DIALECTS in English. Metonymy. Type of word meaning

DIALECTS in English

Standard English - the official language of Great Britain taught at schools and universities, used by the press, the radio and the television and spoken by educated people may be defined as that form of English which is current and literary, sub­stantially uniform and recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken or understood. Its vocabulary is contrasted to dialect words or dialectisms belonging to various local dialects. Local dialeсts - are varieties of the English language peculiar to some dis­tricts and having no normalized literary form. Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called variants. In Great Britain there are two variants, Scottish English and Irish English, and five main groups of dialects: Northern, Midland, Eastern, Western and Southern. Every group contains several (up to ten) dialects. One of the best known Southern dialects is Cockney, the regional dialect of London. This dialect exists on two levels. As spoken by the educated lower middle classes it is a regional dialect marked by some deviations in pronunciation but few in vocabulary and syntax. As spoken by the uneducated, Cockney differs from Standard English in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and syntax. Dialects are now chiefly preserved in rural communities, in the speech of elderly people. Their boundaries have become less stable than they used to be; the distinctive features are tending to disappear with the shifting of population due to the migration of working-class families in search of employment and the growing influence of urban life over the countryside. Dialects are said to undergo rapid changes under the pressure of Standard English taught at schools and the speech habits cultivated by radio, television and cin­ema. Words from dialects and variants may penetrate into Standart English.

Metonymy

The transfer based upon the associa­tion of contiguity. It is the device in which the name of one thing is changed for that of another to which it is related by association of ideas, as having close relationship to one another. (I had no head for names, I have an ear for music, She’s the hope of the family). 1) giving the part for the whole (synec­doche): house may denote the Members of the Parliament; The White House, The Pentagon can mean its staff and policy; 2) the sign for the thing signified: 'gray hair' - old age; 3) the instrument for the agent: the best pens of the day ( best writers); 4) the container for the thing con­tained: the kettle is boiling (water); 5) geographical names turning into common nouns (to name the goods ex­ported or originating there): china, cham­pagne, burgundy, cheddar; 6) the material substitutes the thing made of: glass, iron, copper, nickel; 7) symbol for thing symbolized: 'the crown' for monarchy.

Type of word meaning

Lexical - is the mean­ing proper to the given lin­guistic unit in all its forms and distributions. L. meaning is the realiza­tion of concept or emotion by means of a definite language system. L. meaning is the same in different gram­matical forms of the same word: Listen, listens, listening, listened, listener, listeners, listerner's, lis­teners'. Two components of lexical meaning: Denotative - part of meaning gives objective information about an object, it is the con­ceptual content of a word: terms (nudeous, para­digm). Connotative - part of the lexical meaning is what the word con­veys about the speaker's atti­tude to different situations: stomach vs belly. Four types of connotative meaning: Stylistic - connotation is what the word conveys about the speaker's usage of a certain functional style, situation, re­lationships between inter­locutors, purpose of commu­nication: house (neutral), resi­dence (formal), hut (in­formal); Evaluative - connotation is about the speaker's approval or disapproval of the object spoken: catholics vs papists. Emotional - connotation is what the word conveys about the speaker's emotions: cold weather - beastly weather; Intensifying - connotation ex-presses degree or intensity of lexical meaning: splendid vs gorgeous, magnificent; Grammatical - meaning is ab­stract and generalized, it is recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words: the common element in the words 'kids, tables, types' is the grammati­cal meaning of plurality; Lexico-grammatical meaning is common for all the mean­ings of words belonging to a lexico-grammatical class of words, it is the feature ac­cording to which they are grouped together: the words 'team, crew, staff, brigade' have common lexico-gram­matical meaning of 'group'; Implicational - meaning is the implied information associ­ated with the speaker's knowl­edge about the referent: in the utterance “This classy woman has long been a Hollywood staple' the word 'staple' has an implicational meaning; Direct - meaning nominates the referent in isolation, without certain context: pig's head; Figurative - meaning nominates the referent giving some addi­tional characteristics: He is pig-headed; Primary /main - meaning stands first, usually it is the earliest: 'Field⁷ primary meaning as in 'green fields'; Secondary / de­rived - meaning is formed from the primary: field" derived meaning (secondary) as in " in the field of our history; in the field of physics'.