词汇学 名词解释(部分)

Types of meaning

Types of lexical changes

1.Elevation:词义升格

Definition: words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance

Some words early in their history signify something quite low or humble, but change as time goes by to designate something agreeable or pleasant.

For example: nice: ignorant---foolish---delightful, pleasant

Marshal: a keeper of horses---a high ranking army officer

So elevation refers that the meaning of word changes from the neutral/negative to positive.

2.Old English:It refers to the English starting from 450 to 1100 AD. The old

English is made up of different sources of languages spoken then –that of Anglo-Saxons, that of Celts, and that of Jutes, with a lot of Latin elements used for common peopl e’s life.

3.Bound morpheme:

It is the smallest unit of grammar, a unit which cannot occur as separate words. They have no independent semantic meaning; instead, they have:

➢Attached meaning E.g. un-kind, hope-ful

➢Grammatical meaning E.g. cat-s, slow-ly, walk-ing, call-ed

For an exact example, in the word “careful”, care is free morpheme, “-ful” is a bound morpheme.

4.Hyponymy:

Hyponymy deals with the relationship of semantic inclusion, or to say, the relationship between general lexical items and specific lexical items. That is to say, when X is a kind of Y, the lower term X is the“hyponym”, and the upper term Y is the “superordinate”. For example, “fiction”is the superordinate of “novel”, “novelette”and “short story”, which are the hyponyms of “fiction”.

Knowing the semantic features of the hyponyms and their superordinates can help us achieve vividness, exactness, and concreteness in expression.

5.Collocation:

Collocation is the habitual juxtaposition of linearly arranged words which occurs multiple times to become set expressions.Collocations have four features:

➢They are non-arbitrary and predictable. For example, we can say “have tea” but not “have engine oil”

➢They are stable and rigid. Collocations are strong enough to exclude other synonymous words. For example, we can say “strong wind and heavy rain” but not “strong rain and heavy wind”.

➢They are culturally-loaded. Collocation reflects the English culture and cultural heritage, such as “the Trojan horse” and “Pandora’s box”.

➢They are Language-specific.

Collocations can be classified into: (in terms of collocational strength.)

weak collocations, (collocations that have a wide variety of collocates. Collocational range is wide.E.g. white/red/green/long/small shirt)

strong collocations,(Collocations are strong but not unique.E.g. moved to tears) frozen collocations (Collocations that are fixed and irreplaceable, E.g. foot the bill *foot the coffee)

Collocations are non-arbitrary, which means that they are motivated. There are four kinds of motivations:

Grammatical motivation, (Collocations serve particular grammatical functions in certain grammatical structures.)

Semantic motivation, (The meaning of the collocation depends on the collocated components.)

Pragmatic motivation, (Collocations are pragmatically driven and pragmatically shaped. E.g.Buckle up, keep space, )

Cognitive motivation. (Metaphorical expression beyond literal interpretation.

E.g. red-carpet treatment, political honeymoon, bubble economy, soft landing)

Collocation is one important aspect of vocabulary development.

It offers the most natural way of language use.

It provides alternative ways of language use, which may be more colorful, expressive or precise.

It helps to improve the style in writing.

6.Morpheme:

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language. Morpheme can be lexical or grammatical.

A free morpheme has complete meaning and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences.

A bound morpheme cannot occur as separate words. They are bound to other morphemes to form words.

An inflectional morpheme is a morpheme that is used to inflect a word. e.g. white can be inflected with the morphemes -r (whiter) and -est (whitest)