Origins of Lexicological Research in the West.
It will probably be safe to say that lexicology – as linguistics in general – probably owes the most to western linguistic tradition. It is a long and continuing tradition deeply rooted in philosophy, logic and, more recently, psychology. While Western scholars are by no means the only ones modern linguistics draws on, they have been the most influential by shaping the way present-day linguists talk about linguistic signs, meaning, and discourse in general. In this short overview it is impossible to do justice to all of the Western scholars who contributed to making linguistics what it is today. In view of the objective limitations of the present book, we will confine ourselves to a brief description of views developed by those scholars that helped lay the foundation of modern linguistics in general, and lexicology in particular.
Among such early influences, Wilhelm von Humboldt is often cited as the precursor of modern linguistic anthropology, sociology of language, linguistic pragmatics and philosophy of language. In his essay concerned with questions relating to the philosophy of speech titled The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind (1836), he "... first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community” [Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911]. Von Humboldt was particularly important for the development of semantics because he introduced a conceptual distinction between an outer and inner linguistic form. The outer linguistic form, according to Humboldt, is the material phonetic side of language; the inner form is the specific semantic structure, lexical or grammatical, that lies behind the outer form and that differentiates one language from another. And it is precisely because languages carry with them different inner patterns of meaning that they can embody the specific view of a language community [Cruse, 2010 : 18]. Humboldt is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a collection of words paired with meanings. Many decades later, this idea became the cornerstone of Noam Chomsky’s theory of language. Chomsky is known to quote Humboldt's description of language as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means". What this means is that an infinite number of sentences can be generated by employing a finite number of grammatical rules. While there are significant differences between the two scholars’ views of language, it will be true to say that Humboldt’s ideas had a role to play in the subsequent development of theories to do with language generation. In addition, more recently, Humboldt has also been viewed as a forerunner of the theory of linguistic relativity, which, almost a hundred years later, was elaborated by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf and is now commonly known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The founder of modern 'scientific' linguistics as we know it today, however, is now universally believed to have been Ferdinand de Saussure. Most of the ideas he developed in his lifetime are contained in his lecture notes, which were put together by two of his students and are known today as Cours de Linguistique Générale or Course in General Linguistics. The views he elaborated in the Course remain influential and generate debate to this day. He made a clear distinction, for example, between describing the history of a language and describing how it is at any particular point in time, a distinction between a diachronic perspective on language and a synchronic perspective. If that distinction seems self-evident to us nowadays, that is partly because Saussure firmly established it. Central to Saussure’s theory of language is his view of the nature of the linguistic sign, which he describes as an inseparable combination of a signified – a concept or meaning – and a signifier3, which is understood as the spoken or written form that represents that meaning. This view contrasts with a long and continuing tradition in linguistics, according to which you can separate form and meaning. Saussure argued that you can no more separate the signifier from the signified than you can separate the front and back of a sheet of paper [Halliday, Yallop, 2007 : 58]. Another statement made in the Course that is important for the study of words is that linguistic signs are arbitrary. Arbitrariness, according to Saussure, is not just a matter of the lack of logical or objective connection – for the most part – between the meaning of a word and its form, either spoken or written. Arbitrariness, as we noted briefly earlier, is also evident when different languages are compared with regard to the same concepts. In addition, Saussure was the first linguist to see a distinction between what he called langue and parole. By defining langue and parole, Saussure differentiated between the language as a system, made up of grammar, spelling and pronunciation, and how it is used in the actual utterances, i.e. the concrete use of the language. This differentiation has relevance for the study of words as their meanings may differ in langue and parole. The language as a system would fail to explain how we are able to produce and make sense of utterances that are possible – in fact, quite common – in real contexts of use. The following Ukrainian sentence, for example, is a case in point: Юлія (Тимошенко) – єдиний реальний чоловік у нашій політиці. Ukrainians knowledgeable in domestic politics will easily recognize the problem posed by this (real!) example. People who have little knowledge of Ukrainian politicians will have difficulty understanding why a woman (the name Юлія clearly points to that) is referred to as a man. The semantic component female identified by a woman’s name clashes with the word чоловік, which is meant to describe her. What this example shows, however, is that assigning meaning to words in parole may be a much more subjective process than the traditional view of language – langue – suggests. In actual fact, creative examples like this are in no way exceptional but actually extremely common in our everyday use of language. Based on important research from the 1970s, which we briefly outlined above [Rosch, 1973, 1978; Labov, 1973], scholars argue that category boundaries (man / woman) may shift depending on situational context, which belongs to the sphere of parole. So in the context of our example about Yulia Tymoshenko, the category of men has shifted its boundaries a bit, so that it may include women, if they engage in politics in ways typically more associated with men, display the male cut-and-thrust style of behavior and show assertiveness and even aggressiveness in conducting business. It has to be noted, however, that although Saussure is credited with making a distinction between langue and parole, as a structuralist he was more interested in the langue rather than individual instances of language use. Overall, it is easy to see why the ideas outlined above have permeated the study of words until this day. And even though the Saussurean approach is not universally approved, it has shown its strength in its continuing appeal to substantial numbers of linguists and social scientists.
