The Statistical Analysis

An important and promising trend in modern Linguistics which has been making progress during the last few decades is quantitative study of language phenomena and application of statistical methods in linguistic analysis.

It is common knowledge that very few- people know more than I0% of the words of their mother tongue. Hence, if we do not wish to waste time on committing to memory vocabulary items which are never likely to be useful to the learner, we have to select only lexical units that are commonly used by native speakers. Thus, it is evident that the problem of selection of leaching vocabulary is of vital importance. It is also evident that by far the most reliable single criterion is that of frequency as, presumably, the most useful items are those that occur most frequently in our language use.

Statistical techniques have been successfully applied in the analysis of various linguistic phenomena: different structural types of words, affixes, the vocabularies of great waters and poets and even in the study of some problems of Historical Lexicology.

The Immediate Constituents Analysis

The theory of Immediate Constituents (IC) was originally elaborated as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevant;. related to one another. For example, in the word-group a black dress in severe style we do not relate a to black, black to dress, dress to m. etc. hut set up a structure which may be represented as a black dress / in severe style. Thus, the fundamental aim of the IC analysis is to segment a set of lexical units into two maximally independent sequences or ICs thus revealing the hierarchical structure of this set.

The Transformational Analysis

- transformational analyses –the changing to the sentence, phrase according to prescribed model and following certain groups. It has much in common with substitution;

The transformational analysis in lexicological investigations may be defined as repatterning of various distributional structures in order to discover difference or sameness of meaning of practically identical distributional patterns.

For example, if we compare the two compound words dogfight and dogcart, we shall see that the distributional pattern of the stems is identical and may be represented as n + n. The meaning of these words, broadly speaking, is also similar as the first of the stems modifies, describes the second and we understand these compounds as "a kind of fight" and "a kind of cart" respectively. The semantic relationship between the stems, however, is different and, hence, the lexical meaning of the words is also different. This can be shown by means of a transformational procedure which reveals that a dogfight is semantically equivalent to "a fight between dogs", whereas a dogurt is not "a cart between dogs" but "a carl drawn by dogs''.

dancing hall; dancing girl

- componential analyses – an attempt to describe the meaning of the word in terms of a universal inventory of semantic components. It is close to dictionary definition. When a word is analysed into a set of meaning components (semes) or semantic features.

Analysing the meaning of the word they deal with invariants or lexico-semantic variants or semes. Seme is the smallest element of the meaning of a word.

the componental analysis also proceeds from the assumption that word meaning is not an unanalysable whole but can be decomposed into elementary semantic components.

e.g the meaning of the English word boy may be shown as (+human) (+male) (- adult)

Dictionary definitions are based on this analysis. It deals with invariants - lexico-semantic variants + a seme. (e.g set) its semantic invariant is place

· to be placed towards or below the horizon (The sun sets in the west)

· to move or place so that it is near smth.(to set a glass to one’s lips)

· to cause to be at a certain state.(to set free)

· to be placed in a suitable condition (to place in order)

etc The term lexico-semantic variant was introduced by prof. Smirnitsky. Linguists use also the term sense (prof. Korsakov) instead of lexico-semantic variant.