The use of diverse methods ought to be a key component of teacher preparation

programs as well as the educational process itself.

Thus there are exist the following methods which help researchers carry out their
investigations and obtain definite results.
They are seven in number:
 contrastive analyses,
 statistical methods of inqiury,
 immediate constituents analyses IC,
 distributional analyses,
 transformational analyses,
 componential analyses
 method of semantic differentiation .
All methods of linguistic analysis are tradionally subdivided into formalized
and none formalized procedures. Selection of this or that method or procedure
largely depends on the goal and which includes certain tasks of course set before
the researcher.
Contrastive analyses for example is of great import nowadays as it gives
possibilities to compare different languages, including both related and unrelated
ones, in order to find out their both common and distinctive characteristics.
Besides it is also very important in teaching English as a foreign language. Usually
it is followed by statistical methods of analyses, because quantitative evaluation is
usually an essential part of any linguistic procedure.
TO SUM UP
Of primary importance are contrastive analysis (2 or more languages), statistical
analysis (quantitably study certain language phenomena).
The IC method is mainly applied to find out the derivational structure of lexical
units. Distributional and transformational procedures are of help in the studies of
sameness\difference of meaning of the words and word groups. Also, these
methods may be applied to the study of word building.
The componential analysis brings to the light a set of themes? (Semantic
components) which make up the denotational meaning of lexical units. The
componential analysis may be combined with transformational procedures and
with distributional analysis.
The method of semantic differential is regarded as an interesting attempt to get
better insight into the problem of the connotational meaning. This method however
has not been properly elaborated and it is really used in applied lexicology.

Distributional analysis in its various forms is commonly used nowadays by

lexicologists of different schools of thought. By the term d i s t r i b u t i o n we
understand the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the
same level (words relative to words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.)

Contrastive linguistics
attempts to find out similarities and differences in both philogenically related and
non-related languages. It is now universally recognised that contrastive linguistics
is a field of particular interest to teachers of foreign languages.
Contrastive analysis is becoming nowadays one of the fundamental requirements
in teaching foreign languages in general.
In fact contrastive analysis grew as the result of the practical demands of language
teaching methodology where it was empirically shown that the errors which are
made recurrently by foreign language students can be often traced back to the
differences in structure between the target language and the language of the
learner.
All the problems of foreign language teaching will certainly not be solved by
contrastive linguistics alone. There is no doubt, however, that contrastive analysis
has a part to play in evaluation of errors, in predicting typical errors and thus must
be seen in connection with overall endeavours to rationalise and intensify foreign
language teaching.
Linguistic scholars working in the field of applied linguistics assume that the most
effective teaching materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of
the language to be learned carefully compared with a parallel description of the
native language of the learner.
Linguists proceed from the assumption that the categories, elements, etc. on the
semantic as well as on the syntactic and other levels are valid for both languages,
i.e. are adopted from a possibly universal inventory. For example, linking verbs
can be found in English, in French, in Ukrainian, etc. Linking verbs having the
meaning of ‘change’, ‘become’ are differently represented in each of the
languages. In English, e.g., become, come, fall, get, grow, run, turn, wax, in
Ukrainian ставати.
The contrastive analysis can be carried out at 3 linguistic levels, namely
phonology, grammar (which includes morphology and syntax) lexis or
vocabulary.
Here from it becomes clear that contrastive analysis may be used to compare
sounds, certain grammar structures, words even semantics of morphological
elements like prefixes, suffixes, roots in the woods then certain sentence
structures, parts of sentence members and of course various word groups and
even groups of words including synonyms, antonyms, idioms denoting the
various notions etc.
Of course for our subject of primary importance is the contrastive analysis carried
out at the level of lexis or vocabulary. The contrastive analysis is applied to
reveal the features of sameness and difference in lexical meanings and semantics
structures of correlated words in different languages.
Contrastive analysis also brings to light what can be labelled problem pairs, i.e. the
words that denote two entities in one language and correspond to two different
words in another language. The same example may be suggested here like clock
and watch in English and годинник in Ukrainian, also artist painter in English and
художник in Ukrainian.
Each language contains words which cannot be translated directly from this
language into another. While interpreting the very essence of the notion should be
represented the way to sound understandable and clear for the person for instance
in engaged in translation process or in various ling. Analyses etc.
One of most to some extent even difficult is to use the comparison of polysemantic
words. Usually it is the problem how to compare the words having many
meanings. Majority of words in english and also ukrainian are polysemantic it
means that they have many meanings.
Contrastive analysis on the level of the grammatical meaning reveals that
correlated words in different languages may differ in the grammatical
component of their meaning.
To take a simple instance Ukr are liable to say the *news are good, *the money
are on the table, *her hair are black, etc. as the words новости, деньги,
волосы have the grammatical meaning of plurality in the Ukr language.

