LEXIC AND LEXICOLOGY

Lexicography: principles and pratices applied to the writing of dictionaries

Lexicology: nature, meaning, and use of the vocabulary
Morphology: derivational and inflectional + word formation process
Semantics: study of the meaning of words

There are different concepts and terms related to the use of lexis:
 Lexis
Words Terms
 Lexemes Lemma Entry
 Vocabulary Dictionary Lexicon

The dynamic nature of Lexix

Dynamic it changes over time and over history and this means has lot of innovation. Lexis is the level of
language most rapidly and deeply affected by social, historical and cultural change. There are three process of
lexical innovation:
1. Coinage the creation of completely new words that didn’t exist before. This is related to scientific and
technical integration e.g. computing terms google (search through Google engine) (science and
technology).
2. Borrowing the borrowing of words from other languages (loanwords) e.g. Anglicism in Italian (spam)
(in various fields, from dominant languages)
3. Word formation processes (morphology) internal to the language e.g. “to zap” from “moving quickly”
to “keeping changing TV programmes with a remote control”.

Word formation process

Derivational morphology the process of forming new words from already existing ones:
1.Affixation: the addition of affixes to words. They can be
- Prefixes: prefix+word e.g. unhappy, irreal, impossible, endanger
- Infixes: not in English but in other languages
- Suffixes: word+suffix e.g helpful, happiness, Egyptology, kingdom
Inflectional deals with changes in the form of words that have grammatical meaning.
E.g -er for comparative adjective; -est signals the superlative of adjectives
Derivational morphology deals with the process of new word formation.
E.g help unhelpful (chapter 4) Derivational morphemes are productive

2.Neoclassical combinig: of Greek or Latin origin, in initial position such as mini-, multi- e.g minivan,
multitasking or in final position as -crat, phile e.g. bureaucrat, Europhile.
3.Clipping/ Shortening: e.g. sit-com for situation comedy, flu for influenza, Lise for Elizabeth, Will for
William;
4.Blending: the fusion of two words into one such as Brunch from Breakfast+ lunch; Bexit from
Britain+exit, docutainment from documentary+entertainment, fandom from fan+kingdom, smog
(smoke+fog)
5.Semantic shift: the change of meaning of an existing lexeme e.g. verb zap from the meaning of moving
quickly to that of keeping changing tv programmes with a remote control; mail (from post mail to
internet email).

6.Compounding: e.g. jet lag, screen saver, paperback, country hall, classroom, policeman, businessman
es. MIO: Identity card, Green Pass,
Most frequent forms:
 - N+N= N Adj+N= N Green tea,
- Adj+Adj= Adj bitter-sweet N+Adj= Adj user-friendly
- V+V= V stir-fry V+particle= N handout
- V+particle= V dropout
NB 1: meaning is not straightforward!
- Endocentric meaning: I have a night flight (We can’t get immediately the meaning);
- Exocentric meaning: I bought a paperback book (We can distinguish which word is the Head and
which is the modifier).
NB 2: Noun Phrase versus compounding
- You can play the green card instead of the blue one.
- My friend finally managed to get the Green Card (permesso di soggiorno negli USA)

7.Conversion: the change of grammatical class without any formal change (functional shift or zero-
derivation), e.g. download and update can be both nouns and verbs and their grammatical role will be
made evident in context.
- N to V, e.g. from ‘bottle’ to ‘to bottle’.
- V to N, e.g. from ‘to dump’ (to throw away waste) to ‘dump’ (the place where rubbish is
deposited); from “to run” to “a run”
8.
9.Acronyms: new words formatted from the initial letters of a set of other words.
- CD= compact disk
- VCR= video cassette recorder
- AIDS= acquired immune deficiency syndrome
- FBI=
- BBC
- ADSL=
- COVID19= Corona Virus infective disease

How do words enter the languages?

How are new words collected? How are new words chosen for inclusion in dictionaries? Oxford English’s
strategy:
- Running directed and voluntary reading programmes.
- Analysing the content of published historical dictionaries, especially ones written to describe a
variety of English.
- Searching through large databases of historical and modern text
- Asking for responding to contributions from the public
- Automated monitoring and analysis of massive databases of language in use.

