词汇学chapter 6 Polysemey and Homonymy+Chapter 8 Meaning and Context.ppt

Lexical Context Lexical context refers to the lexical items that co-occur with the word in question. The regulations were made to protect children. We made a good breakfast before leaving. My father made 3,000 yuan a month. The train was making 70 miles an hour. We made it to the station in time to catch the bus. It is obvious that the main factor in bringing out this or that individual meaning of the word “make” is the meaning of the lexical items with which the word is combined. Grammatical Context Grammatical context is the syntactic structure, in which a polysemant occurs, determining or influencing the meaning of the polysemant. get+ n. (to receive) get+ adj. (to become) get+n. +adj. (to bring…to a certain condition; cause…to be or become) get+ infinitive (to succeed in doing) get+ gerund (to reach the start of an activity) get+n. +infinitive (to cause …to do) The Role of context 1) Eliminating ambiguity 2) Indicating referents and the range of the meaning of a word 3) Providing clues for inference of word meaning Session 7 Chapter 6 Polysemy and Homonymy Chapter 8 Word Meaning and Context What is sense? The sense of an lexical unit is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other lexical units within the given language. Sense Relations Sense relation is a relation between two or more words that concerns their senses. According to this definition, polysemy and homonymy, strictly speaking, don’t belong to this field. Polysemy Polysemy refers to the phenomenon in which one and the same word has more than one meaning. Two approaches to polysemy: diachronic and synchronic. Diachronic approach: Polysemy is described as the result of the historical development of the semantic features of one and the same word. It is believed that a word, when it was first coined, is always monosemic. This meaning is known as original meaning or primary meaning. With the advance of time and the development