Last but not least contrastive analysis deals with the meaning and use of
situational verbal units, i.e. words, word-groups, sentences which are commonly
used by native speakers in certain situations.

To sum up the contrastive analysis belongs to one of those relevant ones in

contemporary linguistics due to it, it is possible to get inside into the structure and
functioning of different languages and covering their main peculiarities and also
disclosing their both common and distinctive characteristics

Also, contrastive method may be used in preparation of teaching materials, in

selecting lexical items to be extensively practiced and in predicting typical errors.
It is also of great value for an efficient teacher who knows that to have a native like
command of a foreign language, to be able to speak what we call idiomatic
English, words, word-groups and whole sentences must be learned within the
lexical, grammatical and situational restrictions of the English language.

Statistical analysis
The use of statistical methods in linguistic analysis and the quantitative study of
language phenomena are two significant and promising trends in modern
linguistics that have advanced during the past few decades.

Statistical linguistics is nowadays generally recognized as one of the major

branches of linguistics. Statistical inquiries have considerable importance not
only because of their precision but also because of their relevance to certain
problems of communication engineering and information theory.

The value of statistical methods as a means of verification is beyond dispute.

Though statistical linguistics has a wide field of application here we shall discuss
mainly the statistical approach to vocabulary.

Statistical approach proved essential in the selection of vocabulary items of a

foreign language for teaching purposes. It is common knowledge that very few
people know more than 10% of the words of their mother tongue. It follows that 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.

Statistical techniques have been successfully applied in the analysis of various

linguistic phenomena.Statistical regularities however can be observed only if the
phenomena under analysis are sufficiently numerous and their occurrence very
frequent.

Thus, the first requirement of any statistic investigation is the evaluation of the size
of the sample necessary for the analysis.

To illustrate this statement, we may consider the frequency of word occurrences. It

is common knowledge that a comparatively small group of words makes up the
bulk of any text.3 It was found that approximately 1,300 — 1,500 most frequent
words make up 85% of all words occurring in the text. If, however, we analyse a
sample of 60 words it is hard to predict the number of occurrences of most frequent
words.
It goes without saying that to be useful in teaching statistics should deal with
meanings as well as sound-forms as not all word-meanings are equally frequent.
Besides, the number of meanings exceeds by far the number of words.

Very often in contrastive studies of English and Ukrainian words we may also use
statistical analysis to count the frequency of meanings of certain words or
collocations and then compare them with the corresponding ones in another
language. It can be easily observed from the semantic count above that the
meaning ‘part of a house’ (sitting room, drawing room, etc.) Makes up 83% of all
occurrences of the word room and should be included in the list of meanings to be
learned by the beginners, whereas the meaning ’suite, lodgings’ is not essential and
makes up only 2% of all occurrences of this word.

Statistical methods have been also applied to various theoretical problems of

meaning. An interesting attempt was made to study the relation between polysemy
and word frequency by statistical methods. Having discovered that there is a direct
relationship between the number of different meanings of a word and its relative
frequency of occurrence.

One of the most promising trends in statistical enquiries is the analysis of

collocability of words. It is observed that words are joined together according to
certain rules.

It should be pointed out, however, that the statistical study of vocabulary has
some inherent limitations.

 Firstly, statistical approach is purely quantitative, whereas most linguistic

problems are essentially qualitative.

For example, even simple numerical word counts presuppose a qualitative

definition of the lexical items to be counted. In connection with this different
questions may arise, e.g. is the orthographical unit work to be considered as one
word or two different words: work n — (to) work v.

