F) Colloquial coinages (words and meanings)

Colloquial coinages (nonce-words) are spontaneous and elusive. Nonce-words of a colloquial na­ture are not usually built by means of affixes but are based on certain semantic changes.

“...besides, there is a tact -

(That modern phrase appears to me sad stuff.

But it will serve to keep my verse compact).

(Byron, “Don Juan”)

According to the Oxford Dictionary the meaning of the word tact as used in these lines appeared in the English language in 1804. Byron, who keenly felt any innovation introduced into the literary language of his time, accepts it unwillingly.

“Watching for a moment of weakness she wrenched (рвать, дергать, выкручивать, неправильно истолковывать) it free; then placing the dining-table between them, said between her teeth: You are the limit, Monty.”(“In Chancery”, J. Galsworthy); to be the limit = ‘to be unbearable’.

New coinage in colloquial English awakens as an emphatic protest on the part of literary-conscious people.

The New York Times Magazine:

“ Presently used to mean ‘at the present moment’ but became so completely coloured with idea of ‘in the near future’ that when its older meaning came back into general use after World War II, through re-introduction into civilian speech of the conserva­tive military meaning, many people were outraged and insisted that the old meaning was being corrupted - whereas, in fact, the ‘corruption’ was being purged.

“ Peculiar originally meant “belonging exclusively to”. We still keep the older meaning in such statement as ‘a custom pe­culiar to that country’. But by extension it came to mean ‘uncom­mon’ and thence ‘odd’ with the overtones of suspicion and mistrust that oddness moves us to.”

Some changes in meaning are really striking: nice (уст.притворно-жеманный), knave (подлец, беспринципный человек, мошенник; шутл. плутишка; валет), marshal, fellow (поклонник – ам. разг.)

Bergan Evans, co-author of “A Dictionary of Contemporary Usage” in an article published in The New York Times Book Review shows how the word sophisticated, undoubtedly a word of bookish origin, has devel­oped new meanings:

The word sophisticated originally meant ‘wise’. Then, through its association with the Sophists, it came to mean ‘over-subtle’, ‘marked by specious but falla­cious reasoning’, ‘able to make the worse appear the better reason’. Then it developed the additional, derivative sense of ‘ adulterated’, i.e. ‘spoiled by admixture of inferior material’. This meaning naturally gave birth to a new shade of meaning, viz. ‘corrupted’. Then suddenly (as Evans has it) the attitude implicit in the word was reversed; it ceased to mean unpleasantly worldly-wise and came to mean admirably worldly-wise. For the past fifteen years sophistication has been definitely a term of praise. By 1958 in John O’Hara’s “From the Terrace”, sophistication had come to signify not ‘corruption’ but almost the ‘irreducible’, ‘minimum good manners’.

The word sophisticated from its colloquial use denoting some passive quality started to mean ‘delicately responsive to electronic stimuli’, ‘highly complex mechanically’, ‘requiring skilled control’, ‘extraordinarily sensitive in receiving, interpreting and transmitting signals’. Or at least that is what one must guess it means in such statements as “Modern rea­der is vastly more sophisticated than quaint, old-fashioned reader”. (Time); “the IL-18 is aeronautically more sophisticated than the giant TU-114.” and “The Antikythera mechanism is far more sophisticated than any described in classical scientific texts.” (Scientific American).

Colloquial nonce-words can acquire a new significance and a new stylistic evaluation. They are then labelled as slang, colloquial, vulgar or something of this kind.

Nonce-coinage appears in all spheres of life. They may become permanent and generally accepted terms, or they may re­main nonce-words, as, for example, hateships used by John O’Hara in “Ten North Frederic.”

The contextual meanings of words may be called nonce-meanings: t hus, the word ‘opening’ in the general meaning of a way in the sentence “This was an opening and I followed it”, is a contextual meaning which may or may not in the long run become one of the dictionary meanings.

Литература:

1. Знаменская Т.А. Стилистика английского языка. Основы курса. М., 2004.

2. Мороховский А.Н. Cтилистика английского языка. Киев, 1989.

3. Galperin I.R. Stylistics. M., 1977.

4. Kucharenko V.A. A Book of Practice in Stylistics. M., 1986.

5. Skrebnev Y.M. Fundamentals of English. М., 1994.

Lecture 3.

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