Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis.

1. The stages of scientific research.

2. Contrastive analysis.
3. Statistical methods of analysis.
4. Immediate Constituents analysis.
5. Distributional analysis and co-occurrence.
6. Transformational analysis.
7. Componental analysis.
8. Method of semantic differential.

1. The stages of scientific research.

The process of scientific investigation may be subdivided into several stages. Observation is a basic
phase of all modern scientific linguistic investigation, the centre of the inductive method of inquiry. The
next stage after observation is classification or orderly arrangement of the data obtained through
observation. For example, it is observed that in English nouns the suffixal morpheme -er is added to
verbal stems (speak + -er, writ(e) + -er, etc.), noun stem’s (village + -er, London + -er, etc.), and that -er
also occurs in non-derived words such as mother, father, etc. Accordingly all the nouns in -er may be
classified into two types — derived and simple words.
The following stage is usually that of generalisation, i.e. the collection of data and their orderly
arrangement must eventually lead to the formulation of a generalisation or hypothesis, rule, or law. In
our case we can formulate a rule that derived nouns in -er may have either verbal or noun stems.
Any linguistic generalisation is followed by the verifуing process. Stated, simply, the linguist is required,
as are other scientists, to seek verification of the generalisations that are the result of his inquiries. Here
too, various procedures of linguistic analysis are commonly applied.

2.Contrastive linguistics attempts to find out similarities and differences in both philogenically related
and non-related languages. This naturally implies the necessity of a detailed comparison of the structure
of a native and a target language which has been named contrastive analysis.
Contrastive analysis can be carried out at three linguistic levels: phonology, grammar (morphology and
syntax) and lexis (vocabulary).
I. 1. Contrastive analysis on the lexical level is applied to reveal the features of sameness and difference
in the lexical meaning and the semantic structure of correlated words in different languages, e.g. watch
and clock. Russian speakers have a single word to refer to all devices that tell us what time it is; yet in
English they are divided into two semantic classes depending on whether or not they are customarily
portable.
2. Polysemantic words are not co-extensive: head but a loaf of bread or a mayor of the city.
3. Difference in the lexical meaning (or meanings) of correlated words accounts for the difference of
their collocability in different languages. For instance compare тонкая книга — a thin book тонкая
ирония — subtle irony тонкая талия — slim waist
II. Contrastive analysis on the level of the grammatical meaning reveals that correlated words in
different languages may differ in the grammatical component of their meaning, e.g. the *news are good,
*the money are on the table, *her hair are black or the category of definiteness/indefiniteness is found
hard to use the articles properly.

3. Statistical Analysis
The quantitative study of language phenomena and the application of statistical methods in linguistic
analysis is an important issue in language studies. The value of statistical methods as a means of
verification is beyond dispute.
Statistical approach proved essential in the selection of vocabulary items of a foreign language for
teaching purposes. It is evident that the problem of selection of teaching vocabulary that occur most
frequently in language use of native speakers is of vital importance.
It is common knowledge that very few people know more than 10% of the words of their mother tongue.
It follows that if we do not wish to waste time on committing to memory vocabulary items which are
never likely to be useful to the learner, we have to select only lexical units that are commonly used by
native speakers. Out of about 500,000 words listed in the OED the “passive” vocabulary of an educated
Englishman comprises no more than 30,000 words and of these 4,000 — 5,000 are sufficient for the daily
needs of an average member of the English speech community.
Statistical techniques have been successfully applied in the analysis of various linguistic phenomena:
different structural types of words, affixes, the vocabularies of great writers and poets and even in the
study of some problems of historical lexicology.

4. The theory of Immediate Constituents (IC).

The fundamental aim of IC analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into two maximally independent
sequences or ICs thus revealing the hierarchical structure of this set. Successive segmentation results in
Ultimate Constituents (UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units having both
sound-form and meaning. The Ultimate Constituents of the word-group analysed above are: a | black |
dress | in | severe | style.
It is mainly to discover the derivational structure of words that IC analysis is used in lexicological
investigations. For example, the verb denationalise has both a prefix de- and a suffix -ise (-ize). To
decide whether this word is a prefixal or a suffixal derivative we must apply IC analysis. The binary
segmentation of the string of morphemes making up the word shows that *denation or *denational
cannot be considered independent sequences. In fact no such sound-forms function as independent
units in modern English.

