33. Types of meaning

The word "meaning" is not homogeneous. Its components are described as "types of meaning". The two main types of meaning are grammatical and lexical meaning.

The grammatical meaning is the component of meaning, recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of words (e.g. reads, draws, writes – 3d person, singular; books, boys – plurality; boy’s, father’s – possessive case).

The lexical meaning is the meaning proper to the linguistic unit in all its forms and distribution (e.g. boy, boys, boy’s, boys’ – grammatical meaning and case are different but in all of them we find the semantic component "male child").

Both grammatical meaning and lexical meaning make up the word meaning and neither of them can exist without the other.

There’s also the 3d type: lexico-grammatical (part of speech) meaning. Third type of meaning is called lexico-grammatical meaning (or part-of-speech meaning). It is a common denominator of all the meanings of words belonging to a lexical-grammatical class (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. – all nouns have common meaning oа thingness, while all verbs express process or state).

Denotational meaning – component of the lexical meaning which makes communication possible. The second component of the lexical meaning is the connotational component – the emotive charge and the stylistic value of the word.

36. METONYMY – TYPE OF SEMANTIC SHIFT (Q.V.), FIGURE OF SPEECH THE ESSENCE OF WHICH IS THE SUBSTITUTION OF THE NAME OF AN ATTRIBUTE OR ADJUNCT FOR THAT OF THE THING MEANT (E.G. CROWN FOR KING, THE TURF FOR HORSE RACING).

Cognitive/conceptual metonymy – analysis of metonymical expressions in terms of cognitive semantics, resorting to the notion of conceptual domain (q.v.). C.m. names one aspect or element in a conceptual domain while referring to some other element which is in contiguity relation with it. Basic instances of conceptual metonymy: person for his name (I'm not in the telephone book), possessor for possessed (My tyre is flat), container for contained (This is an excellent dish), producer for produced (My new Macintosh is superb), etc.

Metonymy is the tendency of certain words to occur in near proximity & mutually influence one another.

• Ex.: He drinks 2 cups (tea, coffee) every morning. 

• He has eaten 2 plates (porridge) today.

37. Metaphor accounts for a very considerable proportions of semantic changes.

Language is full of so-called fossilized (trite-банальный, избитый, неоригинальный) metaphors, which no longer call up the image of an object from which they were borrowed.

• Ex.: the leaf of a book;

• hands of a clock;

• a clock face;

• hands of a cabbage.

38. Euphemisms. There are words in every l-ge which people instinctively avoid because they are considered rude, direct or impolite. They are often described by using substitutes, called euphemisms. E.g. lavatory – powder-room, washroom, restroom, retiring-room, lady’s room, water-closed, W.C., public conveniences, toilet. Euphemism may be used due to genuine concern not to hurt someone’s feelings (stupid person can be said to be not brilliant). Euphemisms are used to avoid so-called social taboos. Superstitious taboos have their roots in distant past of mankind, when people believed there was a link btw name and object it represented (devil – the Prince of Darkness, the Black One, the evil one). People aren’t superstitious nowadays and yet they are reluctant to use verb “to die”: to pass a way, to be taken, to breathe one’s last, to depart this life, to close one’s eyes, to keep the basket(slang)). Paronyms are w-s similar in origin, sound form & m-ng, but in fact different in m-ng & usage. (ingenious(smart)\ingenuous(straightforward, frank)).

39. The great influx of borrowings from Latin, English and Scandinavian can be accounted by a number of historical causes. Due to the great influence of the Roman civilisation Latin was for a long time used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse was the language of the conquerors who were on the same level of social and cultural development and who merged rather easily with the local population in the 9th, 10th and the first half of the 11th century. French (Norman dialect) was the language of the other conquerors who brought with them a lot of new notions of a higher social system (developed feudalism), it was the language of upper classes, of official documents and school instruction from the middle of the 11th century to the end of the 14th century.

In the study of the borrowed element in English the main emphasis is as a rule placed on the Middle English period. Borrowings of later periods became the object of investigation only in recent years. These investigations have shown that the flow of borrowings has been steady and uninterrupted. The greatest number has come from French. They refer to various fields of social-political, scientific and cultural life. A large portion of borrowings is scientific and technical terms.

The number and character of borrowed words tell us of the relations between the peoples, the level of their culture, etc.

Some borrowings, however, cannot be explained by the direct influence of certain historical conditions, they do not come along with any new objects or ideas. Such were for instance the words air, place, brave, gay borrowed from French.

