Methods of investigation

According to I. Arnold, different methods of investigation can be applied to contrasted languages. They are: methods of contrastive analysis, operational analysis, distributional analysis, immediate constituents analysis, componential analysis, transformational analysis, method of semantic differentiation.

Contrastive analysis. Contrastive linguists attempt to find out similarities and differences in both related and non-related languages. Contrastive analysis grew as the result of the practical demands of language teaching methodology, where it was empirically shown that the errors which are made by foreign language students can be often traced back to the differences in structure between the target language and the language of the learner. This naturally implies the necessity of a detailed comparison of the structure of a native language and a target one.

Contrastive analysis can be carried out at three linguistic levels:

- phonology,

- grammar (morphology and syntax),

- lexis.

In lexicology contrastive analysis is applied to reveal the features of sameness and difference in the lexical meaning and the semantic structure of correlated words in different languages.

It is commonly assumed by non-linguists that all languages have vocabulary systems in which the words differ in sound-form, but refer to reality in the same way. From this assumption it follows that for every word in the mother tongue there is an exact equivalent in the foreign language. But it should be born in mind that though the objective reality exists outside human beings irrespective of the language they speak, every language classifies reality in its own way by means of vocabulary units. In English, for example, the word foot is used to denote the extremity of the leg. In Ukrainian there is no exact equivalent for foot - стопа is a little bit smaller than foot, the word нога denotes the whole leg including the foot. Differences in the lexical meaning of correlated words account for the differences of their collocability in different languages.

Contrastive analysis brings to light the essence of what is usually described as idiomatic English, idiomatic Ukrainian, i. e. the peculiar way in which every language combines structures in lexical units various concepts to denote extra-linguistic reality.

Operational analysis. The English group of linguists, referred to as London School of Linguistics, suggested operational analysis which encloses operation of taking units from the text with their further segmentation and substitution. Within the method of contrastive substitution all units are defined by placing them into larger units. The representatives of the London school regarded the meaning of the word as a complex of functions that a unit can possess. To discover the meaning of a form it is placed into a wider context and the word is observed in its relation to the surrounding words. As an example the homophones sow and sew are analyzed: [sou] sow / sew carrots, onions, radish (words denoting vegetables); dresses, shirts (words different in meaning denoting articles of clothing) six inches apart (confirmed by adverbial modifier). The difference is not due to the meaning and peculiarities of the noun but it lies in the meaning of the verb harvest and mend. The procedure is based on establishing a sort of associated paradigm for the unit analyzed.

Distributional analysis in its various forms is commonly used nowadays. The term distribution is used to denote possible variants of the immediate lexical, grammatical and phonetic environment of a linguistic unit. The distribution of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the different positions of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements.

Observation of the word relations is facilitated by coding:

N – nouns and personal pronouns, Np – personal noun, Nm – material noun, Ncoll – a collective noun, V – verbs, A – adjectives and their equivalents, D – adverbs and their equivalents. Prepositions and conjunctions are not coded.

When everything but the head-word of the phrase is coded we obtain the distributional formula, e.g.:

English: Ukrainian:

make smb laugh = make + N + V make a coat = make + a + N make the machine go, make somebody work = make the N+V make sure = make + A make a good wife = make + a + A + N

йде дощ = іти + N явище природи rain falls йде поїзд = іти + N неістота train runs йде чоловік = іти + N істота man goes йде дим = іти + N неістота it smokes йде зима = іти + N неістота winter approaches йде заміж – marries йде на пенсію – retires іде конем - moves the knight іти + іменник іти + адвербіальне словосполучення

A phrase all elements of which, including the head-word are coded is called a distributional pattern: to make smb laugh → to V, Np Vl.

The distributional analysis helps to find out contextual meaning of a word depending upon its combinability. It allows to elaborate efficient computer translation programs. Thus analyzing distributional patterns of the word miss in its different meanings (to fail; to hit, reach; to feel absence of smth with regret, or a title preceding the name of unmarried woman) it is easy to give a proper equivalent to this word in the sentence I really had relations with Miss Anderson: Miss + N proper → address to a young woman.

Immediate Constituent Analysis. This method is aimed at analysis of a linguistic unit by presenting it as a hierarchy of the elements composing its structure. The theory of Immediate Constituents was originally elaborated as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another. It was discovered that combinations of units are usually structured into hierarchal sets of binary constructions.

