The article deals with the theory and practice of linguistic investigation of the Middle English occupational terms on the basis of the principles of the traditional functional-systemic paradigm of the language study. The investigation of the functional differentiation of the Middle English occupational terms is based on the principles of the communicative and historical approaches. Middle English occupational terms are distributed into two classes – common nouns (in their nominating function) and proper names, especially family names (in the function of identification of the person as the component additional to the personal name in the personal nomination formulas). According to the functional principle of the distribution of the vocabulary and on the quantitative calculations we draw the conclusions about the degree of sustainability of the usage of the occupational terms: we consider the words that functioned as the common nouns and proper names to be the words with the established (settled) usage; we consider the words that existed only as the personal names in the nomination formulas to be the words with the unsettled usage; we consider the words that existed exclusively as common nouns to be the words with the restricted usage. We have distinguished 152 occupational terms of the restricted usage with English word-stems. The results of the study of their lexical-thematic distribution show the quantitative domination of the names of artisans (34 %); the structural-semantic analysis of their derivational field shows the quantitative priority of the composite nouns (59 %, the model N + N – er = N being the nucleus of the model) over the nouns with the suffixes (36 %, suffix -er being in the nucleus); chronological stratification reveals that 53% of the vocabulary under study was fist mentioned in the XVth century. The article presents the results of the part of the complex study based on the multiple examples, longitude chronology and several functional layers of the Middle English vocabulary. Such an investigation is aimed to give a whole reconstruction of the history of Middle English occupational terms etymology, functional variability, lexical-semantic distribution, structural-semantic characteristics of the word-building and the chronological stratification.

Author Name: O. Ya. Dobrovolskaya

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Keywords: Middle English, occupational terms, functional variability, lexical-semantic distribution, structural-semantic characteristics of the derivational field, chronological stratification

ISSN: 1996-7853

EISSN: 2542-0038

EOI/DOI: 10.21209/1996-7853-2016-11-5-5

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