5. Distributional analysis.
By the term distribution we understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of
the same level (words relative to words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.) or the position which
lexical units occupy or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech.
In a number of cases words have different lexical meanings in different distributional patterns, e.g. to
treat – to treat somebody well, kindly, etc. — ‘to act or behave towards’ and to treat somebody to ice-
cream, champagne, etc. — ‘to supply with food, drink, entertainment. The interdependence of
distribution and meaning can be also observed at the level of word-groups, cf. the difference in the
meaning of water tap and tap water.
The distributional meaning of the lexical units accounts for the possibility of making up and
understanding a lexical item that has never been heard, e.g. hypermagical, smiler, the meaning of which
is easily understood on the analogy with other words having the same distributional pattern, e. g. - (v + -
able- -> A as in readable, eatable), three cigarettes ago (A. Christie), etc. ten thousand miles ago, griefs
of joy (E. Cummings), miles better (Nancy Milford), (cf. days of joy, nights of grief, etc.).
It’s of the greatest importance for language teaching, seized with joy, grief, etc., whereas in the Russian
language one can say на меня напала тоска, отчаяние, сомнение, etc. but the collocations напала
радость, надежда are impossible.
6. Transformational analysis may be defined as re-patterning of various distributional structures in
order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of practically identical distributional patterns.
As distributional patterns are in a number of cases polysemantic, Transformational procedures are of
help in the analysis of semantic sameness / difference of the lexical units, in the analysis of the factors
that account for their polysemy. E.g. dogfight and dogcart, -- distributional pattern of stems is identical
and may be represented as n+n. The meaning of these words broadly speaking is also similar as the first
of the stems modifies, describes, the second and we understand these compounds as ‘a kind of fight’
and ‘a kind of cart’ respectively. The semantic relationship between the stems, however, is different and
hence the lexical meaning of the words is also different. This can be shown by means of a
transformational procedure which shows that a dogfight is semantically equivalent to ‘a fight between
dogs’, whereas a dogcart is not ‘a cart between dogs’ but ‘a cart drawn by dogs’.
The rules of transformational analysis, however, are rather strict. There are many restrictions both on
the syntactic and the lexical level. These are as follows:
1. permutation — the re-patterning of the kernel transform on condition that the basic
subordinative relationships between words and the word-stems of the lexical units are not changed: cf.
his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the excellence of his work -> he works excellently.
2. replacement — the substitution of a component of the distributional structure by a member of
a certain strictly defined set of lexical units, e.g. replacement of a notional verb by an auxiliary or a link
verb, etc. Thus, in the two sentences having identical distributional structure He will make a bad
mistake, He will make a good teacher, the verb to make can be substituted for by become or be only in
the second sentence (he will become, be a good teacher) but not in the first (*he will become a bad
mistake) which is a formal proof of the difference in the meaning of the identical structures.
3. additiоn is best revealed in the classification of adjectives into two groups — adjectives
denoting inherent and non-inherent properties, e.g. if to the two sentences John is happy and John is
tall we add, say, in Berlin, we shall see that *John is tall in Moscow is utterly nonsensical, whereas John
is happy in Berlin is a well-formed sentence. Evidently this may be accounted for by the difference in
the meaning of adjectives denoting inherent (tall, clever, etc.) and non-inherent (happy, popular, etc.)
properties.
4. deletion — a procedure which shows whether one of the words is semantically subordinated to
the other or others, i.e. whether the semantic relations between words are identical. For example, the
word-group red flowers may be deleted and transformed into flowers without making the sentence
nonsensical. Cf.: I love red flowers, I love flowers, whereas I hate red tape cannot be transformed into I
hate tape or I hate red.
Transformational procedures may be of use in practical classroom teaching as they bring to light the so-
called sentence paradigm or to be more exact different ways in which the same message may be
worded in modern English.

7. Componental analysis.
In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes
(or semes) and that sememes and lexemes (or lexical items) are usually not in one-to-one but in one-to-
many correspondence. For example, in the lexical item woman several components of meaning or
sememes may be singled out and namely ‘human’, ‘female’, ‘adult’.

The analysis of the word girl: ‘human’ and ‘female’, + ‘young’. distinguishing the meaning of the word
woman from that of girl.
 Thus, it is assumed that any item can be described in terms of categories arranged in a hierarchical way;
that is a subsequent category is a subcategory of the previous category.
All other semantic features may be classified into semantic markers — semantic features which are
present also in the lexical meaning of other words and distinguishers — semantic features which are
individual, i.e. which do not recur in the lexical meaning of otherwords. Thus, the distinction between
markers and distinguishers is that markers refer to features which the item has in common with other
items, distinguishers refer to what differentiates an item from other items.
Componental analysis with the help of markers and distinguishers may be used in the analysis of
hyponymic groups. In the semantic analysis of such groups we find that they constitute a series with an
increasingly larger range of inclusion. For example, bear, mammal, animal represent three successive
markers in which bear is subordinated to mammal and mammal to animal.
Componental analysis is also used in the investigation of the semantic structure of synonyms. There is
always a certain component of meaning which makes one member of the synonymic set different from
any other member of the same set. Thus, though brave, courageous, fearless, audacious, etc. are all of
them traditionally cited as making up a set of synonymic words, each member of the set has a
component of meaning not to be found in any other member of this set. In a number of cases this
semantic component may be hard to define, nevertheless intuitively it is felt by all native speakers.

9. Method of semantic differential.

All the methods of semantic analysis discussed above are aimed mainly or exclusively at the
investigation of the denotational component of the lexical meaning. The analysis of the differences of
the connotational meaning is very hard. The technique requires the subjects to judge a series of
concepts with respect to a set of bipolar (antonymic) adjective scales. For example, a concept like horse
is to be rated as to the degree to which it is good or bad, fast or slow, strong or weak, etc.

The meaning of the seven divisions is, taking as an example the first of the scales represented above,
from left to right: extremely good, quite good, slightly good, neither good nor bad (or equally good and
bad) slightly bad, quite bad, extremely bad. In the diagram above horse is described as neither good nor
bad, extremely fast, quite strong, slightly hard, equally happy and sad. The responses of the subjects
produce a semantic profile representing the emotive charge of the word. In other words, each person
records his own, entirely subjective reactions, but by the time the analysis has been completed the
result will represent a kind of semantic average reached by purely objective statistical methods.