Patterns of meaning derivation

The most generalized patterns of meaning derivation:

1. narrowing (wife);

2. widening (help – aid)

3. transference (foot – part of the body and part od the table).

Transferences of meaning are available device for creating colorful artistic images. Transferences are based on:

- identification (roof – part of the house and whole house);

- contiguity – metonymy;

- the contrast of the original meaning and the derived meaning.

E.g. sophisticated – from Latin – artificial (something negative). now – refined, elaborated – positive!

Vulgar – люди обычные – became – negative!

Other sematic relations of words

Due to a high complexity of word’s semantic structure and their long historical development word could develop or lose their meanings.

Homonymy

These are words with the same identical form, but with unrelated meanings. These words are listed twice or more in a dictionary.

E.g. bank – 3 different meanings – берег / скамья / учреждение

Borrowing – one of the sources of Homonymy, another – related to the human memory, as soon as the speaking community forgets the initial similarity of meanings of polysemantic words. These polysemantic words splits into homonymy.

Ex: board – a piece of wood and at school.

Types of Homonymy

full partial

Partial homonymy - coincide only in spelling but they differ grammatically.

Full homonymy – coincide in spelling and grammatically (in paradigms). (одна часть речи, одна категория лица и т.д.).

The homonymy is purely English phenomena caused by analytical character, its ability to create new words without affixes through conversion.

E.g. milk – to milk.

Homonymy

Homophones Homographs

Such resemblance is not related to meaning. Some of them have different spelling and different meaning. These cases are treated as partial homonymy. It is rooted from the history of the language.

Synonyms

Synonymy is one the most productive types. They are words with similar but not identical meaning.

Ex: girl – lady – the same denotatum, but they evaluate differently.

Synonyms differ in their reference to objects (desk – table; house – building).

Often synonym specifies our attitude to object or their quality (black – negro; famous – notorious).

Some synonyms are called stylistic because they are appropriate in different styles of language. Therefore, the whole vocabulary of the language is subdivided into stylistic:

- neutral;

- official / bookish;

- colloquial.

Chains of synonyms denote one object and make up synonymic sets and every synonymic set includes words which are more restricted in use or which are more rare and words which are less restricted (more common in situations, wider used).

Ex: synonymic set – ask, beg, request, please.

“Ask” – is the dominant member, synonymic dominant. All these synonyms are registered in dictionaries.

These are cases when some words are used by speakers in some new manner (crocodile tears, happy meal). Such meanings appear constantly, they are called contextual. They are understood from the context (linguistic and extralinguistic factors). This possibility to create new meanings enrich vocabulary and often leads to form idiomatic phrases (green years – молодые годы). Such contextual synonyms have a tendency to enter to vocabulary due to their using in speech.

winged words – крылатые слова.