THEORY OF NAMING
· Theory of naming aims to establish the principles of correlating the meaning (concept) to the sound form. This correlation is covert in non-motivated words, but it is overt in motivated words. The latter manifest their meanings through the internal word form, or the motivator. A derived lexical unit always has a meaning different from that of its ‘internal word form’. As to the ‘physical body’ of a derived word, in some cases it may coincide with that of the internal form, e.g. Engl. metonymy: hand ‘part of the body’ > hand ‘a farm-worker’, mind ‘thought’ > mind ‘opinion’; metaphor: memory ‘capacity of the human mind’ > memory ‘capacity of a computer’. In other cases, the ‘physical body’ of a derived word does not completely coincide with that of ‘the internal word form’, e.g. Engl. metonymy: hand > handle; green > greenery, louse ‘an insect’ > lousy ‘covered with these insects’; metaphor: frog > frogman; louse ‘insect’ > lousy ‘resembling this insect’. In the first case the meaning of ‘the internal word form’ and the new meaning are considered to be the lexical semantic variants (LSV) of one and the same word. These meanings are related to one another either metonymically or metaphorically; one meaning can result from generalization or specification of another meaning. In the second case we enter the area of word-formation where new words are formed from the words that already exist in the language.
· METHODS OF SEMANTIC ANALYSIS Semasiology uses the method of componential analysis, or disintegration of meaning into components called semes (another name is ‘elementary senses’). A seme is an irreducible feature in terms of which the sense of lexical items can be analyzed. E.g. boy n {human, mail, young}; girl n {human, female, young}. However, application of this method poses problems when one attempts to analyze the meanings of such rather abstract words as love, hatred, abstraction, color, entity, etc. To analyze lexical fields, onomasiology uses the method of stratification of words. It aims to reveal the principles according to which the lexical field is organized, and to expose the links due to which the words ‘hang together’. Conventionally, the words are placed either in the center of the field or on its periphery. In the center, are the words which represent the conceptual category most vividly. On the periphery, are the words that refer both to this category and to some other category, i.e. the constituents of their meanings are distributed between two or more categories which thus overlap. To expose these constituents, the method of componential analysis is applied.
The theory of naming applies onomasiological models that include the onomasiological basis, the basic concept which is named, the onomasiological feature, the subsidiary concept which characterizes the basic one, and the link that demonstrates the type of relation between these two concepts. E.g. beauty ‘of a person’: SOMEBODY (basis) IS (link) BEAUTIFUL (feature), four-wheeler: SOMETHING (basis: whole) HAS (link) FOUR PARTS (feature: part), teacher: SOMEBODY (basis) TEACHES (feature), lion ‘of a person’: SOMEBODY (basis) IS LIKE (link) A LION (feature).
Further Reading:
1. Aitchison, J. Linguistics. – Chicago: NTC Publishing group, 1993. 2. Lectures on English Lexicology.
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