THE LEXICAL SYSTEM OF ENGLISH

What do we know about the lexical system of English?

In order to understand better the task involved in learning the vocabulary of the English language we need to look at
two aspects of meaning. The first concerns the link between meaning and the world to which words refer. The second
involves the sense relations that exist among words.

Denotative and connotative meaning

If a word has reference to an object, action, or event in the physical world, this can be described as its referential or
denotative meaning. Novice language learners can make the mistake of believing that one language maps neatly on to
another and the task of learning it means simply learning new words for sets of objects, or states, or concepts. However,
even the task of learning vocabulary in relation to physical objects is complicated by the fact that languages reflect the
world in different ways and use different categories to describe it. Learners are therefore faced with different labelling
systems. For example, every human being has two grandmothers, but there is only one word in English for both your
mother's mother and your father's mother (apart from the very formal and clumsy 'maternal grandmother' and 'paternal
grandmother'). However, some languages have two different words. English has two words for a large area of water,
'sea and 'lake', whereas Swedish has one, sj, presumably because some Swedish lakes have wide channels to the sea
and it is difficult to distinguish where the lake ends and the sea begins.

As well as denotative meaning, learners have to deal with the complexities of connotative meaning. This term relates to
the attitudes and emotions of a language user in choosing a word and the influence of these on the listener or reader's
interpretation of the word. A simple example of this would be to consider the following group of adjectives used to
describe people and to decide which have positive associations and which negative.

obstinate energetic ambitious stubborn single-minded
arrogant confident opportunistic reliable complacent
dogmatic wise determined fanatical rebellious

Some of these will invariably be positive, for example 'wise', or negative, for example 'arrogant', but others will depend
on the context of use and the impression the speaker or writer is trying to create. 'Ambitious' is a good example.

Meaning relations among words

The second aspect of meaning involves the sense relations that exist among words. These relations can be found in two
dimensions which linguists have often referred to as 'axes'. The horizontal axis represents syntagmatic relations, those
between items in sentences. For example, a learner has to understand that we can say 'My car was badly damaged in the
accident' but not *'My car was badly injured in the accident'. Only one of these verbs can collocate with the noun 'car'.
The vertical axis represents paradigmatic relations, the complex relationships that exist between items in the whole
lexical system. For example, learning the meaning of a word involves knowing how that meaning is defined in relation
to other similar or opposite words. Learning English therefore means gradually acquiring a knowledge of synonyms,
antonyms, and other relations in its semantic structure.

Syntagmatic relations
Syntagmatic relations are relations between words as they occur in sequence. In the English language there are words
which co-occur with high frequency, for example, 'a long road', 'a ripe banana', 'a savage dog' . These are collocations.
As well as nouns and adjectives we can find noun +verb collocations such as 'the dog barked' (not 'roared'), the sun
shone (not 'glowed'), or verb +noun collocations such as 'he's picking strawberries' or 'she's collecting stamps', or noun
+present participle collocations in compounds, such as 'train-spotting' and 'bird-watching'.

There are other words which do not co-occur naturally, for example, *'a tall road', *'a mature banana', and *'a barbaric
dog'. With these particular examples, it would become easier for a learner over time to realize their non-compatibility as
these adjectives frequently collocate with other nouns, for example, 'a tall man', 'a mature person', and 'a barbaric
practice'. A growing knowledge of acceptable collocations will build associations which give learners clues about
compatibility. However, with other collocations it is not possible to predict from knowing the meaning of each word in
the collocation what is and what is not acceptable. These more idiomatic expressions are normal in the speech and
writing of native speakers and therefore need to be a part of language learning. Examples include binominal idioms
where the sequence of words is set, for example, 'cloak and dagger' and 'kith and kin'; phrasal verb idioms, for example,
'stand down' and 'get over'; catch phrases, for example, 'keep smiling' and 'chin up'; metaphors, for example 'donkey's
years' and 'a pig's ear', and similes such as 'as pleased as Punch' and 'as thick as two short planks'. Nattinger (1988)
suggests that such expressions should be seen as categories of 'lexical phrase' which learners can be encouraged to store
as chunks of speech and retrieve holistically as they compose. The practical advantage of including them in a language
course is that instruction can help learners avoid incongruity and that having such phrases ready as whole 'chunks' for
language production assists fluency.

However, there are issues here for the teacher. Learning to understand idioms is one thing, but learning to produce them
is perhaps another. Many idioms carry quite subtle nuances in meaning and learners need to be aware of this, develop
preferences, and make choices which they feel are appropriate for themselves. Idioms seem to engender great
enthusiasm in some learners and the teacher may need to guide them towards the most useful ones. Collocations, both
idiomatic and non-idiomatic, are a problematic area for learners. A wide variety of activities for teaching them can now
be found in textbooks, but these need to be carefully assessed by teachers.

Paradigmatic relations
Words not only have sequential relationships, but exist in complex relationships with other words in the language in a
network of meanings. Linguists debate the precise categorization and naming of these relationships, but some terms are
frequently used by teachers and textbook designers. The most common are synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy.

