Lexicology

1.     Give the definition of synonyms. 2.   Characterize such types of synonyms as Ideographic and Contextual. Give the examples. 3 . Characterize such types of synonyms as Total and Phraseological. Give the examples. 4.     What are antonyms? Give their classification. 5.   Give the characteristic of proper and complementary antonyms. 6.  What are neologisms? Give modern exaples. 7.    Give the examples of emotive colored words. 8 .   What is the role of emotive color words?

Types of archaisms:  Interjections. They express emotions without naming them.  F: Alas! Heavens! Hell! Nonsense! Pooh!  Intensifiers.  They convey special intensities to what is said, they indicate the special importance of the thing expressed. The simplest and most often used of these are such words as ever, even, all, so. There is also a big group of intensifying adverbs:  awfully, dreadfully, frightfully, marvellously, terribly, tremendously  and others.  Evaluatory words. They are words when used in a sentence pass a value judgement differ from other emotional words in that they can not only indicate the presence of emotion but specify it. E.g.  silly ass, parrot, pig, snake, wolf. Emotive speech.  Speech has numerous functions as to make statements, to express the speaker’s attitude to what he is talking about, his emotional reaction, his relations with his audience. He may wish to express his approval or disapproval.

Emotionally coloured words are contrasted  to  the emotionally neutral ones. The words of  this type express notions but do not say  anything about the state of the speaker or his   mood. F:  copy, report, reach, say, well  are all  emotionally neutral. Many words are neutral  in their direct meaning and emotional under  special conditions of context .

Archaisms are words which are no longer used   in  everyday speech, which have been ousted by their synonyms. Archaisms remain in the language, but they are used as stylistic devices to express solemnity. Most of these words are lexical archaisms and they are stylistic synonyms of words which ousted them from the neutral style. Examples: avaunt - go away; behold -see or observe; buss - a kiss; coz - a cousin; dark - ignorant; fair - beautiful.

Neologism is a newly coined word or phrase or a new meaning for an existing word, or a word borrowed from another language. The intense development of science and industry has called forth the invention and introduction of an immense number of new words and changed the meaning of old ones. Examples of Modern-Day Neologisms: Noob:  Someone who is new to an online community or game. Ego surfer:   A person who boosts his ego by searching for his own name on Google and other search engines. 404 : Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message 404 Not Found, meaning that the requested document could not be located. Google:  To use an online search engine as the basis for looking up information on the World Wide Web. Troll:  An individual who posts inflammatory, rude, and obnoxious comments to an online community.

Antonyms а r е words belonging to the same part of speech different in sound, and characterised by semantic polarity of their denotative meaning. 

English is very rich in synonyms. An elementary dictionary of  synonyms contains over 8 000 synonyms.  Synonymy is the coincidence in the essential meaning of words which usually preserve their differences in connotations and stylistic characteristics.  Synonyms are two or more words belonging to the same part  of  speech and possessing one or more identical or nearly  identical denotational meanings, interchangeable in some contexts. These words are distinguished by different shades of meaning, connotations and stylistic features. We divide synonyms into the following groups:  ideographic ( e.g. beautiful, fine, handsome, pretty, pleasant,  different, various  large, great, huge, tremendous, colossal ) stylistic ( e.g.    doctor (official), doc (familiar examination (official), exam (coll.) to commence (official), to begin (coll.) )  contextual ( e.g.  I’ll go to the shop and  buy  some bread/ I’ll go to the shop and  get  some bread   )  total ( in

Etymologically the vocabulary of the English language is far from being homogeneous. It consists of two layers - the native stock of words and the borrowed stock of words. Numerically the borrowed stock of words is considerably larger than the native stock of words. In fact native words comprise only 30 % of the total number of words in the English vocabulary but the native words form the bulk of the most frequent words actually used in speech and writing. Besides the native words have a wider range of lexical and grammatical valency, they are highly polysemantic and productive in forming word clusters and set expressions.