Word Formation

Aitchison, Jean. «Taming the Wilderness: Words in the Mental

Lexicon.»
Words, Words, Words: The Translator and Language Learner.
Multilingual Matters. G.M. Anderman and M.A. Rogers, eds. 1996.
Concepción Parrondo Carretero, UMA
• Our Vocabulary, how big?
• How do we store words?
• How do words ‘socialize’ with other words?
• How do we acquire words?
• How do we retrieve them?
• How many words?
• The average university student knows and can use more than
50,000 words.
• A 13 year old knows around 20,000
• Children acquire 10 words a day between ages 5-20
• Vocabulary is not acquired evenly throughout the years.

Many people’s assumptions about vocabulary size should be

revisited and revised.
• How many words do we store and remember?

• Traditionally, it was believed that words had fixed and precise

meanings. This is already obsolete.
• Lakoff (1972): ‘natural language concepts have vague
boundaries and fuzzy edges.’ ( Labov’s ‘container experiment:
vase/bowl ---box of chocolates/sawing basket---- bottle of soy
sauce/cruet).
• Wittgenstein (1958): ‘family resemblance’ syndrome . (‘game,’
not a factor that links all games together---- car makes)
Prototype Theory (1970s): ‘fuzzy edges and family resemblance’
concepts.

• Humans work from protoypical instances. Language users analyze

characteristics of a word/concept and find simmilaritires or
resemblance in others, thus creating a prototype (penguins are
‘birds’, three- legged unstriped vegetarian tiggers are ‘tigers’ ).
Words within a prototypical instance are ranked.
• Ranking depends on linguistic maturity, experience and differ from
culture to culture as they are mental models which may not exist in
the real world.
• How do words relate to each other? Linking

• Most prevalent links:

• Collocational (association of a word with others that occur
alongside it):
• Rancid butter; rotten eggs; rank weeds
• Verbal collocations: put (in, on, ---)
• Ties between coordinates (co-hyponyms) Items that belong to the
same word class and are on the same level of detail within a
semantic area
• Cup, plate, saucer, bowl ---- sheet, pillow, blanket----- sofa, armchair,
loveseat . (Aphasia an stroke patients)
• How do we acquire words?

• In the process of vocabulary acquisition, two tendencies have

been observed:
• Underextensions: in early stages of vocabulary acquisition, they
are common. White: snow /deep: only with swimming pools.
words are learned within a particular context and are only
gradually extended to their full range of meanings.

• Overextensions: more noticeable. Moon/ lunar phases and

curved/circular objects (child attaches to a prototypical instance
of the moon).
• How do we find the right word?
• Interactive activation model:
Humans activate more words than they can actually require = blends
(two or more words combined in one) : Greeceland (Greenland); the
mind is overpreparing itself by activating too many words at once. In
spoken language: Meaning/sound: ‘we had snake and eggs’ (instead
of stake and eggs)
• Connectionist models or parallel distributed processing models:
All lexical items from every language are potentially interconnected,
when dealing with multiple languages.
A bilingual person may retrieve different vocabulary for the same
concept if triggered by the word of one of the languages they know,
e.g., owl, beefstew, driving. A perfectly fluent speaker would not
necessarily be distracted by other words for they are in full control.
THANKS