METHODS AND PROCEDURES OF LEXICOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

1. Procedures of linguistic investigation. 2.Contrastive analysis. 3. Statistical analysis. 4. Immediate constituents analysis. 5.Distributional analysis. 6.Transformational analysis. 7.Componental analysis. 8.Method of semantic differential.

Procedures of linguistic investigation The process of scientific investigation may be subdivided into several stages: 1)observation; 2)classification of the data obtained through observation; 3)generalization, i.e. the collection of data and their orderly arrangement must lead to the formulation of a generalization or hypothesis, rule or law; 4)verifying process.

Contrastive Analysis Contrastive linguistics attempts to find out similarities and differences in languages. It predicts typical errors. 1)news, money, hair – in Russian they have the grammatical meaning of plurality, in English they are singular. 2)Contrastive analysis deals with idiomatic (phraseological) side of the language too. He is a heavy smoker, - He smokes a lot; He is a hearty eater. - He likes to eat. 3) English: head of a person - in Russian: голова  of a bed изголовье  of a match головка  of an organization глава, начальник

Statistical analysis It is common knowledge that a comparatively small group of words makes up the bulk of any text. It was found that approximately 1,300 — 1,500 most frequent words make up 85% of all words occurring in the text. Zipf’s law. The more frequent a word is, the more meanings it is likely to have.

Immediate Constituents Analysis Immediate constituents analysis has the aim to segment a set of lexical units into two maximally independent sequences or immediate constituents (IC) thus revealing the hierarchical structure of the set. This kind of analysis is widely used in word-formation. blue/ eye/ ed a black dress in severe style a | black | dress | in | severe | style fat major’s wife fat major’s | wife fat | major’s wife

Distributional Analysis By distribution we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to words, morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.). In other words by this term we understand the position which lexical units occupy or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech E.g., an hour ago, a month ago - a grief ago, three cigarettes ago Distributional pattern as such seems to possess a component of meaning not to be found in individual words making up the word-group (a grief, a cigarette). the analysis of the derivational pattern N + ish shows that the suffix -ish is practically never combined with the noun-stems denoting units of time, space, etc. (“hourish"). They are usually noun-stems denoting living beings (clownish, boyish, etc.), and colour (reddish).

Giggle Giggle refers to a type of laughter — to giggle is usually defined as ‘to laugh in a nervous manner’. There is nothing in the dictionary definition to indicate that giggling is habitually associated with women. The sentences to be completed were of the type: The man — with obvious pleasure, The woman — with obvious pleasure, etc. The informants were to fill in the blanks with either the verb to laugh or to giggle and were presented with a choice of subjects male and female. Results: a clear preference was shown for women giggling and men laughing with obvious pleasure. a man may giggle drunkenly or nervously, but not happily or politely. In the case of women, all collocations — giggle drunkenly, nervously, happily, politely — are equally acceptable.

Transformational Analysis Transformational analysis consists in repatterning identical distributional patterns in order to discover difference or sameness of their meaning. It is used to investigate polysemantic patterns, e.g. compounds which have the same pattern (n + n) may have different lexical meanings. This is shown by transformational procedure: dogfight – a fight between dogs; dogcart – a cart drawn by dogs. Transformational analysis is a kind of intraligual translation, a kind of paraphrasing: his work is excellent – his excellent work – the excellence of his work – he works excellently.

Re p l a c e m e n t : He will make a bad mistake. He will make/ become/ be a good teacher A d d i t i о n: John is happy (popular, etc.) + in Moscow. John is tall (clever, etc)+ in Moscow. D e l e t i o n: I love red flowers I love flowers I hate red tape I hate tape I hate red

Componental Analysis Componental analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes (or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-many correspondence. Woman : human, female, adult. Girl: human, female + young

Method of Semantic Differential (C. E. Osgood) USA, 1965.

HORSE is described as neither good nor bad, extremely fast, quite strong, slightly hard, equally happy and sad. “bright — light”, “quick — sharp“, “dark — heavy”, “slow — low” tend to be grouped together The comparison of responses by native speakers of different languages to denotationally “equivalent” words revealed that they have different semantic profiles. RAIN tends to be described as rather happy by all the subjects of the Southwest Indian groups. The same word was described as rather sad by the overwhelming majority of English subjects.