A General Survey of English vocabulary
1. The definition of a word
A fundamental unit of speech and a minimum free form; with a unity of sound and meaning (both lexical and grammatical meaning), capable of performing a given syntactic function
2. Classification of English Words
• (1). By origin: native words and loan words Native words: Anglo-Saxon origin/old English
e.g. sun, rain, moon/head, hand, foot/night, morning, here, there/horse, dog, tree, flower/big, small, red, white, etc.
• Loan/borrowed words: words borrowed from other languages
e.g. fault-French; aikido-Japanese; individual-Latin tofu/litchi/chaa/chinchin-Chinese, etc.
• (2). By level of usage: common words, literary words, colloquial words, slang words,
technical words
(3). By notion: function words and content words
• Function/grammatical words: not have much (some of them have no) lexical meaning of
their own; and just serve grammatically • e.g. The (article) friend of (preposition) mine will (auxiliary) come to my house to
(infinitive) take his book. • Content/lexical words: have lexical meanings; refers to substance, quality, action, such as
ns, vs, advs, advs
Lecture Two
Morphological Structure of English Words
• 2.1 Morphemes
• 2.2 Types of Morphemes • 2.3 Allomorphs
• 2.1. Morpheme(词素,形位) (1) The definition of a morpheme
A morpheme(词素) is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. • Examples
• One morpheme: nation • Two morphemes: nation-al
• Three morphemes: nation-al-ize • Four morphemes: de-nation-al-ize
2.2 Types of Morphemes
• 1. Free & bound Morphemes 2. Roots and affixes
• (1)Free morphemes
• Morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free. They
have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in
sentences.
• Eg: man, faith, read, write, red • (2)Bound morphemes
• Morphemes which cannot occur as separate words are bound. They are so named because
they are bound to other morphemes to form words. Unlike free morphemes, they do not have independent semantic meaning; instead, they have attached meaning (un-kind, hope-ful) or grammatical meaning (cat-s, slow-ly, walk-ing, call-ed). They are also called grammatical morphemes. Most of them are derived from Latin or Greek
2. Roots and affixes
• (1) Roots (root morphemes): a root is the basic unchangeable part of a word, and it
conveys the main lexical meaning of the word. • Take for example, the following set of semantically related words: (to) work, workable,
worker, worked, and working: in each word the root is work, which is the basic unchangeable part, carrying the main lexical meaning. • Roots are either free or bound: • A. free roots:
• In English, many roots are free morphemes, such as boy, moon, walk, black. (i.e. they can
stand alone as words). A word consisting of one free root (or one morpheme) is a simple word. • B. bound roots
Quite a number of roots derived from foreign sources, especially from Greek and Latin, belong to the class of bound morphemes.
e.g. tain in contain/ detain/sustain/retain, ceive in conceive/deceive/receive. in Latin: tain-to hold; ceive-to take .
Yet in Modern English, they are not words, and so are not free morphemes; they cannot exist on their own.
• A root, whether it is free or bound, generally carries the main component of meaning in
a word. Notice what the following words have in common: • (2) Affixes
• Affixes(词缀): Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify
meaning or function. • e.g.: workable, worker, and working work-root -able, -er, -ing---affixes
According to the functions of affixes, we can put them into two groups: inflectional and derivational affixes.
A. Inflectional affixes/ morphemes
• • • •
Inflectional ~:affixes attached to the end of words to indicate grammatical relationship . e.g. the regular plural suffix –s (-es), books,horses;
the form –’s indicates the possessive case of nouns; Tom’s, Mary’s;
suffixes –er, -est show comparative or superlative degrees of adj. or adv. Slower, slowest;
• past tense, walked; -ing form, walking, etc • B. Derivational affixes/morphemes
Derivational affixes are affixes added to other morphemes to create new words. They can be further divided into prefixes and suffixes.
• e.g. Prefixes: dis-(disable, disagree); in-(inability, incomplete); non-(nonsmoker);
post-(postwar); over- ( overwork, overjoyed, overweight). • Suffixes: -er(teacher); -age(postage,baggage); -dom (freedom,wisdom)
The Relationship Between the Two Classifications of Morphemes见书.
3. The major processes of word formation
• 3.1 compounding
• 1. definition : also called composition, is the process of word formation by joining two
or more stems/separated words to produce a new one. Word formed in this way are called compounds /compound words. They can be written in three ways: • • • • • •
solid ( bedroom, greenhouse);
hyphenated ( reading-room, word-formation); open ( reading material; dining room) Flowerpot /flower-pot/flower pot 3.2 Derivation
1 definition: Derivation or affixation is a process of forming new words by adding derivational affixes to stems. The words formed in this way are called derivatives.
