英语词汇学
1. Word --- A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.
2.Vocabulary --- Vocabulary is most commonly used to refer to the total sum of the words of a language. It can also refer to all the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given subject and all the words possessed by an individual person as well as all the words current in a particular period of time in history.
The general estimate of the present day English vocabulary is over 1 million words.
3.argot – words used by sub-cultured groups, specialized vocabulary used by criminals
can-opener, dip, persuader
cant, jargon , argot are associated with, or most available to, specific groups of the population.
4.Content word (notional word) – denote clear notions and thus are known as notional words. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and numerals.
5.Borrowed words (loan words, borrowings) – words taken over from foreign language are known as borrowed words or loan words or borrowings in simple terms.
6.Semantic loans – are not borrowed with reference to the form, but their meaning are borrowed from another language. In other words, English has borrowed a new meaning for an existing word in language. e.g. stupid old dump
7.what is the importance of basic word stock?
The basic word stock is the foundation of the vocabulary accumulated over centuries and forms the common core of the language. five characteristics: all national character, stability , productivity, polysemy , collocability 8.
9.What are neologisms? Give one example to illustrate it.
Neologisms are newly-created words or expressions, or words that have taken on new meanings. Here is one example: E-mail: electronic mail,
chapter 2
Three modes of vocabulary development
1. Creation – the formation of new words by using the existing materials, namely roots, affixes and other elements. (This is the most important way of vocabulary expansion.)
2. Semantic change - an old form which take on a new meaning to meet the new need.
3. Borrowing – to take in words from other languages.(particularly in earlier time)
4.Old English (450-1150)
The 1st people known to inhabit England were Celts, the language was Celtic.
The second language was the Latin of the Roman Legions. after the Romans
After the Romans,The Germanic tribes called angles, Saxons and Jutes and their language, Anglo-Saxon dominated and blotted out the Celtic. Now people refer to Anglo-Saxon as old English. Old English has a vocabulary of about 50,000 to 60,000words. It was a highly inflected language just like modern German.
6.Norman Conquest : the Normans invaded England from France in 1066. the Norman Conquest started a continual flow of French words into English. Norman French became the polite speech. 75% of them are still in use today. The situation of 3 languages (French,English,Latin) existing simultaneously continued for over a century..
7.Renaissance: In the early period of modern English, Europe saw a new upsurge of learning ancient Greek and Roman classics. This is known in history as the Renaissance. Latin and Greek were recognized as the language of the Western world's great literary heritage and of great scholarship.
reviving archaic words: words or forms that were once in common use but are now restricted only to specialized or limited use. They are
found mainly in older poems, legal document and religious writing or speech.
8. .Why do we say\" English is a heavy borrower?\" Please justily it. English is a heavy borrower and has adopted words from all other major languages of the world. It is estimated that English borrowings constitute 80% of the modern English vocabulary. As is stated in Encyclopedia Americana ,\"The English language has vast debts. In any dictionary some 80% of the entries are borrowed\".eg. kowtou from China, long time no see from haojiubujian (China), the word \"dream\" originally meant \"joy\" and \"music\" ,its modern meaning was borrowed later from the Norse.
9.Modern English(1150-1500): Modern English began with the establishment of printing in English. word endings were mostly lost with just a few exceptions. Modern English is considered to be an analytic language. 11
12.In the middle English period, what made French a dominant language in England?
In 1066, in the history of England, there was Norman Conquest. The French-speaking Normans were the ruling class. French was used for all state affairs and for most social and cultural matters. Therefore, those who were in power spoke French, those who were literate read and wrote in French; and any young man who sought to earn his living ascribe learned Latin or French because there was no market for such services in English. The Norman Conquest started a continual flow of French words into English.
13.What happened in the mid-seventeenth century in England?
