词汇学论文语境与词汇意义OnContextandMeaning

On Context and Meaning

12级英语D班，赖惠珊，NO.12

Linguists have classified context from different perspectives and for different aims. For example, context may be classified into broad and narrow ones according to their scopes; notional and situational ones according to their content; emotional and rational ones according to their emotions; implicit and explicit ones according to expressing forms, etc. However, the most widely used way is to draw a distinction between two major types:linguistic context and non-linguistic context, which can be illustrated as the following.

There are two Types of context.

1)Linguistic context

It refers to all the words that go before or come after the word in question. There are three main types of lingustic context.

A. Lexical context refers to the words, clauses, sentences in which a particular word appears or combined with a given polysemous word. For example, ‘a white paper’ means government document; ‘a term paper’ means essay writtten at the end of the term; ‘today’s paper’ means newspaper.

B. Grammatical context: the syntactic structure of the context detemines various individual meanings of a polysemous word. Take some example, ‘become+pronoun/n (used as objecct), meaning ‘suit,befit’ ; ‘become+of, meaning happen to, often in a bad way’

Such meaning are sometimes described as grammatically bound meanings. The grammatical structure of context alone, however, although indicative of differences in the meanings of a word in various structures, is not sufficient to indicate all the individual meanings of given word. Consider the following sentences, which show that get has different meanings in the same pattern ‘get+n’.

“I don’t get your point” , “I’ll get him on that point” , “she really gets me when she says these foolish thing”. The above examples show that th e meaning of a word often has to be determined by the lexical and the grammatical contexts combined.

C. Verbal context in its broad sense: maybe an entire passage, or even an entire book, and in some cases even the entire social or cultural setting.

2)Extra-linguistic context

It is also called non-linguistic context, which includes people, place, time, relevant objects, background knowledge etc.

Context is of great importance for the understanding of word meaning,especially for the understanding of the meanings of polysemic words. No matter how many denotative meanings a word may have,generally there will be no risk of misunderstanding the meaning,when it occurs in a particular context.

The vital role of context in determination of word meaning.

The impact of context on word meaning can be seen in the following aspects:

Elimination of ambiguity

Ambiguity often arises due to polysemy and homonymy. When a word with multiple meanings is used in an inadequate context, it creates ambiguity.