English Lexicology: Lexicon Structure, Word-Formation & Change

1. Lexicology and Lexical Units

Lexicology is the part of linguistics dealing with the vocabulary of a language and the properties of words as the main units. Lexicology is concerned with the meaning, history, and use of words and also with lexicographic descriptions of lexical items in dictionaries. The major task is to reveal how the lexicon is organized, structured, systematized, and how it is used for the purposes of communication.

Lexicology is divided into:

• general (across all languages),
• special (in a particular language),
• historical (diachronic approach — ‘through time’),
• descriptive (synchronic approach — ‘single point in time’),
• comparative (comparison of words in different languages).

The importance of English lexicology is based on the fact that at present English is the world’s most widely used language. It is spoken as a native language by nearly three hundred million people in Britain, the United States, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and other countries. Knowledge of English is widely spread geographically — it is, in fact, used on all continents. It is also spoken in many countries as a second language and used in official and business activities there.

Lexical units — also termed lexical items or units — include morphemes, words, word-groups, and phraseological units.

2. General Characteristics of the English Lexicon

The lexicon is the object of lexicology. Its development is influenced by different extralinguistic factors. The lexicon in modern English is very extensive; it is not possible to give the exact number of lexical units. Dictionary makers estimate that there are anywhere from around 450,000 to several million words.

The English vocabulary development is very dynamic — it is always expanding. New words are added to the lexicon through various processes (borrowing, word formation, lexical creation). The English lexicon has polysemy (multiple related meanings) and homonymy (sound-alike forms with different meanings). English has a mixed etymological character: it borrowed up to 70% of its vocabulary from more than 50 languages. Idioms are also part of the lexicon (for example, to break the ice).

3. Etymological Survey of the English Lexicon

Etymology is the branch of linguistics that deals with the origin and primary meaning of words. In English there are only about 30% native words. There are more borrowed words in English than in many other European languages — we therefore speak of the mixed character of the English vocabulary. It contains the native element and many borrowed elements.

The native element includes Indo-European words (e.g., day, night, mother, father), Germanic roots (e.g., arm, bone), and words proper to English (e.g., lord, lady, boy, girl).

Borrowings come from different languages in varying numbers: Latin (e.g., butter, plum), Spanish (e.g., potato, tomato), French, Russian, etc.

Special types of borrowings include translation-loans, doublets, and international words.

Assimilation: Borrowings can be completely assimilated (follow all English rules, e.g., butter, husband), partially assimilated (e.g., machine, sombrero), or non-assimilated (e.g., radio, sushi).

4. Types of Word Meaning and Motivation

There are various types of word meaning. We can distinguish:

• referential — the direct link between a word and the actual object;
• significative — why the person said that word (the communicative motive);
• differential — meaning by contrast (for example, apple is not pear).

Lexical meaning is the realization of a concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. Lexical meaning is the same in different grammatical forms of the same word (e.g., listen, listening, listener).

Two components of lexical meaning:

• Denotative — its literal, neutral meaning.
• Connotative — the emotion or vibe that a word conveys about the speaker’s attitude to different situations.

Types of connotative meaning: stylistic (where and how the word is usually used), evaluative (positive or negative attitude), and emotive (expressing emotions).

Motivation is a clue about a word’s meaning. Words can be motivated (clear and understandable) or non-motivated (connection is unclear, e.g., some idioms).

Types of motivation:

• Morphological — clues from word parts. For example, the words finger-ring and ring-finger contain the same two morphemes but the arrangement changes the meaning.
• Phonetical — a direct connection between the phonetic structure of the word and its meaning.
• Semantic — a connection between central and marginal meanings of the word; often a metaphoric extension of the central meaning (e.g., mother: a woman who has given birth, and extended uses like mother country, mother tongue).

5. The Essence of Meaning and Meaning as a Structure

Meaning is defined as the reflection of a fact of reality in a language sign. The essence of word meaning is that it is a linguistic representation of a concept, serving as a semiotic link between a linguistic sign (the word form) and an extra-linguistic referent (the object, idea, or reality it points to).

Types of meaning: grammatical (abstract functions such as plurality), lexical (a concept specific to a particular word), and part-of-speech meaning (less abstract than grammatical meaning, e.g., ‘thingness’ for nouns and ‘process’ for verbs).