England experienced the Bourgeoisie Revolution followed by the Industrial Revolution and rose to be a great economic power. 14.What are the three main sources of new English words? Three main sources of new words
.The rapid development of modern science and technology Social, economic and political changes .The influence of other cultures and languages
chapter three
1. Morpheme --- A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. (The smallest functional unit in the composition of words.) 2.Morph--- A morpheme must be realized by discrete units. These actual spoken minimal carriers of meaning are morphs.
3.Monomorphenic words – morphemes are realized by single morphs. 4.Allomorph---Some morphemes are realized by more than one morph according to their position. Such alternative morphs are allomorphemes. E.g. the morpheme of plurality (-s) has a number of allomorphemes in different sound context, e.g. in cats/s/, in bags/z/, in matches/iz/. 5. Free morphemes or Free root --- The morphemes have complete meaning and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences, e.g. cat, walk. They are identical with root words. morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free.
6. Bound Morphemes --- The morphemes cannot occur as separate words. They are bound to other morphemes to form words, e.g. recollection (re+collect+ion) collect – free morpheme re-and –ion are bound morphemes. (include bound root and affix) Bound morphemes are found in derived words.
7. Bound root --- A bound root is that part of the word that carries the fundamental meaning just like a free root. Unlike a free root, it is a bound form and has to combine with other morphemes to make words. Take -dict- for example: it conveys the meaning of \"say or speak\" as a Latin root, but not as a word. With the prefix pre-(=before) we obtain the verb predict meaning \"tell beforehand\". Contradict “ speak against”. Bound roots are either Latin or Greek.
Although they are limited in number, their productive power is amazing.
8. Affixes --- Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. Almost affixes are bound morphemes.
9. Prefixes --- Prefixes are affixes that come before the word, such as, pre+war, sub+sea
10.Suffixes --- suffixes are affixes that come after the word, for instance, blood+y.
11.Inflectional morphemes or Inflectional affixes --- Affixes attaches to the end of words to indicate grammatical relationships are inflectional, thus known as inflectional morphemes. The number of inflectional affixes is small and stable.
12. Derivational morphemes or Derivational affixes --- Derivational affixes are affixes added to other morphemes to create new words. 13. Root --- A root is the basic form of a word, which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. (What remains of a word after the removal of all affixes.) .e.g. “internationalists” removing inter-, -al-, -ist, -s, leaves the root nation.
14. Stem --- a form to which affixes of any kind can be added. E.g. “internationalists”, nation is a root and a stem as well.
a stem may consist of a single root or two roots and a root plus a affix.
a stem can be a root or a form bigger than a root.
15.What are the differences between inflectional and derivational affixes? or How do you distinguish inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?
Affixes attaches to the end of words to indicate grammatical relationships are inflectional, thus known as inflectional morphemes. Modern English is an analytic language. Most endings are lost, leaving only a few inflectional affixes, such as plural forms of nouns-s(-es), and the comparative and superlative degree forms of adjectives: -er, -est. Derivational affixes are affixes added to other morphemes to create new words. Derivational affixes can be further divided into prefixes and suffixes.
16. What are the differences between root and stem? Explain with examples.
A root is the basic form of a word, which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity.(What remains of a word after the removal of all affixes.) .e.g. “internationalists” removing inter-, -al-, -ist, -s, leaves the root nation.
A stem is a form to which affixes of any kind can be added. E.g. “internationalists”, nation is a root and a stem as well.
a stem may consist of a single root or two roots and a root plus a affix.
a stem can be a root or a form bigger than a root. chapter 4
1.Affixation (Derivation) -- the formation of words by adding word forming or derivational affixes to stems. (derivative派生词)
According to their position, affixation falls into: prefixation and suffixation.
1). Prefixation -- the formation of new words by adding prefixes to stems. It does not change the word-class of the stem but change its meaning
2). Suffixation --Suffixation is the formation of new words by adding suffixes to stems. Change the grammatical function of stems (the word class). Suffixes can be grouped on a grammatical basis.
