英语词汇学5.ppt

6.2 Main Types of Word Meaning 6.2.1 Grammatical meaning Grammatical meaning consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm (词形变化). 1. Word-class: Word-class is traditionally known as the part of speech of the word. e.g. modern : adj., modernize: v, modernization: n Lexical meaning is dominant in content words, whereas grammatical meaning is dominant in function words, but in neither case is grammatical meaning absent. 2. Inflectional paradigm词形变化 e.g. cat--cats, mouse--mice; great-- greater to walk--walked, to write—writes, wrote, written The set of grammatical forms of a word are called its paradigm. Nouns are declined, verbs are conjugated (动词)变化, and gradable可分级的 adjectives have degrees of comparison. The lexical meaning of a word is the same throughout the paradigm; that is, all the word-forms of one and the same word have the same lexical meaning, yet the grammatical meaning varies from one word-form to another; On the other hand the grammatical meaning is the same in identical set of individual forms of different words, e.g. played, sang, worked, etc. desks, data, boxes, etc. 6.2.2 Lexical meaning A common quoted and accepted way of classifying lexical meanings is the one by G. leech(1974), who recognizes 7 types of meaning in his Semantics: 1. Conceptual meaning Conceptual meaning / denotative meaning. It is the central factor in linguistic communication. One of the functions of words is to designate or describe something, such as an object, a property, a process or a state of affairs. ...conceptual meaning involves the relationship between a linguistic unit (esp. a lexical item) and the non-linguistic entities to which it refers... (Crystal 1980) e.g. chair: a piece of furniture for one person to sit on, having a back and, usually, four legs. The conceptual meaning is the core of the meaning of a word. It is relatively constant and stable, because it is the meaning agreed upon by all the members of t eh s