词汇学论文_浅谈英语构词法_英文版

On Word Formation

★Preface

Learn a language; you must learn pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary. Among the three factors, vocabulary has a very important role in your language-studying. A famous scholar Wilkins said” without grammar, very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.”H e emphasized that in most cases, the vocabulary is more important than grammar. Another famous lexicologist McCarthy said, when a student learn the second language, no matter how well the student learns grammar, no matter how successfully he masters the seconds of a L2，without words to express a wide range of meanings, communication in that language cannot happen in any manful way.

From these two examples and of course include many other cases that are not mentioned here now, we can conclude that if you don’t care vocabulary at all, it is impossible to learn a language in some way. What’s more, you cannot express your real feeling no matter you are happy, sad, fortune, or you areunlucky, because you don’t know what words you can say or you can write.

★Summary

English vocabulary has several of Word-formation methods. But the three greatest word formation powers are affixation, compounding, and conversion. The other six kinds of word-formation methods include blending, clipping, acronymy, back-formation, sound reduplication, andcommunization of proper names.

★Context

Before talking about word formation, maybe we should know the morphological structure of English words first. So what we will discuss next is morphological structure of English words. It includes morphemes, morphs and allomorphs, classifying morphemes, identifying morphemes, morphemes and word-formation.

☆morphemes

Traditionally, words are usually treated as the basic and minimal units of a language to make sentence, which are combinations of words according to syntactic rules. Structurally, however, a word is not the smallest unit becausemany words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units. Theseminimal meaningful units are known as morphemes. In view of word-formation, the morpheme is seen as ‘the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words’. Syn tactically, however, a morpheme is the minimal form of grammatical analysis.

Morphemes are abstract units, which are realized in speech by discrete units known as morphs. They are actual spoken, minimal carriers of meaning.

Morphemes vary in function. Accordingly, we can classify morphemes into several general categories:

①Free versus Bound Morphemes ---- morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are free. These morphemes have complete meanings in