Lecture 1. Introduction. Lexicology and Lexicography.

Plan:
1. Lexicology as a branch of linguistics. What we are going to study:
1) Lexicography: connection with Lexicology and problems this science faces
nowadays.
2) Globish: Global English. Varieties of English.
3) Stylistic characteristics of the English vocabulary (styles, registers,
classification by G.B. Antroushina and I.R. Galperin).
4) Etymological sources of the English vocabulary
5) Word-building: affixation, conversion, composition, contamination; minor
types).
6) Semasiology. The word and its meaning. Historical semantics.
7) Homophones.
8) Synonyms. Euphemisms. Antonyms.
9) English Phraseology. Proverbs and sayings.

2. Lexicology. Definition. What does it study?

3. Lexicography. Glimpses of history. Types of dictionaries. Problems
Lexicography faces nowadays.

Terms and definitions:

1. Wordsmithery – or lexicology, as linguists call it – is a fascination that

demands regular and repeated treatment. There are so many words that no one
book or broadcast can deal with everything. And even if, through some magic, it
was possible to present an account of all the words in a language today, the book
would be out-of-date tomorrow. Language changes. Words change. Our feelings
about words change. And not just over long periods of time. On 3 October 1957,
1
ask anyone what a ‘sputnik’ was, and they would have been mystified. A day later,
the word was on everybody’s lips (D. Crystal, 'Words.Words.Words” 2007: 3).
2. Word: “The word may be described as the basic unit of language. Uniting
meaning and form, it is composed of one or more morphemes, each consisting of
one or more spoken sounds or their written representation” (I.V. Arnold, 'The
English Word', 1986:27).
3. Lexicology (from Greek lexis ‘word’ and logos ‘learning) is a branch of
linguistics which deals with the vocabulary of the language and the properties of
words as the main units of language. The term vocabulary is used to denote the
system formed by the sum total of all the words and word equivalents that the
language possesses.
4. The general study of words and vocabulary, irrespective of the specific features
of any particular language is known as general lexicology.
Special lexicology devotes its attention to the description of the characteristic
peculiarities in the vocabulary of a given language. In our case – of the English
language.
Contrastive lexicology is the study of words of different languages on the basis of
a comparative analysis, when one searches for the universal and peculiar
characteristics.
Lexicology studies all kinds of semantic grouping and semantic relations:
synonymy, antonymy, semantic fields, etc.
5. Lexicography (from Greek lexis ‘word’ and graphos ‘learning) is the art of
dictionary-compiling.