Synonymy
A simple way of defining synonymy is to say that, in a given context, one linguistic item can be exchanged for another
without changing the meaning of the sentence or utterance. For example, in the sentence:
He answered the question courteously
'politely' would probably be regarded as synonym as it could be substituted for 'courteously' without changing the
meaning. It would be a mistake to suggest that words are substitutable in all contexts. In fact synonyms are hard to find
because meaning depends on context. Could we, for example, substitute 'sadly' for 'unhappily' in the context of this
sentence?
He set about the task unhappily as he was not convinced of a positive outcome.
However, with learners at early levels, similarity is a useful way of presenting word meaning, especially with adult
learners returning to study who will have varying language resources to draw on and can relate a new word to words
they already know. For example, this teacher summarizes several words elicited from the class:

Depressed, ... what does this mean? ... yes he's unhappy, he's sad, look at the picture ... he's ... yes ... miserable, he's
depressed.

Antonymy
The term antonymy covers a number of relationships often thought of as opposites. Complementarity is used for
oppositions such as 'male' and 'female' and 'dead' and 'alive' as these are clear-cut; one excludes the other. Converseness
is a relationship where one term implies the other, as with 'import' and 'export', 'parent' and 'child', and 'trainer' and
'trainee'. And a notoriously difficult area is that of gradable antonymy whereit is possible to create a scale of items, for
instance, 'boiling', 'hot', 'warm', 'lukewarm', 'tepid', 'cool', 'cold', and 'icy' (of water), which mayor may not relate to a
similar scale in the learners' first language. The same scale would not apply when talking about weather, though some
items on it would, which points to one of the problems for learners in dealing with antonymy.

Words have different opposites in different contexts. To take just one example, the adjective 'soft' collocates with a
number of nouns and takes a different antonym with each:

soft water
soft material
soft music
soft colour
hard water
rough material
loud music
bright colour

This constitutes another difficulty for learners to tackle.

Hyponomy
Hyponymy is a relationship whereby one word includes others within a hierarchy, so that we have superordinate words
and subordinate words. So 'flower', 'carnation', and 'rose' are in a hyponymous relationship, 'carnation' and 'rose' being
subordinate hyponyms of flower' and co-hyponyms of each other. Although linguists disagree about what precisely
constitutes a hyponymous relationship, teachers and textbooks use a variety of classifications in grouping vocabulary
for ease of learning. McCarthy (1990) usefully describes these as 'ways of doing x', 'one of a series', and 'part of x'. An
example of the first would be 'to snigger', 'to titter', 'to guffaw' , and 'to roar', as ways of laughing; of the second would
be 'breakfast', 'lunch', 'tea, and 'dinner' as meals of the day; and of the third would be 'keyboard', 'mouse', and 'monitor'
as parts of a computer.

The general question that arises from a consideration of the linguistic relations between words is the extent to which
they can be usefully and explicitly exploited by the teacher.

Cultural factors in the building of meaning

As learners develop their vocabulary knowledge, they acquire not only new words but also new meanings associated
with words they have already learned. These are acquired gradually as words are met in different contexts and
eventually a word might have extensive and complex meaning associations.

Eco (1979) commented that every word is potentially a text. This implies that, in order both to interpret meaning
correctly and to choose vocabulary appropriately, learners need to become aware of nuances of meaning. Furthermore,
many of these will be culturally influenced and may not be easily accessible. For example, those associations relating to
dogs as family pets would not be familiar to learners from cultures where dogs are not domestic animals but are seen as
scavengers. Teachers need to be aware that there will be gaps in learners' understanding of nuance and find ways of
helping them to fill the gaps with further meaning associations.

Another culturally affected factor influencing acquisition is the phenomenon of prototypes. A simple definition of
prototype is that it is the foremost example of a particular conceptual category, the one that springs most easily to mind
when a learner hears a word, for example, 'tree'. If an oak tree is the kind of tree first thought of, then it is a prototype
and other trees are non-prototypes. Of course, some concepts or objects will be more central to a particular learner
because of personal experience, but it seems that some are shared widely across speakers from a particular culture.
Rosch (1975) claimed that Americans from quite widely differing backgrounds perceived a robin as a classic example
of a bird, a canary as a poorer example, and a penguin as even poorer. A study by Aitchison (1992) seemed to suggest
that the cabbage was the prototype among vegetables for German speakers.

Aitchison also raises the question of whether teachers need to be aware of how such rankings within categories might
differ between English and the first languages of their learners, or even of whether teaching should be influenced by this
knowledge. Do learners acquire the meanings of prototypes more quickly than those of non-prototypes, for example?
Further research studies are needed to test such suggestions

Prototype studies, however, have pointed out that we store certain kinds of knowledge about words. Some knowledge is
basic and universal, for example, that a dog has four legs, a sensitive nose, and barks. Other knowledge is more abstract
and relates to personal or cultural experience: this is known as schematic knowledge. 'Schemata' are mental
representations associated with the word which are activated in the mind when it is encountered. From the 'dog' list such
associations as 'people play with it' or 'lick one's face' would be classed as cultural schematic knowledge. So the word
'dog' will evoke different associations in different cultures. The concept of schematic knowledge has taken on great
significance in the field of reading in a foreign language.

This section has considered some key factors in the learning of vocabulary. The extent to which each is significant will
depend partly on the purposes for learning English of any particular learner, whether mainly for reading academic
texts, for example, or for appreciating literature, or for communicating in English with other non-native speakers of the
language.