英语词汇学知识点

English Lexicology: A Coursebook

Chapter 1 Lexicology and Words

Knowledge Points:

1. Lexicology is the study of the vocabulary or lexicon of a given language.

2. Morphology is the study of the forms of words and their components.

3. The major purpose of study in morphology is to look at morphemes and their arrangements in word formation.

4. Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. Morphemes may constitute words or parts of words.

5. Semantics is defined as the study of meaning.

6. Generally speaking, semantics focuses on:

1) the meaning of words;

2) the meaning of utterances in context;

3) the meaning of sentences;

4) meaning relations between sentences;

5) meaning relations that are internal to the vocabulary of a language.

7. Etymology is the study of the whole history of words.

8. Word is used traditionally to refer to a sequence of letters bounded by spaces.

9. The term word is also used to refer to an intermediate structure smaller than a whole phrase and yet generally larger than a single sound segment.

10. Major features of Words

1) A word is a sound or combination of sounds which we make voluntarily with our vocal equipment.

2) A word is symbolic and is used to stand for something else.

3) The word is an uninterruptible unit.

4) A word has to do with its social function.

5) A word may consist of one or more morphemes.

6) Words are part of the large communication system we call language.

7) A word occurs typically in the structure of phrases.

11. In traditional grammar, eight parts of speech are distinguished in English: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.

12. Words can also be classified into lexical words and grammatical words.

13. Generally speaking, lexical words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

14. The lexical words can be used (functions):

1) to represent our experience of the word;

2) to refer to persons, places, things and concepts (e.g. the nouns Smith, London, pineapple, unity);

3) to describe qualities and properties (e.g. the adjectives excellent, kind, high);

4) to represent actions, processes or states (e.g. the verbs jump, bite, stay);

5) to describe circumstances like manner (e.g. the adverbs kindly, slowly, cheerfully).

Furthermore, lexical words have their own content meanings and may be meaningful when used alone. E.g. book and house have their own content meanings.

15. Grammatical words are words like pronouns, prepositions, demonstrative, determiners, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and son on.

16. Semantic or lexical field: A semantic field contains words that belong to defined area of meaning. Crystal (1995) defines a semantic field as a ‘named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelated and define each other in specific ways’.

Chapter 2 Some Basic Concepts and Word Meanings

Knowledge Points:

1. Morphemes are the ultimate grammatical constituents, the smallest meaningful units of language.

2. Features of morpheme:

1) A morpheme may be a complete word. E.g. the, fierce, desk, eat, boot, at, fee, mosquito cannot be divided

up into smaller units that are meaningful themselves.

2) A morpheme may also be a word form such as an affix. e.g. –able, in-, -hood.

3) A morpheme may be a combining form. e.g. bio-, geo, pre-.

3. Phonemes are the smallest working units of sound per se, and they build up into morphemes.

4. Lexeme: Lexeme or lexical item is regarded as a unit of lexical meaning, which exists regardless of any inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain.

Lexeme is considered an abstract linguistic unit with different variants (e.g. sing as against sang, sung).

5. Morph: Any concrete realization of a morpheme in a given utterance is called a morph. It is a physical form representing some morphemes in a language.

6. Allomorphs: Morphs which are different representations of the same morpheme are referred to as allomorphs of that morpheme.

7. Morphemes can be classified into bound morphemes and free morphemes.

8. Bound morphemes must be joined to other morphemes. e.g. the suffix –dom, is a bound morpheme.

9. Free morphemes need not be attached to other morphemes and can occur by themselves as individual words.

e.g. cat, chair, farm, and bug are free morpheme.

10. Morphemes may also be classified into derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes.

11. Denotation: Denotation of a lexeme is the relationship that holds between that lexeme and persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system.

12. Reference: The relationship of reference holds between an expression and what that expression stands for on particular occasions of its utterance.

13. Sense: Sense is a relationship between the words or expressions of a single language, independently of the relationship, if any, which holds between those words or expressions and their referents.

14. Leech (1981) distinguishes seven types of meaning in language: conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning.

15. Conceptual meaning, which is sometimes called denotative or cognitive meaning, refers to meanings as presented in a dictionary.

16. Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an expression by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content.

17. Social meaning refers to the kind of meaning a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use.

18. Affective meaning can be used to cover the attitudinal and emotional factors expressed in a word.

19. Reflected meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense.

20. Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.

21. Thematic meaning is what communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the massage, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis.

22. Stem: The word to which affixes are added and which carries the basic meaning of the resulting complex word is known as the stem.

23. Root: A stem consisting of a single morpheme is labeled as root. For, example, walk is a root and it appears in the set of word-forms that instantiate the lexeme walk such as walk, walks, walking and walked.

24. Free morpheme: Roots which are capable of standing independently are called free morphemes. Single words like man, book, tea, sweet, cook are the smallest free morphemes capable of occurring independently.

25. Bound morpheme: some roots are incapable of occurring independently. They always occur with some other word-building element attached to them. Such roots are called bound morphemes, like –mit in permit, remit, commit, admit, and ceive in perceive, receive, conceive.

26. Base: A base is a lexical item to which affixes of any kind can be added.

The affixes attached to a base. In other words, all roots are bases.

27. Affix: A root or stem can be attached with an affix. Affixes are morphemes which only occur when attached to other morphemes. By definition affixes are bound morphemes.

28. Three types of affixes: prefix, suffix and infix.

1) prefix: A prefix is an affix attached before a root (or stem or base) like re-, un- and in-, as in re-make, un-kind, in-decent.

2) suffix: A suffix is an affix attached after a root (or stem or base) like-ly, -er, -ist,and -ed, as in kind-ly, wait-er, interest-ing, interest-ed.