A scholar who did not align himself with any of the linguistic schools of that time was Emile Benveniste, a one-time student of Saussure. His approach to language was a fusion of structuralist ideas and comparative-historical linguistics. In his works, and particularly in his monumental Problems in General Linguistics, Benveniste touched upon a wide range of linguistic issues from subjectivity in language to semantics of personal pronouns and typology of relative clauses. He made a significant contribution to Indo-European morphology by providing a detailed description of the rules of nominal word-formation in Indo-European languages. Besides, Benveniste refuted behaviourist interpretations of language, which were prevalent at that time, by demonstrating that human speech, unlike non-human communication – the so-called languages of bees and other animals – cannot be merely reduced to a stimulus-response system. A central concept in Benveniste's work was the distinction between the énonciation (the act of producing an oral or written utterance) and the énoncé (the utterance itself, oral or written) [Encyclopedia of Literary, :540]. This distinction arose from his study on pronouns. The énoncé is the statement independent of context, whereas the énonciation is the act of stating as tied to context. In essence, this distinction moved Benveniste to see language itself as a "discursive instance" – fundamentally as discourse. It may be safe to say that Benveniste’s work was a precursor of discourse studies, as his research on the actual utilization of language, communicative grammar and deictics prepared sufficient ground for it.
Leonard Bloomfield, who worked concurrently with Saussure on the other side of the Atlantic, was an American linguist also operating within a structuralist framework. Bloomfield’s influential book Language, which came out in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. As a proponent of Neogrammarian tradition, especially early in his career, Bloomfield emphasized the importance of the central Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change (a diachronic sound change affects simultaneously all words in which its environment is met, without exception). He was noted for laying a special emphasis on formal procedures for the analysis of linguistic data. Bloomfield greatly contributed to the development of comparative-historical linguistics. In Language, the American linguist made a coherent argument in favor of steps essential to success in comparative work: (a) gathering appropriate data in the form of texts which must be studied and analyzed; (b) application of the comparative method; (c) reconstruction of proto-forms, i.e. finding linguistic forms which the analyzed data originated from. Drawing on his extensive experience in Sanskrit studies, Bloomfield made a significant contribution to the elaboration of such key linguistic concepts as linguistic form, free form and others. Similarly, Sanscrit sources gave rise to Bloomfield's use of the terms exocentric and endocentric used to describe compound words, which are still relevant today. Even more influential, however, were his definitions of the basic units of language. He interpreted a phoneme as ‘a minimum same of vocal feature’ (that is, as a physical piece of speech rather than as an abstract construct of the linguist). A morpheme was defined as the basic unit of grammatical arrangement, a ‘minimal form which bears no partial phonetic-semantic resemblance to any other form’ [Booij, Lehmann: 218]. The word was ‘a minimum free form’, the smallest unit that can occur in isolation, and might consist of one morpheme (man, but), or more than one (manly, therefore). The influence of Sanskrit texts is also present in Bloomfield's approach to determining parts of speech (Bloomfield used the term ‘form-classes’). In addition, Bloomfield’s other significant contribution to lexicology was his examination of linguistic change. His classification of the types of semantic change is, at its core, relevant to this day.