 Secondly, we must admit that not all linguists have the mathematical
equipment necessary for applying statistical methods. In fact what is often
referred to as statistical analysis is purely numerical counts of this or that
linguistic phenomenon not involving the use of any mathematical formula,
which in some cases may be misleading.

Thus, statistical analysis is applied in different branches of linguistics

including lexicology as a means of verification and as a reliable criterion for
the selection of the language data provided qualitative description of lexical
items is available.
Again alongside with contrastive analysis the statistical method is very important
and largely depends upon the topic of research, the aims of the researcher, the very
material of research and of course if the statistical analysis is needed for the
purposes of conducting research. Then one should in the first place think of
reliable data and certain mathematical equipment to know how to deal with.

The theory of Immediate Constituents (IC)

was originally elaborated as an attempt to determine the ways in which lexical

units are relevantly related to one another. It was discovered that combinations of
such units are usually structured into hierarchically arranged sets of binary
constructions.

In comparative investigation this analysis shows the significant difference in the

morphemic structure of English and Ukrainian words. For example English words
can be divided into more quantity of morphemes than Ukrainian ones. For example
the English word discussion has three morphemes: -dis-, -cuss-, and -ion-.

Then of course another lawfulness: -law-, -ful-, -ness- and in Ukrainian

розбірливий: -роз-, -бір-, -ли-, -вий- and many others.

For example in the word-group a black dress in severe style we do not relate a to
black, black to dress, dress to in, etc. but set up a structure which may be
represented as a black dress / i n severe style.

Thus the fundamental aim of 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. Successive segmentation results in Ultimate Constituents
(UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units having both
sound-form and meaning. The Ultimate Constituents of the word-group analysed
above are: a | black | dress | in | severe | style.

The meaning of the sentence, word-group, etc. and the IC binary segmentation are
interdependent.

It is mainly to discover the derivational structure of words that IC analysis is used

in lexicological investigations. For example, the verb de-nationalise has both a
prefix de- and a suffix -ise (-ize). To decide whether this word is a prefixal or a
suffixal derivative we must apply IC analysis.

Thus, comparing, e.g., snow-covered and blue-eyed we observe that both words
contain two root-morphemes and one derivational morpheme. IC analysis,
however, shows that whereas snow-covered may be treated as a compound
consisting of two stems snow + covered, blue-eyed is a suffixal derivative as the
underlying structure as shown by IC analysis is different, i.e. (blue+eye)+- ed.
Of course this IC analysis is mostly used to focus on the external structure of the
words because when it comes to the internal ones thus meaning it's very difficult to
just make such segmentations.

Distributional analysis

in its various forms is commonly used nowadays by lexicologists of different

schools of thought. By the term d i s t r i b u t i o n we understand the occurrence
of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level (words relative to
words / morphemes relative to morphemes, etc.)

In other words by this term we understand the position which lexical units
occupy or may occupy in the text or in the flow of speech.

 For example, in the sentence The boy — home the missing word is easily
identified as a verb — The boy went, came, ran, etc. home.

Thus, we see that the component of meaning that is distributionally identified is

actually the part-of-speech meaning but not the individual lexical meaning of the
word under analysis.

We can easily find for instance Ukrainian equivalent of many English words.

Distributional analysis shows that there may be equivalent only in some

surroundings and cannot coincide with in other situations.

 For instance english stop + verb(infinitive) – зупинитися for instance stop

to do something. English stop +verb (gerund) припинити english stop doing
something.

Of course the distributional analysis plays an important role in contrastive

lexicology because it helps to define the contextual meaning of the word subjects
to its links.

 For instance english suffixes -er, -ist have the analog in the ukrainian
language pianist піаніст, dancer танцюрист).

The interdependence of distribution and meaning can be also observed at the level
of word-groups. It is only the distribution of otherwise completely identical lexical
units that accounts for the difference in the meaning of water tap and tap water.

Thus, as far as words are concerned the meaning by distribution may be

defined as an abstraction on the syntagmatic level. It should also be noted that
not only words in word-groups but also whole word-groups may acquire a certain
denotational meaning due to certain distributional pattern to which this particular
meaning is habitually attached. For example, habitually the word preceding ago
denotes a certain period of time (an hour, a month, a century, etc. ago) and the
whole wordgroup denotes a certain temporal unit.

