Words and meanings

Language units large and small Marked forms of words - Inflection, Derivation, Declension, Conjugation · Diminutive, Augmentative Groups and categories and properties of words - Syntactic and lexical categories · Grammatical cases · Correlatives · Expletives · Adjuncts Words and meaning - Morphology · Lexicology · Semiotics · Onomasiology · Figures of speech, expressions, phraseology, etc. · Word similarity · Ambiguity · Modality · Segment function, interaction, reference - Clitics · Apposition· Parataxis, Hypotaxis· Attributive· Binding · Coordinations · Word and concept reference Sentence structure and style - Agreement · Ellipsis· Hedging Phonology - Articulation · Formants· Prosody · Sound change · Intonation, stress, focus · Diphones · Intervocalic · Glottal stop · Vowel_diagrams · Elision · Ablaut_and_umlaut · Phonics Speech processing · Praat notes · Praat plugins and toolkit notes · Praat scripting notes Analyses, models, software - Minimal pairs · Concordances · Linguistics software · Some_relatively_basic_text_processing · Word embeddings · Semantic similarity Unsorted - Contextualism · · Text summarization · Accent, Dialect, Language · Pidgin, Creole · Natural language typology · Writing_systems · Typography, orthography · Digraphs, ligatures, dipthongs · More linguistic terms and descriptions · Phonetic scripts

Lexicology

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Lexicology is the general and objective study of words and their meanings.

In some ways, it is the lexical part of philology.

In other ways it is closely related to etymology, phraseology, and semantics.

Lexicography can be said to be the applied part of lexicology, as it studies the use of words.

'Lexicography' is also and is often used to refer to the compilation of a lexicon. Note that lexicographer is a comparatively specific word, referring to someone who writes dictionaries.

Semiotics

Semiotics can be taken as the study of signs and how we relate them to meaning.

Signs in this context are are anything that can be interpreted to have a meaning, including but not limited to sounds, motions, gesture, images.

In a practical sense we often still focus on words, yet the term is used in part to remind you these are far from the only meaning-carriers, even in a lot of everyday situations.

Sign process is sometimes synonym for semiotics, arguably a more self-explanatory name to those not already deep in the theory.

Sign process is also sometimes a little more specifically meant as a "any process/activity that involves signs, and probably meaning".

Linguistics is mostly about intentional meaning.

You could say that semiology is more about the signs and symbols and more anthropological, while linguistics more about the structure, meaning and meaningful communication.

As such, linguistics courses may skim over semiology, or use the term only for all the inbetweens - analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, and also conduct, behaviour, and a lot of other sociology.

It also overlaps with philosophy, relating to structuralism, and more. (see e.g. Saussure)

Entirely unintentional signs include e.g. diagnosis, as a symptom can be a a sign of a medical condition.

See also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiosis

Philology, Etymology

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Etymology is the study of the history of words and phrases, primarily reporting use, change, transfer between languages and such, often comprising of finding and proving (or disproving) these genetic-like relations.

There is usually overlap with morphology simply because a lot of carried meaning comes from morphemes.

The term is related to philology, which refers to the extensive study of historical linguistics, which may easily include many aspects of a language at a time - grammar, culture, relevant politics, and more.

Related concepts

You can usually see systematic differences between cognates between similar languages in terms of phonetics and meaning. Partly because of this, cognate guessing plays a role in second language vocabulary aquisition. Of course, it's easy to guess false cognates and false friends this way and get rather confused.

Loaning across languages can intrododuce various cognate relations.

False etymology, folk etymology

People regularly guess at etymologies. And regularly incorrectly.

They may sound quite plausible, and some get a status similar to urban legend -- they just won't die even though they're not hard to falsify.

Cognates

Cognates are words that are related by origin, by common ancestry, but have started developing independently, and as such now have distinct meanings and etymologies.

Meaning may have drifted apart, or are similar and now serve to distinguish two similar concepts.

For example, the English skirt and shirt have a common Old English origin.

May be used to refer to cognates within a language, but note that words that sound about the same across languages, particularly those in the same language family, are also commonly considered cognates - often because of their common origin and their development within their language.

For example, the word 'night' looks and/or sounds similar between most Indo-European languages.

Various cognates grow from long-term development, from common origins that unites two languages in the language trees. For example, English and German are fairly closely related, while English and Spanish's common ground is mostly in Latin.

False cognates

False cognates are words that are thought to be similar, usually because they look and sound it, but do not share a direct or common root.

For example, Latin habere (to have) and German haben (to have) seem like likely cognates, but these two words come from different origins. Tracing them back reveals that their similarity is coincidental; the sounds changed over time, and from distinct origins.

Doublets (etymological twins)

Repeated loaning from the same origin, often at different times, creates doublets, a.k.a. etymological twins: words with the same origin, but that are made distinct in the loaning process.

Could be considered a special case of cognates.

Regularly have similar but distinct meanings and/or uses, often (near-)synonyms, sometimes (near-)antonyms.

For example, English has fire and pyre, aperture and overture, carton and cartoon, and, less recognizably, sovereign and soprano.

Triplets also exist, but are fairly rare.

False friends

False friends are words that look quite similar between languages, but significantly differ in meaning.

They are easily misidentified when the words are homonyms, or cognates (false or not).

False friend recognition probably happens most often across languages. Literal translation of regular sentences and especially idioms regularly introduces false friends.

See also:

• Linguistic inference / linguistic transfer

See also

Etymological websites:

• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://www.wordorigins.org/
• http://www.takeourword.com/
• http://wordwizard.com/

Names:

• http://www.behindthename.com/