There are also referential, significative, and differential meanings as described earlier. Lexical meaning is the realization of concept/emotion by a definite language system and is generally the same across grammatical forms of the same word (e.g., listen, listening, listener).

Two components of lexical meaning: denotative and connotative, with types of connotative meaning including stylistic, evaluative, and emotive.

6. Change of Meaning in English

Word-meaning is liable to change in the course of the historical development of language.

Causes of semantic change:

• Extralinguistic — various changes in the life of the speech community, changes in life and different spheres of human activity as reflected in word meanings.
• Linguistic — processes such as ellipsis, discrimination of synonyms, and linguistic analogy.

The kinds of association involved in semantic changes include:

• Similarity of meanings (metaphor) — connecting two things because they look or feel alike (e.g., foot of a person / foot of a mountain).
• Contiguity of meanings (metonymy) — associating two referents where one makes part of the other or is closely connected (e.g., tongue meaning both the organ and the language).

Results of semantic change: changes in denotational meaning (generalization, extension) and changes in connotational meaning (pejorative development — derogatory emotive charge; ameliorative development — improvement of the connotative component).

Causes, nature, and results of semantic changes should be regarded as three essentially different but closely connected aspects of the same linguistic phenomenon.

7. Polysemy in English

When analyzing word-meaning we observe that words usually have more than one meaning. Monosemantic words (words having only one meaning) are few; these are mainly scientific terms such as hydrogen, molecule, etc. Many English words are polysemantic (have more than one meaning).

If polysemy is viewed diachronically, it shows the development of a word’s meanings through history: primary and secondary meanings. Example: table — the primary meaning in Middle English (ME) is ‘a flat slab of stone or wood’, proper to the word in Old English (OE) tabule from Latin tabula; all other meanings are secondary and derived from the primary meaning.

Viewed synchronically, polysemy shows the development of meanings at a certain period of time: major and minor meanings. Example: hand — the part of the body (major) and the part of a clock (minor).

8. Homonymy in English: Polysemy vs Homonymy

Homonyms are words that sound alike but have different semantic structures. The problem of homonymy is mainly the problem of differentiating between two distinct semantic structures of identically sounding words.

Types of homonyms: lexical (differ in lexical meaning), lexico-grammatical (differ in both lexical and grammatical meaning), and grammatical (differ in grammatical meaning only).

Homonyms may be classified on the basis of three aspects as well: sound form, graphic form, and meaning. This gives us:

• homographs — identical in spelling but different in sound-form or meaning,
• homophones — identical in sound but different in spelling and meaning,
• perfect homonyms — identical both in spelling and sound-form but different in meaning.

Polysemy vs homonymy: both refer to words that are capable of more than one interpretation, but they are semantically and psychologically different phenomena. Polysemous words are one word with many related meanings; homonyms are distinct words that happen to share form and whose meanings are unrelated.

9. English Lexicon and Its Structure

All lexical units in the lexicon display certain types of semantic relations. The language system is based on two main types of relations:

• syntagmatic — horizontal links between words as you string them together to form a sentence,
• paradigmatic — vertical links between words that can replace each other.

Paradigmatic relations are fundamental for the organization of the lexicon and are very diverse. We can divide them into:

• relations of inclusion — e.g., hyponymy is based on inclusion (vehicle — bus, car, taxi); meronymy — relations of parts to the whole (finger = part of hand);
• serial relations — cycles (seasons) and chains (military ranks);
• relations of compatibility — synonymy, antonymy, and incompatibility (words denoting members of a whole but neither synonyms nor antonyms, e.g., fruits = apple, plum, peach).

10. Word Structure: Morphemic Analysis

Morphemes are the smallest lexical units. They are of two main types:

• form-building or inflectional morphemes, as in smiled, smiles, is smiling (there are only eight inflectional affixes in English: -en, -est, -s, -‘s, -er, -ing, -ed).
• word-building or derivational morphemes (e.g., reason + -able, teach + -er).

Derivational morphemes are identified by criteria such as semantic (a morpheme should have its own meaning), structural, and distributional (the meaning of morpheme arrangement in a word, e.g., un- + effective; sugar + -less).

