Olena Zavalna

NTUU “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”

Theoretical viewpoints due to verbal nouns and denominative verbs in the English discourse

Materialistic philosophy considers any language as ability that appeared during consciousness evolution by natural way; idealistic philosophy sticks to a different position – language in its terms is a spirit creation. Language is an essential means of human society communication and it is connected closely with thinking and consciousness. So linguistics is determined to be (as a central science) a constituent of social sciences observing human nature and human society.

Language was claimed to express notion and it was a mean of logic thinking.

Thomas Hobbes highlighted that language provides communication between people and culture development. He appealed to use exact words denotation fixing their full meaning. Other philosophers such as John Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz pointed that the words are the tools of faith. French materialists of XVIII century thought that ideas are the product of words and signs but everything occurring inside is only imagination.

Helvetius guessed that the conscience, thinking and language origin are connected with labour. Vulgar materialists proved that language is caused by sounds accompanying the collective labour.

German philosopher Johan Herder in his "Treatise on the origin of language" criticized the theory of "divine" origin of language. He came to the conclusion that it aroused naturally in its original form and it served not only for the transmission of ideas, but also for feelings expression.

Evolution is accompanied by a number of social coding stages: preliterate society; emergence of written language; typography; the emergence of radio and television; the emergence of computers. All these stages are related to the development and complexity of language, both natural and artificial. New encoding ways change the character of communication methods and make it difficult to individuals’ inclusion in social networks, pushing boundaries and complicate forms of social behavior and activity.

The power of language is quite large: using certain words, people create or exclude certain items from the life. With the development of the language and mass communications a man unwittingly becomes a “prisoner” of walking opinions, prejudices, he acquires ready-made options assessments of various phenomena.

Being a universal mean of human communication, language’s main features are systemic, multifunctional, variability, dynamicity; the ability to replenish vocabulary with new words provides a vivid example of language. Due to the cognition process, language is constantly improving. Most words in the language are determined to be special ones related to different areas of knowledge, culture, production, etc., and only about a tenth of lexical units are performed as commonly used words.

Vocabulary is not just a set of words. The words exist in a certain system and relationships in the language as well. They vary in sphere and frequency of their usage. Words are intimately related to extra-linguistic reality; they represent its elements and its changes, they respond quickly, reflecting a broad social and historical experience of native speakers. So lexical system is considered to be the most flexible, the most mobile component of language; it constantly creates new words, new meanings to existing words and some words become obsolete, rarely used, even forgotten, remaining only in written monuments. When it is stated that it connects the past and modern generations, stores and transmits previous experience, it means exactly words or vocabulary.

Well-developed vocabulary supplies a thinner perception of the world, profound penetration and more accurately thought as to whole society and to each individual that owns this wealth.

As it is known, language is a dynamic unit. Its lexical structure does not remain in a fixed form, and it is constantly changing. It must be emphasized that the changes are very fast. So lexical system requires constant research on a certain level. Changes in any language can be expressed in such ways as:

a) certain lexical items become obsolete and out of usage or become infrequent;

b) existing in the language, new units either replace the ones having come out of usage or begin to function along with them for a long or a short time;

c) units existing in the language can acquire new meanings;

d) the existing language units are modifiable.

The formation of separate words, their relationships and interaction, their ability to form new words, groups of words, phrases contribute to the vocabulary development and its evolution [2].

Vocabulary updating of the English language in the early years of the new century, as in the past decade as a whole, according to scientists, is made almost entirely from its own resources through linguistic derivation and meaning changing of existing units. English is also enriched by borrowing. However, this linguistic phenomenon as word formation is out of sight of researchers.

The systematic approach, holistic vision of the vocabulary process growth of the English language makes it necessary to study specific parts of derivation; where word formation is the most innovative part of it. A number of issues relating to mechanisms disclosure of this type units formation and their typology needs to be investigated.

English vocabulary enrichment processes and word formation have been observed by both domestic and foreign linguists such as: Barnhart R., Zhluktenko Y.O., Halyshyn I.M., Zabotkina V.I., Zatsniy Y.A., Polyuzhyn M.N., Oleksenko N.G., Levitsky A.E., Mort S., Eyto J., Fisher R. All their works convincingly demonstrate the relevance of a systematic studying of the whole derivative system and word formation and the following task to determine its functioning and principles of its self-organization. The most important and the most particular language features and its vocabulary are mobility, variability, targeting to improvement and development [4].

