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5. Methods of investigation
The process of scientific investigation may be subdivided
into several stages. Observation is an early and basic phase of all
modern scientific investigations, including linguistic, and is the
centre of what is called the inductive method of inquiry. The next
stage after observation is classification, or orderly arrangement of
the data obtained through observation. The following stage is
usually generalization, i. e. collection of data and their orderly
arrangement must eventually lead to formulation of a
generalization.
Contrastive typological investigations are carried out with
the help of several methods.
The distributional analysis in its various forms is
commonly used nowadays by lexicologists of different schools of
thought. By the term “distribution” we understand the occurance
of a lexical unit relative to other lexical units of the same level. It
is readily observed that a certain component of the word meaning
described when the word is identified distributionally. For
example, in the sentence “The boy — home” the missing word is
easily identified as a verb — “ The boy went (came, ran, etc.)
home”. Thus, we see that the component of meaning that is
distributionally identified is actually the part-of-speech meaning
but not any individual lexical meaning of the word under analysis.
It is assumed that sameness and difference in distribution is
indicative of sameness and difference in the part-of-speech
meaning.
We can easily find Ukrainian equivalents of many English
words; distributional method shows that they may be equivalents
only in some surroundings and can not coincide with in other
situations.
So, for example,
англ. stop + V infinitive — зупинитися (stop to do smth.);
англ. stop + V gerund — припинити (stop doing smth.);

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