According to the number of morphemes, words are classified into monomorphemic and polymorphemic. Polymorphemic words can be monoradical (suffixal, prefixal, prefixal-radical, e.g., superteacher) and polyradical (proper head-master, suffixal boarding-school, prefixal super-headmaster, prefixal-suffixal super-headteacher). Monomorphemic words consist of only one root morpheme.

Semantic classification:

• roots — lexical-semantic centres of words;
• affixes — prefixes and suffixes with modifying meaning;
• pseudo-morphemes[1] — semantically deficient elements: re- in receive or con- in contain.

Structural classification:

• free (e.g., friend in friendship),
• bound (always part of a word, e.g., -ship in friendship; affixes and some roots such as histor- in history, cor- in cordial),
• semi-free (semi-bound) — occur both as free and bound (e.g., well in do well and well-done; half in a half of it and half-eaten).
• combining forms — neoclassical compounds (e.g., phonology, telephone) that were created in borrowing languages.

There are three main types of word-segmentability:

1. Complete — segmentation into morphemes does not cause doubt for structural or semantic reasons: teach-er, stud-ent, nat-ive.
2. Conditional — segmentation is doubtful for semantic reasons: re-tain, de-tain, con-ceive.
3. Defective — segmentation is doubtful for structural reasons: ham-let, pock-et, dis-may.

11. Derivational Analysis of English Words

Derivational analysis examines how new words are formed from existing units. The process is built on three core components:

1. Core Components

• Derivational base — the foundational element to which a rule is applied; it can be a stem (e.g., father in fathers), a word form (e.g., known in unknown), or a word group (e.g., blue eye in blue-eyed).
• Derivational affix — a prefix or suffix added to a base to change its meaning or part of speech. Affixes are selective (e.g., the suffix -ance as in disturbance has specific usage rules).
• Derivational pattern — a regular formula for combining elements, defined by part of speech and meaning (e.g., V + -er → N: teach → teacher).

2. Key Principle: Productivity

• Productive patterns, like V + -er → N (build → builder), actively create new words.
• Less productive patterns, like N + -ian → N (politics → politician), are used less frequently and by a more limited set of bases.

3. The Result: Idiomatic Meaning — the meaning of a derived word is often unique, not just a sum of its parts. This idiomatic component requires derived words to be stored in the mental lexicon for quick recognition and use.

12. Affixation in English

Affixation is the main method of forming new words in English by adding prefixes or suffixes to existing bases.

Prefixation involves adding prefixes, which often modify verbs (e.g., rewrite, overcook). Prefixes can be native (e.g., over- in oversleep) or borrowed (e.g., ante- in anteroom). Most prefixes are borrowed. Functionally, they can be convertive (changing a word’s part of speech, e.g., courage → encourage) or non-convertive (only altering meaning, e.g., agree → disagree). Semantically, they add meanings such as negation (unhappy), sequence (prewar), location (subway), repetition (rewrite), or intensity (supermarket).

Suffixation involves adding suffixes, which are central to forming nouns and adjectives. Suffixes can be native (e.g., -er in teacher) or borrowed (e.g., -ist in artist). They are classified by the part of speech they create:

• Noun-forming: -er (teacher), -tion (creation), -ness (happiness).
• Adjective-forming: -able (readable), -ful (hopeful), -less (hopeless).
• Verb-forming: -ize (realize), -en (widen).
• Adverb-forming: -ly (quickly).

Like prefixes, suffixes can be convertive or non-convertive and attach to different bases: denominal (king + -dom), deverbal (teach + -er), deadjectival (happy + -ly).

13. Conversion in English

Conversion is a highly productive word-formation process where a word changes its part of speech (e.g., noun to verb) without adding any affixes. The only change is its grammatical function and paradigm (e.g., eye → to eye).

The most common conversion is between nouns and verbs.

Noun → Verb (N → V): This is the most active type. Often nouns designating instruments, body parts, or substances become verbs (e.g., water → to water). Typically it denotes an action associated with the noun (using the object, acting like it, acquiring it).

Verb → Noun (V → N): Less common, as nouns are often formed from verbs via affixation (e.g., arrive → arrival). Often denotes movement, speech, an instance of the action, the agent, or the result (e.g., to jump → a jump).

Which word came first? Linguists use several criteria to decide whether a noun was converted from a verb or vice versa. No single criterion is perfect, so they are used together.

