Lexicology as related to other linguistic sciences. Lexicology is closely connected with other aspects of linguistics, studying the levels of language both above and below the word

Lexicology is closely connected with other aspects of linguistics, studying the levels of language both above and below the word. This is natural, since the word, which is the main subject of lexicology, is also studied " from above" or " from below" by such linguistic sciences as phonetics, grammar and stylistics, not to mention others.

The links between phonetics and lexicology become apparent if, we remember that words are made up of phonemes which, although semantically meaningless, serve to distinguish one meaningful word from another. This is easily proved by the so-called " substitution test". Thus hope, hop, hoop, heap and hip are all different meaningful words, although they differ in one central phoneme only. Order of phonemes, intonation and stress may also serve to convey meaning, as pit is different from tip by order of phonemes alone, and 'present/pre'sent, 'blackbird/'black'bird are contrasted in meaning –whether grammatical or lexical – by the stress pattern alone. As for intonation, it may only express grammatical meaning or emotional attitudes in English, but there are languages – as Chinese or Vietnamese – where a lexical meaning may be so expressed.

On a higher level, historical phonetics and historical phonology can be of great use in tracing etymological relations, thus proving semantic or morphological links between seemingly unrelated words. In short, while lexicology studies whole words, phonetics deals with their component parts, supplying the " raw material".

Stylistics, on the other hand, approaches the word " from above", studying the problem of meaning, connotation, etc. as they apply to a word in a context or a group of words or a whole text, rather than an isolated word.

The links between lexicology and grammar involve quite a number of points currently debated in linguistics, so we shall consider them in somewhat more detail. The reason for these links to be so close is that words seldom if ever occur in isolation. More typically, they are grouped according to certain more or less fixed patterns, which finally become part of the language structure as " grammatical meaning" of those words. Even isolated words as they stand in a dictionary still preserve part of their grammatical characteristics (e.g. their part-of-speech meaning).

As a result of this, lexical meaning and grammatical characteristics of a word are often inseparable, whether a lexical meaning depending on a grammatical construction the word is used in (linguists say such a meaning is grammatically conditioned), or, on the contrary, a grammatical construction only admitting the use of words with a particular meaning.

A typical example of a grammatically conditioned meaning is the obvious difference of He stopped to smoke and He stopped smoking, although the structures expressing them are quite similar. On the other hand, a predicative expressed by an adjective demands that the link verb is either to be or a verb of motion implying " becoming", as in: fall ill, come true, go wrong, turn red, run dry, etc. Note that the verb is partly losing its own meaning here.

Even the use of words alongside one another in a single construction may often be determined by their meaning, as with verbs say, talk or think only accepting human subjects -unless it is a metaphor (a thinking machine) or a fairy tale situation, both studied by stylistics. The opposite is also true, as a word may mean quite different things if used alongside different words: cf. The new girl gave him a strange smile and The new teeth gave him a strange smile, She made him a good wife and She made him a good husband. This interconnection of syntax and semantics is now considered to be the field of a recently formed branch of linguistics called " semantic syntax".

It may also happen that a word form that originally expressed grammatical meaning – a noun plural form, for example, – drops out of a grammatical paradigm and acquires a new lexical meaning. Arms, originally a plural of arm, came to mean weapons; colours is now a flag, customs, authorities, pictures (= " cinema") all mean something different from what their singular form means. This is known as isolation, or more typically, lexicalization of a grammatical form. In a number of cases, a word has two different plural forms with a different meaning, as brother has brothers (neutral) and brethren (religious), antenna has antennas (radio) and antennae (biology). Finally, the same meaning – e.g. the meaning of futurity – may be expressed by both grammatical (the future tense) and lexical means – as tomorrow, by and by, time to come, etc.

The links between lexicology and grammar are particularly strong in the sphere of word-formation which, as morphology, is often considered as part of grammar. Being an analytical language, English is known for the remarkable flexibility of its vocabulary and the ease with which new words, or new meanings of existing words – both lexical and, by conversion, grammatical – are formed. This flexibility makes the boundary-line between words (treated in lexicology) and morphemes (treated in morphology) almost invisible and easily penetrated.