Loss of words

Taking into account the adaptive nature of the vocabulary we should realize that the appearance of the new words in the vocabulary should be contrasted by a reverse process, which is a regular loss of some part of the same vocabulary. The words which are lost from use are named obsolete words, and these fall into two basic groups:

1. archaisms,

2. historisms.

Archaisms – words once common, but now replaced by their newer synonyms (aught – anything, betwixt – between, billow – a wave, sep – blood, to chide – to scold, mourn – morning, save – except, thee – you). Archaisms more often than not exist alongside with the appropriate new words, but strongly differ from the latter in their stylistic coloring. With regard to this difference they are vastly used in poetic speech and associated with it.

When the causes of the word’s disappearance from the language are evidently extralinguistic, which means that when the object named is no longer used in practical life, then the word becomes a historism. There are a lot of such historisms among the names of social relations, objects of material culture, social institutions of the past, names of the ancient transport means, clothing, weapons, musical instruments, etc. The examples of old weapons are a battering ram (таран для пробивания стен), a blunder-buss, a breast-plate, a crossbow. Many historisms remain in the present-day vocabulary, but are used in some figurative meanings. E.g. an arrow, a shield, a sword, a visor.

Besides we should differentiate the level of the obsolete character of this or that archaism, and from this standpoint there are words which are completely obsolete and those are named obsolescent.

Division of the vocabulary into groupings

There are different approaches to the question of the division of the vocabulary into groupings. So words can be divided according to the morphemes they consist of, according to the number of those morphemes, and their bounded or unbounded character, and this will be the morphemic type of grouping. Another type is word families, but in this case the groups are small and their number is enormous because it is equal to the number of the basic root morphemes. An example of such a word family is dog – doggish – doglike – doggy – to dog – dogged – doggedly – doggedness – dog-wolf – dog-days – dogcart – dog-biscuit, etc. The principle of the word family may serve as the basis for compiling some dictionaries, although it’s no longer used this way nowadays.

We can also classify words into notional and form lexemes, the latter being also called empty words or auxiliaries, since they can hardly express independent notions, but only grammatical relationships between notional words. This feature, however, should not completely deprive them of any possible lexical meaning.

The most dominating subdivision is that into parts of speech, which of course pertains to grammar. The further and more subtle subdivision is into lexico-grammatical groups, which should not be confused with the parts of speech. By a lexico-grammatical group we understand a class of words which all have a common lexico-grammatical meaning, one and the same paradigm, the same substituting elements and possibly a characteristic set of affixes. As a rule several lexico-grammatical groups make one part of speech. As an example we may take English nouns, which are typically subdivided into the following groupings:

1. personal names,

2. animal names,

3. collective names for people,

4. collective names for animals,

5. abstract nouns,

6. material nouns,

7. object nouns,

8. proper names for people,

9. toponymic proper names.

This list is not and should not be perceived as once and forever finished.