Thus in the word-group a black suit in severe style the indefinite article a is not related to adjective black, black to suit, dress to in and so on. A structure which may be represented as a black suit and in severe style is set up.

Thus, the fundamental aim of immediate constituents analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into maximally independent sequences (in the given case there are two of them). These maximally independent sequences are called immediate constituents. The further segmentation of immediate constituents results in ultimate constituents, which means that further segmentation is impossible as no meaning can be found. Therefore the ultimate constituents of the phrase given are ―a, black, suit, in, severe, style.

The method of immediate constituent analysis is extremely fruitful in discovering the derivational structure of words.

1 4 3 2

non/govern/ment/al

1 4 3 2

un/gentle/man/ly

проти/ракет/н/ий

без/по/серед/н/ій

It helps to define the type of morpheme connections in a word, the word-building type and helps to state the meaning of new forms created.

Componential Analysis. In this analysis linguists proceed from the assumption that the smallest units of meaning are sememes or semes. So componential analysis is an attempt to describe the meaning of words in terms of a universal inventory of semantic components and their possible combinations. Distinctive features of meaning d1, d2, d3 can be obtained by means of following procedure (L.Hjelmslev):

d1= boy = man = male

girl woman female

d2 = boy = girl = young

man woman adult

d3 = boy = girl = human

bull cow animal

Therefore the meaning of the word a boy contains semantic elements male, young, human. W. Haas, the English linguist, argues that it looks very plausible if one has carefully selected examples from words entering into clear-cut semantic groups, such as terms of kinship or words denoting colours. But it is less satisfactory in other cases.

Consider the following definitions from the Harby‘s dictionary: Cow – a full grown female of any animal of the ox family (complete definition containing all elements from the proportional oppositions above) Calf – the young of the cow (incomplete definition, its missing elements can be substituted from the previous one). Other examples of componential analysis:

bachelor – 1 - (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (one never got married); 2 - (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (one having academic degree after first four courses of college); 3 - (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (a knight who served under supervision of the other knight).

Father – (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (having at least one child).

Cвекор – (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (having a married son), (in relation to his son’s wife).

Father-in-law – (object), (alive), (a human being), (a man), (a grown-up), (having a married son or daughter), (in relation to his son’s wife or his daughter’s husband).

Componential analysis helps to define semantic fields and semantic rows. Semantic field is a group of words which have common semantic features or semes and can differ at least in one seme. A seme common to all the words of the semantic field is called archiseme. Thus archiseme for the verbs of movement (go, walk, run, slide, crawl, fly, swim; йти, їхати, повзти, летіти, пливти) is move in space (рухатись у просторі). The rest of their semes are called distinctive features, such as speed, way, environment. For example: swim – (in water), (move), (by movements of the limbs, fins, tail, etc.); плавати – 1. (на воді), (пересуватись), (за допомогою рухів кінцівок); 2. (триматись), (на поверхні), (на воді), (внаслідок меншої питомої ваги). So the words swim and плавати cannot be viewed as full equivalents.

While translating, the difference in meaning should be considered and the absent semantic feature should be compensated by additional lexical elements. In case when the absent seme is not crucial for the whole meaning of the source text it can be neglected while selecting an equivalent in the target language. It is essential for the comparative lexicology to take into consideration distinctive features of the meaning. It often happens that at presence of a number of common semantic features only one can justify the usage of the archisema, a word with more general meaning in combination with other linguistic units which are used to convey the meaning of the source utterance more precisely. Thus translating його тесть into English as his father-in-law narrowing of the source meaning occurs as father-in-law means a man having a married son or daughter in relation to their wife or husband while тесть denotes a man having a married daughter in relation to her husband. If one of the distinctive features which is the main in the meaning of the word is absent in the target language it results in untranslatibility. Componential analysis is practically always combined with transformational procedures or statistical analysis. The combination makes it possible to find out which of the meanings should be represented first of all in the dictionaries of different types and how the words should be combined in order to make speech sensible.

