词汇学复习资料

Word —— A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.

Vocabulary——Not only can it refer to the total number of the words in a language, but it can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period.

Morpheme——A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of a language.

Root—— A root is the basic form of a word, which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity.

Conversion——is the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class. Clipping ——shorten a longer word by cutting a part of the origin and using what remains instead.

Blending——is the word formation by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word.

Motivation（理据）—— is the relationship between the structure of a word and its meaning. polysemy is a common feature of all languages. the same word may have two or more different meanings.

Homonym is generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical（完全相同的）both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.

Synonym is words different in sound and spelling but most nearly alike or exactly the same in meaning.

Antonymy is traditionally described as words opposition in meaning.

Context——means the total environment in which the word appears.

Etymology is the sudy of the origin and history of words and their meaning

Aliens are words borrowed form a foreign language without any change of the foreign sound and spelling.

Denizens are words taken from a foreign language with a transformation of the foreign sound and spelling into native forms.

Language is a system of symbols based on physiology ,psychology and physics

Meaning can be defined as a reciprocal relation between name and sense.

Generalization is a term referring to the widening of meaning.

Deterioration of meaning

Blending（拼缀法）is a process of word-formation in which a new word is formed by combining parts of two words

Prefixation an affix attached to the beginning of a base

1. The history of the English language

1）Old English （450-1150）

a. The first people known to inhabit（居住）England were Celts，the language was Celtic（凯尔特语）.

b. The second language was the Latin（拉丁语）of the Roman Legions（罗马军队）.

2）Middle English （1150-1500）

The Norman Conquest started a continual flow of French words into English——上层人物

3）Modern English （1500-up to now）

The Renaissance（文艺复兴）The Industrial Revolution（工业革命）

2. Tendencies in semantic changes

Extension/generalization —— is a term referring to the widening of meaning.

Narrowing /specialization—— is a term referring to the shrinking of meaning.

Degradation/deterioration—— It is a process whereby words of good origin fall into ill reputation or non-affective words come to be used in derogatory sense.

Elevation/ amelioration—— refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance.

3. Synonyms and relative synonyms

1 Absolute synonyms are words which are fully identical in meaning, a few Absolute synonyms in English.2relative synonyms are most near alike in meaning, many in English .

4. Classification of motivation

1 phonetic motivation

2 grammatical motivation

3 motivation by meaning

5. Types of antonyms

1 Complementaries绝对反义eg: alive — dead

2 Contraries eg: hot —cold

3 Conversives eg: parent — child

6. Classification of dictionaries

1Monolingual bilingual and multilingual dictionaries

2General-purpose and Specific-purpose dictionaries

3Pocket medium-sized and unabridged dictionaries

4Synchronic and diachronic dictionaries

5Encyclopedias and encyclopedic dictionaries

7. Sources of English words

The rapid development of modern science and technology

Social, economic and political changes

The influence of other cultures and languages