3) infix: An infix is an affix inserted into the root itself. According to Katamba (1993), infixes are very common in semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew.

29. Other types of affixes: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes.

1) Inflectional affixes are used for syntactic reasons to indicate number, tense, case, and so on.

2) derivational affixes can alter the meaning or grammatical category of the base.

30. Polysemy: Polysemy refers to the situation in which a word has two or more different meanings.

For instance, the noun bank is said to be polysemous because it may mean:

(1) a financial institution that people or businesses can keep their money in or borrow money from;

(2) a raised area of land along the side of a river;

(3) a large number of things in a row, especially pieces of equipment.

31. Features of polysemy:

1) The concept of polysemy is complex and involves a certain number of problems. As mentioned by Jackson and Amvela (2000), we cannot determine exactly how many meanings a polysemous word has, as a word may have both a literal meaning and one or more transferred meanings.

2) The is no clear criterion for either difference or sameness of meaning.

3) It difficult to distinguish between polysemy (i.e. one word with several meanings) and homonymy (i. e. several words with the same shape—spelling and/or pronunciation).

4) Polysemy is an essential condition for its efficiency.

32. Homonymy: Homonymy refers to a situation in which there are two or more words with the same shape.

33. Tow types of homonyms (Jackson and Amvela, 2000): homograph and homophone

1) homograph: Homograph refers to a word which is spelt the same as another word but has a different meaning and sometimes a different pronunciation. For example, lead (metal) and lead (dog’s lead) are spelt the same but pronounced differently.

2) homophone: Homophone refers to a word that sounds the same as another word but ahs its own spelling, meaning and origin. For example, right, rite and write are spelt differently but pronounced the same.

34. Features of homonymy:

1) There are cases in which two homonyms with totally different meanings may both make sense in the same utterance.

2) Spelling will often help to differentiate between words with are identical in sound.

3) Writing conventions can help remove homonymy, as English writing is more intelligible than speech.

Chapter 3 The Origins of English Words

Knowledge Points:

1. The Development of English:

Indo-European Family

Italic Germanic Europe the Near East North India …

the North Germanic the East Germanic the West Germanic

branch branch branch

English

English belongs to the Indo-European family, which includes most of the languages of Europe, the Near east,

and North India. One branch of the Indo-European family is called Italic, from which Latin and later the Romance languages developed. Another is called Germanic, which is subdivided into the North Germanic branch, the Ease Germanic branch and the West Germanic branch. English is one of the languages in the West Germanic branch.

Celts are believed to be the first people who, inhabited the land that was later to become England. They came to the island around the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Their languages were yet another branch of the Indo-European language family. Most of the island of Britain was occupied by the Romans from about 43 AD until 410 AD.

Two stages:

First Stage (Beginning of English): After the withdrawal of the Romans, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes moved into England in about 450 AD and began to take it over. It is at this time when the English language began.

Second Stage: By the 10th century, the West Saxon dialect became the official language of Britain. Written Old English is mainly known from this period. It was written in an alphabet called Runic (北欧古文字).

2. The four historical periods of English:

1) The language from 450 to 1066 is known as Old English.

2) From 1066 to 1500 the language is known as Middle English.

3) The language from 1500 to 1800 is considered the Early Modern English period.

4) The language since 1800 is called Modern English.

3. Old English Period (450-1066). There are many differences between the way vocabulary was used in Old English and the way it is used today.

1) the Anglo-Saxon preference for expressions that are synonymous, far exceeds that found in Modern English, as does their ingenuity in the construction of compounds.

2) the absence of a wide-ranging vocabulary of loanwords also forces them to rely more on word-formation processes based on native elements.

3) the latter period of Old English was characterized by the introduction of a number of ‘loan translations’.

4) grammatical relationships in Old English were expressed mainly by the use of inflectional endings.

5) Old English is believed to contain about 24,000 different lexical items.

4. The Middle English Period (1066-1500). The Middle English period was marked by extensive changes. In 1066 the Normans conquered Britain.

5. Features of this period:

1) The changes of this period affected English both in its grammar and its vocabulary.

2) Inflections were greatly reduced in Middle English.

3) The inflectional endings was due partly to phonetic changes and partly to the operation of analogy.

4) Middle English is particularly characterized by intensive and extensive borrowing from other languages.

6. Early Modern English Period (1500-1800). This period is the transitional period from Middle English to Modern English.

1) The printing press helped to standardize the spelling of English in its modern stages.

2) Throughout the modern period, written English has been quite uniform.

3) In the sixteenth century, scholars began seriously to talk about their language, making observations on grammar vocabulary, the writing system and style.

4) Adjectives lost all endings except for in the comparative and superlative forms.

7. The Modern English Period (1800-present). Features of this period:

1) Modern English is as the unprecedented growth of scientific vocabulary.

2) The assertion of American English is as a dominant variety of the language.

3) The emergence of other varieties known as ‘New Englishes’.

8. ‘New Englishes’refers to new varieties of the language that have become localized not only through the influence of the other languages of the regions where they are used, but also through being adapted to the life and culture of their speakers.

9. The differences between American English and British English:

1) The differences of vocabulary are the most striking;

2) American spelling and British are also a bit different;

3) The differences between American and British pronunciation are perhaps the most pervasive of all.

10. Native English vocabulary is made up of Anglo-Saxon words. This category comprises words that were used by the Germanic tribes and are still used in Modern English.

11. The Celtic language did not have any serious impact on English.

1) In the Old English period, only a number of Celtic words were borrowed, and just a few have survived into modern English, sometimes in regional dialect use.

2) In the seventeenth century, a few more Celtic words were introduced into English from Irish Gaelic.