Transformational analysis in lexicological investigations may be defined as repatterning (representing, reorganization) 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 not only in the analysis of semantic sameness / difference of the lexical units but also in the analysis of the factors that account for their polysemy. Word-groups of identical distributional structure when repatterned show that the semantic relations between words and consequently the meaning may be different. Thus consider a pattern possessive pronoun+noun (his car, his failure, his arrest, his kindness). According to transformational analysis the meaning of each word-group may be represented as: he has a car, he failed, he was arrested, he is kind. In each of the cases different meaning is revealed: possession, action, passive action, quality. The rules of transformation are rather strict and shouldn‘t be identified with paraphrasing in the usual sense of the term. There are many restrictions both on syntactic and lexical levels. These are:

Permutation is the repatterning on condition that the basic subordinative relationships between words or word-stems of the lexical units are not changed.

For example His work is excellent may be transformed into his excellent work, the excellence of his work, he works excellently. In the example given the relationships between lexical units the stems of the notional words are essentially the same.

Replacement is the substitution of a component of the distributional structure by a member of a certain strictly defined set of lexical units. For example replacement of a notional verb by an auxiliary or link verb (he will make a bad mistake or he will make a good teacher). The sentences have identical distributional structure but only in the second one the verb to make can be substituted by become or be. The fact of impossibility of identical transformations of distributionally identical structures is a formal proof of the difference in their meaning.

Addition (or expansion) may be illustrated by the application of the procedure of addition to the classification of adjectives into two groups – adjectives denoting inherent or non-inherent qualities. e. g. John is happy. John is tall. We add a word-group in Moscow. We shall see that John is happy in Moscow has meaning while the second one is senseless. That is accounted by the difference in the meaning of adjectives denoting inherent (tall) non-inherent(happy) qualities.

Deletion is a procedure which shows whether one of the words semantically subordinated to the other. Thus in the word-group red flowers red may be deleted and transformed into flowers without making the sentence senseless: I like red flowers or I like flowers. In the other word-group red tape no element can be deleted. So the sentence transformed either into I hate tape or I hate red loose its initial meaning as in both transformed sentences the meaning of the phrase red tape meaning bureaucracy can‘t be divided into two parts.

Transformational analysis is frequently used to reveal semantic connections between constituents of the compounds. For example: heartache – heart aches (subject-predicate relation); schoolteacher – teacher at school (place of work); sunray – ray of the sun (genitive case relation); steamboat – boat set in motion by steam – (the means of the movement to be caused); snowball – ball made of snow (material); skateboard – board for skating (purpose of usage). With the help of transformational analysis it is possible to construct a map of all possible meanings of newly formed words if affixes have several meanings or in case of the morpheme homonymy. For instance: болільник – той, хто уболіває; зрадник - той, хто зраджує; чайник – те, що призначено для заварювання чаю; спільник – той, хто діє спільно з кимсь; здирник – той, хто здирає, вимагає, шляхом примусу; супутник – той, хто супроводжує; могильник – сховище непотрібного, зайвого; полярник – той, хто досліджує полярні регіони; ливарник – той, хто відливає металеві вироби; намордник – те, що надівають на морду тварині; хабарник – той, хто бере хабарі.

Method of semantic differentiation. A word has not only one meaning, even one word usually implies some additional information which differentiates one word from another. Thus the words to like, to love, to adore, to worship denote positive feelings, characteristic of a human being. But each of them gives additional information on the so-called strength of feeling. This is the connotational aspect which is singled out by the semantic differential, the method which was worked out by a group of American psycholinguists. Their technique requires the subjects to judge a series of concepts with respect to a set of antonymic adjective scale.

For example division can be: good – bad; fast – slow; strong – weak; hard – soft; happy – sad.

The meaning of the divisions is that each of the quality may be gradated representing extremely good, very good, neither good nor bad, slightly bad, extremely bad. Therefore division may be very good, not bad, etc.

The revealed gradations showing some portion of quality helps to single out such words which are usually referred to as neutral, expressive, archaic or new (neologisms).

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using a technique known as the comparative method. Therefore among the final tasks of any research in the field of Contrastive Lexicology are the following: 1) to study lexical units of the languages compared; 2) to investigate the problems of word-structure and word-formation in the languages under consideration; 3) to study the problem of interrelation of a word and its meaning; 4) to identify and classify the main isomorphic and allomorphic features characteristic of lexicons of the languages studied; 5) to single out the isomorphic regularities and describe allomorphic singularities in the lexicons of the languages investigated.

Practical data obtained from the researches in the Contrastive Lexicology contribute to General Lexicology, Typology, Translation, Semasiology and other linguistic sciences.

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