We would not do full justice to linguistic thought in the West if we failed to mention the contribution made by what is now generally referred to as the Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilem Mathesius, a Czech linguist and scholar. The Prague linguistic circle (PLC) as it was called included among its most prominent members Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, Sergei Kartsevsky (all three Russian émigrés), René Wellek, Jan Mukařovský and many others. Central to their fundamental perspective was a view of language as a synchronic and dynamic system. The fundamental theoretical platform of the PLC can be described as a combination of functionalism (every component of a language at every level – phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences – are meant to fulfill a particular function) and structuralism (linguistic expressions essentially derive their meaning from their relation to other expressions, i.e. from their position in a whole field or network of expressions and structures available to users of the language [Wunderlich, 1979 : 230]). They regarded language as a system of subsystems, each of which has its own problems but these are never isolated since they are part of a larger whole. As such, a language is never in a state of equilibrium, but rather has many deviations. It is these deviations that allow the language to develop and function as a living system [] Although linguists of the Prague school contributed to several areas of linguistic thought, we will briefly outline only ones which had the most far-reaching implications for lexicological analysis. The PLC scholars primarily distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. Nikolai Trubetzkoy, in particular, led pioneering research in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages, and in search for general and universal phonological laws.In his seminal work, Principles of Phonology, he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline in its own right, and, most importantly, separate from phonetics. The PLC developed distinctive feature analysis, whereby each sound is seen as a phonological entity made up of contrasting articulatory and acoustic characteristics, with sounds perceived as different due to at least one contrasting feature that they possess. Even though the work of the PLC linguists was initially inspired by Saussure, the approaches they proposed constituted a radical departure from the classical structural position initiated by the eminent Swiss linguist. They suggested that their methods of studying the function of speech sounds could be applied both synchronically, to a language as it exists, and diachronically, to a language as it changes. Within their framework, synchronic and diachronic approaches were seen as closely interconnected and influencing each other. Besides, the functionality of elements of language and the importance of its social function were key aspects of their linguistic perspective. Prague school has had significant continuing influence on many fields of semantics, phonology and semiotics.
Lexical category
In grammar, a lexical category is a linguistic category of words , which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others...
A linguist who joined the field decades after Saussure and had a profound effect on many subfields of linguistics is John Rupert Firth. Apart from doing a lot of work in phonology, a field in which he was descriptively and theoretically innovative, Firth wrote about meaning and about language in general. For Firth, meaning is function in context, and consistently with this broad claim, not only words but even sounds of language have meaning. Firth seemed to equate meaning with use (a word, for example, is meaningful because it serves some purpose in genuine contexts) or with context itself (a word’s meaning is the range of contexts in which it occurs). And if for some, this extension of the notion of meaning was seen as going a little too far, what is significant here is Firth’s attention to what could be observed and his rejection of the kind of linguistic description which deals with invented examples considered outside any real context [Halliday, 2007 : 61]. The influence of Firth’s views on the study of words is evident in much of present-day linguistics: he was a major influence on M.A.K. Halliday, and hence on the development of modern functional linguistics, and on J.Sinclair and the development of corpus linguistics. The development of corpora, the large electronically accessible collections of textual material, has made Firth’s seemingly odd statements about meaning as use and meaning as context far more credible. Now that it is possible to keep track of countless instances of word use in their real settings, it is apparent how informative a record of use in context can be – and how wrong our intuitions sometimes are [Ibid.]