Distribution defined as the occurrence of a lexical unit relative to other lexical

units can be interpreted as c o - o c c u r r e n c e of lexical items and the two terms
can be viewed as synonyms.
It follows that by the term d i s t r i b u t i o n we understand the aptness of a word
in one of its meanings to collocate or to co - occur with a certain group, or certain
groups of words having some common semantic component . In this case
distribution may be treated on the level of semantic classes or subclasses of lexical
units.

Thus, e.g., it is common practice to subdivide animate nouns into nouns

denoting human beings and non-humans (animals, birds, etc.). Inanimate nouns
are usually subdivided into concrete and abstract (cf., e.g., table, book, flower and
joy,, idea, relation).

The results of the co-occurrence or distributional analysis may be of great help to

teachers in preparation of teaching material.

To illustrate the point under consideration it is sufficient to discuss the experiment

the goal of which was to find out the semantic peculiarities of the verb to giggle.
Giggle refers to a type of laughter — to giggle is usually defined as ‘to laugh in a
nervous manner’. There is nothing in the dictionary definition to indicate a very
important peculiarity of the word-meaning, i.e. that giggling is habitually
associated with women.

Transformational analysis

in lexicological investigations may be defined as re-patterning of various

distributional structures in order to discover difference or sameness of
meaning of practically identical distributional patterns.

 transformational procedures are of help not only in the analysis of semantic

sameness / difference of the lexical units under investigation but also in the
analysis of the factors that account for their polysemy.

For example, if we compare two compound words dogfight and dogcart, we shall
see that the distributional pattern of stems is identical and may be represented
as noun+noun.

Transformational analysis may also be described as a kind of translation. If we

understand by translation transference of a message by different means, we may
assume that there exist at least three types of translation:
1. interlingual translation or translation from one language into another which
is what we traditionally call translation;

2. intersemiotic translation or transference of a message from one kind of semiotic

system to another. (using flag)

3. intralingual translation which consists essentially in rewording a message

within the same language — a kind of paraphrasing. Thus, e.g., the same message
may be transmitted by the following her work is excellent -> her excellent
work -> the excellence of her work.

In short, any transformation is a form of expressing some definite meaning. The

simplest transformation is transcoding.

 For instance, in English: Liverpool, London, Wales in Ukrainian Ліверпуль,

Лондон, Вельс.

The transformational method is employed:

 to identify the nature of a language unit in the source language or in the

target language. Thus, the type of the Ukrainian sentence «Знаю, прийду»
may be understood and treated differently:

1) as a definite personal sentence with two homogeneous predicates;

2) as a definite personal main sentence (why shall I come?) because (I know

it) or

3) as two co-ordinate definite personal clauses with the causal implicit

meaning. When translated into English (i. e. transformed), this sentence
acquires the following structural form: I know it and I shall come.

The transformational method we can use for founding semantic links

between the components of the compound words: англ. sunray “ray of the
sun” (промінь сонця — відношення родового відмінка); укр.полярник “той,
хто досліджує полярні райони” (polar explorer)

The rules of transformational analysis, however, are rather strict and should not be
identified with paraphrasing in the usual sense of the term.

We shall confine our brief survey to the transformational procedures commonly

used in lexicological investigation. These are as follows:

1. PERMUTATION cf. his work is excellent -> his excellent work -> the
excellence of his work -> he works excellently.
2. REPLACEMENT She will make a bad mistake, She will make a good
teacher, the verb to make can be substituted for by become or be only in the
second sentence (she will become, she will be a good teacher) but not in the
first (*she will become a bad mistake)
3. ADDITIОN (OR EXPANSION) John is happy (popular, etc.) and John is
tall (clever, etc.) we add, say, in Uzhhorod, we shall see that *John is tall (clever,
etc.) in Uzhhorod is utterly nonsensical, whereas John is happy (popular, etc.) in
Uzhhorod is a well-formed sentence.
4. DELETION Cf.: I love red flowers, I love flowers, whereas I hate red
tape cannot be transformed into I hate tape or I hate red.

Transformational procedures may be of use in practical classroom teaching as they

bring to light the so-called sentence paradigm or to be more exact different ways in
which the same message may be worded in modern English.

