Indicators of Meanings of Unknown Words Used in a Text
Mikhail Yu. Fedosyuk, Xiao Zhang · Izvestiâ Rossijskoj akademii nauk. Seriâ literatury i âzyka · 2021
The article describes the mechanisms by which more or less complete ideas about the content of words unknown to the recipients of а text can be formed in their minds. It is shown that the lexical meanings of words used in speech do not necessarily have to be known to the recipients a priori or require reference to defining dictionaries. These meanings might be deduced in the process of perceiving texts on the basis of a set of fragments of previously perceived texts stored in the memory of recipients, or “linguistic material” in the terminology of Lev Scherba. When faced with unknown words, the recipient subconsciously deciphers the content of each word with a greater or lesser degree of completeness, relying on a number of linguistic means, which are proposed to be called indicators of the meanings of words used in a text. These indicators include the part-of-speech belonging of words, their attribution to certain lexico-semantic categories, as well as some other morphological features, the content of syntactic bonds between words in a sentence, the meanings of the roots and derivational affixes of the words, and, finally, the micro-context and macro-context. The process of determining the lexical meanings of words and phraseological units in the compilation of defining dictionaries proceeds in a similar way. Analyzing the collected examples of the use of lexical units and relying on the just listed morphological, syntactic, derivational and contextual indicators of the meanings of words used in a text, lexicographers formulate definitions of their lexical meanings.