Lecture 12 cohesion andcoherence 英语词汇学 教学课件.pptVIP

Chapter 12  Cohesion Coherence Revision Causes for Meaning Change in Words Historical Social Psychological linguistic Pencil”, for instance, is from a Latin word meaning “a little tail” or “a fine brush”, like our Chinese “pen”. Later, when it was made of wood and graphite, it was still called a “pencil”. “Engine” originates in Latin word “ingenium, natural ability”. But when stream power was developed in the first quarter of the 19th century, the term “engine” comes to mean “a railroad locomotive”, and in contemporary English it means “any machine that uses energy to develop mechanical power, esp., a machine for starting motion in some other machine” The word “feedback” it original meaning is “the transfer of part of the output of an active circuit or device back to the input”. But now it can mean “response” as in “the company welcomes feedback from customers”. It takes three forms (1).euphemism (2).grandiloquence (3) cynicism One example, we have such euphemistic expression in referring to death as “to pass away” “to be no more” “can’t breathe any more”…and many others.? Change of meaning is frequently brought about two tendencies in a linguistic system, towards ellipsis and towards analogy. Ellipsis often occurs in habitual collocations, such as adjective + noun or attributive noun + noun in which the noun is often deleted and only the first element (the attributive) is left, but retaining the sense of the whole phrase. “uniform” for instance, meaning “a dress which was for uniform use” comes from the omission of the noun in the phrase “uniform dress”. More examples a general---a general officer, gold-gold medal, private-private soldier. The analogical tendency is also constantly at work. New meanings developed in one part of speech are passed on to other parts of speech from same lexical base. For instance, the adjective, “diplomatic” which hah earlier meant only “skillful in managing international relations” had by 1826 developed t