Word of the year tradition (OED)

COVID-19, Coronavirus, Lockdown, Social-distancing, Pandemic, Quarantine.

Meaning is complex
The arbitrariness of the sign:
- There is no ‘natural’ connection between a linguistic form and its meaning.
- There is no fixed or unified mental representation of ‘words’ and ‘things’.
- Some words imitate sounds (onomatopoeic) but most words have an arbitrary connection with
“things”
- English examples are cuckoo, Crash, slurp, squelch or whirr

Defining word meaning may prove difficult.

William Shakespeare is (that’s depend on our prospective and depending on the context sometimes):
- A famous English playwrite of the 16th century
- The greatest playwrite of all times
- The author of Hamplet, Romeo and Juliet and many other tragedies
- The father of British theatre
- A writer of the Modern English period
- My favourite dramatist

Defining the adjective “honest”. The meaning of words can be culturally conditioned.
- A person who is honest does not tell lies, cheat people or violate the law
- A person who is honest always tells the truth, respects other people, obeys the law and pays taxes

Defining the noun “bird”

A bird is:
- An animal with the body covered in /with feathers, with two wings and a beak, which is able to fly.
Female birds lay eggs
- An animal with feathers, two legs and two wings, which is able to fly (sparrow, robin, lark, pigeon)

But what about penguins and ostriches?

 We conceive a general image, a mental PROTOTYPE based on our experience and containing the most
distinctive characteristics of the class. Some members are less central than others.

“Butterfly”
- Butterflies live only one day
- She is a butterfly when she daces (metaphorical).
 Words denote object and concepts, but may have emotional or stylistic connotations.
 Words can be used in a figurative sense (metaphorical)

What does knowing a word mean? (p.188 libro)

Native speakers’ knowledge about words, or lexical competence:
- Receptive or passive: words that we recognize when we hear or read them;
- Productive or active: words that we currently use.
 Receptive competence is broader (più ampia) than productive competence.

Lexical competence
abilities to pronounce the words and to spell it. Also involves the ability to identify the parts and their
grammatical functions, understand the referents or conceptual/connotative meaning(s), be aware of the
network of sense relations it is part of (e.g. synonyms and antonyms); know what grammatical pattern/s it
occurs in and what other words it can or must ‘collocate’ with; be aware of where, when and how often it is
used in communication e.g. whether in formal or informal contexts with low or high frequency.

Denotation and connotation

- Conceptual meaning meaning conveyed (trasportato) by the literal use of a word. (denotational
meaning) it is the same meaning (like the one in the dictionary) E.g. needle in English might include ‘thin,
sharp, steel instrument’.
- Associative meaning connotational meaning that may differ from one person to another or from one
culture to another (connotation meaning) e.g. ‘pain’, or ‘illness’, or ‘blood’, or ‘drugs’ or ‘thread’, or
‘knitting’, or ‘hard to find’.
Lexical relations:
Monosemous and polysemous words
Monoreferential One words that refers to only one entity or has only one referent and they have one
specific object and one specific concepts. E.g. the computer is an electronic machine which is used for storing,
organizing and finding different types of information. “THE SONNET”
Polysemous words that express several and related meanings. Those words may acquire a specialized
meaning and become monoreferential in a specific context. (the word head has a different meaning
depending on the context)
- Cutting heads was so common during the dark ages
- He is the head of the department
- The head of a glass of beer
- Europe (continent, community)
- Cool (beauty as Adj, refreshing, cool down as Verb all of them as a positive meaning)

SEMANTIC RELATIONS
 Homophones and homonyms
Homophones when two or more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation (bare/beat,
meat/meet, flour/flower, pail/pale, right/write, sew/so and to/too/two).
Homonyms one form (spoken or written) and this has two or more UN-related meanings
- bank (of a river)- bank (financial institution)
- bat (flying creature)- bat (used in sports)
- pupil (at school)- pupil (in the eye)
- race (contest of speed)- race (ethnic group)
- Coach (the man)-(the sofa)- (a kind of a bus)

 Metonymy when we use one word to refer to another one. It comes in various relations:
1. Container-contest relation: bottle/water, can/juice (he drank the whole bottle)
2. Whole-part relation: car/wheels, house/roof (giving someone a hand/ filling up the car)
3. Representative-symbol relationship: king/crown, the President/the white House (the White House
has announced/ Downing Street protested)

 Synonymy two or more words with very closely related meanings. They can often, though not
always, be substituted for each other in sentences.
- What was his answer? What was his reply?
- Sandy had only one answer current on the test
- *Sandy had only one reply correct on the test.