12. Major influences on English:

1) The Scandinavian Influence

2) The Norman Conquest

3) The Latin Influence

13. Borrowing is the process of imitating a word from foreign language and, at least partly, adapting in sound or grammar to the native language.

14. Latin is not only the first major contributor of loanwords to English, but also one of the most important sources for the coinage of new English words.

15. Greek borrowings have been continuous from the fifth century to the present. Borrowing from French started long before 1066.

16. New English words can be created by root creation, onomatopoeic words, ejaculations and word formation (Jackson and Amvela 2000).

Chapter 4 Word Formation in English

Knowledge Points:

1. There are basically three ways of extending the word stock:

1) borrowing words that already exist in other languages;

2) creating entirely new words;

3) forming new words from existing resources within the word stock.

2. Word formation refers to the different devices used in English to build new words from existing ones.

3. The basic distinction between inflection and derivation is mainly morphological. Inflection results in the formation of alternative grammatical forms of the same word, while derivation creates new vocabulary items.

4. Inflection refers to a general grammatical process which combines words and affixes to produce alternative grammatical forms of words.

5. Inflections in English are all suffixes that occur at the very end of a word.

6. Functions of Inflection

Inflection creates variant forms of a word to conform to different functional roles in a sentence or in discourse.

1) Inflections modify the form of a word so that they can fit into a particular syntactic slot.

2) Sometimes inflectional morphemes serve merely to integrate a word into its sentence.

3) inflections attach grammatical information to the stem, but do not change its grammatical category.

7. Affixation is the process whereby an affix is attached to a base.

8. Derivation refers to the creation of a new word by means of the addition of an affix to a stem.

9. Functions of Derivations

Derivational affixes serve functions very different from those of inflectional morphemes.

1) A derivational affix can change the part of speech of a word;

2) Derivation affixes are so called because they are used to derive new words and meanings.

3) Derivational affixes can change the word class of the item they are added to and establish words as members of the various word classes.

4) Derivational affixes do not always cause a change in grammatical class.

10. Derivational affixes can be divided into two types: class-changing and class-maintaining.

11. Class-changing derivational affixes change the word class of the word to which they are added.

12. Class-maintaining derivational affixes change the meaning of the derivative.

13. Class-changing derivational affixes determine the word class of the stem.

14. The largest group of class-changing derivatives in English is nominalizers which make nouns out of adjectives or verbs.

15. Verbalizers are used to form verbs from other stems.

16. Adjectivalizers are used to form adjectives when added to a given stem.

17. Adverbializers form adverbs when added to a given stem.

18. Class-maintaining derivations do not change the word class of the stem but its meaning. Most derivatives that are prefixes in English affect only the meaning of the root, not its syntactic class.

19. Compounding refers to the method and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words.

20. Compounds are stems consisting of more than one root.

21. The orthographic treatment of compounds is by no means consistent.

22. Characteristics of Compounds

1) Phonologically, there is always a single primary stress in English words, so that compounds are often recognized by stress pattern and lack of juncture.

The criterion of stress applies only to nominal compounds, and the distinction between compound and idiom becomes fuzzy for verbs and other nominal categories.

2) Syntactically, compounds are single lexical units and have specific features.

The grammatical relations between the constituents of the compound are sometimes obscure.

3) Semantically, compounds tend to have special meanings.

The meanings of the words interrelate in such a way that the new meaning may be different from the meanings of the words in isolation.

23. A common semantic classification yields four types of compounds: endocentric, exocentric, copulative and appositional.

24. An endocentric compound consists of a head and its modifier.

25. An exocentric compound does not have a head, and its meaning cannot be literally guessed from its constituent parts.

26. A copulative compound has two semantic heads.

27. An appositional compound has two attributes which classify the compound.

28. A compound is a lexical item in which two roots combine to make one unit.

29 According to constituent elements, compounds can be divided into four major types.

1) Noun compounds: A noun compound can be formed by ‘N+N’, ‘N+V-ing’, ‘V-ing+N’, ‘V+N’, ‘Adj+N’, ‘V+Adv’, ‘Adv+V’, ‘Prep+N’, ‘Adj+V-ing’ and other combinations.

2) Verb compounds: A verb compound can be formed by ‘N+V’, ‘Adv+V’, ‘Adj+V’, ‘V+V’, ‘Adv+N’ and other combinations

3) Adjective compounds: An adjective compound can be formed by ‘Adj+Adj’, ‘Adj+N’, ‘Adj+N-ed’, ‘N+Adj’, ‘Adj+V-ing’, ‘Adj+V-ed’, ‘N+V-ing’, ‘N+V-ed’, ‘Adv+V-ed’, ‘Adv+Adj’, ‘Prep+N’and other combinations.

4) Pronoun compounds: A pronoun compound can be formed mostly by the combination of some/any/no with thing/body/one and my/your/her/him/our/them/it + self/selves.

30. Conversion: A change in word class without the addition of an affix is known as conversion. In other words, conversion is a process by which a word belonging to one word class is transferred to another word class without any change in form.

31. There are four major kinds of conversion: from noun to verb, from verb to noun, from adjective to noun and from adjective to verb.

Noun →verb: to air, to arm, to bottom, to cup, to fish, to mouth, to tooth.

Verb →noun: a call, a command, a count, a go, a guess, a book, a walk.

Adjective →verb: to better, to blind, to bold, to brave, to dirty, to empty.

Adjective →noun: best, poor, rich, blind, convertible, daily, double.

32. Auxiliary verbs, adverbs, modal verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections and even affixes can all act as bases for conversion.

33. Blending refers to the process of combining parts of two words to form a third word which contains some of the meaning of each part. Blends are compounds that are less than compounds.

