名词解释
1. Word --- A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.
2. V ocabulary --- V ocabulary is most commonly used to refer to the sum total of all 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 2 million words. 3. Content word (notional word) ---denote clear notions and thus are known as notional words. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and numerals.
4. Borrowed words (loan words, borrowing) --- words taken over from foreign language are known as borrowed words or loan words or borrowings in simple terms. According to the degree of assimilation and manner of borrowing, we can bring the loan words under 4 classes: Denizens, Aliens, translation loans, Semantic loans
5. 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
6. 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 ab out. 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.
7. 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 languages in the world.
8. 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.
9. 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 noises. 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).
10. 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, tens
e meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms. Grammatical meaning becomes important only used in actual context.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. 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) 14. The Indo-European Language Family---it is assumed that the world has approximately 3,000(some put it 5,000)languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families on the basis of similarities
in their basic word stock and grammar. It is made up of most of the language of Europe, the Nera East, and India Eastern set: Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Albanian
Western set: Celtic, Italic, Hellenic, Germanic.
15. 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, 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.
16. 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..
17. 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 scholarshi
p.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. Morpheme---A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. (The smallest functional unit in the composition of words.)
21. Morph---A morpheme must be realized by discrete units. These actual spoken minimal carriers of meaning are morphs.
22. Monomorphenic words---morphemes are realized by single morphs.
23. Allomorph---Some morphemes are realized by more than one morph according to their position. Su
ch alternative morphs are allomorphemes. e.g. the morpheme of plurality (-s) has a number if allomorphemes in different sound context, e.g. in cats/s/, in bags/z/, in matches/iz/.
24. Free morphemes or free root---The morphemes have complete meaning and van 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.
25. 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. (including bound root and affix) Bound morphemes are found in derived words.
26. 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.
27. Affixes---Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. Almost affixes are bound morphemes.
28. Prefixes---Prefixes are affixes that come before the word, such as, pre+war, sub+sea
29. Suffixes---suffixes are affixes that come after the word, for instance, blood+y.
30. 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.
31. Derivational morphemes or Derivational affixes---Derivational affixes are affixes added to other morphemes to create new words.
32. 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. 33. 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 an affix.
A stem can be a root or a form bigger than a root.
34. Affixation (Derivation)---the formation of words by adding word forming or
derivational affixes to stems. 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 meaningsuggest的名词
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.
35. Blending---is the formationof new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word.
36. Adjective suffix---the suffix combines with noun or verb to create denominal or deverbal suffixes.---adj suffix
37. 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.
A change of grammatical function
38. Blending---is the word formation by combining parts of two words or a word plus
a part of another word.
39. 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.
40. 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 41. Initialisms---are words formed from the initial letters of words and pronounced as letters. It’s one of the word formations of acronymy.
42. Acronyms---are words formed from the initial letters of word and pronounced as words. . It’s one of the word for mations of acronymy.
43. 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.
www.doczj/doc/c1e007185acfa1c7ab00cc13.html pounding （Composition---Compounding is a process of word-formation by joining two or more stems.
45. Polysemy---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.
46. Radiation---is a semantic change in which the primary meaning stands at the center and the secondary meanings proceed out of it in every direction like rays.
47. Concatenation---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 beginning.
48. Homonyms---are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound
and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.
49. Perfect Homonyms---are words identical both in sound and spelling, but different in meaning. e.g. bank (financial institution) and bank (edge of a river)
50. Homographs---are words identical only in spelling but different in sound and meaning. e.g. sow/sow
51. Homophones (most common)---are words identical only in sound but different in spelling and meaning. e.g. dear/dear
right/rite son/sun
52. Synonyms---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. Ab
solute (Complete) Synonyms are restricted to high-specialized vocabulary. For instance, composition / compounding. They have the perfect same meaning in Lexicology.
2). Relative (Approximate) synonyms---are similar or nearly the same in denotation but embrace different shades of meaning or different degrees of a given quality.
53. Antonyms---words which are opposite in meaning.
54. Hyponymy---deals with the relationship of semantic inclusion. That is, the meaning of a more specific word is included in that of another 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）.
55. 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.
56. 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. 57. Elevation or amelioration--refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance.
58. 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
59. Transfer---words which were used to designate on thing but later changed to mean something else.
60. Linguistic context---it refers to the words, clauses, sentences in which a word appears. Smetimes linguistic context may cover a paragraph, a chapter and even the entire book.
61. Extra-linguistic context---it refers to the physical situation, which embraces the people, place, and even the whole culture background.
62. 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.
63. Grammatical context---The meanings of a word may be inflected by the structure in which it occurs.
64. Ambiguity---often arises due to polysemy and homonymy. When a word with multiple meanings used in inadequate context, it creates ambiguity