An Outline of English Lexicology

Lexical Structure, Word Semantics, and Word-Formation

Bibliographic Data

ID2901796
AuthorsZdenek Salzmann, Leonhard Lipka
Year1991
Volume67
Issue3
Pages654
Publication date1991-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/415055
OpenAlexW2064401302
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited2

Words (namely prison).Let us first look at a partial quotation (slightly modified) from the revised LDCE 2 1987: Jail 1 II also Gaol BrE ... n ... a place where criminals are kept as part of their punishment; prison Jail 2 II also Gaol BrE -v [T] to put in jail ... Jailbird ... n infinl a person who has spent a lot of time in prison Jailbreak ... n an escape from prison ... Jailer ... n esp.old use a person who is in charge of a prison or prisonersA number of interesting relations can be found in these entries between lexical items and also some of their constituents.Obviously, there are variants of items, too, and it is interesting to see, how these are treated in another dictionary.I will only give a short excerpt from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (COD 1982): Gaol ... Jail, n. y & v. t. (G-in official use, G-and J-in literary use, J-inU.S). 1. n. public prison for detention of persons committed by process of law; confinement in this, ... 2. v. t. put in gaol ...For the LDCE jail is the normal variant, and the British English (BrE) gaol is the marked option.For the COD the American variant is the marked one, and further distinctions are drawn concerning official and literary use.Another interesting difference is the treatment of the distinction between the noun and the formally identical verb in the two dictionaries.In the LDCE jail, noun, and jail, verb, are considered as homonyms and distinguished by raised numbers. 2 In the COD, however, gaol is treated as one lexical entry with two meanings, and we therefore have a relationship of polysemy.Synonymy and homonymy are counted among paradigmatic lexical relations (see 4.2.), since the lexical items so related stand in a relationship of opposition or contrast to each other.Polysemy is a relationship internal to a lexical entry or word (see 3.1.,4.2.1.).But we may also say that jail v and jail 2 are derivationally connected and that jail 2 is a denominal verb derived from the noun jail y We are then concerned with word-formation processes (see 3.2.).This could be justified by pointing out that the meaning of the verb necessarily contains the meaning of the noun, and that the latter is included in the paraphrase 'to put in jail\ Since the derivation is not formally expressed by a suffix, it is customary to speak in such cases of zero-derivation (see 3.2.2.).That this specific pattern is a productive word-formative process can be seen from examples such as to bag, to bottle, to box, to dock, and to kennel There are also the synonymous verbs to imprison and to incarcerate 'to imprison' (LDCE).The latter is marked as "formal" (fml) in the LDCE and "literal or figurative" in the COD.Only the COD gives a further zero-derived verb to prison 'imprison', labelled "poetical or dialect".Here, a so-called 'zero-In the following replaced by subscripts, in order to avoid confusion with the raised numbers for footnotes.Loosely defined here as the substitution or association and the combination of words; see 4.2.and 4.3.and cf.Jackson (1988:96, 244), Carter (1987:158).In Lyons (1981:91) the terms substitutional and combinatorial (relations) are introduced as equivalents for the Saussurean paradigmatic and syntagmatic

Lexical Semantics · Lexicology · Word formation · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity