Replenishment of modern English vocabulary

Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

REPLENISHMENT OF MODERN ENGLISH VOCABULARY

L.V. Savateeva, O.M. Muraviova

The article is devoted to the analysis of the modern English language and development of its vocabulary. It is also said about structural and semantic peculiarities of new vocabulary units, ways and means of enriching the vocabulary. One of the main ways of enlarging the lexical system of modern English language is represented by borrowings. The analysis of the latest research shows that the role of borrowings depends on certain development conditions. The appearance of a numerous new words and the development of new meanings in the words already available in the language may be largely accounted for by the rapid flow of events, the progress of science and technology and emergence of new concepts in different fields of human activity. The growth of the vocabulary also reflects the peculiarities of the way of life of the language community in which the new words appear. The obtained results are aimed at further understanding of various means of word- formation, and semantic development of words already available in the language.

Keywords: word-meaning, vocabulary, borrowing, monosemantic, extension, conversion, morpheme.

ПОПОВНЕННЯ СЛОВНИКА СУЧАСНОЇ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ. Л.В. Саватєєва, О.М. Муравйова

Проаналізовано стан сучасної англійської мови та розвиток її словника. Досліджено появу великої кількості нових слів та зміну значень уже існуючих лексичних одиниць, їх структурні та семантичні особливості. Стаття містить матеріал про різноманітні шляхи та засоби збагачення англійського лексичного словника.

Ключові слова: значення слова, словник, запозичення, моносемантичний, розширення, конверсія, морфема.

ПОПОЛНЕНИЕ СЛОВАРЯ СОВРЕМЕННОГО АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА. Л.В. Саватеева, Е.Н. Муравьёва

Проанализированы состояние современного английского языка и развитие его словаря. Исследовано появление большого количества новых слов и замена значений уже существующих лексических единиц, их структурные и семантические особенности. Статья содержит материал о разнообразных путях и способах обогащения английского лексического словаря.

Ключевые слова: значение слова, словарь, заимствование, моносемантический, расширение, конверсия, морфема.

Statement of a problem

It is more or less universally recognized that word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word. These components are usually described as types of meaning. The two main types of meaning that are readily observed are the grammatical and the lexical meanings to be found in words and word-forms. That is why the problem of new vocabulary units, ways and means of enriching the vocabulary is very important.

Review of the latest works and publications

It is useful to acknowledge that many previous authors have pointed out that «English is almost overwhelming in the richness of its vocabulary, estimated to contain more than a million words and to be the world's leader» [1, p. 58].

At the same time, «one of the main way of enlarging the lexical system of the language is represented by borrowings» [2, p. 35-36]. The role of borrowings is different in various languages and it depends on certain development conditions.

Ukrainian scientists investigated that «the number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete, that the development of vocabularies may be described as a process of never-ending growth» [3]. But most linguists give the leading role in replenishment of the English word-stock to word-formation [4]. Productive word-formation is the most effective mean of enriching the vocabulary [5].

The objective and tasks of the article

The objectives of the paper are to concern structural and semantic peculiarities of new vocabulary units, ways and means of enriching the vocabulary. The main tasks of the research are to determine the modern trends in linguistics, to identify the functions of investigated phenomenon (new English words) at language and speech levels. The paper considers the analysis of the modern English language and its historical development.

Presentation of the research material

As has been mentioned elsewhere, no vocabulary of any living language is ever stable but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The changes occurring in the vocabulary are due both to linguistic and non-linguistic causes, but in most cases to the combination of both. Words may drop out altogether as a result of the disappearance of the actual objects they denote, e.g. the OE. wunden-stefna - «a curved-stemmed ship», 3ar - «spear, dart»; some words were ousted as a result of influence of Scandinavian and French borrowings, e.g. the Scandinavian take and die ousted the OE. niman and sweldan, the French army and place replaced the OE. here and staps. Sometimes words do not actually drop out but become obsolete, sinking to the level of vocabulary units used in narrow, specialized fields of human intercourse making a group of archaisms: e.g. billow - «wave», welkin - «sky», steed - «horse», slay - «kill» are practically never used except in poetry; words like halberd, visor, gauntlet are used only as historical terms. Yet the number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete that the development of vocabularies may be described as a process of never-ending growth.

