Филологические науки/4.

Синтаксис: структура,семантика,функция

Крыжак О.Ю.

Национальный технический університет Украины «Киевский политехнический институт»

THE GENERAL CHARACTERISTIC OF NEOLOGISMS

According to professor I.V.Arnold [1], a neologism is a newly coined word or phrase or a new meaning for an existing word, or a word borrowed from another language.

The appearance of a great number of new words and the development of new meanings in the words already available in the language may be largely accounted for by the rapid flow of events, the progress of science and technology and emergence of new concepts in different fields of human activity. The influx of new words has never been more rapid than in the last few decades of this century. Estimates suggest that during the past twenty-five years advances in technology and communications media have produced a greater change in our language than in any similar period in history. The specialised vocabularies of aviation, radio, television, medical and atomic research, new vocabulary items created by recent development in social history — all are part of this unusual influx. Thus war has brought into English such vocabulary items as blackout, fifth-columnist, paratroops, A-bomb, V-Day, etc.; the development of science gave such words as hydroponics, psycholinguistics, polystyrene, radar, cyclotron, meson, positron; antibiotic, etc.; the conquest and research of cosmic space by the Soviet people gave birth to sputnik, lunnik, babymoon, space-rocket, space-ship, space-suit, moonship, moon crawler, Lunokhod, etc [2, p. 182].

The adaptive lexical system is not only adding new units but readjusts the ways and means of word-formation and the word-building means [2].

As professor Ginzburg [2, p. 184] has observed, there are two ways of enriching the vocabulary:

1. Vocabulary extension — the appearance of new lexical items. New vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of productive or patterned ways of word-formation and non-patterned ways of word-creation;

2. Semantic extension — the appearance of new meanings of existing words which may result in homonyms.

Productive word-formation is the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation, conversion and word-composition.

Affixation is generally defined as the formation of words by adding derivational affixes to different types of bases.

Derived words usually consist of a root and an affix, which in their turn fall into prefixes which proceed the root in the structure of the word (re-write, mis-pronounce) and suffixes which follow the root (teach-er, dict-ate). Words like reappearance, unreasonable, denationalise, are often qualified as prefixal-suffixal derivatives [2].

Conversion, one of the principal ways of forming words in Modern English, is highly productive in replenishing the English word-stock with new words. It is sometimes referred to as an affixless way of word-building or even affixless derivation.

Word-composition (compounding) is one of the productive types of word-formation in Modern English. This is a type of word building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems. Compounds, though certainly fewer in quantity than derived or root words, still represent one of the most typical and specific features of English word-structure.

In neutral compounds the process of compounding is realized without any linking elements, by a mere juxtaposition of two stems (shop-window, bedroom, tallboy).

Morphological compounds are fewer in number . This type is not productive and it is represented by words in which two compounding stems are combined by a linking vowel or consonant (Anglo-Saxon, statesman, handiwork).

In syntactic compounds we find a feature of a specifically English word-structure. These words are formed from segments of speech, preserving in their structure numerous traces of syntagmatic relations typical of speech: articles, prepositions, adverbs, prepositions (lily-of-the-alley, good-for-nothing).

Telescopy is the result of conscious creation of words by merging irregular fragments of several words which are aptly called “splinters.” Splinters assume different shapes — they may be severed from the source word at a morpheme boundary as in transceiver (transmitter + receiver); transistor (transfer + resistor) or at a syllable boundary like cute (from execute) in electrocute; medicare (from medical care); polutician (pollute + politician) or boundaries of both kinds may be disregarded as in brunch (breakfast + lunch), smog (smoke + fog), ballute (baloon + parachute), etc [2].

Clipping refers to the creation of new words by shortening a word of two or more syllables (usually nouns and adjectives) without changing their class membership. For example: Ad (from advertisement), lab (from laboratory), mike (from microphone), car (from motor-car), phone (from telephone), copter (from helicopter), maths (from mathematics), pants (from pantaloons), specs (from spectacles), flu (from influenza), tec (from detective), fridge (from refrigerator), etc.

Letter abbreviations are mere replacements of longer phrases including names of well-known organisations, names of agencies and institutions, political parties, famous people, names of official offices, etc. They are not spoken or treated as words but pronounced letter by letter and as a rule possess no other linguistic forms proper to words. The following may serve as examples of such abbreviations:

CBW = Chemical and Biological Warfare, DOD = Department of Defence, ITV = Independent Television, SST = supersonic transport, etc [2, p. 189]

Acronyms are regular vocabulary units spoken as words. They are formed in various ways:

1) From the initial letters or syllables of a phrase:

UNO = United Nations Organisations; NATO = North Atlantic Treaty Organisation;

2) Acronyms may be formed from the initial syllables of each word of the phrase:

Interpol = inter/national pol/ice; Tacsatcom = Tactical Satellite Communications: Capcom = Capsule Communicator;

3) Acronyms may be formed by a combination of the abbreviation of the first or the first two members of the phrase with the last member undergoing no change at all:

V-day = Victory Day; H-bomb = hydrogen bomb; g-force = gravity force, etc.

Semantic neologisms are new lexical-semantic variants of words formed on the basis of already existing lexical items [3].

Semantic extension of words already available in the language is a powerful source of qualitative growth and development of the vocabulary though it does not necessarily add to its numerical growth; it is only the split of polysemy that results in the appearance of new vocabulary units thus increasing the number of words [2].

A great number of new meanings develop in simple words which belong to different spheres of human activity. New meanings appear mostly in everyday general vocabulary, for example beehive — ‘a woman’s hair style’; lungs (n pl.) — ‘breathing spaces, such as small parks that might be placed in overpopulated or traffic-congested areas’; bird — ‘any flying craft’; vegetable — ‘a lifeless, inert person’; clean (sl.) — free from the use of narcotic drugs’; to uncap (sl.) — ‘to disclose, to reveal’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Арнольд И.В. Лексикология современного английского языка.- М.: Высшая школа, 1986.- 295 с. – На англ. яз.

2. Ginzburg R.S. A course in modern English lexicology.- Moscow: Vysshaja Shkola, 1979.- 269 p.

3. Жлуктенко Ю.А. Английские неологизмы.- Киев: Наукова думка, 1983.- 167 с.