2.Blending—is the formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word.
3.Conversion (zero-derivation, functional shift) --Conversion is the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class. These words are new only in a grammatical sense. The most productive is between nouns and verbs. It is a change of grammatical function
5.Clipping – shorten a longer word by cutting a part of the origin and using what remains instead. People tend to be economical in writing and speech to keep up the tempo of new life style.
7.Acronymy –is the process of forming new words by joining the initial letters of names of social and political organizations or special phrases and technical terms
--Initialisms are words formed from the initial letters of words and pronounced as letters. It’s one of the word formations of acronymy. --Acronyms are words formed from the initial letters of word and pronounced as words. . It’s one of the word formations of acronymy.
8.Back-formation-- is a process of word-formation by which a word is created by the deletion of a supposed affix. It is considered to be the opposite process of suffixation.
Compounding （Composition）--Compounding is a process of word-formation by joining two or more stems.
9. How do you distinguish compounds from free phrases?
Compounds differ from free phrases in the following three aspects. 1) Phonetic features. In compounds the word stress usually occurs on the first element whereas in noun phrases the second element is generally stressed if there is only one stress.
2) Semantic features. Compounds are different from free phrases in semantic unity. Every compound should express a single idea just as one word.
3) Grammatical features. A compound tends to play a single grammatical role in a sentence.
10. How do you explain the difference between backformation and suffixation? Give example to illustrate your point.
Back-formation is a process of word-formation by which a word is created by the deletion of a supposed affix. It is considered to be the opposite process of suffixation. As we know, Suffixation is the formation of new words by adding suffixes to stems, and back-formation is therefore the method of creating words by removing the supposed suffixes. For example, -er is a noun suffix, it is added to noun base engine to produce a new word--engineer. however, people can make verbs by dropping the endings such as -or in editor, and -er in bolter. This is how we derive edit and bolt. The removed suffixes are not true suffixes but inseparable parts of the words.
chapter 5
1.Reference– the relationship between language and the world. By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about.
The reference of a word to a thing outside the language is arbitrary and conventional. This connection is the result of generalization and abstraction.
Although reference is abstract, yet with the help of context, it can refer to something specific.
2.Concept– which beyond language is the result of human cognition reflecting the objective world in the human mind. It isn’t affected by language. Meaning and concept are closely connected but not identical. Meaning belongs to language, so is restricted to language use. A concept can have as many referring expressions as there are language in the world.
3.Sense-denotes the relationship inside the language. Every word that has meaning has sense.
The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.
4.Motivation--accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning.
1）Onomatopoeic Motivation – the words whose sounds suggest their meaning. (Indicate the relationship between sound and meaning). Knowing the sounds of the words means understanding the meaning. These words were created by imitating the natural sounds or noise. For example, bang, ping-pang, crow by cocks, etc.
2）Morphological Motivation --Compounds and derived words are multi-morphemic words and the meaning of many words are the sum total of the morphemes combined. (Indicate the relationship between word meaning and each morpheme meaning). For instance, airmail means
3）Semantic Motivation--refers to the mental associations suggested by the conceptual meaning of a word. It explained the connection between literal sense and figurative sense of a word).
4）Etymological Motivation--The history of the word explains the meaning of the word. (Indicate the relationship between word meaning and its origin).
5。Grammatical meaning – refer to that part of the meaning of the word which indicates grammatical concept or relationships, such as part
of speech of words, singular and plural meanings of nouns, tense meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms.
Grammatical meaning becomes important only used in actual context. 6.Lexical meaning -- is constant in all the words within or without context related to the notion that the word conveys.
It has two components conceptual meaning and associative meaning. 7.Conceptual meaning (denotative meaning) – the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word-meaning. It is constant and relative stable. Conceptual meaning forms the basis for communication. 8. What are the features of conceptual meaning?
the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word-meaning. It is constant and relatively stable. Conceptual meaning forms the basis for communication.