34. Structurally, ELL (2006) divides blends into four common types.

1) The first type of blends is a full word followed by a splinter. Blends can also begin with a splinter, followed by a full word.

2) The second type of blends consists of two splinters. There are two subtypes.

A) In some cases, the beginning of one word is followed by the end of another.

B) In other cases, both splinters are the beginning of words.

3) The third type of blends consists of complete overlap, in which a part of the blend belongs to both words.

4) The fourth type of blends involves the embedding of one word in another.

35. Blending often results in the creation of new morphemes or in the addition of new meanings to old ones.

36. Shortenings include clipping and initialisms.

37. Clipping is the process by which a word of usually three or more syllables is shortened without a change in meaning or function.

38. Features of clipping:

1) Clipped words tend to be casual but very useful.

2) Clipping often ignores morphemic boundaries.

There are three major types of clippings: fore clipping, hind clipping, and midclipping.

3) On some rare occasions, clipping may affect both ends of the source with the middle part retained.

There are three types of phonetic clippings: phonetic fore clipping, phonetic midclipping, and phonetic hind clipping.

39. Initialisms are the results of putting together the initial letters, or occasionally the first two letters, of the orthographic words in a phrase and using them as words.

40. Alphabetisms: When initialisms are pronounced with the names of the letters in them, they are called alphabetisms.

41. Acronyms: When two words are pronounced like individual words, they are acronyms.

42. Backformation is the making of a new word from an older word which is mistakenly assumed to be its derivative.

43. Communization of proper names: The English vocabulary is also characterized by the number of words that derive from the names of people, place, books or brands. This process is called the communization of proper names.

44. Metanalysis refers to an analysis of a word into parts, in the course of which the original structure of the word is altered.

Chapter 5 Sense Relations

Knowledge Points:

1. Sense is an internal meaning relation. Sense relations are relations between word meanings and hold between words within the vocabulary.

2. Characteristic of Sense Relations

(1) The meaning of one item can be related to the meaning of others.

(2) Synonyms are items that mean the same, or nearly the same.

(3) Antonyms are items that mean the opposite.

3. According to Jackson and Amvela (2000), synonymy is of two types: strict synonymy and loose synonymy.

4. Strict synonymy refers to the situation in which two synonymous words can be interchangeable in all their possible contexts of use.

5. Actually, many words have similar senses and denotation without having exactly the same meaning.

6. Loose synonyms may be substitutable in particular contexts, but are not substitutable across a range of contexts.

7. In synonymy, we can find not only a significant overlap in meaning between two words, but also some contexts

where they cannot substitute for each other.

8. Difference among synonyms:

1) Synonym pairs may differ in different geographical varieties of English.

2) Synonym pairs may differ in the style or formality of the context in which a word may be used.

3) Synonym pairs may differ in connotations. Two words may refer to the same entity, but they may have different associative or emotive meanings.

4) Synonym pairs may differ in the use of registers.

5) Synonym pairs may differ in etymology.

6) Synonym pairs may differ in collocation. They occur in different environments.

9. Antonymy refers to the relationship of oppositeness of meaning between words.

1) Antonymy is typically found among adjectives but it can be extended to other word class.

2) Antonymy covers a number of different types of oppositeness of meaning.

10. There may be no true synonyms, but there are several kinds of antonyms. Three types are commonly identified: gradable antonyms, contradictory or complementary antonyms, and converses.

11. Gradable antonyms represent a more/less relation and can be viewed as terms at the end-points of a continuum.

12. Complementary antonyms, also called contradictory antonyms or non-gradable antonyms, are in an either/or relation of oppositeness.

13. Converse antonyms represent two-way contrasts that are interdependent. They are also called reciprocal antonyms or relational opposition, in which one member presupposes the other.

14. Hyponymy refers to the notion of inclusion whereby we can say that ‘an X is a kind of Y’. It is the class-inclusion relation.

15. A hyponym includes the meaning of a more general word and serves as specific examples of a general concept. The more general term is called the superordinate or hypernym.

16. Hyponymy is one of several relationship types with which language users organize the lexicon.

17. Meronymy is the part-whole relation in any pair of items. This is an important hierarchical relationship that is found in pairs of words.

18. According to Cruse (2000), the notion of meronymy is relational rather than absolute.

19. Meronymic relationships are not a property of pairs of words.

20. Collocation is concerned with meaning arising from co-occurrence, more specifically to meaning arising from predictable co-occurrence of two or more than two words.

21. Collocation is the meaning relations that a word contracts with other words occurring in the same sentence or text.

22. Collocator: A word with a certain meaning which occurs in a collocation along with a given word is called a collocator of that word.

23. Collocations differ from free combinations. In collocations, the components are not freely interchangeable.

24. Collocations are of several types. Those relating to syntax are grammatical collocations, and those relating to expression are lexical collocations.

25. Grammatical collocation refers to any kind of syntactic element that must accompany a particular word (usually verb, noun or adjective in English).

26. Lexical collocations consist of groups of words with a certain meaning that often occur together.

27. The lexical collocations usually consist of words that are in a relation of mutual expectancy of habitual association.

28. Other features of collocation

1) Collocation often occurs between words in structures;

2) Collocations can also cut across part-of-speech or sentence boundaries.

3) Collocation is as a cohesive device, because collocation is one of the factors on which we build our expectation of what is to come next in text.

29. A metaphor is an extension of the use of a word beyond its primary meaning to describe referents that bear similarities to the word’s primary referent. It refers to cases where a word appears to have both a literal and a

transferred meaning.

30. Once a metaphor becomes accepted, speakers tend to view the metaphorical meaning as separate from its primary meaning.

