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Question 1

What is lexicology?

Answer 1

a continually growing branch of linguistics defined as a diachronic and synchronic study of the from and structure, origin and development, referential and contextual meaning and usage of words. the main task of lexicology is to provide the theoretical basis for lexicography

Question 2

What is lexicography?

Answer 2

the main task of lexicology is to provide the theoretical basis for lexicography - the art of making dictionaries.

Question 3

How many kinds of lexicology are there?

Answer 3

three, they are:
- general lexicology
- special lexicology
- contrastive lexicology

Question 4

General lexicology is:

Answer 4

the study of words and vocabulary of a language irrespective of its specific features.

Question 5

Special lexicology is:

Answer 5

a study of words which devotes its attention to the description of the peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language.

Question 6

Contrastive lexicology is:

Answer 6

when the vocabularies of different languages are compared and described.

Question 7

Who is the father of modern lingustics?

Answer 7

Ferdinand de Saussure

Question 8

What did Ferdinand de Saussure do for linguistics?

Answer 8

he made a fundamental distinction between “synchronic” and “diachronic” linguistics.

Question 9

Synchronic or descriptive lexicology is:

Answer 9

the study of the words and the vocabulary of a given language at a given stage of its development. A “state” of a language vocabulary is described, disregarding whatever lexical changes might be taking place.

Question 10

Diachronic or historical lexicology:

Answer 10

traces the words to their earliest determinable base, discusses the origin of various words,their change and development through time and investigates the linguistic and extralinguistic forces that modify their structure, usage and meaning of words.

Question 11

What is sociolinguistics?

Answer 11

the branch of linguistics which best studies all these aspects of the relationship between language and society, that is the causal relations between the way the language works and develops and the facts of social life.

Question 12

What is syntax?

Answer 12

Syntax is the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language. *

Question 13

Distinguish between semantics and pragmatics.

Answer 13

• Semantics: system and the study of meaning in a language.
• Pragmatics: Deals with the contextual meaning of words. The words are studied from the point of view of the users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter when using words in social interaction, and the effects their use of words has on the other participants in the act of communication.

Question 14

What is the etymology of “etymology” ?

Answer 14

“Etumon” (ἔτυμον): This word means “true sense” or “true meaning.”
“Logia” (λογία): This word means “study” or “knowledge.”

Question 15

Discuss the relationship between lexicology and lexicography.

Answer 15

Lexicology is a continually growing branch of linguistics defined as the synchronic and diachronic study of the form and structure, origin and development, referential and contextual meaning and usage of words. Its main task is to create a technical base for lexicography: the art of making dictionaries.

Question 16

What is a word?

Answer 16

A word is a major linguistic unit, stable and intuitively recognizable unit which belongs to the morphological, and to the syntactic and lexical levels of analysis.

Question 17

What is a:
-lexeme
-word form
-citation
-grammatical words and examples

Answer 17

• a lexeme is a fundamental abstract unit of the lexicon of the language.
  -word form is the phonological or graphic realisation of the lexeme
• citations are the basic forms appearing as headwords of dictionary entries
  -grammatical words are the representations of the lexemes associated with morpho-syntactic properties such as: noun, verb, adjective; number, tense, gender

Question 18

What is a morpheme and syllable?

Answer 18

the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words. It’s impossible to try to analyze a morpheme into its constituents because it will lose its meaning.

Syllables are groupings of sounds for the purposes of articulation.

Question 19

Morph and allomorph?

Answer 19

Morph: discrete unit, a physical form representing some of the morphemes in a language. (morpheme used to express indefiniteness in English - a, an)
Allomorph: when different morphs represent the same morpheme and they are grouped together. (-s (s,z,iz) (-ed(d,t,id)

Question 20

We classify a set of morphs as allomorphs if they are in __________?

Answer 20

• complementary distribution (if they never occur in the same contexts but instead divide up some set of contexts between them and of course, they should represent the same meaning or grammatical function.

Question 21

When do we say that a phoneme is phonologically conditioned?