9.What are the characteristics of associative meaning?
Associative meaning is the secondary meaning supplemented to the conceptual meaning.
It is open-ended and indeterminate. It is liable to the influence of such factors as culture, experience, religion, geographical region, class background, education, etc.
10.What is the difference between lexical meaning and grammatical meaning?
Unlike lexical meaning, different lexical items, which have different lexical meanings, may have the same grammatical meaning. On the other hand, the same word may have different grammatical meanings. Functional words, though having little lexical meaning, possess strong grammatical meaning whereas content words have both meanings,lexical and grammatical. Lexical meaning and grammatical make up the word-meaning. It is known that grammatical meaning surfaces only in use. But lexical meaning is constant in all the content words within or without context as it is related to the notion that the word conveys. chapter 6
1. Polysemy(多义) —polysemy is a common feature peculiar to all natural languages that one word may have two or more senses or different meanings.
Two approaches: Diachronic approach ,Synchronic approach.
2.Radiation(辐射semants in which the primary meaning stands at the center and the secondary meanings proceed out of it in every direction like rays.
3.Concatenation（连锁）– meaning “linking together”, is the semantic process in which the meaning of a word moves gradually away from its first sense by successive shifts until, in many cases, there is not a sign of connection between the sense that is finally developed and that which the tern had at the begining.
4.Homonyms（同形同音异义）--are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.
5.Perfect Homonyms--are words identical both in sound and spelling, but different in meaning. bank and bank
6.Homographs--are words identical only in spelling but different in sound and meaning. Sow/sow
7.Homophones (most common)--are words identical only in sound but different in spelling and meaning. e.g. Dear/dear Right/rite Son/sun 8.Synonyms（同义词）—are words different in sound and spelling but most nearly alike or exactly the same in meaning. Synonyms share a likeness in denotation and in part of speech Types of Synonyms
1)Absolute (Complete) Synonyms--are words, which are identical in meaning in all its aspects, i.e. both in grammatical meaning and lexical meaning, including conceptual and associative meanings. Absolute (Complete) Synonyms are restricted to high-specialized vocabulary. For instance, composition / compounding. They have the perfect same meaning in Lexicology.
2).Relative (Near) synonyms--are similar or nearly the same in denotation but embrace different shades of meaning or different degrees of a given quality.
9.Antonyms(反义词）words which are opposite in meaning.
10.Hyponymy--deals with the relationship of semantic inclusion. That is, the meaning of a more specific word is included in that of anothe
r more general word. These specific words are known as hyponyms（下义词）. For instance, tulip and rose are hyponyms of flower. The general word flower is the superordinate term（上义词） and the specific ones tulip and rose are the subordinate terms（下义词）.
11.What is the difference between the process of radiation and concatenation?
辐射定义，The meanings are independent of one other, but can all be traced back to the central meaning.If we give a graphic description of the meanings of face,it would look very much like a wheel of the bicycle.
连锁定义，In plain terms,the meaning reached by the first shift may be shifted a second time,and so on until in the end the original meaning is totally lost.
12.How to differentiate homonyms from polysemants?
The fundamental difference ies in the fact that the former refers to different words which happen to share the same form and the latter is the one and the same word which has several distinguishable meanings. One important criterion is to see its etymology,the second is semantic relatedness.
13.What are the 3 types of antonyms? Illustrate with examples. Antonyms--are words which are opposite in meaning. Types of Antonyms (according to the semantic opposition )
1) Contradictory terms – these antonyms are truly represent oppositeness of meaning. They are so opposed to each other that they are mutually exclusive and admit no possibility between them. They assertion of one is the denial of the other.
E.g. alive—dead, present--absent, male – female, boy – girl, true – false, same – different, imperfect – perfect
2) Contrary terms -- a scale running between two poles or extremes. The two opposites are gradable and one exists in comparison with the other.