31. Metaphor can be seen as a phenomenon of human cognition.

Chapter 6 Idioms, Multiword Verbs and Proverbs

Knowledge Points:

1. Idiom: An idiom can be defined as a group of words with a meaning of its own that is different from the meanings of each separate words put together.

2. The features of idioms:

1) Idioms are conventionalized multiword expressions.

2) The meaning of an idiom cannot be predicted from its components.

3) Idioms are not only colloquial expressions, but also appear in formal style and in literary works. The meaning of an idiom has usually been fixed by long usage.

4) There are many different sources of idioms. Many English idioms come from the every-day life of the English-speaking people, food and cooking, agricultural life, nautical life and military, or related to parts of the body, animals, and colors.

3. Classification of idioms:

Structurally, idioms take many different forms or structures, and can be very short or rather long.

According to Seidl and McMordie (1988), idioms can be divided into three groups:

1) The first group has irregular form but clear meaning.

2) The second group has a regular form but an unclear meaning.

3) The third group is irregular both in form and meaning.

However, according to Jackson and Amvela (2000), there are ‘partial idioms’, in which some of the words have their usual meaning while the others have meanings that are peculiar to that particular structure.

4. According to Jackson and Amvela (2000), idioms have two major features: ambiguity, and syntactic peculiarities.

5. Ambiguity arises because the words in an idiom can also be used non-idiomatically, and thus they may have either a literal or an idiomatic meaning.

6. Features of idioms:

1) Idioms are fixed expressions, not only lexically but also to some extent grammatically.

2) The idioms which cannot be changed at all are called fixed idioms.

3) Some idioms are fixed in some of their parts but not in others.

4) Several fixed idioms cannot be changed in any part (except the tense of the verb).

5) None of the words in an idiomatic expression may normally be omitted.

6) Syntactic restrictions vary from one idiom to another. Some idioms are more restricted or frozen than others.

7) Idioms have special syntactic properties.

7.In English, multiword verbs are units in which the main verb occurs with one or two particles.

8. Jackson and Amvela (2000) classify multiword verbs into phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, and phrasal-prepositional verbs. They use two main criteria to identify the different subclasses of multiword verbs.

1) the notion of transitivity and the relative position of the direct object.

2) the number of particles following the main verb.

9. Three types of multiword verb.

1) prepositional verbs are always followed by an object.

2) phrasal verbs may be followed by an object.

3) phrasal-prepositional verbs constitute a bridge class between phrasal and prepositional verbs.

10. Proverbs are short well-known statements that give practical advice about life.

11. According to ELL (2006), they capture the shared beliefs or collective wisdom of a society.

12. Proverbs express in few words a truth which relates to everyday experience.

Chapter 7 English Dictionaries

Knowledge Points:

1. An entry usually contains four main types of information:

a) its standard phonological representation;

b) the possible sequences of morphemes into which in enters;

c) its syntactic properties (such as noun, verb, and so on);

d) its semantic representation.

2. According to Halliday (2004), dictionary entries often consist of six parts:

1) headword or lemma, often in bold or some other special font;

2) its pronunciation, in some form of alphabetic notation;

3) its word class (‘part of speech’);

4) its etymology (historical origin and derivation);

5) its definition;

6) examples of its use.

3. Headword: The headword is the base form from which the word is entered and assigned its place. The number of headwords in the dictionary depends on the purpose, the audience and the size of the dictionary.

4. Pronunciation: After the headword, the dictionary will give the pronunciation of the word, using sound symbols that will vary from one dictionary to another. The pronunciation in most dictionaries is indicated by the International Phonetic Alphabet, although some use a modified one.

5. The word class will be one of the primary word classes.

6. Grammatical Information: The grammatical information given by dictionaries is limited to the part of speech for a word and the labels prefix, suffix, or combining form for bound forms.

7. Etymology: Etymology in the dictionary is a statement of the origin of the head word. It may include not only the earliest known form and the language in which this occurs but also cognate forms in other language.

8. Definition: The definition takes one or both of two forms: description and synonymy. The description often uses

a sentence but may need to include words that are less frequently used.

9. Since most words have more than one meaning, the definitions are usually grouped together in some order. There are three kinds of order: historical order; frequency-determined order and logical order.

10. Examples: Examples are often grouped under numbers referring back to definitions or senses to show how the word is used in context.

11. Usage Labels: Usage labels indicate that a word’s use is restricted in certain ways.

12. Corpus work in English began in the 1960s with the development of the Survey of English Usage and the Brown University Corpus.

13. With the help of corpora, the frequency of use can be worked out, and the different meanings of a word can be described and classified by inspecting how the word is actually used.

14. Functions of corpora: The use of corpora not only allows the lexicographers to get reliable information about the relative frequency of occurrence of words and senses, but more importantly to obtain data, in the form of concordances, for deciding on the senses and meaning of words.

15. Types of Dictionaries:

There are unabridged dictionaries, dictionaries for students learning a foreign language (learner’s dictionaries), bilingual dictionaries, general dictionaries and specialized dictionaries, such as shoes devoted to slang, occupational jargons, abbreviations or place names.

Nevertheless, three basic distinctions can be made of dictionaries:

1) general and specialized dictionaries;

2) monolingual and bilingual dictionaries;

3) electronic and print dictionaries.

16. General dictionaries include all of the elements of a lexicon. They help users understand the precise meanings, pronunciations, spellings, usages, and histories of the words of their language, including some of the technical words.

17. Specialized Dictionaries: There are dictionaries of etymology, pronunciation, and names; dictionaries of idioms, proverbs and phrasal verbs; dictionaries of abbreviations, loanwords and acronyms; crossword puzzle dictionaries; rhyming dictionaries; and many others.