Semantic criteria: the derived word’s meaning is typically more specific and fits common patterns (e.g., denominal verbs: “to act like a father”; deverbal nouns: “an instance of jumping”).

Polysemy: the original word tends to have more meanings; the converted word usually has fewer.

Behavioral and structural criteria: look at derivational relatives. If most related words are based on a noun, the noun is likely original (e.g., hand has derivatives like handful, handy, suggesting to hand is derived).

Other related processes (not pure conversion): substantivation (turning adjectives into nouns, e.g., the poor, the impossible), adverbialization/adjectivalization (using adjectives as adverbs or nouns/participles as adjectives). These are cases of transposition rather than core conversion.

14. Compounding in English

Compounding is word-building by combining two or more stems. It is one of the three most productive types in Modern English, alongside conversion and affixation. Compounds are generally clearly distinguished from free word-groups, but they also border on them. Criteria used to differentiate compounds include phonetic, semantic, and graphic criteria.

Phonetically, compounds have a specific stress pattern and no phonemic changes in bases; for example, the compound acquires its own stress pattern (armchair, grass-green).

Graphically, compounds may appear as hyphenated or multi-word forms (e.g., daughter-in-law, man-of-war, brother-in-arms).

Semantically, compound words are generally motivated units: their meaning is derived from the combined lexical meanings of their components.

Classifications of compound words:

• From the point of view of degree of semantic independence: coordinative compounds (two components are semantically equally important, e.g., oak-tree, girl-friend, Anglo-American) and subordinative compounds (components are not equally important).
• From the part of speech they form: compounds are found in all parts of speech, but the majority are nouns and adjectives.
• By correlation with variable word-groups: adjectival-nominal (care-free), verbal-nominal (hand-shake), nominal (horse-race), and verb-adverb compounds (break-down, runaway).

15. Abbreviation and Minor Word-Formation Processes

Shortening (abbreviation) is a comparatively new and highly productive way of word-building, especially in American English. Shortenings are produced in two principal ways:

1. Clipping: making a new word from a part (syllable) of the original word: losing the beginning (e.g., phone from telephone), the ending (e.g., hols for holidays, ad from advertisement), or both beginning and ending (e.g., fridge from refrigerator).
2. Initialisms and acronyms: making a new word from the initial letters of a word group:
   • Acronyms — the abbreviated form is read as a word (e.g., NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).
   • Initial shortenings — abbreviation with alphabetical reading retained (e.g., B.B.C. — the British Broadcasting Corporation).

Other types:

• Sound imitation (onomatopoeia) — words made by imitating sounds (e.g., the English cock cries cock-a-doodle-doo).
• Reduplication — making words by doubling a stem (e.g., bye-bye, ping-pong).

Minor word-formation processes are creative and non-systematic. Significant processes include blending (e.g., smog from smoke + fog), back-formation (e.g., edit from editor), and extension of proper names into common vocabulary (e.g., champagne, hoover).

Sound plays a direct role in onomatopoeia (e.g., buzz) and in reduplication (e.g., bye-bye, walkie-talkie). Other key processes involve shifts in grammatical status: adjectivalization (nouns/participles used as adjectives) and nominalization (verbs/adjectives turned into nouns). Finally, lexicalization occurs when a common grammatical form becomes a fixed word with specialized meaning (e.g., customs for border inspection).

16. Phraseological Units

A phraseological unit (set expression, idiom) is several words that tend to be used together and whose overall meaning cannot be guessed from the meanings of the parts.

Typology of phraseological units (according to degree of motivation):

• phraseological unities,
• phraseological combinations,
• phraseological fusions.

Classification of idioms according to structure:

1. Fixed idioms:
   • (a) fixed regular idioms (e.g., “It’s a sixty-thousand-dollar question” = a difficult question);
   • (b) fixed irregular idioms — can be varied on the grammatical level (e.g., “to have a bee in one’s bonnet” — “She has…, I have…”).
2. Variable idioms — varied on the lexical level (e.g., “to add fuel to the fire/flame”).

Semantic classification (two criteria):

1. The degree of semantic isolation.
2. The degree of disinformation.

Examples by function:

• Nominative — a hard nut to crack.
• Nominative-communicative — the ice is broken.
• Interjectional & modal — emotions and feelings (e.g., “Oh, my eye!” = “Oh, my God!”).
• Communicative — proverbs and sayings (e.g., “There is no smoke without fire”).