Answer 21

When a morpheme has several allomorphs and the allomorph selected to represent the morpheme in a particular context is one whose phonological properties are similar to those of sounds found in its neighborhood.
(example: cats, dogz, judgiz)

Question 22

Assimilation and their division:

Answer 22

-Assimilation is a phonological process in which a sound becomes more like a neighboring sound, usually a neighboring phoneme.
Progressive - if moving to the right, when the affix agrees with the root
Regressive- if moving to the left, when the consonant of the root tends to agree with the affix. (knife - knives)

Question 23

Grammatically conditioned allomorph:

Answer 23

grammatically conditioned allomorphy is when the form of a morpheme changes based on the grammatical rules or structure of the language in which it appears.
cats
dogz
judgiz

Question 24

Lexically conditioned allomorph:

Answer 24

an allomorph is lexically conditioned if its use is obligatory in the presence of a specific lexical word. (ex. realisation of plural in English)
* however this rule fails for the plural morpheme of the word ox - oxen.)
the choice of allomorph -en is lexically conditioned
* the allomorphy in the irregular past tense verbs in English, the change of the root vowel swim/swam; hang/hung is also lexically conditioned.

Question 25

Orthographically conditioned allomorph:

Answer 25

Orthographically conditioned allomorphy focuses on variations in written forms rather than variations in pronunciation, .
*silent E
ex. compete - competing
When we take the -ing suffix off the respective gerunds or present participles what remain. It’s called orthographically conditioned because it has to do with the not spelling of the letter “e”.

Question 26

Free morpheme and bound morpheme?

Answer 26

-Free: can contitute a word by itself (monomorphemic word)
-Bound: must be attached to another element (polymorphemic word)

Question 27

Base, root, stem?

Answer 27

-Base: the basic part of the polymorphemic word.
-Root: the base form of a word which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. Semantically; the root carries the main component of meaning in a word. Historically: it’s the earliest form of a word.
-Stem: is that part of the word to which inflectional affixes are attached, it may consist of:
*simple stem (single root morpheme) boy\
*compound stem (two root morphemes) boyhood
*complex stem (root morpheme + derivational affix)
unmanly

Question 28

affix, prefix, suffix, infix?

Answer 28

-Affix is the added part in the morpheme
Depending on their position they are divided into:
*prefixes added to the beginning of the base
*suffixes added to the end of the base (most common in English)
*infixes occur within base
Furhermore: suffixes are divided into:
*derivational - marks grammatical categories (-s in boys)
*inflectional - creates new lexemes (hood in boyhood)

Question 29

Lexical and grammatical morphemes?

Answer 29

*Lexical: morphemes used for the construction of new words (lexemes) in a language such as in compound words (boy+friend=boyfriend) and derivational affixes such as pre-; re-; -ness; -ly. They are conceived as autonomous, self-contained, unique, and absolute.
*Grammatical (formal) morphemes: used to express grammatical relationships between a word and its contexts such as plurality or past tense:
-inflectional -s (plural) affixes.
-s’ possessive affixes.
-er comparative affixes.
The grammatical words are conceived as concomitant, auxiliary, general and relational to the lexical morphemes.
*Interalia: the grammatical morphemes which are separate items are called interalia/ function words (on, and, to)

Question 30

Distinguish between sentences, utterances and proposition

Answer 30

-Sentences are abstract entities which are independent of the context, in the sense that they are not tied to any particular time and place: sentences are neither physical events nor objects. They are conceived abstractly, a strings of words put together by the grammatical rules of the given language system.
-Utterance as any stretch talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person.
-Propositions are, in a sense, objects of thought and, as such, they are often confused with thoughts.
-. Prepositions should not be confused with thoughts because the latter are usually held as private, personal and mental processes, whereas propositions are public in the sense that the same proposition is accessible to different persons. In addition, a proposition is not a process(it is an abstract semantic entity), whereas a thought is seen as a mental process going on in an individual’s mind, not necessarily available to others.

Question 31

Sense and reference (explain and exemplify)

Answer 31

-Sense and reference are two distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words or other expressions. By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about. (Example: (The English expressions like) your Highness , this country, today can be referred to the actual person, location and time referred to (as part of the world). We call the relationship between them ‘reference’. )
-The actual person, location and time in the world which are picked out by the use of the corresponding language expressions on a particular occasion of utterance are called referents.
-The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.
-The notions of sense and reference are central to the study of meaning. In talking of sense, we deal with relationships inside the language, in talking about reference we deal with the relationship between language and the world. The terms denotation and extension are sometimes used for reference and the terms intention and connotation are sometimes used for sense.