Lecture Methods of Lexicological Research

The synchronic approach.
The center of interest has shifted to the synchronic level, the spoken utterance and structure. Lexicologists are now describing what the vocabulary of the language is like, rather than how it came to be that way.
The new trend has received the name structural (descriptive) linguistics. Its methodological principles can be summarized as follows: Language is to be analyzed by specifically linguistic methods, according to the specifically linguistic criteria, not as a combination of psychological, physiological and physical phenomenon. This analysis arrives at a definite number of discrete units, interdependent parts of relational structure, and each language is characterized by an internal structure of its own.
Descriptive linguistics cannot be simply a list of elements; it must show how these elements are combined.
Structural linguistic has many varieties and schools. The main schools are those of Prague, the United States, Copenhagen, and more presently, London and Moscow.
A major achievements of the Prague school is represented in N.S.Trubetzkoy’s classical work, and means in the first place a particular approach to phonology (the theory of oppositions).
The typically American developments of linguistic theory resulted from practical tasks: the study of the America Indian languages, teaching of foreign languages, and recently, machine translation. Books by L.Bloomfield, E.Nida, B.Bloch, Z.Harris and others mark stages in the development of structuralist theory in the United States. The main achievements of the American schools are the analysis into immediate constituents, substitution, distributional and transformational analysis.
Immediate constituents (IC) are the two meaningful parts forming a larger linguistic unity. The IC of bluish are blue- and –ish.
Substitution is testing of similarity by placing into identical environment:
It is reddish – it is some what red.
Substitution is also necessary for determining classes for words.
E.g. the words family, boy, and house all belong to different classes of nouns, as they are differently substituted:
I like this family – I like them
I like this boy – I like him
I like this house – I like it.
This linguistic feature and not the difference between the objects the words serve to denote, is the basis for their subdivision into collective, personal and object nouns.The term distribution is used to denote the possible variants of the immediate lexical, grammatical and phonetical environment of a linguistic unit.
According to Z.Harris, “the distribution of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the positions of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements”.
E.g. she made him a good wife – she made a good wife for him.