• According to the positions which affixes occupy in words, affixes fall into 2 subclasses:
prefixation and suffixation. • A. prefixation: Prefixation is the formation of new words by adding a prefix or
combining form to the base.
B. Suffixation
definition: Suffixation is the formation of a new word by adding a suffix or a combining form to the base, and usually changing the word-class of the base. e.g. boy---boyish. But there are exceptions: e.g. boy---boyhood.
• 3.3 conversion:
• definition: Conversion is the formation of new word by converting word of one class to
another class. It is also called ‘functional shift or transmutation’ or ‘derivation by zero suffix’（零位后缀派生法）, ‘zero-derivation’. • e.g. He was knocked out in the first round. (n.) • Round the number off to the nearest tenth. (v.) • The neighbors gathered round our barbecue. (prep.) • The moon was right and round. (adj.)
• People came from all over the country round. (adv.)
Lecture Four
Words Meaning and Semantic Features
• 1. The Relationship between Meaning and the Object • According to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the
linguistic sign consists of a signifier and a signified, that is, a sound image and a concept. This is called the sign theory of de Saussure.
• According to Ogden & Richards the symbol is the
linguistic element, that is, the word, and the referent is the object, etc, in the world of experience, while thought or reference is concept. This is called the semiotic triangle.
Thought or Reference (Concept) 意义 （概念）
形式，符号 Symbol --- - - - - - - - - - - - - - Referent (Object)
(Word) 所指对象
Sense : 1. ‘ sense’ denotes the relationships inside the language. ‘ The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.’
2. Since the sense of an expression is not a thing, it is often difficult to say what sort of identity it is. It is also an abstraction.
*3. Every word that has meaning has sense (not every word has reference)
• Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it deals with the
relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience. • E.g. the dog is barking, we must talk about a certain dog know to both speaker and hear. • Concept, which is beyond language, is the result of human cognition, reflecting the
objective world in the human mind .
3. Concept is universal to all men alike regardless of culture, race, language and so on.
2．Motivation
• Motivation refers to the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning. Most
words are non-motivated. • 2.1． Phonetic motivation • 2.2 Morphological motivation • 2.3 Semantic motivation • 2.4 Etymological motivation 3. Main Types of Words Meaning
• • • •
2. Classification of Lexical Meaning
Lexical meaning is composed of conceptual meaning and associative meaning. A. Conceptual/denotative meaning
Conceptual meaning is often described as dictionary meaning or literal meaning of a word. It is the core of the meaning of a word. It is relatively constant and stable, because it is the meaning agreed upon by all the members of the same speech community.
• e.g. computer: an electronic machine that stores information and uses programs to help
you find, organize, or change the information
• B. Associative meaning
• Associative meaning is that part of meaning which has been supplemented to the
conceptual meaning. It is the meaning which arises of the associations a word acquires. It is open-ended, unstable and in’determinate, because it varies with culture, time, place, class, individual experiences, etc. Associative meaning includes connotative, stylistic, affective and collocative meanings • 1).Connotative meaning
• ~ refers to the emotional association which a word suggests in one’s mind. It is the
supplementary value which is added to the purely denotative meaning of a word. • e.g. woman: frail, prone to tears, emotional, sympathetic, lack of ration, timid, sensitive,
diligent • • • •
mother: love, care, tenderness, tolerant
home: family, friends, warmth, cozy, comfortable, safety, love, free, convenience 2). Stylistic meaning
Many words have stylistic features, which make them appropriate for different contexts. These distinctive features form the stylistic meanings of word.
• e.g. domicile (very formal, official) / residence (formal) • 3. Affective meaning
• ~ indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the person or thing. It can be appreciative and
pejorative. • e.g. famous, determined; notorious, pigheaded
• 4) Collocative meaning (搭配意义):
• collocative meaning consists of associations a word gets from those words that are often
used together with it. • eg. *“pretty” vs. “handsome”: both meaning nice looking. But ‘pretty’ is often used
together with ‘girl’, ‘woman’, ‘flower’, ‘garden’, ‘color’, or ‘village’, etc., words that suggest feminity, • while ‘handsome’ frequently appears together with ‘boy’, ‘man’, ‘car’, ‘vessel’,
‘overcoat’, ‘airliner’ or ‘typewriter’ etc. words suggesting masculinity.
• *“handsome woman” and “beautiful man” are both acceptable, but they suggest
different kinds of attractiveness because of the collocative association of these two adjective, and hence should be translated respectively into ‘端庄的女性’ and ‘了不起的男子’。
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