A considerable contribution to the study of word meaning was made by John L. Austin. According to George Lakoff, Austin’s views on the relationships among meanings of words are both a crystallization of earlier ideas in lexicography and historical semantics and a precursor of the contemporary view of polysemy. In his celebrated paper “The Meaning of a Word” (written in 1940 and published in 1961), Austin asked, “Why do we call different (kinds of) things by the same name?” The traditional answer is that the kinds of things named are similar, where “similar” means “partially identical”. This answer relies on the classical theory of categories. If there are common properties, these properties form a classical category, and the name applies to this category. Austin argued that this account is not accurate… Austin’s analysis attempted to explain relations between the multiple senses of a word by distinguishing between central and noncentral senses of a polysemous word. The sense may not be similar, but instead are related to one another in other specifiable ways. It is such relationships among the senses that enable those senses to be viewed as constituting a single category [Lakoff, 1992 : 18]. Austin thus prefigured much of contemporary cognitive semantics – especially the application of prototype theory to the study of word meaning. [Ibid.].
Working in an entirely different field was another scholar whose contribution to linguistics cannot be overestimated – Noam Chomsky, an American linguist who is believed to be one of the originators of ‘mentalist’ or ‘cognitivist’ school. Chomsky explored a wide range of issues, but he is primarily credited with a generative theory of language, according to which language, as a strictly patterned structure, can be generated through a number of finite grammatical rules, which amount to a series of basic, ‘stripped-down’ sentences. Since these sentences seldom, if ever, appear in their ‘stripped-down’ form in actual speech, it means they will have undergone certain transformations, hence also the name ‘transformational’ grammar. The program of cognitive linguistics initiated by Chomsky and his colleagues in the 50s and 60s proposed a distinction between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ structure in language. At least in the early stages of this program, deep structure was assumed to have a mental reality closely related to meaning: ‘It is the deep structure underlying the actual utterance, a structure that is purely mental, that conveys the semantic content of the sentence’ [Chomsky, 1966 : 35]. Another view that was offered was that this deep structure might be universal: ‘The deep structure that expresses the meaning is common to all languages, so it is claimed, being a simple reflection of the forms of thought’ [Ibid.]. Along the same lines, he argued that ‘mental processes are common to all normal humans and that languages may therefore differ in the manner of expression but not in the thoughts expressed’ [Chomsky, 1966 : 96]. Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics offered a classic defense of mentalism by reviving the concerns and perspectives of the rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably philosopher Descartes.
Chomsky’s structuralist view of language was challenged by another noted linguist, Michael Halliday, whose ideas have had an enduring influence on the linguistics of the 20th century. Halliday’s interest has been in what he calls "naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use" in a number of languages (he is himself an expert on Chinese), whereas Chomsky was concerned only with the formal properties of English. In his approach, he moved away from structure to consideration of grammar as a system, as a meaning-making resource and description of grammatical categories by reference to what they mean [Halliday, Matthiessen :10]. Halliday is best known for his Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL), a theory that takes into account the contextual dimensions of language and views linguistics as the study of how people exchange meanings through the use of language [Halliday, 1994]. The approach emphasizes the functions of language in use, particularly the ways in which social setting, mode of expression, and register influence language choices: “Meaning is a product of the relationship between the system and its environment” [McArthur, 1992:460]. This implies that language must be studied in contexts such as professional settings, classrooms, etc., and emphasis should be placed on particular aspects of a given context, i.e. the topics discussed, the language users and the medium of communication. Halliday is credited with introducing the concept of lexicogrammar, which combines syntax, lexicon, and morphology. Halliday believes that these three components must be described as one [Halliday, 1985b : 8] as we seem to process and store larger chunks of language. Besides, viewing lexicogrammar as one entity helps determine certain patterns of use, like collocability, for example: some lexical/syntactic patterns are more likely to co-occur than others depending on the context and type of text that they are used in.
It would be wrong not to mention the contribution made by Uriel Weinreich, an American linguist who, apart from his other studies, i.e. sociolinguistic research, advocated the increased acceptance of semantics. In his works Explorations in Semantic Theory and On semantics, which were published posthumously, he argued for “creating a coherent body of semantic description” [Weinreich, 1972 : 5]. Weinreich formalized such notions as ‘designation’, ‘denotation’, ‘polysemy’, ‘idiomaticity’, and ‘taxonomy’ and attempted to link them to the main body of formal linguistic description. Words as well as the world itself display the ‘orderly heterogeneity’, according to Weinreich and his students William Labov and Herzog, which characterizes language as a whole [Weinreich, Labov, Herzog 1968:] By “orderly heterogeneity”, they mean that there is a system to extensive variation in language. The view of vocabulary from the perspective of variation has had profound implications for further research into how words function and correlate with each other. Furthermore, Labov’s “The word boundaries and their meanings” discusses methods of investigation of words and their meanings and focuses primarily on the study of the variable conditions that govern denotation [Labov, 1983 : 30].
