英语词汇学Chapter 01

e. g. • can-opener • dip • persuader
(all-purpose key) (pick-pocket) (dagger)
e. g. • beauty (AusE: excellent, great) • auld (Scot: old) • hame (Scot: home) • lough (Irish: lake)
1.2 Vocabulary The term ‘vocabulary’ is used in different senses. • (1) It can refer to the total number of the words in a language;
• (2) It can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period, e. g. Old English vocabulary, Middle English vocabulary and Modern English vocabulary;
e. g. • heart: a change of heart; after one's heart; a heart f ຫໍສະໝຸດ Baiduold; at heart; break one's heart; cross one's heart; cy one's heart out; eat one's heart out; have one's heart in one's mouth; heart and hand; heart and soul; one's heart sinks within one; wear one's heart upon one's sleeve; with all one's heart
Chapter 1 The Basic Concepts of Words and Vocabulary To define some basic concepts concerning words and vocabulary; To explain relationship between words and vocabulary, between sound and meaning, between sound and form; To classify English vocabulary by different criteria
• 2. Nonbasic vocabulary Nonbasic vocabulary include: • (1) Terminology（术语） （术语） • (2) Jargon（行话） （行话） • (3) Slang（俚语） （俚语）
• • • •
(4) Argot（黑话） （黑话） (5) Dialectal Words（方言词） （方言词） (6) Archaisms（古语词） （古语词） (7) Neologisms（新词） （新词）
1.3 Sound and Meaning • A word is a symbol that stands for something else in the world. • Certain sounds will represent certain persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system.
• (1) The English alphabet was adopted from the Romans, and it does not have a separate letter to represent each sound in the language so that some letters must do double duty or work together in combination.
• (2) The pronunciation has changed more rapidly than spelling over the years, and in some cases the two have drawn apart. • (3) The phenomenon of borrowing in the English vocabulary.
They include words relating to: Natural phenomena Human body and relations Names of plants and animals Action, size,domain,state Numerals, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions
1.5 Classification of Words • The English vocabulary, multifarious in nature, consists of words of all kinds. They can be classified by different criteria and for different purposes.
e. g. • In medicine: photoscanning, hepatitis, indigestion, penicillin • In education: audiovisual, megauniversity, microteaching
e. g. • In business: bottom line, balloark figures • In horse-racing: hold him back, hold him in • In medicine: paranoid, persona, hypo
• This symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary, and there is ‘no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thing or an idea and the actual thing and idea itself’ (Lodwig and Barrett, 1973)
e. g. • dough, bread, plant, pot, beaver, smoky, bear, catch, holler, Roger, Xrays • nut, dome, upper, bean, block • elevated, merry, jolly, comfortable, boiled, grassy, tight, knocked out, blue-eyed, fried, paralyzed, picked, stiff, stunned
• (1) By use frequency: basic word stock & nonbasic vocabulary; • (2) By notion: content words & functional words; • (3) By origin: native words & borrowed words; • (4) By morphology: simple words, compound words & derived words, etc.
• (3) It can also refer to all the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person.
• English is one of the world’s highly developed languages. Naturally the vocabulary is one of the largest and richest. The general estimate of the vocabulary is over 2,000,000 words.
1.4 Sound and Form • It is generally agreed that the written form of a natural language is the orthographical record of the oral form.
• Naturally the written form should agree with the oral form. In other words, the sound should be consistent with the form. This is fairly true of English in its earliest stage, i. e. Old English.
• With the development of the language, more and more differences arose between the two. • There are several causes for the differences between sound and form of English:
• • • •
2) Stability（稳定性） （稳定性） 3) Productivity（能产性） （能产性） 4) Polysemy（多义性） （多义性） 5) Collocability（搭配性） （搭配性） (See PP 6-7)
e. g. • foot: footage, football, footpath, footer, footfall, footed, footloose, footling, footman, footbath, footing, footprint
• Characteristics of words of the basic word stock: • 1) All National Character（全民性） （全民性） • They denote the most common things and phenomena of the world around us, which are indispensable to all the people who speak the language.
1.1 The Definition of a Word The definition of a word will cover the following points: • (1) a minimal free form of a language; • (2) a sound unity;
• (3) a unit of meaning; • (4) a form that can function alone in a sentence. ‘A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.’
• 1.5.1 Basic Word Stock and Nonbasic Vocabulary（基本词 （ 汇和非基本词汇） 汇和非基本词汇） • 1. Basic word stock: • The basic word stock is the foundation of the vocabulary accumulated over centuries and forms the common core of the language.