英语词汇学重点名词解释
Word a word is a minimal free form of a language that has a giving sound and meaning and syntactic function.
Native words are words brought to Britain in the fifth century by the German tribes. They are neutral in style and frequent in use.
Denizens are words borrowed early in the past and now are well assimilated into English language. In other words they have come to comfort to the English way of pronunciation and spelling.
Translation-loans are words and expressions formed from the existing material in the English language but modelled on the patterns taken from another language.
Aliens are borrowed words which have retained their original pronunciation and spelling.
Semantic-loans refers to words whose meanings are borrowed and whose forms are not borrowed.
Creation refers to the formation of new words by using the existing material, namely roots, affixes and other elements.
Semantic change means an old form which takes on a new meaning to meetthe new need.
Mopheme the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words.
Free mophemes are independent of other mophemes and have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammarical units in sentences. They are identical with root words.
Bound mophemes A mopheme that occurs with at least one other mopheme.
Stem is a form to which affixes of any kind can be added.
Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function.
Inflectional affix is an affix that indicates grammatical relationships.
Derivational affix is an affix that forms new words with a stem or a root.
Affixation It is also called derivation, is the formation of new words by adding affix to stems.
Prefixation is the formation of new words by adding prefixes to stems. Prefixes do not generally change the word-class of the stem but only modify its meaning.
Conversion the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class.
Blending the formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word. Clipping to shorten a longer word by cutting a part off the original and using what remains instead. Acronyms are words formed from initial letters but pronounced as a normal word.
Back-formation is the method of creating words by removing the supposed suffixes.
Initialisms are words pronunced letter by letter.
Semantic motivation refers to the mental associations suggested by the conceptual meaning of a word. It explains the connection between the lieral sense and figurative sense of the word..
Morphological motivation accounts for the connection between the meaning of the word and the meaning of each morpheme in the word.
Onomatopoeic motivation indicates the relationship between sound and meaning of a word . Its sound suggests its meaning.
Grammarical meaning refers to that part of the meaning of the word which indicates grammarical concept or relationships.
Conceptual meaning the meaning giveb in the dictionary forms the core of word meaning.
Connotation (Connotative meaning ) refers to the overtones or associations suggested by the conceptual meaning.
Affective meaning indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the person or thing in question.
Collocative meaning the word meaning which is suggested by the words before or after the word in discussion.
Reference is the relationship between language and the world.
Concept Concept, which is beyond language, is the result of human cognition, reflecting the objective world in the human mind.
Radiation a semantic process in which the primary meaning stands at the centre secondary meaning proceed out of it in every direction like rays.
Concatenation a process where each of the later meaning is related only to the preceding one like chains.
Polysemy words that have two or more than two sense.
Homonymy words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or meaning.
Perfect homonyms are words identical both in sound and in spelling, but different in meaning.
Synonym one of two or more words in the English language which have the same or very nearly the same essential meaning.
Antonyms can be defined as words which are opposite in meaning.
Hyponymy deals with the relationship of semantic inclusion. That is, the meaning of a more specific word is included in that of another more general word.
Primary meaning is the only first meaning that a word had when it was created.
Extension (Generalization) A process by which a word which originally had a specialized meaning has now become generalized.
Narrowing (Specialication) It is also called specialication. It is the opposite of widening meaning. It is a process by which a word of wide meaning acquires a narrower or specialized sense.
Degradation is a process whereby words of good origin fall into ill reputation or non-affective words come to be used in derogatory sense..
Amelioration ( Elevation ) is also called elevation, a term referring to the process by which words rise from humble beginning to positions of importance..
Transfer words which were used to designate one thing but later changed to mean something else have experienced the process of semantic transfer.
Linguistic context refers to the words, clauses, sentenses in which a word appears.
Extra-linguistic context is also called non-linguistic context, which includes people, time, place, even the whole cultural background..
Lexical context refers to the word occur together with the word in question.
Grammatical context In some cases, the meaning of a word may be influenced by the structure in which it occurs.
Metonymy the name of one thing is used for that of another associated with it.
Synecdoche is that of substituting part for the whole and vice versa.
Idioms strictly speaking, idioms are expressions that are not readily understandable from their literal meanings of individual elements.
Idioms nominal in nature idioms of this class have a noun as the key word in each and function as a noun in sentences.
Specialized dictionary is a dictionary concentrationg on a particular area of language or knowledge.
Unabridged dictionary As the name indicates, an unabridged dictionary is an unshortened one. Theoretically, it is a complete record of all the words in use ( actually no dictionariy can contain all the words in the language ).
Desk dictionaries are medium-sized ones containing words ranging from 50,000 to 150,000. As they are dictionaries that one finds most used on desks, they are called desk dictionaries.