Sources of idioms:

1. Everyday life (e.g., “to sail under false colours”).
2. The Bible (e.g., “black sheep, lost sheep”).
3. World literature (e.g., “an ugly duckling”).
4. Other languages (e.g., “to lose face” from Chinese).
5. History (e.g., “to cross the Rubicon”).

17. Regional Varieties of English: AmE vs BrE

The English language exists in the form of national and regional varieties. It is the national language of England, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Canada.

Standard English is the official form of English taught at schools and universities, used by the mass media and spoken by educated people. Modern linguistics distinguishes territorial variants of a national language and local dialects.

Dialects are varieties of a language with distinctive features of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary used in a particular area (e.g., Cockney in East London, Scouse in Liverpool).

Although British English (BrE), American English (AmE), and Australian English (AusE) have practically the same grammar system, phonetic system, and much vocabulary in common, they cannot be regarded as the same national standard: they are three variants of the English national language with different accepted literary standards. Canadian English is influenced by both BrE and AmE but has specific features and Canadianisms. Similarly, there is Indian English and other regional varieties, each characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.

18. Ways of Enriching and Expanding the English Lexicon

The vocabulary of any living language is constantly changing, growing, and decaying. Changes in the vocabulary are due to both linguistic and non-linguistic causes, often a combination of both. Words may drop out as the objects they denote disappear — such words are called archaisms (e.g., billow = ‘wave’).

However, the number of new words appearing in the language is much greater than those that drop out; vocabulary development is a process of ongoing growth. The appearance of many new words is mostly due to progress in science and technology; new vocabulary units often belong to specialized vocabularies. Neutral words and phrases are comparatively few. Words mirror their times: e.g., in the 1940s the word bikini appeared; in the 1950s do-it-yourself; in the 1960s fast-food; in the 1970s global warming, etc.

Ways of enriching the lexicon include:

1. Word formation: affixation (e.g., workaholism, micro-),
2. Compounding (e.g., e-mail),
3. Conversion (e.g., to office),
4. Semantic derivation (e.g., antivirus),
5. Borrowings from French, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, etc.

19. British and American Lexicography: Main Dictionary Types

Lexicography is the science and practice of compiling dictionaries. Dictionaries are traditionally divided into several groups according to different criteria:

• Number of languages: monolingual (mainly explanatory), bilingual (translation dictionaries), multilingual.
• Number of lexical units: abridged (e.g., pocket dictionaries), unabridged (complete dictionaries).
• Nature of lexical items: general (all spheres of life), specialized (limited sphere).
• Structural arrangement: alphabetical order, thematic arrangement (e.g., Roget’s Thesaurus).
• Temporality: synchronic (a certain period in time, e.g., Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner’s) and diachronic (through history, e.g., Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology).
• Type of information: encyclopedic and linguistic (e.g., Encyclopaedia Britannica).

The biggest and most famous dictionaries include the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s.

20. Some Basic Problems of Dictionary Compiling

Dictionary compilation involves two central problems: the number of words in the dictionary and the list of words to be included. Dictionaries come in different volumes — pocket dictionaries may contain 25,000 or fewer words, while among the largest, Webster’s includes about 600,000 words.

The volume of a dictionary and its word list depend on the type of dictionary and its aim. At different stages of the lexicographer’s work there are additional problems, including:

1. the selection of lexical units for inclusion — choosing entries is one of the first and most important tasks;
2. their arrangement;
3. the setting of the entries — different dictionary types differ in their aims and the information they provide, so they differ in the structure and content of entries;
4. selection and arrangement (grouping) of word meanings;
5. definition of meanings;
6. illustrative material;
7. supplementary material.

When these issues are decided, the lexicographer must settle on the overall structure of the dictionary. Despite the great variety of linguistic dictionaries, their composition has many features in common. It is also important for the user to read the preface, which shows what is to be found in the dictionary and what is not. In translation dictionaries, supplementary material may differ from explanatory dictionaries — for example, a Russian-English dictionary might include lists of geographical names and standard abbreviations, rules of English and Russian pronunciation, and brief outlines of English and Russian grammar.

[1] Reference note retained from original text.