Analysis of the lexicon of American and British English languages

Analyzing the lexical composition of these two languages, two main types of lexico-semantic differences are distinguished: the differences in the content plan in the context of the commonality in terms of expression and differences in the expression plan with a commonality in terms of content. Members of the correspondences allocated on the basis of the opposition of the first kind will hereafter be called lexico-semantic divergents, and members of second-kind correspondents will be lexical-semantic analogues.

A group of so-called lexico-semantic divergents includes words that reveal more or less significant discrepancies in their semantic structure in the generality of the sound shell. These differences can be divided into several main categories:

• a)    Words that are part of the microsystems of the British and American versions of the English language are intersected by a certain part of their semantic structure and reveal discrepancies only in that part which belongs to one of the microsystems. Words like the market, the bazaar, marketing, the American food store, the reader, the reviewer and the British lecturer, the university lecturer, note

the coexistence of one locally marked lexical-semantic variant (Americanism or Briticism ) with variants obscheagnliskimi.

At the level of the microsystems being compared, the semantic structure of this word represents, in one case, the totality of its general English values, and in the other, the totality of its English values plus the value inherent in only one of the variants.

• b)    The discrepancies found in the semantic structure of such words as faculty (English ability, gift, British faculty, American faculty) and transportation (general English transportation, transportation, American railway ticket, British reference to hard labor), in which the general English lexicon -semantic variants co-exist not with one locally marked variant, but with two - Americanism and Briticism.

Such divergent oppositions can be characterized as oppositions with bilateral local marking. At the level of the microsystems being compared, the semantic structure of each divergent is a set of variants specific for this variant and general English values.

• c)    Divergents have absolutely no matching lexical meanings. Such units as billion (American billion, British billion), dresser (American dressing table and British kitchen table) and others are units of different microsystems. At the same time, the fact that the above lexico-semantic divergents are mutually exclusive within the same microsystem (i.e., are in relation to intersystem additional distribution) and reveal a certain semantic connection allows us to consider them as variants of the same units of the microsystem.

• d)    The relationship between divergents can be characterized by the complete absence of any kind of semantic connection. For example, the all-England muller pestle, mortar and American muller is a pensive man, a lover of meditation.

In such cases, divergents are not variants of the same microsystem unit, but in different words-homonyms.

Among the divergent oppositions described above, a number of fundamental differences are observed. First of all, it should be noted that in the latter case, in contrast to all previous discrepancies, concern the inventory of constitutive units of the lexical-semantic system. At the same time, in all previous cases, the partial semantic differences between divergents are manifested in the different functioning of the same units, i.e., in the mismatch of the range of contextual environments in which these units can occur in each of the microsystems being compared.

At the same time, these types of divergent oppositions are by no means equivalent to their specific gravity. Differences affecting the lexical-semantic variants of words clearly prevail over the differences concerning the inventory of words themselves. This is convincingly evidenced by the data of dictionaries, in which the litters of Americanism or Briticism, as a rule, accompany not the word as a whole, but only some of its meanings. According to our observations, the most characteristic type of divergent oppositions are the oppositions described above with one-sided local marking

Used sources:

"Экономика и социум" №4 (47) 2018