Theoretical Principles of the Vocabulary Study

The GENERAL PROBLEM of the THEORY of the WORD

Plan:

1. Theoretical principles of the study of the vocabulary.

2. The word as a speech unit. The phonetic, grammatical and

semantic characteristics of the word.

3. Word and phrase.

4. The notion of lexical system.

5. Modern methods of a structural study of meaning.

6. The application of statistic methods in language study.

Theoretical Principles of the Vocabulary Study

As we know the aim of lexicology is the study of words. Words are not only the units of the vocabulary but also the main units of language. But we haven’t a definition of the word which could combine in itself all its main features. The cause lies in the fact that word being the association of sounding and meaning is a focus in which the problem of linguistics, philosophy and psychology are gathered. Being a fundamental unit of language, word is a very complicated unity of grammatical and lexical meaning.

The important point to be remembered about definitions is that they should indicate the most essential characteristic features expressed by the term under discussion, the features by which this notion is distinguished from other similar notions.

e.g. in defining the word one can distinguish it from other linguistic units such as the phoneme, the morpheme or the word-group.

The definition of the word is a very hard task because even the simplest word has many different aspects. It has a sound form (as a certain arrangement of phonemes), its morphological structure (being also a certain arrangement of morphemes), when used in actual speech it may occur in different word-forms and single various meanings:

e.g. It was a dull winter evening.

It was a dull knife which he couldn’t use.

He is a dull boy. (dense)

All attempts to characterize the word are necessarily specific for one domain of science and are considered one-sided and criticized for incompleteness.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), an English philosopher revealed a materialistic approach to the problem when he wrote that “words are not mere sounds but names of matter”.

Henry Sweet and later L. Bloomfield defined it as “the minimum sentence “, “a minimum free form”. This is a syntactical definition.

E. Sapir, an American linguist, takes into consideration the syntactic and semantic aspects when he calls the word ”one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated meaning, into which the sentence resolves itself”

(in Russian: «слово есть одно из мельчайших, самодовлеющих кусочков изолированного смысла, к которому сводится предложение»).

Sapir also points out one more very important characteristic of the word, its indivisibility. “It cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning”.

e.g. a lion and alive. A lion is a word-group, because we can separate its elements and insert other words between them

(a dead lion). Alive is a word. It is indivisible, i.e. structurally impermeable: nothing can be inserted between its elements.

The eminent French linguist A. Meillet gave the following definition of the word: “A word is defined as the association of a given meaning with a given group of sounds susceptible of a given grammatical employment”. We can only add that word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone.

The weak point of all definitions mentioned above is that they do not establish the relationship between language and thought. We treat the word as a dialectical unity of form and content in which the form is the spoken or written expression which calls up a specific meaning, whereas the content is the meaning rendering the emotion or concept in the mind of the speaker which he intends to convey to his listeners.

To reflect many-sided character of the word our scientists give not the definition but the description of a word.

The problem of creating a word theory based upon the materialistic understanding of the relationship between word and thought, on the one hand and language and society on the other hand, has been one of the most discussed for many years.

Conclusion

The word is one of the fundamental units of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content. Its content or meaning is not identical to notion, but it may reflect human notions, and in this sense may be considered as the form of their existence. Notions, fixed in the meaning of words are formed as generalized and approximately correct reflections of reality, therefore in signifying them, words reflect reality in their content.

The acoustic aspect of the word serves to name the objects of reality, not to reflect them. In this sense the word may be regarded as a sign. However, this sign is not arbitrary (произвольный) but motivated by the whole process of its development. It means that when a word first comes into existence it is always build out of the elements already existing in the language and according to the existing patterns, otherwise it cannot be understood and will be useless in the process of communication. A word consists of phonemes which fall into morphemes.

A morpheme is also an association of a given meaning with a given pattern. But unlike a word it is not autonomous. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. They are not divisible into smaller meaningful units. The term morpheme is derived from Greek - morphe (form), eme – suffix, denoting the smallest linguistic unit.

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