General characteristics of modern English vocabulary

The most efficient communication between people is verbal. Without words there is no human language. In different speech communities the number of words, their form and meaning, their origin and use is different, and it is this difference in lexicons that alongside specific grammar and phonology that makes the way humans communicate with each other a separate language.

Of all the language components lexicon is the most sensitive to man’s social life, its development is influenced by different extralinguistic factors. One of the specific characteristics of the lexicon in modern English is that it is very extensive. Though it is not possible to give the exact amount of lexical units in any language because there is not a complete unanimity what should be considered a lexical unit, and because lexicon is too complex, dynamic and flexible for any accurate calculations, dictionary makers estimate that in English there are somewhere from 450,000 to 3,000 000 words.

The English language vocabulary development is very dynamic. Many words like mizzle ‘drizzle’, toom ‘empty’ become obsolete and drop out of the system. But still many more words are born. The characteristic feature of the English vocabulary is its steady replenishment.

The expansion of vocabulary is especially noticeable in the sphere of terminology. New developments in science and technology brought in use such words as television, laser, vinyl, computer, software, diskette, video, modem, to log in, high-tech, on-line, and there is no limit to their potential number.

Such recent prefixes like –mini-, maxi-, super-, micro-, mega-, hyper- are very active and highly productive in creating new words: mini-diskette, superchip, micro-surgery, or hypersonic.

Minor word-formations like blendings, or portmanteau words(pompetent for ‘pompous but competent’, smust (smoke and dust), sexplosion for ‘sex explosion’,movelist for ‘a writer for the movies’) and analogical word-formations like beef-a-roni;rice-a-roni, noodle-roni after the original macaroni or cheeseburger, fishburger after hamburger have become quite numerous in modern English.

A Native American proverb suggests that language changes within a mile. No wonder then that the English language, one of world languages spoken in all the continents by millions of people, exists in a great number of variants and dialects. The existing varieties of English are made first of all by lexical differences, as well as differences in phonetic and grammatical systems.

Still another characteristic feature of the English lexicon is its mixed etymological character. A Germanic language, English borrowed up to 70% of its total vocabulary from more than 50 languages of the world. Though not so intensively as during and after the periods of invasion of Great Britain, foreign words still enrich the English lexicon: bébé, baguette, bouillon [Fr], baba, babushka, borshch [Russ], a capella, bambino [It], charisma [Gk], bonsai, sushi [Jap], caramba, or bosque [Sp]. The majority of them were remodelled and assimilated according to the specific features of the English language system; some of them are still being assimilated. Taking into account the number of words borrowed from French and Latin, English is regarded by some linguists as half-Romance. Classical (i.e. from Latin and Greek) borrowings and neo-classical compounds constitute perhaps the absolute majority of all the words in the language though they are usually not used frequently. Not only words but many affixes came from Latin and Greek with the Renaissance, many of them became very productive and are often used with native roots forming such hybrids as womanize, witticism, etc.

Loan words radically changed the structure of the Old English lexicon. They led to numerous etymological doublets, homonyms, created a three-member pattern of stylistically different synonyms neutral ones being traced to Anglo-Saxon roots, literary words coming from French and learned words being borrowed from Latin.

However, native, predominantly monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin are still the most frequently used, polysemantic, communicatively important, and thus remain the core of the lexical system of modern English.

Specific characteristics of the English vocabulary are also revealed in all morphological and lexical-semantic aspects of a word.

Monomorphism of many words consisting of only roots (love, answer, sail, hate, birth, death, etc.) is one of the most distinctive features of the English vocabulary that was developed in the course of its history. Most of them, both native and loans, are also monosyllables: eye, head, nose, cat, dog, home, bed; air, cost, firm, pay, push, cry, move; die, egg, leg, sky, skirt; disc, pain.

These short words naming the most important concepts for human survival and further development possess a tremendous potential for derivation and they act as sources for new names derived by lexical-semantic, morphological and lexical-syntactic means.

Their active use in lexical-semantic naming lead to a high degree of polysemy of English words, estimated as one of the highest in the European languages.

Like in other Indo-European languages they are the bases for many morphologically derived words by means of affixation, composition, conversion, and other word buildingmeans that finally make up the majority of word-stock in English.

Linguistic and extralinguistic restrictions on long words prevent them from participating in numerous acts of derivation, and the majority of English derived words are the products of the first or the second degree of derivation as it can be seen in the morphological family of the noun hand: handy, handiness, handy-man, handily; handless, handbag, handbarrow, handbook, hand-breadth, hand-cart, handcuff, to handcuff, handful, hand-out, handshake. Derivatives of the third and fourth degree of derivation, like non-environmentalist, are rare in English.

High productivity of conversion as well as some other non-affixal ways of word-derivation such as shortening, back-formation, transposition, and some others, make many English derived words remain monomorphic (to knife, a fan, to edit, the rich).

Compounding is one of the most important types of word-formation in English. Within the system of English compounds the predominant part is made up of composites without a linking element (snowman, oil-rich, sky-blue). The mere juxtaposition of immediate constituents in English compounds alongside the lack of any other reliable criterion for referring a composite to the class of compounds make it difficult for lexicologists and lexicographers to differentiate among numerous cases of wide use of nouns in attributive function (as alife story, a stone wall). Semantically most important component in English compounds is always the second root.

English words are more polysemantic than Russian words and are characterized by a wide lexical and grammatical collocability.

In addition to different restrictions naturally provided by the English language system (cf.: strong tea but powerful argument), some collocations of words, and even some sentences, become more fixed as a result of their frequent use in speech. They change into readily reproduced clichés and finally become lexicalized alongside with morphemes and words. We are quick to say wrong numberwhen answering some telephone calls, or Good morning! when we greet a friend, we take the bus or walk on foot. In English, as in any other language, there are also, numerous word groups that semantically cannot be reduced to the meanings of their components and are characterized by functional integrity (to break the ice, in the long run, mare’s nest, etc.). Such idiomatic word groups along with words as smaller units and proverbs, sayings or quotations as longer ready-made units, are also part and parcel of the English lexicon.

Though lexicon is not any more viewed as a list of irregularities that have to be memorized but a certain system and structure having a generative character, the process of vocabulary acquisition for both first and second language learners is still a long and pains taking process because lexical rules are not rigid. Rather than strict laws they are major tendencies and are limited to particular groups of lexicon.

Segmentation of lexicon into lexical-semantic classes of words, ways of concept naming, semantic features chosen for motivation, morphemic, derivational and semantic structures, grammatical and lexical collocations of the correlative words in different languages are to a great extent arbitrary, and it needs a lot of practice to acquire them to avoid lexical-semantic errors in using a language.

But theoretical knowledge of a foreign language lexicon structure is a kind of a map that presents the major lines of differences and makes learning more efficient and enjoyable.

3. Etymology [fr Gk etymon ‘true meaning’ + logos ‘word, learning’] studies the history of a linguistic form, especially of a word.

Knowledge of vocabulary development history, especially in a foreign language, makes a person a sophisticated learner, saves his/her time, energy and efforts in second language acquisition, extends his/her philological horizons and explains unusual spelling, pronunciation or usage of words. The easiest, quickest and most dynamic way to survey a lexicon is to give its etymological characteristics, though to study them is one of the most strenuous and toilsome jobs in linguistics.