Phraseology

Phraseology (frazeologie) = an independent sub-branch of lexicology, dealing with phraseological units (idioms in a broader sense. Phraseological unit/phraseme (frazeologická jednotka, frazém) is a name for the basic unit of phraseology, however, the term almost unknown in the English-speaking countries.

Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics = study of linguistic phenomena through data obtained from a corpus. The leading figure of this discipline is Douglas Biber. Noam Chomsky criticized corpus linguistics, arguing you can never have a corpus of all utterances and most importantly common everyday English because even spoken sections are mainly from television where people tend to speak rather formally.

Words and meaning

What are words?

Words are generally the basic elements of language that clearly show up in writing and are the items defined in dictionaries. Words are classified into word classes – parts of speech. Orthographic words are in written language separated by spaces (King Arthur was brave. - contains 4 orthographic words). Grammatical words fall into one word class or another (King – noun, was – verb, brave – adjective). Lexemes = a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning and word class (Was, are, being = members of the verb lexeme to be).

Coherence

Coherence is a feature of an underlying structure of the text. Coherence is not a state but a process of a co-operative achievement, depending on  speaker's and hearer's willingness to negotiate meaning. It is not texts that have coherence but rather people who decode meaning. For an addressee to create coherence involves making reasonable guesses and hypotheses matched against one's knowledge. Coherence therefore also refer to relations between communicative acts.

Cohesion

Cohesion (soudržnost) is one of the manifestations of isotopic relations (vztahů na stejné úrovni) contributing in to the inner connectivity of the text and it is associated with the surface structure of the text. The meaning of the word cohesion is "to stick together" = the way grammatical features of a sentence can connect that sentence to its predecessors and successors in a text. Simply put, cohesion is a surface structure linkage between the elements of a text.

Introduction to text building

Traditionally the main concern of linguistic analysis has been the sentence. Today we know that very little communication is confined to isolated sentences. Linguistics today prefers the term tone unit for the spoken language which an equivalent to the sentence in the written language. The tone unit is characterized by a genuine melodic contour and pauses on either side. Analysis cannot proceed very far without the recognition of units larger than a sentence which give birth to a discourse grammar where sentences occur as constituents of text. The discipline treating various parameters of text is called text linguistics (focuses on written language) or discourse analysis (focuses on spoken language). However, sometimes these terms mean the same.

Origin of English word stock

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins and how their form and meaning have changed over time.

False friends and transfer of meaning

False friends are pairs of words in two different languages or dialects that look or sound similar but differ in meaning = a word in a foreign language bearing a deceptive resemblance to a word in one's own language. False friends cause difficulty for students learning a foreign language because students wrongly identify words due to linguistic interference. False friends are also a frequent source of difficulty between speakers of different dialects of the same language.

Sense relations

Synonymy

= two or more lexemes have similar meaning (boy – lad) as there may be no such thing as a perfect synonym, full synonymy is rare (greenhouse – hothouse, kind – sort, noun – substantive).

There’s a close relation between collocations and synonyms since words can be used wrongly in a sentence, even though they have similar meaning. (Before the world started (began), only God existed. Leave/depart. Kingly, regal, royal -> Royal mail. Offspring (formal), children (neutral), kids (informal).

Multi-word expressions

Some words are not independent lexical units, they form complex units with other words and such a complex unit has a single lexical meaning.

Phrasal and prepositional verbs

Multi-word verbs function like a single verb and often have idiomatic meaning since their sense cannot be deduced from its constituents. There is a strong tendency, especially in informal English, to use phrasal verbs instead of their often longer one-word equivalents. It would be very unusual, for instance, to say Enter! instead of Come in! in response to a knock at the door. Moreover, new combinations or new meanings are constantly evolving.

Minor types of word formation

Abbreviations

Initialism = particular items are spoken as individual letters (also called alphabetism). Some use only one initial letter like BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), some two initial letters PhD.

Principal types of word formation

Derivation (affixation) is a very productive form of word building by means of adding a prefix or a suffix to the already existing base. Derivation is of two types:

      Inflectional is grammatical derivation but the word does not change its meaning, just takes inflection for noun-verb concord (write - writes)

      Derivational deals with lexical change, creating new words.

                                                                        prefix – stem – suffix

Infixes are rare in English, used mostly in swear taboo words to intensify.            ST – infix – EM

(unfuckingbeliveable!)