英语词汇学Chapter 01.ppt

Chapter 1 The Basic Concepts of Words and Vocabulary To define some basic concepts concerning words and vocabulary; To explain relationship between words and vocabulary, between sound and meaning, between sound and form; To classify English vocabulary by different criteria 1.1 The Definition of a Word The definition of a word will cover the following points: (1) a minimal free form of a language; (2) a sound unity; (3) a unit of meaning; (4) a form that can function alone in a sentence. ‘A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.’ 1.2 Vocabulary The term ‘vocabulary’ is used in different senses. (1) It can refer to the total number of the words in a language; (2) It can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period, e. g. Old English vocabulary, Middle English vocabulary and Modern English vocabulary; (3) It can also refer to all the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person. English is one of the world’s highly developed languages. Naturally the vocabulary is one of the largest and richest. The general estimate of the vocabulary is over 2,000,000 words. 1.3 Sound and Meaning A word is a symbol that stands for something else in the world. Certain sounds will represent certain persons, things, places, properties, processes and activities external to the language system. This symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary, and there is ‘no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thing or an idea and the actual thing and idea itself’ (Lodwig and Barrett, 1973) 1.4 Sound and Form It is generally agreed that the written form of a natural language is the orthographical record of the oral form. Naturally the written form should agree with the oral form. In other words, the sound should be consistent with the form. This is fairly true of English in its earliest stage, i. e. Old English. With the development of t