John Lyons
a discussion of sense, reference and denotation, a general chapter on structural semantics and semantic field theory, and an excellent account of sense relations of various kinds.' synthesizing work from many disciplines on meaning and communication. Little technical knowledge needed, as all relevant terms and concepts carefully explained. Lyons' introductory texts are very widely read, notably Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Chomsky, Semantics, and Linguistic Semantics.
It is hardly possible, in view of the obvious limitations of this chapter, to give a detailed account of research that ultimately contributed to the study of words, so clearly this account will be unavoidably biased toward some scholars and their views at the expense of others. Some will even fall by the wayside, as a result. We are aware of this inadvertent bias and tend to see it as an unavoidable drawback under the circumstances.
E.Nida, Fodor. Katz, D.Crystal, McArthur, J.Lyons, H.Jackson, G. Lakoff
7.3. Lexicological Studies in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Russian and subsequently Soviet linguistics made a significant contribution to world linguistics in general and to lexicology and lexicography in particular. Russian traditions are especially rich in historical study of languages, i.e. comparative linguistics, grammatical scholarship and lexicographical research. Much of the work carried out by early Russian linguists contributed to data underlying subsequent lexicological studies. The most noted of Russian scholars were F.F.Fortunatov, whose major contribution to linguistics was in the general theory of morphology, A.K.Vostokov, whose innovative studies of comparative Slavonic grammars proved fairly influential, F.I.Buslayev, a champion of comparative linguistics and the author of the still relevant classification of secondary members of the sentence. Among other linguists that impacted Russian lexicological research were W.Porzeziński (historical morphology of Baltic and Slavic languages), A.M.Peshkovsky, who focused on semantic aspects of syntactic constructions, A.A.Shakhmatov, a pioneer of textological research, Ushakov et al. At a later point, a major contribution to Russian linguistics was made by Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist, who spent most of his life working at Russian universities. Among the most notable of his achievements is the theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations. Owing to his work in this field, he became a major influence on 20th century linguistic theory as his findings subsequently laid the foundation for several schools of phonology. Among some of his other contributions that had a bearing on lexicology is a distinction between language as an abstract group of elements and speech, i.e. how language plays out in the actual speech of individuals. This distinction, which had profound implications for future linguistic research and for Saussure’s ideas in particular, had significance for the study of words in context as the focus of word study shifted to differences between paradigmatic and syntagmatic use of lexical units. As a lexicographer, Baudouin de Courtenay is credited with revising Vladimir Dal’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language in its third and fourth editions, which was a marked improvement on Dal’s not wholly satisfactory alphabet-nest system.
Lev Shcherba, one of Baudouin de Courtenay’s pupils, helped him shape the modern interpretation of the phoneme, which he defined as the grouping of sounds into "sound types". Beyond phonology, Shcherba made significant contributions to the wider fields of linguistics and lexicography. He gave a lot of thought to the concept of the word, believing that as a term it is indefinite in the extreme. His very important contribution to the field was a study of meaning, where he argued that all language comes down to the question of meaning. In his view, if sense and meaning are removed, all language is gone. As opposed to Ferdinand de Saussure, he recognized three, rather than two, objects of study in linguistics: speech activity, language systems, and language material. He placed emphasis on the capacity of the speaker to produce sentences never previously heard, an issue that was to become important for the linguistics of the later twentieth century and in many ways predated Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar. He also emphasized the importance of experiments in linguistics, particularly those with negative results, developing methods which provided profitable ways of exploring language phenomena in field studies. He was a teacher of the lexicographer Sergei Ozhegov, the author of the most widely used Russian dictionary.
