Chapter___A_General_survey_of_English_vocabulary【DOC精选】.doc

Chapter 1 A General survey of English vocabulary 一． Basic concepts of words and vocabulary 1 - The definition of a word comprises 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 and meaning and syntactic function. 2- Sound and Meaning:??symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary and conventional. A dog is called a dog not because the sound and the three letters that make up the word just automatically suggest the animal in question. 3- Old English, the speech of the time was represented very much more faithfully in writing than it is today. The internal reason for this is that the English alphabet was adopted from the Romans, which does not have a separate letter to represent each sound in the language so that some letters must do double duty or work together in combination. Another reason is that the pronunciation has changed more rapidly than spelling over the years, and in some cases the two have drawn far apart.?? A third reason is that some of the differences were created by the early scribes. Finally comes the borrowing, which is an important channel of enriching the English vocabulary. 5 - Vocabulary: All the words in a language make up its vocabulary.??Not only can it refer to the total number of the words in a language, but it can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period. We also use it to refer to all the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person. The general estimate of the present-day English vocabulary is over million words. 6 - Words may fall into the basic word stock and nonbasic vocabulary by use frequency, into content words and functional words by notion, and into native words and borrowed words by origin. 7 - The basic word stock is the foundation of the vocabulary accumulated over