Task 8 Exercise # Answer the questions with short and definite statements

Exercise # 2 Answer the questions with short and definite statements

1. 
   Word is the smallest language unit.
   
2. 
   Classification of the word according to meaning.
   
3. 
   The difference between polysemy and homonymy.
   
4. 
   Structural classification of words.
   
5. 
   Lexical typology of words according to its structure.
   
6. 
   Lexical typology of words according to its meaning.
   
7. 
   Lexical typology of borrowings.
   
8. 
   Lexical typology of phraseology.
   
9. 
   Lexical typology of proverbs and sayings.
   

1. 
   Word is the smallest unit of syntax that has distinctive meaning and can occur by itself. (He is a good student. This sentence has five words.) To syntax, words make sentences while to morphology, word has internal structure and has different inflectional forms.
   
2. 
   This handout contains a brief explanation of homonymy and polysemy. It is intended to supplement the discussion on pages 130-132 of the textbook, not replace it.
   

• A word is polysemous if it can be used to express different meanings. The difference between the meanings can be obvious or subtle.

• Two or more words are homonyms if they either sound the same (homophones), have the same spelling (homographs), or both, but do not have related meanings.

• In other words, if you hear (or read) two words that sound (or are written) the same but are not identical in meaning, you need to decide if it’s really two words (homonyms), or if it is one word used in two different ways (polysemy). • The only real way we have of telling the two apart is by applying our judgement.

There are no tests that can tell them apart in a foolproof manner. Still, for many cases this is enough.

• There are, however, many other cases for which this decision is not clear. This doesn’t mean that they are both or halfway between each; that makes no sense, because a word can’t be both one word and two words. Rather, it means that one of the following options holds:

1. Different speakers treat the word differently. It might be one word for me but two for you.

2. We are dealing with two homonyms, but there is enough overlap between them.

3. We are dealing with one word whose different uses are relatively far enough apart.

3. 
   English has four major word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They have many thousands of members, and new nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are often created. Nouns are the most common type of word, followed by verbs. Adjectives are less common and adverbs are even less common.
   

Many words belong to more than one word class. For example, book can be used as a noun or as a verb; fast can be used as an adjective or an adverb:

It’s an interesting book. (noun)

We ought to book a holiday soon. (verb)

He loves fast cars. (adjective)

Don’t drive so fast! (adverb)

4. 
    Lexical categories are classes of words (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), which differ in how other words can be constructed out of them. For example, if a word belongs to a lexical category verb, other words can be constructed by adding the suffixes -ing and -able to it to generate other words.
   

Lexical categories are of two kinds: open and closed. A lexical category is open if the new word and the original word belong to the same category. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open lexical categories. In contrast, closed lexical categories rarely acquire new members. They include conjunctions (e.g., and, or, but), determiners (e.g., a, the), pronouns (e.g., he, she, they), and prepositions (e.g., of, on, under). The creation of different grammatical forms of words is called inflection.

5. 
   Comparing word-forms of one and the same word we observe that besides grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning to be found in them. Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms of the word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word.
   

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical components of meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of meaning, but rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, e.g., may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the world plurality; it may also be expressed in the forms of various words irrespective of their lexical meaning, e.g. boys, girls, joys, etc. The concept of relation may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word relation and also by any of the prepositions, e.g. in, on, behind, etc. (cf. the book is in/on, behind the table). “

It follows that by lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other. That can be also observed in the semantic analysis of correlated words in different languages. E.g. the Russian word сведения is not semantically identical with the English equivalent information because unlike the Russian сведения the English word does not possess the grammatical meaning of plurality which is part of the semantic structure of the Russian word.

6. 
   There is a large amount of previous research on loanwords in individual languages, but the Loanword Typology project is the first research project that attempts to shed light on lexical borrowing in general by adopting a typological approach.1 This chapter defines and discusses some of the basic notions required for such an endeavor, and raises some of the most important issues. A broadly comparative (and ideally world-wide) perspective is essential if we want to go beyond the descriptive goal of identifying particular loanwords and their histories, towards the goal of explaining (at least partially) why certain words but not other words have been borrowed from one language into another language. To be sure, there are many simple cases of culturally motivated borrowing where a cultural importation is accompanied by a lexical importation in a straightforward way, e.g. Quechua borrowing plata ‘money’ from Spanish, or English borrowing kosher from Yiddish. But even in such seemingly unproblematic cases, there is always the question why a borrowing had to take place at all, because all languages have the means to create novel expressions out of their own resources. Instead of borrowing a word, they could simply make up a new word. And of course there are many other cases where it is not at all clear why a language borrowed a word from another language, because a fully equivalent word existed beforehand. Thus, French had no need to borrow blanc ‘white’ from Franconian (because Latin had albus ‘white’), and English had no need to borrow window from Old Norse (because Old English had an equivalent word eagþyrel).
   
7. 
   In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units (often collectively referred to as phrasemes), in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than or otherwise not predictable from the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’.
   

Ex.3

1. 
   Borrowing –
   
2. 
   Separate – origin
   
3. 
   Dependent – independent
   
4. 
   Irrelevant – proper
   
5. 
   Semi-bound – negative
   
6. 
   Bound – full