Opposition of emotionally colored and emotionally neutral vocabularies

The basic function of any verbal statement is to convey information, although the ideas conveyed may be of principally different nature. Thus this information may constitute or include the reflection of the speaker’s attitude to the subject of speech as well as definite data about his relations with the listener, his emotional reaction to the situation of speech

One should distinguish between emotional and emotive speech. Emotion is the category of psychology, while emotiveness is that of linguistics. Among the foreign linguists of the 20^th century concerned with emotiveness we should name Anna Vezhbitska, while in the Russian linguistics it was Victor Ivanovich Shakhovsky.

Emotive speech is any utterance which contains and expresses emotion. The quality of emotions can be formed at any language level with the help of intonation, stress and special pronunciation that is phonetically; with the help of specific syntactical construction that is in syntax; with the help of the use of special or specialized words that is through lexicon.

From out of all the emotionally colored words the best studied type are interjections. It should be noted that in fact any word of the language may be used as an interjection, because in such special cases the lexeme loses its primary meaning and is used figuratively.

Emotions may also be shown at the morphological level by diminutive or derogative suffixes: dad – daddy, dear – deary, old – oldie. There are also special words and phrases named speech intensifiers, like ever, even, so, such, at all, in the world, etc. Pointed out may also be evaluative words, showing positive or negative evaluation of the subject of utterance.

One of the most effective ways to express evaluation is the stylistic device of irony when words and expressions are used in their opposite meanings. E.g.: Everybody was too bloody friendly at the party. Some of such words and expressions are vulgar and banned, and some belong to taboo.

Non-semantic or formal groupings of words

1. Alphabetical organization of written words.

2. Rhyming organization of words (the words are grouped according to the similarity of their final elements, i.e. it’s a reverse alphabetical order).

3. Groupings according to the number of sounds or letters within one word.

4. Groupings according to the frequency of use of the words.

The origin of the modern English vocabulary. Native words versus loan words

The whole stock of the English words can be divided from the viewpoint of their origin into two principal sets:

1. the native lexicon,

2. the borrowed lexicon.

A native word is a unit belonging to the original English stock as it is known from the earliest manuscripts of the Old English period.

A loan word or a borrowing is a unit taken from another language and in the majority of cases modified either in its phonemic shape or spelling or its grammar paradigm and/or meaning in accordance with the standards of the recipient language.

The native vocabulary is further subdivided by diachronic linguists into the words of Indo-European stock and those of common Germanic origin. The words of Indo-European origin make the oldest lexical layer of English. They have cognates in different Indo-European languages and they readily fall into semantic groups. These are the words which have been functioning in the language for the longest period of time and the best possible example here are the terms of kinship like father, mother, son, daughter, brother, etc. But these may also be words naming natural phenomena like sun, moon, star, wind, water, wood, hill, stone, tree, etc. Names of animals and birds like bull, cat, crow, goose, wolf, etc. Parts of human body like arm, ear, eye, foot, heart. Also some of the most frequent words like bear, come, sit, stand, etc. Adjectives denoting physical properties, like hard, quick, slow, red, white. And most numerals.

However, a much bigger part of the native vocabulary layer is formed by the words of the common Germanic stock which find parallels in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic and others, but do not find such parallels in such Indo-European languages as French or Russian. Such are nouns as summer, winter, rain, ice, ground, bridge, house, shoe, life, rest, etc. Verbs like burn, drive, learn, make, see, send, etc. Adjectives like broad, dead, deaf, deep and others.

Today this layer constitutes not less than 80% of the 500 most frequently used English words. These words can be met in any style of speech and are characterized by a wide range of their lexical and grammatical value. They actively develop polysemy, they are often monosyllabic, they show high word-building abilities and they enter a large number of set expressions.