Words and their meanings Chapter One, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Words and their meanings Chapter One e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! WORDS AND THEIR MEANINGS Chapter 1 – What is a Word? The term word is ambiguous and we use it in many ways. Field linguists use a variety of criteria from several linguistic levels – phonological (the level of sounds and their combination), morphological (the level of word structure), semantic (the level of meaning), syntactic (the level of sentence structure) – to decide on word boundaries in languages that they are ‘reducing to writing’. In English, the question of word boundaries in writing still exists in a few casas, especially in how we write compound words > a unit made up of two or more single words. E.g. time + keeper; many compounds undergo a development from being written as two words, through being hyphenated, to being written ad a single word. One source of confusion is where a written word may be pronounced in more than one way – meaning two different things. A more frequent confusion that that (same spelling, different pronunciation) is when occur differences in spellings but same pronunciation. E.g. Feet – feat In the first case – same spelling, different pronunciation – we are talking about two diffent words. Dictionaries will give them different entries. Similarly, a particular pronunciation that has two spellings with different meanings represents 2 words: in the dictionary will be separated headwords. Words which are spelt the same, but have different pronunciations and meanings, are called homographs. Words which are pronounced the same, but have different spellings and meaning are called homophones. There are also many words that are spelt the same and pronounced equally but do not share the meaning, such as bank. These words are called homonyms. When words have closely related meaning we are talking about word senses. Such words are cases of polysemy (multiple meaning). Word-forms Some words have variant spellings: medieval and mediaeval, for example. Variants may occur also because of accents etc. Inflections, is it the same word? Yes and no. Clearly, they are different orthographic and phonological words; they have a distinct spelling and pronunciation but these features are essentially grammatical differences. Grammatically, they are different words: they occur in different grammatical context. We have identified 4 kinds of ‘word’. Orthographic words: words distinguished from each other by their spelling. Phonological words: distinguished from each other by their pronunciation. Word-forms: grammatical variants. Lexemes: ‘items of meaning’, the headwords of dictionary entries. Lexemes Earlier we identified ‘lexemes’ with the headwords of dictionary entries, which implies separate entries for homographs and homonyms (and for homophones as well) but not separate entries for word-forms. The headwords are regarded as the base forms of the words, from which other word forms are considered to be derived. The other main subdivisions in dictionary entries (apart from derivation) are for the different ‘senses’ of polysemous lexemes. Multi-word lexemes We assumed so far that a lexeme consists of no more than one orthographic word but that’s not entirely true. For example, there are sequences of words which have to be considered as single lexemes > phrasal verbs. E.g. thought up The only difference between phrasal verbs and single word lexemes is the way the preposition is attached to the phrasal verbs and how it might move. There are also prepositional verbs which don’t allow the postponement of the particle (*Jane looks her after) but do allow the particle before a pronoun. Another case of multi-word lexemes is that of some compounds. A final kind of multi-word lexeme is the idiomatic phrase, a more or less fixed sequence of words with a unitary meaning, such as: hand in glove, spill the beans, let the cat out of the bag etc. These words clearly consist of more than one orthographic or phonological word but they have unitary meaning and sometimes have a single-word equivalent. Idioms tend to be listed under the main word entry in the dictionary. Lexical and grammatical words There is one more distinction that it is useful to draw whrn discussing the notion of ‘word’, and it is one which cuts across all the other distinctions that we have made so fare. Lexical and grammatical words. Lexical are considered like bricks and grammatical ones like mortar (they’re function words). Lexical words: classes of words relatively large and open (not stable) – nouns, most verbs, adjectives, many adverbs. - There are some subclasses of verb and adverb which are more like grammatical words than lexical words.