Lexicology

Key takeaways

Lexicology belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Lexicology to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Lexicology from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that concerns the words of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own. A word might have one or more small components called morphemes. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition. Lexicology also considers the relationships that exist between words. In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is composed of lexemes, which are abstract units of meaning that correspond to a set of related forms of a word. Lexicology looks at how words can be broken down and identifies common patterns in words. Lexicology is associated with lexicography, which is the practice of compiling dictionaries.

Etymology

The term lexicology derives from the Greek word λεξικόν lexicon (neuter of λεξικός lexikos, "of or for words", from λέξις lexis, "speech" or "word") and -λογία -logia, "the study of" (a suffix derived from λόγος logos, amongst others meaning "learning, reasoning, explanation, subject-matter").

Etymology as a science is one of the foci of lexicology. Since lexicology studies the meaning of words and their semantic relations, it often explores the history and development of a word. Etymologists analyze related languages using the comparative method, which is a set of techniques that allow linguists to recover the ancestral phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc., components of modern languages by comparing their cognate material. This means many word roots from different branches of the Indo-European language family can be traced back to single words from the Proto-Indo-European language. The English language, for instance, contains more borrowed words (or loan words) in its vocabulary than native words. Examples include parkour from French, karaoke from Japanese, coconut from Portuguese, mango from Hindi, etc. A lot of music terminology, like piano, solo, and opera, is borrowed from Italian. These words can be further classified according to the linguistic element that is borrowed: phonemes, morphemes, and semantics.

Approach General lexicology is the broad study of words regardless of a language's specific properties. It is concerned with linguistic features that are common among all languages, such as phonemes and morphemes. Special lexicology, on the other hand, looks at what a particular language contributes to its vocabulary, such as grammars. Altogether lexicological studies can be approached two ways: Diachronic or historical lexicology is devoted to the evolution of words and word-formation over time. It investigates the origins of a word and the ways in which its structure, meaning, and usage have since changed. Synchronic or descriptive lexicology examines the words of a language within a certain time frame. This could be a period during the language's early stages of development, its current state, or any given interval in between. These complementary perspectives were proposed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Lexicology can have both comparative and contrastive methodologies. Comparative lexicology searches for similar features that are shared among two or more languages. Contrastive lexicology identifies the linguistic characteristics which distinguish between related and unrelated languages.

Semantics

The subfield of semantics that pertains especially to lexicological work is called lexical semantics. In brief, lexical semantics contemplates the significance of words and their meanings through several lenses, including synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and polysemy, among others. Semantic analysis of lexical material may involve both the contextualization of the word(s) and syntactic ambiguity. Semasiology and onomasiology are relevant linguistic disciplines associated with lexical semantics. A word can have two kinds of meaning: grammatical and lexical. Grammatical meaning refers to a word's function in a language, such as tense or plurality, which can be deduced from affixes. Lexical meaning is not limited to a single form of a word, but rather what the word denotes as a base word. For example, the verb to walk can become walks, walked, and walking – each word has a different grammatical meaning, but the same lexical meaning ("to move one's feet at a regular pace").

Phraseology

Another focus of lexicology is phraseology, which studies multi-word expressions, or idioms, like 'raining cats and dogs.' The meaning of the phrase as a whole has a different meaning than each word does on its own and is often unpredictable when considering its components individually. Phraseology examines how and why such meanings exist, and analyzes the laws that govern these word combinations. Idioms and other phraseological units can be classified according to content and/ or meaning. They are difficult to translate word-for-word from one language to another.

Lexicography

Lexicologists Dámaso Alonso (October 22, 1898 - January 25, 1990): Spanish poet, literary critic, and philologist Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915 - March 25, 1980): French writer, critic, and semiotician Ghil'ad Zuckermann (born June 1, 1971): Israeli linguist and language revivalist

See also Calque Computational lexicology Lexicostatistics Lexical semantics Lexical analysis English lexicology and lexicography List of lexicographers List of linguists Lexical Markup Framework

References

External links

Societies Association for Automatic Language Processing (ATALA), Paris, France International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology, University of Leicester

Theory Lexicology vs. lexicography – an explanation Lexicography, lexicology, lexicon theory

Glossary 'L' entries (from lexeme to lexicon) at SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics)'s glossary of linguistic terms

Teaching material English and General Historical Lexicology (by Joachim Grzega and Marion Schöner

Journals Lexis, E-Journal in English Lexicology (by Denis Jamet) Archived 2016-07-31 at the Wayback Machine

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Lexicology

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Lexicology claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Lexicology before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Lexicology ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Lexicology

In research: Lexicology appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Lexicology in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Lexicology is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Lexicology, Linguistics terminology, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Lexicology outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

How to study Lexicology in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Lexicology means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Lexicology out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Lexicology in simple terms?

Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that concerns the words of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own.

Why does Lexicology matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Lexicology?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Lexicology.