflection of human thought, all languages are
significantly similar as far as their conceptual categories are concerned.

2-SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
The Sapir Whorf hypothesis explains that it is hard to avoid that different
grammatical categories or different languages invite or compel their
speakers to see the world in distinctive ways. According to Benjamin Lee
Whorf, who coined the term linguistic relativity, we dissect nature along
lines laid down by our native language. Whorf claims that language
influences thought, linguistic patterns really do influence people's patterns
of attention and categorization.

3-SEMANTIC PRIMES AS A KEY TO CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONS

The traditional view of human thought is that of universalism; all people
all over the world basically think in the same way. But since languages are
so different, linguistic concepts in various languages cannot be the same.
However, there are universal concepts that may be the base of our
method of semantic analysis. These concepts are called semantic primes
and can be thought of as universal concepts or as basic "atoms of meaning

4-CULTURAL SCRIPTS
in different societies people not only speak different languages, they also
use them in different ways, following different cultural norms. Cultural
norms of communication are usually described using vague and
impressionistic labels such as "directness", "formality" and "politeness".
They can also lead to ethnocentrism because they are usually not
translatable into the language of the people whose culture is being
described. These problems can be largely overcome if we use semantic
primes to formulate our descriptions of cultural norms of communication.
When cultural norms are described in this way, they are referred to as
cultural scripts.
in Japanese culture one does not say explicitly what one wants but relies
instead on implicit messages in Anglo-American culture one can feel free
to say what one wants, though preferably without "imposing (hence the
frequent use of indirect requests in English) Both contrast with the
forthright instruction" style of the French.