toourlanguagemaybewithgreatjustnessappliedthe.docVIP

“To our language may be with great justness applied the observation of Quintilian, that speech was not formed by an analogy sent from heaven. It did not descend to us in a?state of uniformity and perfection, but was produced by necessity and enlarged by accident, and is therefore compound of dissimilar parts, thrown together by negligence, by affectation, by learning or by ignorance.“ (Samuel Johnson, a ?famous writer of dictionaries, 1747). Introduction “Word-perfect” is a?sourcebook for advanced students of English as well as teachers of English lexicon and lexicology at various levels. The book is initially aimed at those who wish to focus on English structures and broaden their socio-cultural awareness and, at the same time work on the theory of English linguistics and lexicology. Linguistics covers several sub-branches, such as morphology, phonetics or lexicology. These sub-branches examine language from various points of view and tend to overlap. Lexicology is a?branch of linguistics which studies words and their meaning (Peprník, p. 133). Thus, the most frequent questions a?student of lexicology is likely to ask are: What is a?word?; What sort of relationship is there between a?word and its meaning?; Why are there several notions for one meaning?; Why there exist words which have several meanings?; How come that there are so many English expressions whose meaning is different from the meaning of their individual words? To answer the first question (What is a?word?) we have to look closely at the theory of linguistic signs as well as at some morphological issues. Therefore, Section I?of this book examines selected phenomena of the word-formative process, such as suffixation, prefixation, back-formation, conversion, portmanteau words and compounds. Section II analyses structural relations among words, i.e. “how words behave“. This part provides an opportunity to study and practise homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, hyperonyms and lexical