Lacunarity, lexicography and beyond: integration of the introduction of a linguo-cultural concept and the development of L2 learners’ dictionary skills

The paper discusses the integration of presenting theoretical linguocultural knowledge and developing dictionary skills in advanced students of a foreign language. The proposed approach allows showing students the interdisciplinary character of various issues, one of which is cross-linguistic lacunarity. It is given as an example of a phenomenon, whose introduction can be combined with the development of students’ dictionary use abilities. Lacunarity consists in the lack of some source language elements in the target language. Two main kinds of lacunae are distinguished: linguistic and referential ones. The focal issue of the paper is how the information on the lacunary character of words can be presented to advanced students of English as a foreign language, in this paper Polish learners, so that they could consider the phenomenon in terms of bilingual lexicography: first, becoming aware of the specifics of their description; second, practising their dictionary skills by analysing entries for selected lacunary lexical and phraseological units; third, combining the information and skills in doing creative tasks, related to lacunarity and its bilingual lexicographic descriptions. Furthermore, additional activities are proposed for revising the acquired knowledge on lacunarity and advancing dictionary use. Offering students tasks, which require them to adopt a different perspective, aims to increase their involvement in the learning process and to foster their autonomy as learners. Encouraging learners to reflect on lacunae and their lexicographic description is expected to familiarize them with the phenomenon and simultaneously to develop their dictionary skills by doing especially designed [email protected] University of Bialystok101-11

Gradable nouns as concepts without prototypes

Non-copy-edited preprint. To appear in L. McNally, E. Castroviejo-Miró, and G. Sassoon (eds). The Semantics of Gradability, Vagueness and Scale Structure. Language, Cognition and Mind series. Springer

Semantic Fields and Semantic Change

Published as Coyote Papers: Working Papers in Linguistics from A-Z, Exploring Language: Linguistic Heresies from the DesertThe theoretical activities and insights of the last two decades in linguistics have not spilled over into etymology and the study of semantic change, even though there has been much important work in both historical linguistics and in semantics. One reason for this neglect of semantic change is that the changes themselves seem to be sporadic. Every word has its own history. About the best we have come to hope for is a taxonomy, or classification schema, as found in Ullmann (1957), Stern (1931, 1968), or Williams (1975). These categories of semantic change summarize the tendencies or possibilities which may in fact have opposite effects, as narrowing vs. broading. Our current state of knowledge does not allow us to state interesting, falsifiable statements concerning the lexicon as a whole. In this paper we shall argue that some insights into the principles of semantic change can be found by looking, not at the whole lexicon, but at words which belong to a single semantic field. A semantic field is a set of lexemes which cover a certain conceptual domain and which bear certain specifiable relations to one another. An example of a simple semantic field would be the conceptual domain of cooking, which in English is divided up into the lexemes boil, bake, fry, roast, etc. A basic premise of semantic field theory is that to understand lexical meaning it is necessary to look at sets of semantically related words- -not simply at each word in isolation. By 'semantically related' we refer to relationships between lexical items such as synonymy, as in big and large; antonymy; such as big and small, hyponymy, as rose and flower or robin and bird; converseness, as buy and sell; incompatibility, such as cat, dog, cow, horse, pig, etc. A list of such lexical relationships and their meaning can be found in Lyons (1977) or Lehrer (1974). We will show that our understanding of semantic change can be enriched by looking at the histories of semantically related words.The Coyote Papers are made available by the Arizona Linguistics Circle at the University of Arizona and the University of Arizona Libraries. Contact [email protected] with questions about these materials