Also we can say that the closer the languages, the deeper is the influence. Thus under the influence of the Scandinavian languages, which were closely related to Old English, some classes of words were borrowed that could not have been adopted from non-related or distantly related languages (the pronouns they, their, them); a number of Scandinavian borrowings were felt as derived from native words (they were of the same root and the connection between them was easily seen), e.g. drop (AS.) — drip (Scand.), true (AS.)-tryst (Scand.); the Scandinavian influence even accelerated to a certain degree the development of the grammatical structure of English.

Borrowings enter the language in two ways: through oral speech (early periods of history, usually short and they undergo changes) and through written speech (recent times, preserve spelling and peculiarities of the sound form).

Borrowings may be direct or indirect (e.g., through Latin, French).

Assimilation of borrowings

The term 'assimilation of borrowings' is used to denote a partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical and morphological standards of the English language and its semantic system.

According to the degree of assimilation all borrowed words can be divided into three groups:

1. completely assimilated borrowings;

2. partially assimilated borrowings;

1. unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms.

1. Completely assimilated borrowed words follow all morpholo­gical, phonetical and orthographic standards, take an active part in word-formation. The morphological structure and motivation of completely assimilated borrowings remain usually transparent, so that they are morphologically analyzable and therefore supply the English vocabulary not only with free forms but also with bound forms, as affixes are easily perceived and separated in series of borrowed words that contain them (e.g. the French suffixes -age, -ance and -ment).

They are found in all the layers of older borrowings, e. g. cheese (the first layer of Latin borrowings), husband (Scand),face (Fr), animal (Latin, borrowed during the revival of learning).

A loan word never brings into the receiving language the whole of its semantic structure if it is polysemantic in the original language (e.g., ‘sport’ in Old French - ‘pleasures, making merry and entertainments in general’, now - outdoor games and exercise).

2. Partially assimilated borrowed words may be subdivided depending on the aspect that remains unaltered into:

1. borrowings not completely assimilated graphically (e.g., Fr. ballet, buffet; some may keep a diacritic mark: café, cliché; retained digraphs (ch, qu, ou, etc.): bouquet, brioche);

2. borrowings not completely assimilated phonetically (e.g., Fr. machine, cartoon, police (accent is on the final syllable), [3] — bourgeois, prestige, regime (stress + contain sounds or combinations of sounds that are not standard for the English language));

3. borrowings not assimilated grammatically (e.g., Latin or Greek borrowings retain original plural forms: crisis - crises, phenomenon - phenomena;

4. borrowings not assimilated semantically because they denote objects and notions peculiar to the country from which they come (e. g. sari, sombrero, shah, rajah, toreador, rickshaw (Chinese), etc.

3. Unassimilated borrowings or barbarisms. This group includes words from other languages used by English people in conversation or in writing but not assimilated in any way, and for which there are corresponding English equivalents, e.g. the Italian addio, ciao — 'good-bye'.

Loan words. Assimilation of borrowing words. Borrowed words or loanwords are words taken from another l-ge and modified according to the patterns of the receiving l-ge. English vocabulary, which is one of the most extensive among world's l-ges, contains immense number of words of foreign origin. Celtic borrowings - clan, slogan, whisky. Greek - fantasy, cathedral. Latin - terms in religion were borrowed: pope, bishop, priest. Scandinavian – fish, skirt, music. French - parliament, government, beauty. The distinction should be made btw the term source and origin of borrowing (source applies to the l-ge from which the loan w was taken, origin refers to the l-ge to which the w-d may be traced). Classification: 1)translation loans are w-f-w or m-f-m transl. of some borrowed w-s or expr. (to take the bull by the horns (L)); 2) sem. bor-s are such units when a new m-g of the unit existing in the receiving l-ge.(2 relative l-ges, which have common w-s with diff m-gs) 3) morpheme bor-gs (-ous, -ful). Degree of assimilation: 1) w-s, which are completely assim., not perceived as foreign w-s (sport): partially assimilated w-s 1. sem. (kvass), 2. gram. (phenomenon\a) 3. phonetic (memoir) 4. graphically (chaos) 3) non-assimilated w-s\ barbarisms(hors d'oeuvre, tet-a-tet, dolce vita) The degree of assimilation depends on the time of borrowing, the extent to which the word is used in the language and the way of borrowing.