18. Monolingual dictionaries are those in which the language of description is the same as the language being described.

19. A bilingual dictionary uses two different languages – one as the object of description and one as the instrument of description.

20. Based on media, dictionaries can be classified into electronic dictionaries and print dictionaries.

21. Unabridged Dictionaries

‘Unabridged’ means the dictionary is not a shortened version of some other dictionary. It was complied from scratch largely from its own files of citations, with all definitions and arrangements of meanings and examples determined by its own editors.

22. Learner’s dictionaries are designed to serve the needs of learners whose native language is not English but who are at the intermediate or the advanced stage of language learning.

23. Children’s dictionaries are intended for children who are native speakers.

24. A thesaurus presents information about words in a different way from a traditional dictionary.

25. The Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest of all unabridged English dictionaries. It is the only English dictionary complied totally from its own citation files. It excludes most technical words, but includes, in principle, all the words that have ever appeared in the English language after 1150.

26. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (1961), is another relatively complete unabridged English dictionary of recent times.

27. The Chambers Dictionary

The first edition of The Chambers 20th Century Dictionary came out in 1901. One feature of Chambers is that all derived forms are listed within the entry under a single headword.

Chapter 8 Words in Context

Knowledge Points:

1. Dialect: A dialect is a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language’s speakers. The term is applied most often to regional dialect, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class.

2. Sociolect: A dialect that is associated with a particular social group can be termed a sociolect.

3. According to Formkin et al. (2007), regional dialects may differ in the words people use for the same object.

4. Dialect differences tend to increase proportionately to the degree of communicative isolation of the groups, but an Australian was much less likely to talk to an Englishman than to another Australian.

5. Social dialects are varieties of language used by groups defined according to class, education, age, sex and a number of other social parameters (Yule, 1996).

6. Register: Register is a form of language appropriate to a specific situation.

7. Halliday (1978) defined a register as a variety of language distinguished according to context, which consists of the field of discourse, the relations between participants, and the mode of discourse.

8. Word choice is one of the most obvious linguistic features among registers.

9. The use of special jargon is characteristic of a register.

10. According to EEL (2006), style is seen as the making of conscious and unconscious choices of certain linguistic forms and structures in preference to others.

11. A taboo is a strong social prohibition against words, objects, actions, or discussions that are considered undesirable or offensive by a group or community.

12. Breaking a taboo may result in embarrassment, shame, rudeness and even legal penalties.

13. Taboos may cover restrictions on diet, sexual activities, gender roles, private parts, illegal drugs and so on.

14. As suggested by Poole (1999), as alternatives to using taboo words we can either use medical terms or evasive

terms.

15. According to Leech (1981), euphemism is the practice of referring to something offensive or indelicate in terms that make it sound more pleasant or becoming than it really is.

16. A euphemism is a word or phrase that replaces a taboo word or serves to avoid frightening or unpleasant subjects.

1) Some euphemisms are involved in genteel swearing.

2) Some euphemisms are chosen to replace the taboo word by its sound.

17. According to Wikipedia (2008), many euphemisms fall into one or more of the following categories:

1) Terms of foreign and/or technical origin.

2) Abbreviations.

3) Abstractions and ambiguities.

4) Indirections.

5) Mispronunciaton.

6) Litotes or reserved understatement.

7) Changing nouns to modifiers.

8) Slang.

18. The use of euphemisms is somewhat situational. What might be used as a euphemism in a conversation between two friends might make no sense to a third person. Some euphemisms are common in some circles but not others.

19. Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker’s dialect or language.

20. Features of slang:

1) A slang word is often an informal and transient lexical item used by a specific social group. The use of slang has brought many new words into the language by combining old words into new meanings.

2) Slang also introduces entirely new words.

3) Slang is something that nearly everyone uses and recognizes, but it is not always easy to draw the line between slang words and standard words.

4) As observed by Formkin et al. (2007), many slang words have entered English from the underworld.

5) Slang is sometimes regional, but slang expressions can spread outside their original areas to become commonly used.

21. Jargon is often defined as the language peculiar to a trade, profession, or other group. It is the language used in spoken or written texts dealing with a circumscribed domain in which speakers share a common specialized vocabulary, habits of word usage, and forms of expression.

22. Jargon functions as a technical or specialized language and can promote in-group solidarity and exclude non-group members from the conversation.

23. The most prominent characteristic of a jargon is its specialized vocabulary.

24. Linguistic jargon consists of terms such as phoneme, morpheme, cases, lexicon, phrase structure rule, and so on.

25. Meaning shifts include broadening, narrowing, amelioration and pejoration.

26. When the meaning of a word becomes broader, that word means everything it used to mean and more.

27. The new meanings did not replace the earlier ones but gave us new words by extending the domain of reference for old words. More recent broadenings are computer, window, cookie, cache, virus, and bug.

28. In Stockwell and Minkova’s (2000) words, narrowing is an unnatural semantic change in that it requires moving from generality to specificity.

29. Narrowing take place quite frequently when common words with non-specialized meanings are borrowed into some scientific field where they are given a highly specialized meaning within the context of one area.

30. Ameliorations refer to the development of more favorable meaning for words.

31. A development of the meaning in the opposite direction, which is perhaps more frequent, is called pejoration. Chapter 9 English Words and Cognition

Knowledge Points:

1. V ocabulary is divided into the passive vocabulary and the active vocabulary. The former refers to the number of words that one understands, while the latter refers to the set of words on uses in language production.

2. According to Booij (2005), the mental lexicon differs from a dictionary in several ways.

1) The number of lexical entries in a good dictionary is much higher than that in our individual mental list of words.

2) The mental lexicon is a multi-dimensional web of words, with all kinds of connections between words.