The appearance of a great number of new words and the development of new meanings in the words already available in the language may be largely accounted for by the rapid flow of events, the progress of science and technology and emergence of new concepts in different fields of human activity. The influx of new words has never been more rapid than in the last few decades of this century. The specialized vocabularies of aviation, radio, television, medical and atomic research, new vocabulary items created by recent development in social history - all are part of this unusual influx. Thus war has brought into English such vocabulary items as blackout, fifth-columnist, shock-troops, paratroops, time-bomb, D-day and V-Day; the development of science gave such words as hydroponics, psycholinguistics, immunology, polystyrene, bathysphere, radar, cyclotron, meson, positron; the conquest and research of cosmic space by the people gave birth to sputnik, lunik, babymoon, space-rocket, space-ship, space-suit.

The growth of the vocabulary reflects not only the general progress made by mankind but also the peculiarities of the way of life of the language community in which the new words appear, the way its science and culture tend to develop. The peculiar developments of the American way of life find expression in the vocabulary items like sharecropper - «a tenant farmer who, provided with credit for seed, tools, living quarters, works the land and receives a certain share of the value of the crop»; taxi- dancer - «a girl employed by a dance hall, cafe, cabaret to dance with patrons who pay for each dance»; to job-hunt - «to search assiduously for a job»; the political life of America of to-day gave items like witch-hunt - «the screening and subsequent persecution of political opponents»; ghostwriter - «a person engaged to write the speeches or articles of an eminent personality»; brinkmanship - «a political course of keeping the world on the brink of war»; sit-downer - «a participant of a sit down strike»; to sit in - to remain sitting in available places in a cafe, unserved in protest of Jim Crow Law»; a sitter-in; to neuclearize - «to equip conventional armies with neuclear weapons»; neuclearization; unilateralism; gradualism - «a political course of bit-by-bit, measure-bymeasure, individual-by-individual attack upon the Jim Crow System».

Structurally new vocabulary items represent two types of lexical units: words, e.g. blackout, microfilm-reader, unfreeze, and word-groups, mostly phraseological units, e.g. blood bank - «a place where blood plasms are restored», script-show - «a serial program on radio and television», to button up - «to refrain from speaking», loss leader - «a popular article sold for less than its regular price», atomic pile - «reactor».

Words in their turn comprise various structural types:

a) root-words, e.g. jeep - «a small, light motor vehicle esp. for military use», zebra - «street crossing-place, marked by black and white stripes», to beam - «to direct a broadcast to a particular area», beat - «tired out, exausted», to beef - «to voice complaints»;

b) derived words, such as collaborationist - «one who in occupied territory works helpfully with the enemy», to accessorize - «to provide with dress accessories»;

c) compounds, e.g. corpsman (mil.) - «a member of a hospital squad trained to administer first aid to wounded servicemen», cutback - «a reduction, a decrease», microfilm-reader, air-drop, etc. The analysis of new words for their derivational structure shows a marked predominance of derived and compound words and a rather small number of simple words.

Word-groups comprise a considerable part of vocabulary extension. Structurally, the bulk of the word-groups belongs to the attributive-nominal type built on the A+N and N+N formulas, e.g. frequency modulation, jet engine, magnetic mine, total war; word-groups of verb-adverb type, e.g. to blow up, to tick over, to run in, etc., are represented by an insignificant number.

Word-groups and different types of words are unequally distributed among various lexico-stylistic groups of the vocabulary, with a predominance of one or another type in every group. For example, new words in the field of science are mostly of derived and compound structure but the technical section of the vocabulary extension is characterised by simple and root-words. The greater part of word-groups is found among scientific and technical terms; the political layer of vocabulary is rather poor in word-groups. Besides this peculiar distribution of different types of words, every type acquires its own specific peculiarity in different lexico-stylistic groups of the vocabulary, for example, although derived words are typical both of scientific and technical terms, words formed by conversion are found mostly among technical terms.

New vocabulary units are as a rule monosemantic and most of them are marked by peculiar stylistic value - they primarily belong to the specialized vocabulary of literary and non-literary layers. Neutral words and phrases are comparatively few. Terms, used in various fields of science and technique, make the greater part of new words. In the non-literary layer new words mostly originate as professionalisms, colloquialisms or slang, e.g. fink (sl.) - «an informer, a squealer», noble - «a captain of strike-breakers», doghouse (col.) - «an ignominious state of disfavour», heel - «a double- crosser».

It must be mentioned as a noteworthy peculiarity that new words and word-equivalents in Modern English belong only to the notional parts of speech, to be more exact, only to nouns, verbs and adjectives; of these nouns are most numerous.

The analysis of the extension of the vocabulary of Modern English proves that new vocabulary units do not present genuine creations but are based on elements already available in the language. In other words the vocabulary of present-day English is enriched mainly as a result of the given options:

1) word-formation which alongside with productive types includes some minor ways, such as backderivation and shortening;

2) semantic extension of meaning of existing words which may result in the appearance of homonyms;

3) borrowing from other languages.

