A course In Modern English Lexicology

§ 5. Frequency and Semantic and comparative importance of individual Structure
meanings within the word. For example, the
adjective exact has two meanings 'entirely correct, precise', eg. the exact time, smb's exact words, etc. and 'capable of being precise', e.g. exact observer, exact memory. The comparison of the frequences of these individual meanings shows that they are not of equal importance in the semantic structure of the word; it is the first meaning of this word that is much more important than the second as it accounts for 78% of total occurrences of the word, leaving only 18% to the second meaning.
The adjective blue which is a polysemantic unit of a high frequency value may serve as another example. On comparing the frequencies of individual meanings of this word we find that its neutral meaning 'the colour of the sky' accounts for 92% of the occurrences of the word, whereas the meaning 'sad' (cf. to look (to feel) blue) and the meaning 'indecent, ob-scene' (cf. to tell blue stories, to talk blue) are both marked by a heavy emotive charge and make only 2% and 0.5% of the occurrence of this word respectively.
Thus, as we see, the semantic frequencies of individual meanings give a better and a more objective insight into the semantic structure of words.
We may now conclude by pointing out that frequency value of the word is as a rule a most reliable and objective factor indicating the relative value of the word in the language in general and conditioning the grammatical and lexical valency of the word. The frequency value of the word alone is in many cases sufficient to judge of its structural, stylistic, semantic and etymological peculiarities, i e. if the word has a high frequency of occurrence one may suppose that it is monomorphic, simple, polysemantic and stylistically neutral. Etymologically it is likely to be native or to belong to early borrowings. The interdependence so markedly reflected by frequency can be presented graphically. Below we show the analysis of two groups of synonyms. (See the table, p. 181.)
REPLENISHMENT OF MODERN ENGLISH
VOCABULARY
As has been already mentioned, no vocabulary
§ 6. Development of 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'; зãг—
180
’spear, dart’; some words were ousted1 as a result of the influence of Scandinavian and French borrowings, e.g. the Scandinavian take and die ousted the OE: niman and sweltan, the French army and place replaced the OE. hēre and staÞs. Sometimes words do not actually drop out but become obsolete, sinking to the level of vocabulary units used in narrow, specialised 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, gaunt-let 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.2
Groups of
Structure
The Number
Style
Etymol-
Synonyms
of Meanings
ogy
Morphemic Deriva-
ngs
ary
e
tional
rrow-
u
rd
al
da
-liter
bo
ngs
V
hic
ic
meani
y
y
re
rl
orp
rph
ng
ngs
, non
l, stan
rrowi
m
ound
uial
sh
, ea
uenc
mo
p
ani
ani
ved
d mo
ra
bo
mple
m
me
me
an
Freq
Mono
Poly
Si
Deri
Co
1
2
3
Neut
colloq
Booki
Native
ings
Late
I
1
+
+
+
+
+
Fair Just Impar-
tial Unbiased
Equitable
1
+
+
+
+
+
Dispassionate II
7
+
+ +
+
+
Cool
11
-
Composed Un-
+ —+
+
4-
13
ruffled
+
+ +
+
Imperturbable
14
+
+ + +
+
+
Nonchalant
1 +
+
+
+
15
+
+ +
+
+
17
+
+ +
+ +
17
+
+ + —
+
+
19
+
+ +
+
+
—
1 See ‘Etymological Survey...’, § 12, p. 172.
2 It is of interest to note that the number of vocabulary units in Old English did not exceed 30 — 40 thousand words, the vocabulary of Modern English is at least ten times larger and contains about 400 — 500 thousand words.
181
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. Estimates suggest that during the past twenty-five years advances in technology and communications media have produced a greater change in our language than in any similar period in history. The specialised 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, para-troops, A-bomb, V-Day, etc.; the development of science gave such words as hydroponics, psycholinguistics, polystyrene, radar, cyclotron, meson, positron; antibiotic, etc.;1 the conquest and research of cosmic space by the Soviet people gave birth to sputnik, lunnik, babymoon, space-rocket, space-ship, space-suit, moonship, moon crawler, Lunokhod, etc.
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 speech 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 for example find expression in the vocabulary items like 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 witchhunt — ‘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’; sitdowner — ‘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; a lie-in or a lie-down — ‘a lying 1 The results of the analysis of the New Word Section of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary covering a period of 14 years (from 1927 to 1941) and A Dictionary of New English by С. Barnhart covering a period of 10 years (from 1963 to 1972) confirm the statement; out of the 498 vocabulary items 100 (about 1/5 of the total number) are the result of techno-logical development, about 80 items owe their appearance to the development of science, among which 60 are new terms in the field of physics, chemistry, nuclear physics and biochemistry. 42 words are connected with the sphere of social relations and only 28 with art, literature, music, etc. See P. С. Гинзбург. О пополнении словарного состава. «Иностранные языки в школе», 1954, № 1 ; Р. С. Гинзбург, Н. Г. Позднякова. Словарь но-вых слов Барнхарта и некоторые наблюдения над пополнением словарного состава
современного английского языка. «Иностранные языки в школе», 1975, № 3.
A similar result is obtained by a count conducted for seven letters of the Addenda to The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English by A. S. Hornby, E. V. Gatenby, H. Wakefield, 1956. According to these counts out of 122 new units 65 are due to the development of science and technology, 21 to the development of social relations and only 31
to the general, non-specialised vocabulary. See Э. М. Медникова, Т. Ю. Каравкина. Со-циолингвистический аспект продуктивного словообразования. «Вестник Московско-го университета», 1964, № 5.
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down of a group of people in a public place to disrupt traffic as a form of protest or demonstration’; to nuclearise — ‘to equip conventional armies with nuclear weapons’; nuclearisation; nuclearism — ‘emphasis on nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war or as a means of attaining political and social goals’.
It must be mentioned as a noteworthy peculi-