2010届英语专业毕业论文外文翻译原文格式+范文.docVIP

Main Types of Word Meaning Word meaning is made up of various components which are interrelated and interdependent. These components are commonly described as types of meanings. Two main types of word meaning are grammatical and lexical. A. Grammatical meaning: Grammatical meaning consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm. 1. Word-class: When a dictionary lists the function of a word, the definition does at least two things: it describes the word’s lexical meaning and also gives what is traditionally known as the part of speech of the word, which modern linguists call the word-class; e.g.: modern will be marked as an adjective, modernize an a verb, and modernization as a noun. The word-class is essential, for when we use a word in a sentence, we have to take into consideration two factors: its specific lexical meaning and the position it normally occupies in a sentence, which is determined by the word-class to which the word belongs. As already discussed in the section on “Content words and function words” in Chapter 1, lexical meaning is dominant in content words, whereas grammatical meaning is dominant in function words, but in neither is grammatical meaning absent. The two kinds of meaning can be demonstrated by nonsense verse. Nonsense sentences of verses are not strings of random words put together. The words are combined according to regular rules of syntax with grammatical signals, i.e. function words, except that the content words are arbitrarily invented without lexical meaning and what is left is only grammatical meaning. Lewis Carroll’s “ Jabberwocky”, which appears in his book Through the Looking Glass, 1871, is probably the most famous poem in which most of the content words have no meaning—they do not exist in the vocabulary of the English language. Yet all the sentences “sound” as if they should be English sentences. 2. Inflectional paradigm: When used in actual speech, words appear in different forms; e.g.: cat-cats, mouse-mice; to walk, wal