Same has the same meaning but cannot be used in the same context:
- Almost/nearly, big/large
- Broad/wide, buy/purchase
- Cab/taxi, car/automobile
- Couch/sofa, freedom/liberty.

 Antonomy two forms with opposite meanings

- Alive/dead, big/small, fast/slow
- Happy/sad, hot/cold, long/short
- Male/female, married/single
- Old/new, rich/poor, true/false.
My car isn’t old, doesn’t necessarily mean that My car is new.
 Hyperonymy or hyponymy when the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of
another.
E.g. flowers, roses, daffodils, violets, tulips, daisies.

Collocations, idioms and phraseology (PRENDERE DA LIBRO) (Phraseological phenomena)

“Words keep company with other words”.
We know which words tend to occur with other words, it is part of native speakers’ knowledge about
language.
Words collocate together i.e, they tend to be used together rather than with other words
• to do research rather than *to make research
• fully booked rather than *completely booked
• Heavy rain rather than *strong rain

Some collocations turn into fixed expressions or idioms

• How do you do?
• The ups and downs of life (not *the downs and ups)
• He has spilled the beans (not *spilled the peas)
 I’m dead tired
 Go to Duch (pagare alla romana)
Semantic fields
• The lexis of an area of reality or knowledge in a more extended way
• The use of various words that belong to the same field
• The semantic field of sport, e.g. player, team, coach, fans, athlete, competition
• The semantic field of linguistics, e.g. language, phoneme, transcription, syllable
• The semantic field of medicine, e.g. patient, physician, nurse, blood test, virus
• The semantic field of education, e.g. teacher, student, assignment, exam, lecture
. The semantic field of Astronomy, e.g. Universe, space, horizon, scientist, stella, Milky Way, galaxy, gravity

Where are words stored? Mental Lexicon

 A question for psycholinguists, neurolinguists
 Words are stored in speakers’ minds together with all information about language.
 Unlike most dictionaries, our mental word stock is not sored in alphabetical order but through
complex networks of a different nature, which include meaning and syntactic combination, form and
sound.

How many words can speaker knows depends on variables such as age and education and use (receptive or
productive)
Where are words stored? Dictionaries
Types of Dictionaries:
1. The number of languages they cover, i.e. monolingual, bilingual or multilingual dictionaries;
2. The number of lemmas they include:
- ‘unabriedged’ (ingludinf the words of a language), middle-size college, desk dictionaries/pocket
dictionaried.
3. The approach:
- Diachronic i.e. providing information on the history and etymology of words;
- Synchronic i.e. focusing mainly on the language of a specific period.
4. Areas of language covered:
General language that covers general area, specialized areas of knowledge (e.g. business, science,
technology and medicine), specific linguistic areas (e.g. pronunciation, abbreviation, neologisms,
collocations, idiom and proverbs)
5. Addressees: (native vs learner’ dictionaries)
 6. Attitude towards new words, foreign words, slang expressions and taboo form like swearwords and
insults (descriptive vs prescriptive)
7. The focus on ‘words’ rather than on ‘things’ (dictionaries vs encyclopaedias);
8. Organization: alphabetical order or semantic fields, i.e. the so-called thesauri (give a series of
synonymous instead of giving the explanation).
9. Type of publication: paper format versus electronic format (e.g. CD-ROMs or online)

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary 1755 is considered the 1st English dictionary. Includes about 42.000
entries. Main objectives: “preserve the purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom […] one great
end of this undertaking is to fix the English language”.