Understanding of system integrity derivation depends, above all, not only and not so much on clear identification of its structural organization as on number of functions it performs. Thus, functions identifying and proving the fact of relationships between the constituent mechanisms are an important step towards trends theorizing and identifying, operating in the derivative English system.

Researchers always deal with the problem of the relationship of a noun and a verb in various aspects. The presence of verbal nouns and dominative verbal conversion indicates that the performance of belonging to speech parts in some lexical-semantic groups loses its clarity. The relevance of the study is confirmed by modern linguistic schools targeting to exploration of different ways of verbal nouns and dominative verbs formation in the English language in different functional styles. There is a need to systematize existing approaches for the comprehensive study of verbal nouns and denominative verbs and to establish criteria for their separation.

Analysis of theoretical sources shows that most of the language studies are devoted to conversion as one of the most productive ways of dominative verbs and verbal nouns formation. The phenomenon of conversion was studied in terms of the morphology by prominent linguists (Smirnitsky O. I., Plotkina K. Z., Biese Y.M., and Marchand H.), semantics (Kostenko S.M., Trinity G.P., and Lee D.), syntax (Craig D., Pence R.). Scientists Zagoruiko A.J. and Irtenieva N.F. proposed to consider conversion as morfoloho-syntactic derivative method and Pavlichenko L.P. conducted a study of conversion pairs in the terms of their relationships with phrase formation [3].

The problem of denominative verbal vocabulary studying containing partly causative verbs is presented by a large number of scientific studies in English. Noun derivative activity in the causative verbs forming on the material of English discourseis is not fully investigated.

Last decade, growing interest and comparable typological research of causative verbs is occurred; it is caused by extralinguistic factors such as intensification of cross-cultural, socio-cultural and language contacts, linguistics targeting to identification of general and specific items in the structure and functioning languages different in their structure.

The research of derivational verbs potential as one of the most complex morphological classes of words performs in order:

a) to trace the relationship between semantic structures generatrix and derivational units,

b) to predict derivatives with a specific word formation meaning,

c) to set word formation means for its explication,

d) to reveal the ability of some derived units to express additional semantic nuances,

e) to detect the reasons of non implementation derivation capacity in some semantic positions.

It is part of the systematic study of the words belonging to a certain lexical and grammatical class or to lexical-semantic group in terms of the generatrix basics as typological factor in structural word formation processes.

This task solution is possible within a relatively newly formed central aspect of derivatology research that supplements formant central aspect, "provides a whole-comprehensive word formation system description in all its complexity".

The latest scientific researches are characterised by the derivative verbs capacity observation of modern English language, particularly, there are studies performed on different material structure and semantic types of denominative and onomatopoeic verbs. However, this cycle of studies would be incomplete without examining derivational potential of denominative verbal substantial stems.

Considering, firstly, the centrality of verbal and noun classes of words, and secondly, their polarity and simultaneously their functional unity, the analysis of this material is relevant primarily for verbal derivation and it is important for understanding and predictability of word formation behavior of all "members" of derivational process.

For a long time researchers' attention was focused on the ways and means clarifying of denominative verbs formation, criteria for establishing nominal origin of verbal stems, history of the development of word formation means, semantic and formal features, their combination of notional ones, noun bases, plurality problems of denominative verbs formation, morphonological features in the derivation system, and in the substantial verbs system of foreign origin.

Thus, the noun is a product and an instrument of knowledge thinking: all elements of speech specify the nouns semantics, while the verb appears as a core of sentence statement, which is a product and instrument of people communication: all the speech elements help verbto formulate an idea. The central verb role in the sentence structure makes its content particularly difficult and hence it causes the relevance of its research.

Reference:

1. Акопян А. А. О семантической соотносительности производящих и производных основ в современном английском языке / А. А. Акопян // Семантика и структура слова : сб. науч. трудов. – Калинин : КГУ, 1985. – С. 14–18.

2. Беркещук І. Структура вербального та адвербіального блоків словотвірних парадигм іменників на позначення частин тіла та способи й засоби їх творення / Інна Беркещук // Наукові записки. Серія : Філологія : зб. наук. праць. – Вінниця : ВДПУ ім. М. Коцюбинського, 2008. –Т. 1, № 10. – С. 45–48.

3. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. – M.: Vysšaya Škola, 2000. – 381, [2] p.

4. Woods An. Statistics in Language Studies / An. Woods, P. Fletcher, Ar. Hughes. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996. – 322 p.