E.g. rich--(well-to-do)--poor; old – (middle-aged) -- young, open – (ajar)—close, beautiful – (good-looking) –(plain) – ugly,
3) Relative terms – consist of relational oppositeness. The pairs of words indicate such a social relationship that one of them can not be used without suggesting the other, the type is also reverse terms. The two words of each pair interdependent.
E.g. parent--child; husband--wife; predecessor – successor, employer -- employee chapter 7
1.Extension (generalization)--is a term referring to the widening of meaning. It is a process by which a word, which originally had a specialized meaning, has now become generalized.
2. Narrowing (specialization) --is a term referring to the shrinking of meaning. It is a process by which a word of wide meaning acquires a narrower or specialized sense.
3.Elevation or amelioration--refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance.
4. Degradation or pejoration of meaning --It is a process whereby words of good origin fall into ill reputation or non-affective words come to be used in derogatory sense
5. Transfer --- words which were used to designate on thing but later changed to mean something else.
6.What are the extra-linguistic factors that cause changes in meaning?
historical reason, class reason, and psychological reason. 7.what are the linguistic factors that cause changes in meaning? internal factors within the language system, the influx of borrowing, analogy. chapter 8
1.linguistic context: it refers to the words, clauses, sentences in which a word appears. Sometimes linguistic context may cover a paragraph, a chapter and even the entire book.
2.extra-linguistic context : it refers to the physical situation , which embrace the people, place, and even the whole culture background.
3.Lexical Context – refers to the words occur together with the word in question. The meaning of the word is often affected and defined by the neighboring word.
4.Grammatical context – The meanings of a word may be inflected by the structure in which it occurs.
5.Ambiguity often arises due to polysemy and homonymy. When a word with multiple meanings used in inadequate context, it creates ambiguity 6.discuss the role of context in understanding word meaning. Context is a vital clue in understanding word meaning. namely,it can eliminate ambiguity, indicate referents,and provide clues for inferring word meaning. First, a word or even a sentence without adequate context can be quite ambiguous. So it is hard to determine the exact meaning especially when the word is polysemous or the sentence structure has a different interpretation. Secondly, some referents like pronouns, nouns may refer to anything or anybody, as for a pronoun or a noun, if we know what its exact meaning or referent is, we have to know it from its context. Third, context provides important clues in understanding unknown words, or inexact meanings, The clues can be : definition, explanation, example, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, relevant details, word structure.
7.In what way can cultural background affect the meaning of words? The extra-linguistic context may extend to embrace the entire cultural background, which also affect the meaning of words. Take the word landlord for example, in Chinese cultural, landlord is usually understood as referring to someone who owned a lot of land and collected money by renting land without working. It is used to be associated with \"exploitationhe term in western countries is denotatively different and affectively neutral. The most commonly used meaning of the word is \"someone who rents house for money.\" chapter 9
1.what are the characteristics of English idioms?
semantic unity, structural stability, idioms are characterized by terseness, expressiveness and vividness.
2.what are phrasal verbs and verb phrases?
phrasal verbs are idioms which are composed of a verb plus a prep and/or a particle. verb phrases are composed of verbs plus adverbs /pron+n/a+n/conj+n/n+v/n+inf,etc./n structure, phrasal verbs and verb phrases are different from each other, but they share one thing: their meaning are all fixed. Therefore they are idioms.
3.how to use English idioms appropriately?
In using English idioms exactly and rightly, we need to pay attention to the following points:
1) Stylistic features of idioms. Idioms are created by people in their different work, thus acquiring a lot of stylistic features. They are colloquialisms, slangs and literary expressions. That is to say, idioms of different stylistic features are used on different occasions, You should not misuse or abuse them.
2)Rhetorical features of idioms. We use idioms to achieve vividness of description, for idioms can show alliteration, rhyme, reiteration , repetition and juxtaposition of antonyms. Besides, there are also simile, metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, personification and euphemism in idioms.
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