SYNONYMOUS STRINGS LENGTH AND CONSTITUENTS' PLACEMENT aIN ENGLISH DEVERBAL WORD-FORMATION: THE PHYSICIST'S CONTRIBUTION TO DIACHRONIC LEXICOLOGY

摘要

Diachronic onomasiology is concerned with two issues: the availability of lexical resources at specific moments of history and complementation of these resources over time. A peculiar feature of such a complementation is the unevenness of the expansion in various sections of the lexicon. The paper focuses on the heuristic potential for historical onomasiology of the formalism suggested by Professor Vakarchuk to assess the mean values of similarity in the sequential placement of constituents within synonymous strings of specific lengths. The rise of the common-root word-forming families initiated by synonymous verbs makes two kinds of bilateral comparisons plausible: strings of verbs can be compared with strings of deverbatives of a specific categorial affiliation or strings of one class of deverbatives are juxtaposable with those of another class Both kinds of comparisons can be carried out on the material of the entire lexicon or its various cross-sections providing an insightful application to the heuristic potential of the matrix as a tool of sets analysis in historical lexicology.