英语词汇学复习要点

填空、选择、判断等：

Features of word:

1、a minimal free form of language

2、a sound unity

3、a unit of meaning

4、a form that can function alone in a sentence

Classification of English words: native words and borrowed words.

Meaning and concept: meaning is closely to a concept. A concept is the base of the meaning of a word. A word is used to label a concept.

The Indo-European language family:

1、Eastern sets: Balto-slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian

2、Western sets: Celtic, Italic, Hellenic, Germanic, Hittite, Tocharian

Affixes: the affix is a collective term for a type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme. They may be divided into inflectional and derivational types.

Roots: root is a form which is not further analyzable, either in terms of derivational or inflectional morphology.

Stem: is of concern only when dealing with inflectional morphology.

Base: is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added; it may also be defined as a form to which a rule of word-formation is applied.

Backformation: is a process of word-formation by which a word is created by the deletion of a supposed affix. Reduplication: is a minor type of word-formation by which a compound word is created by the repetition of the same element with little or no change. Words make this way are known as reduplication.

Abbreviation(shortening):

Initialisms: are words formed from the initial letters of words and pronounced as letters.

Acronyms: are words formed from the initial letter of words and pronounced as words.

Clipping: is a common way of making a word by shortening or clipping a longer word.

Metaphor: is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison, in which a word or phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another.

Metonymy: is the device in which we name something by one of its attributes.

Synecdoche: synecdoche means using a part for a whole, an individual for a class, a material for a thing or the reverse of any of these.

Analogy: is a process whereby words are created in imitation of other words.

Morphological motivation: compounds and derivatives are multi-morphemic words and the meaning of many of them are the sum total of the morphemes combined. Often when one knows the meaning of the morphemes or bases, one can deduce the meaning of the words.

Semantic features:The linguistic meaning of a word is the set of abstracted characteristic necessary to distinguish the category which the word names from all other categories. These abstracted characteristics are known as semantic features.

Kind of synonyms:

1、complete synonyms: are words which are identical in meaning in all its aspects,

i.e.both in grammatical meaning and lexical meaning.

2、relative synonyms: are words similar or nearly the same in denotation, but embrace

different shade of meaning or different degrees of a given quality.

名词解释：

Synonym: is a term used in semantics to refer to a major type of sense relation between lexical items. Lexical items which have the same meaning but different in morphemic structure phonological form and usage are synonyms, and the relationship between them is one of synonymy.

Antonym: the term "antonymy" is used for " oppositeness of meaning"; words that are in opposition are antonyms.

Homonymy: are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound and spelling.

Conversion: is also called zero derivation, it is a word-formation process by which a word is changed from one part of speech into another without the addition of an affix.

Composition(compounding): is a process of word-formation by which two independent words are put together to make one word. Words formed by compounding are called compounds.

Blending:is a process of word-formation in which a new word is formed by combining the meanings and sounds of two words, one of which is not in its full form or both of which are not in their full forms. Euphemism:in English, there are thing which are considered as taboo and specific unpleasantness which related to such things as accidents, illness, death,excretion and sex. People tend to avoid mention them directly and talk about them in a euphemism way. They try to employ pleasant terms to express the idea. There is a semantic change involved as the expressions used often have little to do with the referents.

V ocabulary: refers to the total number of the words in a language, but it can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period. V ocabulary also refers to all the words of a given dialect, given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person.

简答：

Affixation: Affixation is a kind of derivation. It is the morphological process whereby grammatical or lexical information is added to the base. A word thus made is called a "affixation". English affixed are can be divided into prefix and suffix. Affixed that come before the root are called prefixes, those that come after the root are called suffixes. Most prefixes, when added to words, effect a change in meaning, but without converting one word-class to another. Some prefixes have the effect of converting one word-class to another. Some suffixes, when added to words, can transform one word-class to another; others merely modify without converting. Hyponymy:The relationship of semantic inclusion is called hyponymy, superordinate and hyponym(subordinate). Hyponymy refers to the relationship which obtains between general and specific lexical items.(between the genus and the species). The latter is included in the former. The general lexical item is called the superordinate or the upper term, and the specific item is called the Hyponym or the lower term. For example, the cat is a hyponym of the superordinate animal. The superordinate and the hyponym are relative to each other. For example "animal" is a superordinate of "cat", but it can be a hyponym of "living". Change of meaning: means the alteration of meaning and the generation of new meaning.

1) cause of changing: ①historical reasons②social reasons ③class reasons ④psychological reasons type of semantic change:

1、Generalization: is a term of Latin origin referring to the stretching of meaning.

2、Specialization: is a term of Latin origin referring to shrinking of meaning.

3、Elevation: the meaning narrows toward a more favorable meaning.

4、Degeneration: the meaning of a word narrows toward an unfavorable meaning.

5、The use of the abstract for the concrete or vice verse: is the application of the name of a quality to a person.

6、Common words from proper names: the use of a proper noun to convey a general idea is known as antonomasia.

7、Transference of meaning: the process by which the difference has occurred in the evelopment of a language.

d

Polysemy:a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexical item which has a range of different meanings.

The approaches to polysemy: diachronic and synchronic approach

Diachronically: there are two kinds of meaning

①primary meaning: refers to what a word originally meant

②derivative meaning: refers to the meaning springing from the original meaning.

Synchronically: there are two kinds of meaning

①central meaning: appears at the center in the form of a hub

②secondary meaning: it radiates out from central meaning like the spokes of a wheel.

综述题：

一、American English: American English contains archaic features of the language which have disappeared in English itself.

1)the characteristics of American English:

㈠The conservativeness and creativeness in usage. American English is characterized by creativity or ingenuity, conversion of word-function or part of speech.

㈡The verbosity and brevity of expression.

㈢The heterogeneous nature of the American vocabulary:

①The melting pot

②Slang, jargon and cant

2)Differences between British English and American English:

㈠difference in pronunciation: word stress and sentence stress are weaker in American English than in British English.

㈡difference in spelling:

㈢difference in vocabulary:

二、Association: Word association can be handled in terms of syntagmatic and paradigmatic

Relations between words. There are four paradigmatic rules and two syntagmatic rules to

account for word associations.

㈠Paradigmatic rules

①The minimal-contrast rule: the rule of changing the sign of one feature beginning with

bottommost feature.

②The feature-deletion and feature-addition rules: there are rules either delete features

from, or add features to, the end of the feature list. Deletion of features generally

produces superordinates, like "fruit" from "apple", while addition of features produces

subordinates, like "apple" from "fruit". It should be noted that feature-deletion takes

precedence over feature-addition.

③The marking rule: the marking rule means that there is a great tendency to change a

feature from, rather than, to its marked value in wordassociation data.

④The category-preservation rule:

㈡Syntagmatic rules

①The selectional feature realization rule

②The idiom-completion rule

In summarize, association has always come down to the usage of the language finally, it can penetrate step by step, first from words, and structure association, then carry out the transition to the association center on content. It's the premise to ensure the accuracy of language use that considering the collocation relation between words in process of association.