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LEXICOLOGY EXAM

Terms in this set (107)

Abbreviation
is the process and the result of forming a word out of the initial elements of a word or phrase
Accent
is a manner of pronunciation of a language.
Acronym
is a word formed by taking the initial letters of the words in a phrase
or title and pronouncing them as a word.
Active vocabulary
is the vocabulary available to a native speaker or a learner
for encoding purposes such as speaking, writing or translating from the native into a
foreign language; it is considerably smaller than passive vocabulary associated with
decoding tasks such as listening and reading.
Adjective
is a lexical category that designates a property that is applicable to
the entities named by nouns, can often take comparative and superlative endings in
English, and functions as the head of an adjective phrase.
Affix
is a bound morpheme that modifies the meaning and / or syntactic (sub)
category of the stem in some way
Affixation
is the formation of words by adding derivational affixes to different
types of bases.
Allomorph
is a variant of a morpheme
Amelioration
is the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more
favourable
Antonyms
are words grouped together on the basis of the semantic relations of
opposition
Aphaeresis
is clipping of the first part of the word, dropping the beginning of
the word.
Apocope
is shortening by dropping the last letter or syllable.
Archaism
is a lexical item that was previously widely used but has survived
only in a particular dialect.
Argot
is a secret language associated with social groups whose members wish
to conceal some aspects of their communication from nonmembers.
Assimilation of borrowings
is the adaptation of borrowed words to the system
of the receiving language in pronunciation, in grammar and in spelling.
Back-formation
is creating a new word by removing a real or supposed affix
from another word in a language.
Base
is the form to which an affix is added
Blend(ing)
is a word created from parts of two already existing items, usually
the first part from one and the final part of the other
Borrowing (a loan word)
is a word taken over from another language and
modified in phonemic shape, spelling, paradigm or meaning according to the
standards of the receiving language.
Bound morpheme
is a morpheme that must be attached to another element.
Cliché
is a stereotyped expression mechanically reproduced in speech.
Cognate word
is a word related to one or more other words in the same
language by derivation (thought is a cognate of think)
Cognitive linguistics
is a branch of linguistics or cognitive science which
seeks to explain language in terms of mental processes or with reference to a mental
reality underlying the language.
Collocation
is a combination words which conditions the realization of a
certain meaning.
Combinability
is the ability of linguistic elements to combine in speech.
Concept
is a generalized reverberation in the human consciousness of
properties of the objective reality learned in the process of the latter's cognition.
Concordance
is a list of all the words which are used in a particular book or in
the works of a particular author, together with the contexts in which each word occurs
(usually not including highly frequent grammatical words such as articles and
prepositions), e.g. The Concordance to Shakespeare.
Connotation
is supplementary meaning or complimentary semantic and / or
stylistic shade which is added to the word's main meaning and which serves to
express all sorts of etymological, expressive, evaluative overtones; often contrasted
with denotation.
Corpus
is a systematic collection of texts which documents the usage features
of a language variety.
Corpus linguistics
is a branch of linguistics concerned with the application of
computational corpus techniques to the solution of problems of large-scale
description.
Corpus-oriented lexicography
is an approach to dictionary-making based on
the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics.
Creole
is a contact vernacular based on a 'pidgin' which has become the
mother tongue of a speech community. Linguists recognize a continuum from the
variety nearest the standard language ('acrolect') to that most different ('basilect'),
with an intermediate variety ('mesolect') which varies from speaker to speaker.
Conversion
is one of the principal ways of forming words in modern English
which consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the
category of a part of speech; the morphemic shape of the original word remains
unchanged.
Declension
is the paradigm of an adjective, noun or pronoun, giving all its
forms.
Defining dictionary
is a type of reference work which explains the meaning of
the words and phrases by definitions; the prototype of this dictionary is the
monolingual alphabetical general dictionary.
Denotation
is the central or core meaning of a word, sometimes claimed to be
the relationship between a word and the reality it refers to, and often contrasted with
connotation.
Derivation
is forming a new word by combining a stem and affixes.
Derivational morpheme
is an affixal morpheme which is added to the stem to
form a new word.
Dialect
is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of
the language's speakers.
Dictionary
is a book that lists the words of a language in a certain order
(usually alphabetical) and gives their meanings or equivalent words in a different
language.
Dictionary information
is the information categories presented by the
compiler and consulted by the user of a dictionary or other reference work; the
information can be linguistic (e.g. spelling, meaning, pronunciation) or encyclopedic
(facts and figures).
Discourse
is the totality of verbal interactions and activities (spoken and
written) that have taken place and are taking place in language community.
Distinctive stress (distinctive change)
is the formation of a word by the
means of the shift of the stress in the source word
Endoglossic language
is a language spoken as a native language by the
majority of people in a given geographic region. e.g. Russian in Russia.
Epithet
is a word or phrase used as a comment on, or brief description of, a
person or object o attention.
Eponym
is a word or phrase formed from a personal name, e.g. a Roget (i.e. a
kind of thesaurus)
Equivalence
is the relationship between words and phrases, from two or more
languages, which share the same meaning; because of the problem of anisomorphism,
equivalence is 'partial' or 'relative' rather than 'full' or 'exact' for most contexts.
Equivalent
is a word or phrase in one language which corresponds in meaning
to a word or phrase in another language.
Ethnonym (ethnic name)
is a word or phrase used to refer to a particular
community, they can range from affectionate nicknames to racial slurs.
Etymological dictionary
is a type of dictionary in which words are traced
back to their earliest appropriate forms and meanings.
Etymology
is the origin and history of the elements in the vocabulary of a
language.
Etymon
is the form from which a word in a subsequent period of the language
is derived.
Euphemism
is a word or phrase used as a substitute for a vulgar, profane,
blasphemous or otherwise disturbing.