Of the three ways, the first two are by far more important.

1. Productive word-formation patterns are the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation (mainly prefixation in verbs and suffixation in nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns), and composition (which includes patterns of proper and derivational compounds that form new nouns and adjectives).

Productive structural patterns of word-formation have a specific distribution in relation to individual lexico-stylistic groups of new words, i.e. certain lexico-stylistic groups are characterized by specific structural patterns, typical only of these groups, for example scientific terms are mostly built with the help of suffixes of peculiar stylistic reference, often of Latin-Greek origin which are scarcely ever used outside this group of words, e.g. suffixes -ite, -ine, -iron, -ics, etc. Thus suffixes -gen, -ogen are productive in biochemical terms, e.g. carcinogen, -in - in chemical terms, e.g. auxin, citrin, lactoflavin, penicillin, -ics - in naming sciences, e.g. dynamics, electronics, geopolitics, psycholinguistics, etc. In comparison with terminological vocabulary items, units of standard-colloquial layer are more often created by affixes of neutral stylistic reference, by conversion and composition.

The correct appraisal of the existing counts of new words registered by the New Words Dictionaries and various Addenda plays its role in enriching the vocabulary of Modern English and would be incomplete if one does not take into account the so-called occasional words. Built on the most productive structural patterns, easily understood and never striking one as «unusual» or «new» they are so numerous that it is virtually impossible to make conversation in Britain to-day, to hear a speech or to read a newspaper without coming across a number of words that are new to the language. The English vocabulary of to-day is teeming with words that remain unrecorded even by the best dictionaries available. The higher the productivity of the word-formation pattern the greater the number of occasional words that can be built on it, the more unlikely it is that they are listed in the dictionaries. It follows that these potential or occasional words are built on the most productive patterns immensely increasing the different layers of the vocabulary, though this does not find any reflection in dictionaries and various Addenda.

Conversion gives another highly productive pattern especially for verbs formed from the corresponding noun-stems. This pattern accounts for a more or less simultaneous appearance of new verbs when new simple nouns are coined. But whereas nouns are, as a rule, listed in Addenda, verbs derived from their stems do not find their way into a dictionary, e.g. the noun sputnik is already listed but to sputnik which appeared almost simultaneously is a non-dictionary word.

Of the minor word-formation means giving rise to a considerable number of new words, we should mention back-derivation and shortening. Many words built by backderivation are typical of the colloquial layer of vocabulary, for example televise from television, to enthuse from enthusiasm, to laze from lazy, to play-act from play-acting, to sight-see from sight-seeing, and to tongue-tie from tongue-tied.

Shortening and blending also play an important role in replenishing present-day vocabulary. Though words of thistype are the result of curtailing words or word-groups the resultant units mainly belong to words of simple structure, e.g. navicert that stands for «navigation certificate», Efta for «European Free Trade Association», mike for «a microphone», lab for «a laboratory». Words of this type should be regarded as one-morpheme words of simple structure.

Shortened words - both lexical abbreviations and clippings - in most cases possess a specific stylistic value - they are either colloquial or belong to specialized vocabularies of terminological character, for example B.W. - «bacteriological warfare», A.R.P. - «air raid precautions», etc.

2. Semantic extension of words already available in the language is a powerful source of qualitative growth and development of the vocabulary though it does not necessarily add to its numerical growth; it is only the split of polysemy that results in the appearance of new vocabulary units that increases the number of words. 1 In this connection it should be remembered that the borderline between a new meaning of the word and its lexical homonym is in many cases so vague that it is often difficult to state with any degree of certainty whether we have another meaning of the original word or its homonym - a new self-contained word, e.g. in the verb to sit in - «to join a group in playing cards» and a newly recorded use of to sit in - «to remain unserved in the available seats in a cafe in protest against Jimcrowism» the meanings are so widely apart that they are definitely felt as homonyms. The same may be said about the new word deal - «a particular policy of administration, especially of economic or politico- economic affairs» that lost all connections with deal - «part», the new word heel (sl.) - «a traitor, double-crosser» and heel - «the back part of a human foot». On the other hand the meaning of the verb freeze - «to immobilize (foreign-owned credits) by legislative measures» and its further penetration into a more general sphere seen in to freeze wages and the correlated compound wage-freeze is definitely felt as a mere development of the semantic structure of the verb to freeze. The same must be said about new meanings of such words as to fade - «to become weaker through fading»; hot 1) «having an elaborate and stimulating jazz rhythm», 2) «just issued» and 3) «dangerous because connected with some crime» as in the phrase hot money; compare also hot necking (sl.); to screen - «to classify by means of standardized test, to select methodically» (the original meaning of the verb to screen - «to separate coal into different sizes», «to pass through a sieve or screen»). All these meanings may serve as further examples of qualitative growth of Modern English vocabulary.