The Oxford English Dictionary on historical principles, OED, unabridged: the 20 volume 1989 edition.
The project started in the second half of the 19th century
It covers English since the 14th century. It also includes the early form of English form.
The second print edition in 20 volumes + 4 additions has 616,500 headwords and derived……… SLIDES

OED: a selection from the entry for “spaghetti”

Merriam-Webster’s: the American counterpart to OED

It covers American English since the 18th century ……….. SLIDES

Lexical frequencies: Corpora

 A corpus is a collection of naturally-occurring texts available in machine-readable form and assumes to
be representative of a given language, or a particular register of it.
 Corpora are the repertoire where words can be searched for and studied. E.g: The British National
Corpus (BNC)
 Corpus linguistics: the linguistic study of corpora in search for specific lexical, semantic, structural etc.
features.
 Computational tools: specific software programs to obtain information on a language on a large scale
and in a more systematic and reliable way than through manual search or subjective intuition.

The mixed nature of English lexis: Germanic vs Romance words:

 PDE is made of a core (c. 40%) of high-frequency Germanic words that are usually short and refer to
common “things”, action and concepts (e.g. man, woman, day, child, bread, to go, to get, phrasal
verbs) monosyllabic words
 A wider component (c.60%), of less frequently used words of classical or Romance origin which are
usually longer and used in specialised or formal context (e.g. encyclopaedia, tonsillectomy,
parliament, infrastructure)

Germanic/Romance near-synonyms
Discover (Roman origin) Columbus discovered a new continent
Find out (verbal) Her parents found out that she had a boyfriend.

Continue (roman origin) the treatment has to be continued for 4 weeks

Go on; Keep going (verbal) we can’t go on like this any longer.

Abandon
Give up
Pig/cow living animal
Pork/beefthe meat you eat

Regal, royal royal family, regal powers

Kingly kingly manner

Return
Come back

“Good” and “false friends” with Italian

Similarity may help
e.g. problem, result, company, million, community
Similarity may be misleading
e.g. actually, eventually, argument, factory, educated, lecture, library, magazine, major, agenda.
- Well actually, John, I rang you for some advice.
- The issue has caused heated political argument.

English loans Italian and other European languages

From a “borrowing language” English has become a “donor language”. Why?
In present-day Italian there are many different types of Anglicisms and people have different attitudes to this
phenomenon. What is happening in other languages?
Comment on the following anglicism in Italian. Do they have an Italian counterpart? Film, management,
briefing, week-end, pub, scanner, mouse, computer, report, boom.

User-related variation
British and American lexical variation e.g. geographical area (GB, USA, etc), age, education
1. He lives in a lovely apartment in New York AmE/ flat BrE
2. The autumn term will start in September BrE/ fall AmE
3. Where can I find a gas station? AmE/ petrol BrE
4. 9/11/2001 AmE / 11/9/2001 BrE
5. I has some good marks in the last term AmE / grades BrE
6. I miss my secondary school friends/ high school BrE
7. Hall of residence AmE /dormitory BrE

Use related variation: field and Mode

Field the use of specialized vocabulary
Related to occupational, scientific, technological, artistic, etc. areas
Tonsillectomy is needed used by specialist for example doctors
Doctor, I have to remove/to take out your tonsils out used by common people

Avian influenza broke out last year specialized word used by doctors and specialists
Bird flu broke out last year used by common people

Mode refers to the channel or medium used (e.g. spoken/written, electronic language, mixed forms)
Think about the following use of language:
Poem, lyrics
Political speech, sermons
University lecture, thesis defence
Social media chat language
Newspaper and magazine advertisement pages
- Many things have contributed to the spread of English
- Many factors have contributed to the spread of English
- This chapter is about the English lexicon
- This chapter deal with the English lexicon.

Core/basic vocabulary
Choose the most neutral and general lexeme to refer to someone
“who has very little fat on his/her body”
With the help of dictionaries, identify the differences in meaning
- Emaciated  abnormally thin or weak, especially because of illness or a lack of food
- Skinny (of a person or part of their body) Unattractively thin (skinny arms)
- Slender (of a person or part of the body) gracefully thin: her slender neck
- Lean (of a person or animal) especially healthily so; having no superfluous fat: his lean, muscular body
- Slim (of a person or their build) gracefully thin; slender: her slim figure
- Think having little, or too little, flesh or fat on the body: a thin, gawky adolescent

Words and culture

There is a link between the structure and the character of a language and the spirit of the nation
The language we speak constrains our world view

Words reflect changes in society