词汇学知识点Chapter 1-3.doc

Chapter 1 Basic concepts of words and vocabulary 1.1 A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function. 1.2 - Vocabulary: refers to all the words in a language, and all the words of a particular historical period, 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 1 million words. 1.3 - 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. 1.4 Sound and Form English? Phonetic language表音文字 - Chinese?Ideographic language 表意文字 The reasons for the inconsistency between sound and form 1) More sounds than form 2) 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.?? 3) A third reason is that some of the differences were created by the early scribes. e.g. women, luve?love 4)Finally comes the borrowing, which is an important channel of enriching the English vocabulary. e.g. cliché, debut 1.5 classifications of words 1.5.1 - The basic word stock 基本词汇is the foundation of the vocabulary accumulated over centuries and forms the common core of the language. Though words of the basic word stock constitute a small percentage of the English vocabulary, yet it is the most important part of it. These words have obvious characteristics. 1.5.1.1 characteristics of basic word stock 1) All national character. 全民性Words of the basic word stock denote the most common things and phenomena of the world around us, which are indispensable to all the people who speak the language. Most important of all features Natural phenomena/Human body and relations/Names of plants and animals/Action, size, domain, state/Numerals, pronoun