Transformational procedures are also used as will be shown below in componental

analysis of lexical units.

The componential analysis

which belongs to one of the most important frequently used methods of semantics.

Semantics is meanings of the words thus in order to carry out semantic

investigations we necessarily have to make use of the componential analysis.

It should be pointed out that the componental analysis deals with individual
meanings. Different meanings of polysemantic words have different
componental structure.

The contrastive analysis supplemented by the componental analysis yields

very good results as one can clearly see the lack of one-to-one correspondence not
only between the semantic structures of correlated words but also between
seemingly identical and correlated meanings of contrasted words.

 For example: укр. широкий and the English words wide, broad, large,
extensive,generous — are not semantically identical because Ukrainian
word широкий is used to describe both humans and objects
indiscriminately (широка жінка “товста”; широка вулиця, двері),
whereas the English word wide does not contain the semantic
component human.

In its more elaborate form componental analysis also proceeds from the
assumption that word-meaning is not an analysable whole but can be
decomposed into elementary semantic components.
The most inclusive categories are parts of speech — the major word classes are
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. All members of a major class share a
distinguishing semantic feature and involve a certain type of semantic information.
More revealing names for such features might be “thingness” or “substantiality”
for nouns, “quality” for adjectives, and so on.

All other semantic features may be classified into semantic markers — semantic
features which are present also in the lexical meaning of other words and
distinguishers — semantic features which are individual, i.e. which do not recur in
the lexical meaning of other words.

Componental analysis with the help of markers and distinguishers may be

used in the analysis of hyponymic groups. In the semantic analysis of such
groups we find that they constitute a series with an increasingly larger range of
inclusion. For example, bear, mammal, animal represent three successive markers
in which bear is subordinated to mammal and mammal to animal.

Componental analysis is also used in the investigation of the semantic

structure of synonyms. There is always a certain component of meaning which
makes one member of the synonymic set different from any other member of the
same set. Thus, though brave, courageous, fearless, audacious, etc. are all of
them traditionally cited as making up a set of synonymic words, each member of
the set has a component of meaning not to be found in any other member of this
set.

The componential analysis may also be arrived at through transformational

procedures. It’s assumed that sameness or difference of transforms is indicative of
sameness or difference in the componential structure of lexical units under study.
One can assume that practically all classification of lexical units presupposes
application of the theory of semantic components.
 For instance the classification of nouns into animate — inanimate, human —
nonhuman proceeds from the assumption that there is a common semantic
component found in such words as, e.g., man, boy, girl, etc., whereas this
semantic component is nonexistent in other words, e.g. table, chair,
pen, etc., or dog, cat, horse, etc.
Thus, due to the use of componential analyses we may analyse all those words
within the groups of words. Usually we divide lexical meanings of these words
into certain components and then study the relationship between the words and
their meanings. Due to this we may also make use of certain formalized methods
which included not only pure linguistic ones but also mathematical analysis.
In this case usually matrices are model where this correlation between the words
and their meanings this correlations are presented.
The method of semantic differential
deals with the connotational meaning.
All the methods of semantic analysis discussed above are aimed mainly or
exclusively at the investigation of the denotational component of the lexical
meaning.
The analysis of the differences of the connotational meaning is very hard since the
nuances are often slight, difficult to grasp and do not yield themselves to objective
investigation and verification.
An attempt to establish and display these differences was developed by a group of
American psycholinguists.1 They set up a technique known as the semantic
differential by means of which, as they claim, meaning can be measured.
Their technique requires the subjects to judge a series of concepts with respect to a
set of bipolar (antonymic) adjective scales. For example, a concept like horse is to
be rated as to the degree to which it is good or bad, fast or slow, strong or weak,
etc.
It follows that learners of a foreign language can hardly expect that words will
have the same connotation for them as they do for native speakers. This naturally
concerns first of all the emotive charge of the lexical units. Thus, e.g., it was found
that the word rain tends to be described as rather happy by all the subjects of the
Southwest Indian groups. The same word was described as rather sad by the
overwhelming majority of English subjects.
The new technique, however, has not been properly developed or extended to an
adequate sample of vocabulary and consequently is of little use in lexicological
analysis.