Лексикология современного английского языка

Task 1. Discuss the following groups of words from the point of view of their meaning (denotational and connotational components).

a) Joke, jest, witticism, gag, wisecrack.

b) Fat, stout, plump.

c) Friend, crony, buddy, companion.

d) Stubborn, mulish, obstinate.

e) Abridged, shortened, epitomized.

f) Lament, mourn, deplore, grieve for.

It is very important to distinguish between the lexical meaning of the word in speech and its semantic structure in language. The meaning in speech is contextual. (“Any woman will love any man who bothers her enough”. H. Philipps.)

Polysemy does not interfere with the communicative function of the language because in every particular case the situation and context cancel all the unnecessary meanings and make the speech unambiguous.

Task 2. Analyze the following sets of sentences.

a) He bought a chair at the furniture store. He was condemned to the chair. Please address the chair. He will chair the meeting. He was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the university.

b) My father came. Father Murphy came. He was the father of the idea.

c) The horse runs. The man runs. The water runs. The tap runs. His nose runs. He ran his business well.

d) He charged the battery. He charged them to do their duty. The judge charged him with the crime.

In “Through the Looking Glass” Lewis Carroll makes Humpy Dumpy say the following:

“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

Task 3. Discuss this statement. What are its linguistic implications?

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Task 1. Read the passage given below, make a plan and comment on it.

William Bright

University of Colorado

What is a Name? Reflections on Onomastics

“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing you a song to comfort you.”

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day. “It’s long,” said the Knight, “but very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it – either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else – ” “Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks Eyes’.”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested. “No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man’.” “Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself. “No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!” “Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”

Many books and articles have taken as their title the famous line from Shakespeare’s.

Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” I choose to raise a slightly different question:

“What is a name?” – not to answer the question definitively, of course, but simply to focus attention on some aspects of the problem. In doing so, I also want to focus attention on the field of onomastics, understood as the study of names. Such study is, in fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including linguistics, ethnography, folklore, philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship. In Europe, especially in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness the three-volume encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there.

By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a scholarly field at all. To be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society, which publishes a small journal called “Names,” but only a few linguists belong to the society, and most linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the journal. I myself have been interested in onomastics since my student days, and I have published articles in the journal “Names”; but even so, in 1992, when I edited the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, it never occurred to me to plan for an article on names. Fortunately, the forthcoming second edition of that encyclopedia will repair my omission.