A significant contribution to linguistics in general, which was important for lexicology as well, was made by V.N.Voloshinov and M.M.Bakhtin. In contrast to many linguists before them, Voloshinov/Bakhtin[6] took linguistics beyond the word and sentence level, arguing for an approach to language as a socially constructed sign system. For them, language was the medium of ideology, and could not be separated from it. Ideology, however, is not to be understood in the classical Marxist sense as an illusory mental phenomenon which arises as a reflex of a "real" material economic substructure. Language, in their interpretation, is what allows consciousness to arise, and is in itself a material reality. Because of this belief that language and human consciousness are closely related, they held that the study of verbal interaction was key to understanding social psychology.
In contrast to Saussure, they argued that it was a mistake to attempt to study language abstractly and synchronically. Words, in their interpretation, are dynamic social signs, which take different meanings for different social classes in different historical contexts. The meaning of words is not subject to passive understanding, but includes the active participation of both the speaker (or writer) and hearer (or reader). While every word is a sign taken from an inventory of available signs, the manipulation of the word contained in each utterance is regulated by social relations. In Voloshinov/Bakhtin's view, the meaning of verbal signs is the arena of continuous class struggle: a ruling class will try to narrow the meaning of social signs, making them "uni-accentual", but the clash of various class-interests in times of social unrest will make clear the "multi-accentuality" of words.
As a linguist with a Marxist background, Mikhail Bakhtin criticized the splitting of langue and parole as separating individuals and society where it matters most, at the point of production. He developed a 'dialogic' theory of utterances where language is understood in terms of how it orients the speaker/writer to the listener/reader. Words are subject to negotiation, contest and struggle, since language is strongly affected by social context. Modification of langue at the point of parole is used to create new meaning, either where the speaker has limited grasp of language or where deliberate distortion is used.
Another celebrated Russian linguist who made a significant contribution to the field was Roman Jakobson, who for the better part of his life lived and worked abroad, first in Europe, then in the USA. At the time when Jakobson arrived on the linguistic scene, the latter was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and the only scientific approach to language was by studying the history and development of words across time, i.e. through the diachronic approach. Jakobson, following Saussure’s work and his strong emphasis on the synchronic study of language, did a lot to popularize the study of a state of language at any given time. That marked a gradual shift from historical linguistics, which was the modus operandi of 19th century linguists. Jakobson developed an approach focused on the way in which language's structure served its basic function and that was to communicate information between speakers. Besides, he later went on to develop three ideas in linguistics that seem to play a major role in the field to this day. Those are the concepts of linguistic typology, markedness, and linguistic universals, ideas that are tightly intertwined: typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin), markedness is a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more "natural" than others, and the concept of linguistic universals is concerned with the study of linguistic characteristics that are intrinsic to all languages. The influence of Jakobson’s views is evident in much of present-day linguistics as most of his ideas have been taken up and further developed and his interpretation of language phenomena is still very much relevant today.
In the former Soviet Union, the study of vocabulary, became an even more important element of linguistics.
Soviet books and articles on lexicology were abundant and readily available, though there was criticism from Western linguists that they were not scholarly enough [Weinreich 1980, p. xi]. But even if these criticisms were often justified, the fact remains that in Soviet linguistics, lexicology was accorded special attention. And while the exclusive focus on vocabulary, according to U.Weinreich, was unusual for Western linguistics, the Soviet lexicological material (ideological indoctrination aside) offered a “goldmine” of information for researching "systematic properties" which could be put to use in teaching lexis. Here is an excerpt from U.Weinreich’s article Lexicology that came out in Current Trends in Linguistics (ed. by Th.Sebeok) and offered valuable insights into the state and contribution of the 1950s-1960s Soviet lexicology to the field at large:
To an American observer, the strangest thing about Soviet lexicology is that it exists. No corresponding discipline is officially distinguished in Western European or American linguistics; in such American textbooks as H.A.Gleason, Jr.’ Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (New York, 1955) or C.F.Hockett’s Course in Modern Linguistics (New York, 1958) there is no mention of lexicology, and what these books have to say about the study of vocabulary bears the marks of half-hearted improvisation. By contrast, Soviet textbooks assign to lexicology a prominence comparable to that enjoyed by phonology and grammar. A sizeable literature of articles, dissertations, book-length monographs, specialized collections, and a lively stream of conferences on various lexicological subjects, reflect the relative importance of lexicology in the economy of Soviet scholarship.