3) The mental lexicon also stores information about the frequency with which you come across a word.

3. It takes a number of years to build up our mental lexicon, and at the same time we shall continue adding and losing words.

4. Metaphor is often considered as a variation in the expression of meanings.

5. Metaphor involves the ‘non-literal’ use of words.

6. According to Halliday (1985), in metaphor a word is used for something resembling that which it usually refers to.

7. Metaphor is a type of figurative usage.

8. Richards (1965) made a distinction between three aspects of metaphor:

1) vehicle, the items used metaphorically;

2) tenor, the metaphorical meaning of the vehicle;

3) ground, the basis for the metaphorical extension, especially the common elements of meaning, which license the metaphor.

9. From the perspective of cognition, a metaphor is a device that involves conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another.

10. Lakoff and Johnson use the formula TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN to describe the metaphorical link between the domains.

11. Every metaphorical word or phrase contains a key idea.

Two kinds of metaphors are involved in the conceptualization of quantity:

(a) MORE is UP; LESS is DOWN.

(b) LINEAR SCALES are PATHS.

12. Spatial relationships are so fundamental that we use space as a domain for structuring other less concrete aspects of our experience.

13. Lee (2001) gives many examples to show that there is flexibility and abstraction involved in the coding of spatial relationships. He takes a close look at three basic locative prepositions, in, on and at.

14. Spatial terms and spatial concepts are used to structure more abstract non-spatial domains.

15. The relationships between prepositions and meanings manifest several possibilities.

1) the same term can express opposite meaning.

2) opposite meanings can be expressed by unrelated spatial terms.

3) spatial terms that normally express opposite meanings sometimes express similar meanings.

4) sometimes such spatial terms express meanings that seem to be quite unrelated to each other.

5) similar meanings are expressed by prepositions that are not closely related to each other in their basic locative uses.

16. Prototype theory was formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch and others. The term prototype has been defined by Rosch (1973) as the most central member of a category.

英语词汇学教程(练习答案)(1)解析

《英语词汇学教程》（2004 年版）练习答案 Chapter 1 7. Choose the standard meaning from the list on the right to match each of the slang words on the left. a. tart: loose woman b. bloke: fellow c. gat: pistol d. swell: great e. chicken: coward f. blue: fight g. smoky: police h. full: drunk i. dame: woman j. beaver: girl 8. Give the modern equivalents for the following archaic words. haply = perhaps albeit = although methinks = it seems to me eke = also sooth = truth morn = morning troth = pledge ere = before quoth = said hallowed = holy billow = wave / the sea bade = bid 12. Categorize the following borrowed words into denizens, aliens, translation loans, and semantic loans. Denizens: kettle, die, wall, skirt, husband Aliens: confrere, pro patria, Wunderkind, mikado, parvenu Translation loans: chopstick, typhoon, black humour, long time no see Semantic loans: dream Chapter 2 1. Why should students of English lexicology study the Indo-European Language Family? The Indo-European Language Family is one of the most important language families in the world. It is made up of most of the languages of Europe, the Near East and India. English belongs to this family and the other members of the Indo-European have more or less influence on English vocabulary. Knowledge of the Indo-European Language Family will help us understand English words better and use them more appropriately. 2. Make a tree diagram to show the family relations of the modern languages given below.

现代英语词汇学概论最强版复习资料chapter

现代英语词汇学概论最强版复习资料c h a p t e r 文件管理序列号：[K8UY-K9IO69-O6M243-OL889-F88688]

Chapter 9 Changes in Word Meaning 9.1 Causes of Changes in Word Meaning 9.2 Four Tendencies in Semantic Change 9.3 Semantic Development or Change Resulting from the Figurative Use of Words Definition: Change of meaning refers to the alteration of the meaning of existing words, as well as the addition of new meaning to established words. 9.1 Causes of Changes in Word Meaning A.Historical cause 历史原因 It often happens that though a word retains its original form ,its meaning has changed because the object which it denotes has changed . *Changes of meaning because of increased knowledge of the object described are common in the history of science. Eg. pencil ==is from a Latin word meaning “a little tail” or “a fine brush”, like our Chinese “pen”毛笔.Later, when it was made of wood and graphite ,it was still called a “pencil”. atom ==It was borrowed though Latin and French from Greek arouos,invisible. Thus atom meant originally “an particle too small to be divided”. This meaning is now out-of-date, because scientist have found out that atom can be split.

英语词汇学及答案

英语词汇学 第一部分选择题 I. Each of the statements below is followed by four alternative answers .Choose the one that would best complete the statement and put the letter in the bracket（30％） 1. Degradation can be illustrated by the following example[ ] A. lewd → ignorant B. silly → foolish C. last → pleasure D. knave → boy 2. Homophones are often employed to create puns for desired effects of: [ ] A. humour B. sarcasm C. ridicule D. all the above 3. The four major modes of semantic change are _____. [ ] A. extension, narrowing, elevation and degradation B. extension, generalization, elevation and degradation C. extension, narrowing, specialization and degradation D. extension, elevation, amelioration and degradation 4. The use of one name for that of another associated with it is rhetorically called _____. [ ] A. synecdoche B. metonymy C. substitution D. metaphor 5. Idioms adjectival in nature function as _____. [ ] A. adjectives B. attributes C. modifiers D. words 6. Grammatical context refers to _____ in which a word is used. [ ] A. vocabulary B. grammar C. semantic pattern D. syntactic structure 7. In the idiom 'in good feather', we change 'good' into 'high, full' without changing meaning. This change of constituent is known as _____ . [ ] A. addition B. replacement C. position-shifting D. variation 8. The word "laconic" is _____. [ ] A. onomatopoeically motivated B. morphologically motivated C. semantically motivated D. etymologically motivated 9. CCELD is distinctive for its _____. [ ] A. clear grammar codes B. language notes

