词汇学 名词解释(部分)

Types of meaningTypes of lexical changes1.Elevation:词义升格Definition: words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importanceSome 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, pleasantMarshal: a keeper of horses---a high ranking army officerSo 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 oldEnglish 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-edFor 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)A derivational morpheme is a morpheme that is used to create derivations of words. e.g. white can form the derivation whiten by adding the -n morpheme.7.Stylistic meaning:Apart from their conceptual meanings, many words have stylistic features, which make them appropriate for different contexts. These distinctive features form stylistic meaning of words. In some dictionaries ,these stylistic features are clearly marked as “formal”, “informal”, “ literary”, “archaic”, “slang” and so on. This stylistic difference is especially true of synonyms. It is observed that there are few words which have both the same conceptual meaning and the stylistic meaning.8.Analogy:Analogy refers to the process by which words or phrases are created or re-formed according to the existing patterns in the language.E.g. youthquake, airbag, earthriseearthquake, handbag, sunrisepounding:It is a type of word-formation process consisting of joining two or more bases to form a new unit, a compound word. It is also a productive device at every period of the English language. Forms of compounds are solid, hyphenated, open. According to the grammatical property, there are three types of compounds: noun compounds, adjective compounds, verb compounds. For instance, sleeping-bag= sleeping + bag (the bag for sleeping).Today the largest number of new words are formed by compounding.10.Word:A word is defined as a minimum free form of language with a unity of sound and meaning, capable of preforming a given syntactic function. A word contains three elements: form, structural function and meaning. Broadly speaking, all the words in a language together constitute what is known as vocabulary. It is very important to a language.Without words, nothing can be conveyed.11.Superordinate: in the case of hyponymy, superordinate is the upper word standing for thetotality or the group. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordinate.12.Subordinate: in the case of hyponymy, subordinate is the lower word standing for amember of the group.13.Semantic components: They are the features in a word as far as its concept is concerned.Father –a word with the conceptual features of “adult”, “male”, “humanity”, and “animate”.All the 4 features are its semantic components.14.Derivation:Derivation is the formation of word by adding word-forming or derivational affixes to stems. For example, when the verb “care”add a suffixe “-ful”, a new word ”careful” is formed.This process is also known as affixation. New words formed in this way are called derivatives. According to the position affixes occupy in words, affixation falls into two subcategories: prefixation and suffixation.15.Inflection:The process of changing word form for the sake of grammaticality, withoutchanging its meaning.16.Back formation:Backformation is a process of word-formation by which a word is created by the deletion of a supposed suffix from a longer form already present in the language. It is also called reverse derivation. The process of word-formation by changing from one form into another for m, as in “edit” from “editor”(initial word).17.Connotative meaning:For people with different cultural backgrounds, a word might evoke different associations.It is the extended meaning of a word. When a word is enlarged in meaning, its meaning is no longe r limited to the original sense. For instance, “torch” in certain context indicates the hope or the ambition/spirit based on its original sense.The connotative meaning of a word refers to the feeling that a word invokes. This differs from its dictionary definition, which is called its "denotative" meaning. Two words can have similar denotations but very different connotations. For example, the words "miserly" and "thrifty" are both adjectives that describe a person who goes to certain lengths to save money. However, "miserly" has strong negative connotations, while "thrifty" evokes positive feelings in a reader.18.Affective meaning:the meaning of a word as decided by the person who uses it withhis/her personal emotion. Positive or negative sense belongs to affective meaning.It refers to the speaker’s attitude towards the person or thing in question. You may address sb as an “idiot” to convey your despise, or describe sth as “marvelous”to express your positive evalution. This meaning can be conveyed into three types by the choice of words: commendatory, derogatory and neutral.Extension:It is a process by which a word which originally had a specialized meaning has now become generalized, or has extended to cover a broader and often less definite concept.For example, the original meaning of manuscript is the handwriting( writing by hand only), but nowadays, it refers to any author’s writing whether written by hand or typed with a type-writer or a word-processorA large proportion of polysemic words of modern English have their meanings extended in the course of development.19.Degradation:It is a process whereby words of good origin or affective neutrality fall into ill reputation or come to be used in a derogatory sense. It is the reverse of elevation.For example, “sad” formerly refers to full, satisfied, but now comes to be described “sorrowful”.20.Specialization: the meaning is limited and reduced to certain sense. It is also called“narrowing”.。