The problems of translation modal verbs from English into Uzbek Contents: Introduction

1.3. Frequent verbs


Frequency n
The number of occurrences of a linguistic item in a text or corpus.
Different linguistic items have different frequencies of occurrence in speech and writing. In English, function words (e.g. a, the, to, etc.) occur more frequently than verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. Word frequency counts are used to select vocabulary for language teaching, in lexicography, in the study of literary style in stylistics, and in text linguistics. The twenty most frequently occurring words in a corpus of over one million words in a study of written American English by Kucera and Francis were: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, was, he, for, it, with, as, his, on, be, at, by, I.⁷
The same is true of the different meanings of one and the same word.
Analyzing the function of a word in linguistic contexts and comparing these contexts, we conclude that; meanings are different (or the same) and this fact can be proved by an objective investigation of linguistic data. For example we can observe the difference of the meanings of the word take if we examine its functions in different linguistic contexts, take the tram (the taxi, the cab,, etc.) as opposed to take to somebody. It follows that in the functional approach (1) semantic investigation is confined to the analysis of the difference or sameness of meaning; (2) meaning is understood essentially as the function of the use of linguistic units. As a matter of fact, this line of semantic investigation is the primary concern, implied or expressed, of all structural linguists⁸.
The English Language is full of words. In fact, Oxford dictionary lists approximately 250,000 separate English words and their most recent dictionary included more than 170,000 entries. The problem is deciding which words are useful and which words are not. Another way to say this is that not all 170,000 words found in the dictionary are used commonly. This makes learning new vocabulary very difficult. How can someone decide if a word is common or not, useful or not?
Well, one of the ways to do this is to start by learning and using what are generally considered the most common words found in English. The list below comes from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and is the result of intensive research and evaluation.

• 
  be
  
• 
  have
  
• 
  do
  
• 
  say
  
• 
  get
  
• 
  make
  
• 
  go
  
• 
  know
  
• 
  take
  
• 
  see
  
• 
  come
  
• 
  think
  
• 
  look
  
• 
  want
  
• 
  give
  
• 
  use
  
• 
  find
  
• 
  tell
  
• 
  ask
  
• 
  work
  
• 
  seem
  
• 
  feel
  
• 
  try
  
• 
  leave
  
• 
  call⁹
  

It is more or less universally recognized that word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word. These components are usually described as types of meaning. The two main types of meaning that are readily observed are the grammatical and the lexical meanings to be found in words and word-forms.
In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in relation to other linguistic units, i.e. by its distribution. Word forms speaks, reads, writes have one and the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution, e.g. only after the pronouns he, she, it and before adverbs like well, badly, to-day, etc. It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributional different (cf. my work and I work).
Comparing word-forms of one and the same word we observe that besides grammatical meaning, there is another component of meaning to be found in them. Unlike the grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms of the word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on, but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word. All members of a major word-class share a distinguishing semantic component which though very abstract may be viewed as the lexical component of part-of-speech meaning. A verb is understood to possess sets of forms expressing, e.g., tense meaning (worked — works), mood meaning (work! — (I) work), etc. In verbs the lexical meaning usually comes to the fore although in some of them, the verb to be, e.g., the grammatical meaning of a linking element prevails (cf. he works as a teacher and he is a teacher).
The verb «to take» does not coincide in the number of meanings with its corresponding word « олмоқ ». For example, to take an exam — imtihon topshirmoq; to take tea – choy ichmoq; to take off —yechinmoq; to give an examination- imtihon olmoq; to have a rest-dam olmoq; to photograph- rasm olmoq.
In the semantic structure of the Uzbek word there may be a definite figurative meaning which its corresponding English word doesn't possess. For example, Bu voqea menga katta maktab bo’ldi- This event was a good lesson to me (not «this event was a good school to me»). The norm of lexical valance of a word in English is not the same as in Uzbek. For example, in Uzbek the verb «ko’tarmoq» may be combined with the nouns «qo’l» and «stul». However, its corresponding English verb «to raise» can be combined with the noun «hand» («to raise hands but not «to raise chair» (to lift chair).
The number of English synonymic sets may be substituted by one word in Uzbek. For example, the verbs «accept», «admit», «adopt», «take», «receive» correspond to the meanings of the Uzbek word «qabul qilmoq». In English to the Uzbek word «rassom» corresponds three words. They are: painter, artist, and drawer. In Uzbek 6 words are used to express the notion «blow» (urish, zarba, zarb, urilish, taqillatish, tepish). In English more than 20 words denote this notion. They are: blow, smack, slap, whack, poke, dig, rap, knock, stroke etc. The correlated words «to make» and «qilmoq» have different lexical valances. E.g. to make soup —sho’rva qilmoq (pishirmoq), to make tea —choy damlamoq, to make a table — stol yasamoq, dars qilmoq — to do lessons, to ring up – telefon qilmoq, to wish- niyat qilmoq, to try-harakat qilmoq and etc¹⁰.
Some semantic changes may be accounted for by the influence of a peculiar factor usually referred to as linguistic analogy. It was found out,
e.g., that if one of the members of a synonymic set acquires a new meaning other members of this set change their meanings too. It was observed, e.g., that all English adverbs which acquired the meaning ‘rapidly’ (in a certain period of time — before 1300) always develop the meaning ‘immediately’, similarly verbs synonymous with catch, e.g. grasp, get, etc., by semantic extension acquired another meaning — ‘to understand’. We can observe restriction and specialization of meaning in the case of the verb to glide (OE. glidan) which had the meaning ‘to move gently and smoothly’ and has now acquired a restricted and specialized meaning ‘to fly with no engine’ (cf. a glider).
There are given types of verbs which obtained by conversion. This is the most productive area in which conversion manifests itself. Very many English verbs have been obtained by conversion, from nouns especially.
a) Verbs obtained from nouns
The semantic relationships between the nouns and their converted verbal counterparts are very diverse and, therefore, quite difficult to classify. Consequently the patterns of meaning which can be identified form a rather non-homogenous class:

• 
  action resulting in the situation designated by the noun: to rain, to snow, to frost;
  

• 
  action generating the notion designated by the noun: to point, to spot, to drop, to stripe;
  
• 
  instrumental meaning: to finger, to elbow, to shoulder, to saw, to hammer, to screw, to gun, to nail;
  
• 
  agentive meaning (to be/to act like what the nouns designates): to wolf, to ape, to monkey, to parrot, to pig, to nurse, to father;
  
• 
  locative meaning: to pocket, to corner, to garage;
  
• 
  to put in what the noun designates: to bottle, to catalogue, to list;
  
• 
  to deprive of what the noun designates: to peel, to skin, to scalp;
  
• 
  to send/go by what the noun designates: to mail, to ship;
  
• 
  to provide with what the noun designates: to cover, to wrap, to plaster, to coat.
  

b) Verbs obtained from adjectives
The basic meaning of the de-adjectival verbs is “to bring about the characteristic expressed by the adjective in an object”: to calm, to dirty, to square, to round, to alert, to aggregate, or “to make a subject suffer the instatement of the quality expressed by the adjective: to wrong, to dry, to wet, to sour, to clean.
c) Verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions, interjections
Verbs obtained from adverbs, conjunctions or interjections are pretty rare in English. Nevertheless, verbs such as to forward, to but (“But me no buts!”), to chirp, to squeal, to hum, to meow are present in the language.