[Weinreich 1980, p. 315] [Weinreich, 1963]
This comment by Uriel Weinreich, dating from 1963, is a telling confirmation of the role lexicology played within Soviet linguistics and the contribution it made to the overall study of language. In the opinion of many, therefore, it was unfortunate that Western scholars had limited access – if any at all – to research data provided by Soviet lexicologists. The situation in the West was exacerbated by the fact that the communicative method in the area of teaching languages was enjoying widespread popularity, which, regrettably, left the teaching of specific linguistic information, including vocabulary, increasingly on the sidelines. A notable neglect of lexicological issues by Western scholars continued into the 1980s and 1990s.
What another Western scholar, the well-known British lexicographer A.Cahill, had to say more recently on the subject seems to bear out Weinreich’s earlier view:
In a recent study, Carter et al. (1988) have argued that over the last thirty years, vocabulary and vocabulary teaching have been unduly neglected by linguistics, applied linguists and language teachers alike. This may well be true of Western Europe and the United States where, as they argue, the dominance of syntactic models of language has, until recently, relegated the study of vocabulary to the periphery of linguistic scholarship. This criticism is, however, demonstrably not applicable to the study of language in the Soviet Union, where lexicography in general, and pedagogical lexicography in particular, has never ceased to be a major subject of interest to Soviet linguists and language teachers.
(Cahill 1989 : 18)
As is evident, it is now generally recognized that lexicology took shape in the Soviet Union as a linguistic discipline in its own right. It was Soviet scholars that brought into prominence and developed certain aspects in the study of words and the lexicon of a language. Most notably, the idea of the unity of form and content in the general theory of words as well as the theory of polysemy and the inner form of the word were suggested by A.Potebnia and M.Pokrovsky. E.Polivanov, V.Zhirmunskiy and V.Vinogradov introduced a sociolinguistic approach to the study of words. A number of scholars, most notably L.Scherba, A.Smirnitsky, O.Akhmanova, Yu.Rozhdestvenskiy sought to define word versus concept. Typology of word meanings was in the focus of Vinogradov’s and A.Smirnitsky’s scholarly pursuits. Soviet lexicologists wrote a substantial amount about idioms – pharaseological units – as multiword lexemes whose semantic import is different from combined meanings of lexical items that make them up. Research carried out by Vinogradov, Kunin, Barantsev was a major step forward in the treatment of idioms, devising typologies of phraseological units and even putting together comprehensive (bilingual) dictionaries of idiomatic expressions (Kunin, Barantsev).
Ginsbourg et al., Arnold, Antrushina,
Slang and other non-standard strata of vocabulary were at the center of attention of Khomiakov, M.Makovsky, A.Schweitzer and others. There had been no or very little systematic treatment of this area of lexicological research and their studies raised a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues relating to slang and offered insights that were to influence later research in the field.
Galperin, Apresian,
In today’s Russo slang and offered insights that were to influence later research in the field.
Galperin, Apresian,
In today’s Russia, the range of linguistic research that has a direct impact on lexicological studies is extremely wide, given the arrival on the linguistic scene of new and profitable approaches and methodologies (cognitive studies, pragmatics, dialect studies and sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and others). As a result, there probably are more linguists working in fields that indirectly affect lexicological research than ones that explore traditionally lexicological areas (word-formation processes, derivation studies, polysemy, homonymy and others). Some of the studies that have put Russian linguistics at the forefront of world linguistics is
С. И. Ожегов, А. А. Реформатский, Л. Ю. Максимов
Kobozeva, Yu. Karaulov, Ye.Kubriakova, Arutiunova, Teliya, J.Sternin
Проблема системности лексики в связи с теорией номинации (Караулов Ю, Е.Кубрякова, Д.Шмелев)