《英语词汇学》完整版.doc

Lectures on English Lexicology Main Sections for the Lectures: Chapter 1: Basic Concepts of Words and Vocabulary What Is a Word? A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function. 1.2 Sound and Meaning A word is a symbol that stands for something else in the world. This symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary, and there is no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thing or an idea and the actual thing and idea itself. The relationship between sound and meaning is conventional because people of the same speech community have agreed to refer to a certain thing with a cluster of sounds. In different languages the same concept can be represented by different sounds. 1.3 Sound and Form It is generally agreed that the written form of a natural language is the written record of the oral form. The English alphabet was adopted from the Romans. In spite of the differences, at least eighty percent of the English words fit consistent spelling patterns. 1.4 Vocabulary All the words in a language make up its vocabulary. The general estimate of the present-day English vocabulary is over one million words. 1.5 Classification of Words 1.5.1 Basic Word Stock and Non-basic Vocabulary Basic words have the following characteristics: All national character: they denote the most common things and phenomena of the world around us, which are indispensable to all the people who speak the language. Stability: as these words denote the commonest things necessary to life, they are likely to remain unchanged. Productivity: as they are mostly root words or monosyllabic words, they can each be used alone, and at the same time can form new words with other roots and affixes Polysemy: words of this kind often possess more than one meaning because most of them have undergone semantic changes in the course of use and become polysemous. Collocability: most of these words enter quite a number of set expressions, idiomatic usa