英语词汇漫谈结课大作业

2015-2016学年第二学期英语词汇漫谈

结课大作业

班级能化1401

姓名张旭

学号201408130124

How to Grasp English Words Effectively Nobody could have failed to notice the fact that some students, especially college students always have great difficulty in grasping a number of English words in an effective way, which has already been a heavy work load foe them. Therefore, it is of critical importance for the language learners to master vocabulary, when it comes to learning a foreign language. Having studied English vocabulary course for nearly six weeks, a general frame about lexicon has been made in my mind.

In order to effectively grasp English words, attention must be paid to the following ways.

To begin with, in fact, polysemic word and monosemic word are the quite common phenomenon. For example, john is a bachelor, which may mean john is an unmarried man or john holds a first university degree. Meanwhile, there also are lots of native words and loads words coming from German, Arabic, Chinese etc. which enriches the English vocabulary. However, Words from German do not exert great influence on the English vocabulary, such as nickel, allopathy and teleology.

And then, great importance must be attached to the structure of English words, which assists you to remember English words more easily. Do remember A root is the basic form of a word, which cannot be further analyzed. The root generally carries the main component of meaning in a word and A stem refers to a form to which affixes of any

kind can be added. Based on this, eight word-formation methods are mentioned. They are affixation, conversion, compounding, blending, clipping, acronyms ，back-formation and reduplication. Affixation is generally defined as the formation of words by adding word-forming or derivational affixes to bases. For example, un-, dis-, and ir- are common negative prefix, while-tion, -dom, usually means it is a noun. Secondly, Conversion is a process by which a word belonging to one word class is transferred to another word class without any change in form. An example is that I don't want to be the caged bird. Cage is a noun but used as a verb. Thirdly, compounding is the process of word formation that creates compounds. Greenfly, the honey-mouthed and the paper-backed is the example. Fourthly, an acronym is a word composed of the initial letters of the words of a phrase and is pronounced as a word. As an example, APEC means Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation and CBD mean central business district. Fifthly, clipping is one way in which we shorten a relatively long word and thereby create a new one without changing its meaning. The minibus to bus, the influenza to flu and the

co-operate to co-op is the special instance. Sixthly, Blending refers to the process in which some words are formed by joining part of one word with part of another. For instance, motor and town can be blended as Motown and work and welfare can be blended as workfare. Seventhly,

Back-formation is a process of word-formation by which a word is

created by removing or deleting a supposed affix. It is also called a reverse derivation. For instance, verbs are formed from nouns. The original word is auditor but the news word is audit. Lastly, Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) is repeated exactly or with a slight change. Bow-wow, gee-gee and wish-wash are the case in point.

Last but not least, the final aim of learning English word is knowing their meaning. There are two schools thoughts about meaning. They are Analytical( referential)definitions of meaning Operational (contextual) definitions of meaning. At the same time, the motivation of creating a new word is a very significant factor.

That is all the best way to grasp English words effectively.