It follows that the main source of qualitative replenishment of the vocabulary is the semantic development of words already existing in the language. Homonymy - the final stage of this process - accounts for a comparatively small group of new words.

3. Borrowing as a means of replenishing the vocabulary of present- day English is of much lesser importance and is comparatively active only in the field of scientific terminology as many terms are often made up of borrowed morphemes, mostly morphemes from classical languages.

As a source of vocabulary extension borrowing takes different shape. It may be subdivided into a) borrowing of morphemes, mainly from Latin and Greek, b) borrowing of actual words, c) loan-translations.

a) Present-day English vocabulary, especially its terminological layers, are constantly enriched by words made up of morphemes of Latin and Greek origin such as words with the morphemes -iron, e.g. mesotron, cyclotron, ignitron, gyrotron, etc., tele-, e.g. telecast, televise, telestar; -in, - scope, e.g. protein, actinomycin, aureomycin, penicillin, iconoscope, oscilloscope, etc.

But though these words consist of borrowed morphemes they cannot be regarded as true borrowings because these words did not exist either in Greek or in Latin word-stock. All of them are actually formed after the patterns of English word-formation. Words of that type can be found in the vocabulary of various languages and reflect as a rule the general progress in science and technology.

Morphemes continue to penetrate into Modern English from other languages through the words that Modern English borrows. This can be exemplified by the Russian suffix -nik which came within the words sputnik, lunnik and has already given a number of hybrids in Modern English, such as beatnik, flopnik, unemployednik, nogoodnik, do-goodnik, nudnik.

b) There are true borrowings from different languages as well. They, as a rule, reflect the way of life, the peculiarities of development of the speech communities from which they come.

The words borrowed from the German language at the time of war reflect the aggressive nature of German fascism, e.g. Blitzkrieg - «aggressive war conducted with lightning-like speed and force», Wehrmacht - «Germany's armed forces», Lebensraum - «living space», Luftwaffe - «the air force of the Third Reich», Herrenvolk - «master people», etc.

As most of these words remain unassimilated in present-day English, they are all the time felt as foreign words and tend to drop out of the language.

c) Loan-translations on the whole are more numerous than true borrowings. They also reflect the peculiarities of the way of life of the countries they come from, but unlike true borrowings they tend to become stable units of the vocabulary, e.g. fellow-traveller, self-criticism, workers' control, Workers' FacuIty, Black-shirt, etc.

language vocabulary replenishment

Conclusion

We can assume that borrowing being the least important, it would be right to conclude that the principal ways of enriching the vocabulary of present-day English are various means of word-formation, and semantic development of words already available in the language.

Список джерел інформації / References

1. Bryant, M. M. (2012), Modern English and its heritage, Lexicon publications, inc., London, 175 p.

2. Кобякова І. К. Креативне конструювання вторинних утворень в англомовному художньому дискурсі: монографія / І. К. Кобякова. - Вінниця: Нова книга, 2007. - 128 с. Kobiakova, I.K. (2007), Creative constructioning of secondary units in English-spoken artistic discourse: Monography [Kreatyvne konstruiuvannia vtorynnykh utvoren v anhlomovnomu hudozhniomu dyskursi: Monohrafia], Nova knyha, Vinnytsia, 128 p.

3. Єнікєєва С. М. Системність і розвиток словотвору сучасної англійської мови: монографія / С. М. Єнікєєва. - Запоріжжя: ЗНУ, 2006. - 303 с. Yenikeeva, S.M. (2006), System and development of modern English word- formation: Monography [Systemnist i rozvytok slovotvoru suchasnoi anhliyskoi movy: Monohrafia], ZNU, Zaporizhia, 303 p.

4. Кочерган М. П. Загальне мовознавство: Монографія / М. П. Кочерган. - К.: Академія, 2006. - 368 с. Kocherhan, M.P. (2006), General linguistics: Monography [Zahalne movoznavstvo: Monohrafia], Akademiya, Kyiv, 386 p.

5. Апресян Ю. Д. Лексическая семантика. Синонимические средства языка / Ю. Д. Апресян. - М.: Наука, 2004. - 367 с. Apresian, Yu.D. (2004), Lexical semantics. Synonimical means of language [Leksicheskaya semantika. Sinonimicheskiye sredstva yazyka], Nauka, Moscow, 367 p.

Размещено на Allbest.ru