Endocentric word-group
has one central member functionally equivalent to
the whole word-group, i. e. the distribution of the whole word-group and the
distribution of its central member are identical.
Exocentric word-group
has no central component and the distribution of the
whole word-group is different from either of its members.
Grammatical meaning
is the meaning of the formal membership of a word
expressed by the word's form. i.e. the meaning of relationship manifested not in the
word itself but in the dependent element which is supplementary to its material part.
Grammatical valency
is the aptness of a word to appear in specific
grammatical (or rather syntactic) structures
Homographs
are words different in sound and in meaning but accidentally
identical in spelling
Homonyms
are the words, different in meaning and either identical both in
sound and spelling or identical only in spelling or sound.
Homonyms proper
are words identical in pronunciation and spelling
Homophones
are words of the same sound, but of different meaning
Idiom
is a type of fixed expression in which the meaning cannot be deduced
from the meanings or functions of the different parts of the expression.
Inflection
is the marking of grammatical function by means of morphology,
e.g. to show case or number.
Language
is a semiological system serving as the main and basic means of
human communication.
Lemma
is a form which represents different forms of a lexical entry in a
dictionary.
Lexeme
is a word in all its meanings and form, i.e. a word as a structural
element of language.
Lexical meaning
is the material meaning of a word, i.e. the meaning of the
main material part of the word (as distinct from its formal or grammatical part),
which reflects the concept the given word expresses and the basic properties of the
thing (phenomenon, quality, state, etc.) the word denotes.
Lexical valency (collocability)
is the aptness of a word to appear in various
combinations.
Lexicography
is the professional activity and academic field concerned with
didctionaries and other reference works, it has two basic divisions: lexicographic
practice, or dictionary-making, and lexicographic theory, or dictionary research.
Lexicology
is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the basic
units of the vocabulary (lexemes), their formation, structure and meaning.
Lexicon
the totality of a language's vocabulary, seen either as a list or as
a structured whole; the view of vocabulary as a list of words has lead to the
development of glossaries, dictionaries and other works of reference, while the
structural view has encouraged such linguistic disciplines as grammar, lexicology and
semantics
Morpheme
is the smallest meaningful unit of a language, which has lexical or
grammatical meaning
Motivation
of the linguistic sign is a direct connection between the signifier
and the signified.
Neologism
is a new word, form, construction or sense introduced into
discourse and ultimately into the language
Onomatopoeia
is the formation of words from sounds that resemble those
associated by the object or action to be named, or that seem suggestive of its
qualities.
Paradigm
is the system of the grammatical forms of a word.
Paronyms
are words that are kindred both in sound form and meaning and
therefore liable to be mixed but in fact different in meaning and usage and therefore
only mistakenly interchanged.
Pejoration
is a semantic change where the meaning of a word becomes more
negative or unfavourable.
Phraseological transference
is a complete or partial change of meaning of an
initial (source) word-combination (or a sentence) as a result of which the wordcombination
(or the sentence) acquires a new meaning and turns into a phraseological
unit
Phraseological unit
is a lexicalized, reproducible bilexemic or polylexemic
word group in common use, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may
be idiomatized, may carry connotations, and may have an emphatic or intensifying
function in a text
Pidgin
is a lingua franca with a highly simplified grammatical structure that
has emerged as a mixture of two or more languages and has no native speakers.
Polysemy
is the situation in which a word has two or more related meanings
Prefix
is a derivational morpheme preceding the root-morpheme and
modifying its meaning
Productivity
is the relative freedom with which affixes can
combine with bases of the appropriate category
Proverb
is a collection of words that
has been disseminated forth, and states a general truth or gives advice
Received Pronunciation
is a form of pronunciation of the English
language (specifically British English) which has long been perceived as uniquely
prestigious amongst British accents
Regional dialect
is a speech variety spoken in a particular geographical area
(e.g., Appalachian English).
Register
is a speech variety appropriate to a particular speech situation (e.g.,
formal versus casual).
Semantic broadening
is the process in which the meaning of a word becomes
more general or more inclusive than its historically earlier form
Semantic narrowing
is the process in which the meaning of a word becomes
less general or less inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
Semantic shift
is the process in which a word loses its former meaning, taking
on a new, often related, meaning
Semantics
is the study of meaning in human language.
Slang
is an informal nonstandard speech variety characterized by newly coined
and rapidly changing vocabulary.
Sociolect
is a speech variety spoken by a group of people who share a
particular social characteristic such as economic class, ethnicity and age.
Speech variety
is the language or form of language used by any group of
speakers.
Sound-interchange
is the formation of a word due to an alteration in the
phonemic composition of its root.
Syncope
is shortening by dropping the letter or unstressed syllable in the
middle of the word.
Synonyms
are word and expressions that have the same meanings in some or
all contexts
Taboo
are expressions that are seen as offensive and are therefore often
euphemized.
Thesaurus
is a book of words (synonyms, antonyms, associated and related
words) that are put in groups together according to connections between their
meanings and common topic (rather than in alphabetical order)
Variants of English
are regional varieties possessing a literary norm
Vocabulary
is the system formed by the sum total of all the words and word
equivalents
Word
is a basic unit of a language of a given language resulting from the
association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a
particular grammatical employment
Word-composition
is the type of the word-formation, in which new words are
produced by combining two or more Immediate Constituents, which are both
derivational bases.
Word-group
denotes a group of words which exists in the language as a
ready-made unit, has the unity of meaning, the unity of syntactical function
Concordance
is a list of all the words which are used in a particular book or in
the works of a particular author, together with the contexts in which each word occurs
(usually not including highly frequent grammatical words such as articles and
prepositions), e.g. The Concordance to Shakespeare.
Cognate word
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