《现代英语词汇学概论》

张韵斐著《现代英语词汇学概论》——解析 第一部分Chapter Ⅰ 英语词汇的概论(A general survey of English vocabulary) Bloomfield 1933 中对词的定义是，每个单词都是最小的自由词。然而这个定义不够全面，存在着缺陷。首先，不是所有的单词都可以独立出现，如the ，a ，my 这些单词单独出现则没有具体意义。另外，Bloomfield的定义侧重在于语法（syntax）却没有涉及到词的意义。随着词汇学的发展跟完善。人们给词下了较为完整的定义。“词，今指语言组织中的基础单位，能独立运用，具有声音、意义和语法功能。”（《辞海》1984（上）375页，上海辞书出版社） 一种语言中所有的单词汇集起来便构成了该语言的词库。纵观英语的发展历史，我们可以知道，大多数的英语词汇都是外来词，它从拉丁语，法语和希腊语等语言中汲取词汇，不断的扩充自己，为己所用。特别是第二次世界大战之后，英语词汇得到了空前的发展。现代英语词汇快速发展的原因主要有四方面。一是科学技术的快速发展，二是社会经济的全球化，三是英语国家的政治和文化变化，最后是其他文化和语言对英语的强烈影响。 英语词汇是由各种不同类型的单词组成，而这些单词有着不同的分类标准。根据词的起源可以分为本族语和外来语；根据使用水平可以分为普通词汇，文学词汇。口头词汇，俚语以及科学术语。基础语库的基本特征是具有民族特征，稳定性，构词的能力和搭配能力。 第二部分Chapter Ⅱ到Chapter Ⅳ 英语词汇的形态结构和词的构词(Morphological structure of English words and word-formation ) (一) 词素（Morphemes） 单词是有词素（morphemes）构成的。词素即英语语言中有意义的最小单位，同时具有声音和意义。单词可以有一个或一个以上的词素组成。如：nation 是一个词素，national有nation+al 两个词素。词素跟音素（phoneme）不同，词素必须同时具备声音和意义两方面，而音素只需要发出声音即可。如k 和u 只是音素，因为它们没有什么具体含义。而a 和i 分别存在于单词tame 和time 中是音素，但当a是定冠词和i表示第一人称时它们则是词素。词素并不等同于音节（syllable ），因为音节并没有什么具体含义。如单词dis·a·gree·a·ble有五个音节却只有三个语素（dis + agree + able ）。词素有不同的形式，同一语素的不同形式即语素变体。 词素可以分为自由词素（free morphemes）和黏着词素（bound morphemes）。自由词素可以单独成为单词，而黏着词素则必须要依附于其他的词素，如-ly , -ness。 词素又可以分为词根和词缀。词根是单词中表示含义的成分，可以是自由或者黏着词素。词缀只能是黏着词素，它又可以分为屈折词缀（inflectional affixes）和派生词缀（derivational affixes ）。屈折词缀跟语法有关，派生词缀又可以分为前缀跟后缀，这都是构成新单词的重要元素。从词素的层面来说，词可以分类为简单词，复杂词以及合成词。词素在词的构成中取到非常重要的作用，因为构词的二大过程----合成和附加都涉及到了词素，前者是词素的联合，后者是黏着词素附加到自由词素上。 (二) 词的构成（word-formation） 1/5页 有很多种途径可以构成词汇，大的方面主要有合成法（compounding），派生法(derivation)和转换法(conversion)三种，小的方面主要有八个过程，分别是首字母法(acronym)，混合法(blending)，截短法(clipping)，专有名词(word from proper names)，逆构法(back-formation)，复制法(reduplication)，新古典法(neo-classical famation)以及混杂法(miscellaneous)。

(完整版)英语词汇学英语词汇学习题3及答案

试题三 第一部分选择题 I. Each of the statements below is followed by four alternative answers. Choose the one that would best complete the statement and put the letter in the bracket.(30%) 1.According to the degree of similarity, homonyms can be classified into ( ) A. perfect homonyms B. homonyms C. homophones D. all the above 2.Transfer as a mode of semantic change can be illustrated by the example ( ) A. ad for “advertisement” B. dish for “food" C. fond for “affectionate” D. an editorial for “an editorial article" 3.It is a general belief that the meaning does not exist in the word itself, but it rather spreads over ( ) A. the reader’s interpretation B. the neighbouring words C. the writer's intention D. the etymology of the word 4.Which of the following is a prefix of time and order? A. extra- B. pro- C. re- D. semi- 5.Which of the following dictionaries is not a specialized dictionary? A. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology B. Chamber's Encyclopedic English Dictionary C. Longmont Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs D. Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms 6.Which of the following statements is Not true? A. Reference is the relationship between language and the world. B. The relationship between a word and its referent is arbitrary. C. Concept is universal to all men alike. D. Sense denotes the relationships outside the language. 7.The words which occur before or after a word and may affect its meaning form ( ) A. physical context B. grammatical context C. lexical context D. linguistic context 8."Smith is an architect. He designed World Trade Center. "The clue provided in the context is ( ) A. definition B. explanation C. example D. hyponym 9.The term "vocabulary" is used in different ways because of all the following reasons EXCEPT that ( ) A. it can refer to the common core of a language B. it can refer to the total number of the words in a language C. it can represent all the words used in a certain historical period D. it can stand for words in given dialect or field 10.The idiom "a dark horse" is a ( ) A. simile B. metaphor

张韵斐著《现代英语词汇学概论》一书的读后感

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