Week-2词汇学.pptVIP

English LexicologyThe History of English and Sources of English Vocabulary Revision: What is a word? How to classify English words? The definition of word a word may be defined as: A fundamental unit of speech and a minimum free form; with a unity of sound and meaning (both lexical and grammatical meaning), capable of performing a given syntactic function. The classification of English words A. By origin: native words and loan words B. By level of usage: common, literary (archaic poetic), colloquial, slang and technical words C. By notion: function words and content words Learn some examples of each category. The History of English and Sources of English Vocabulary In the study of English vocabulary, it is important to know about the history of English. We will look at the major historical events that have shaped the English language. The History of English and Sources of English Vocabulary We pay special attention to the development of the native Germanic vocabulary, and also to the forces that introduced a large number of foreign words, especially from Latin, Greek, and French. This combination makes English vocabulary extremely rich and heterogeneous among the world languages. The World Languages – A typological survey Questions: How many languages do we have all over the world? How can they be classified and how are they distributed? It is estimated that there are about 5000 languages all over the world, which can be grouped into about 300 language families, such as Sino-Tibetan Family, Indo-European Family, Austronesian Family (南岛语系), Altaic Family（阿尔泰语系), and so on. Chinese is a member in the Sino-Tibetan Family, while English is a member in the Indo-European Family. The Sino-Tibetan Family (汉藏语系） The Sino-Tibetan Family includes two branches: The Tibeto-Burman branch （藏缅语族） The Sinitic branch （汉语族） These branches are similar to families: groups of related languages have a common ancestor. We refer to their common ancestor languages by