1. What is the publicly accepted definition of a word? (1) a minimal free form of a language;(2) a sound unity;(3) a unit of meaning;(4) a form that can function alone in a sentence.Therefore, we can say that …a word is a minimal free form of a langua ge that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function?.
2. What accounts for the differences between sound and form?
four major reasons. The internal reason for this is that there are more phonemes than letters in English. Another reason is that the pronunciation has changed more rapidly than spelling. The third reason is that some of the differences were created by the early scribes. The fourth reason is borrowing.
3. What is the relationship between sound and meaning? Give examples to illustrate it.
The relationship between sound and meaning is almost always arbitrary and conventional, and there is no logical relationship between sound and meaning. The same concept can be represented by different sounds in different languages. For example, …woman? becomes …Frau? in German and …femme? in French. On the other hand, the same sound /mi:t/ is used to mean …meat?, …meet?, and …mete?.
4. How are English words classified?
English words can be classified by different criteria and for different purposes. They may fall into the basic word stock and nonbasic vocabulary by use frequency, into content words and functional words by notion, and into native words and borrowed words by origin.
5. What is the difference between denizens and aliens? Denizens which are words borrowed early in the past are now well assimilated into the English language and have come to conform to the English way of pronunciation and spelling, but aliens are borrowed words which have retained their original pronunciation and spelling and are immediately recognizable as foreign in origin
1. What does the Germanic family consist of?
The Germanic family consists of the four Northern European Languages: Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and Swedish, which are known as Scandinavian languages. Then there is German, Dutch, Flemish and English.
2. What major families can be found in the Indo-European language family?
In the Indo-European language family, we can find eight main groups, which can be grouped into an Eastern set: Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armanian and Albanian; a Western set: Celtic, Italic, Hellenic and Germanic.
3. What are the characteristics of Old English?
Old English was mainly Anglo-Saxon spoken by the Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. It had a vocabulary of about 50,000 to 60,000 words. It was a highly inflected language just like modern German. It was a synthetic language.
4. What are the characteristics of Middle English?
Middle English (1150-1500) borrowed a large number of words mainly from French. It had a much larger vocabulary. It retained much fewer inflections. It was a language of leveled endings.
5. What are the characteristics of Modern English?
Modern English (1500-up to now) has a huge vocabulary of different elements. Word endings were mostly lost with just a few exceptions. English has evolved from a synthetic language to the present analytic language.
1. What are the differences between a bound morpheme and a bound root?
Bound morphemes which cannot occur as separate words include two types: bound root and affix. A bound morpheme may be either a bound root or an affix. Bound roots, only one type of bound morphemes, are included in bound morphemes.
2. What are the differences between a root and a stem? A root and a stem are not the same. A root is the basic form of a word which cannot be further analysed.
A stem may consist of a single root or two roots or a root plus one or more affixes. Therefore a stem can be a root or a form bigger than a root.
V. Analyze and comment on the following.
1. Analyze the morphological structures of the following words.
2. Point out the types of morphemes. prediction, strawberries, encouragement
答:(1) Each of the three words consists of three morphemes: prediction ( pre + dict + ion ), strawberries ( straw + berry + es ), encouragement ( en + courage + ment ).
(2) “Straw”, “berry” and “courage” are all free morphemes as they can stand alone as wo rds.
(3) Of the nine morphemes, all the rest pre-, -dict-, -ion, -es, en- and –ment are bound morphemes as they cannot stand alone as words. Of the six bound morphemes, pre-, -ion, en- and –ment are derivational morphemes and –es is an inflectional morpheme,
while –dict- is a bound root.
2. Analyze the morphological structures of the following words in terms of free morphemes and bound morphemes, then explain the differences between the two kinds of morphemes.
luckily, reminded, teachers
答: (1) Each of the three words consists of three morphemes: luckily ( luck + y + ly), reminded ( re + mind + ed), teachers ( teach + er + s)
(2) “Luck”, “mind” and “teach” are free morphemes; re-, -ed, -y, -ly, -er and –s are bound morphemes. And of the six bound morphemes, -ed and –s are inflectional morphemes and the other four are derivational morphemes.
(3) Free morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can stand alone as words. Bound morphemes cannot occur as separate words. They must be bound to other morphemes to form words. 1. What is the main difference between prefixes and suffixes?
Prefixes do not generally change the word classes of stems. In other words, most of the prefixes are characterized by their non-class-change nature. Their chief function is to change the meanings of stems. Unlike prefixes, suffixes have only a small semantic role, their primary function being to change the grammatical function of stems.
2. What are the three main features of compounds?
Compounds have the following three main features: phonetic features, semantic features and grammatical features. The word stress of a compound usually occurs on the first element if there is only one stress. In cases of two stresses, the compound has the primary stress on the first element and the secondary stress, if any, on the second. Semantically, every
compound should express a single idea just as one word. Grammatically, a compound tends to play a single grammatical role in a sentence.
3. What is conversion? What are its characteristics?
A. Conversion is the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class.
B.These words are new only in a grammatical sense. Since the words do not change in morphological structure but in function, this process is also known as functional shift. Words produced by conversion are primarily nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
4. What is blending? What are the four major groups of blends?
Blending is the formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word.
As far as the structure is concerned, blends fall into four major groups: head + tail, head + head, head + word and word + tail.
5. What is back-formation? What are the characteristics of back-formation?
Back-formation, the opposite process of suffixation, is the method of creating words by removing the supposed suffixes.
Words created through back-formation are mostly verbs. There are only a few that can be used as nouns or as both nouns and verbs.
Back-formed words are largely informal in style and some of them have not gained public acceptance.
6. What is the difference between partial conversion and full conversion?
If the nouns converted from adjectives do not possess all the qualities a noun does and they must be used together with
definite articles, the conversion is partial conversion.
If the nouns converted from adjectives have all the characteristics of nouns, the conversion is full conversion.
7. What is acronymy? What is the difference between initialisms and acronyms?
Acronymy is the process of forming new words by joining the initial letters of names of social and political organizations or special noun phrases and technical terms. Words formed in this way are called initialisms or acronyms, depending on the pronunciation of the words.
Initialisms are words pronounced letter by letter, but acronyms formed from initial letters are pronounced as normal words.
8. What is clipping? What are the four common types of clipping?
Clipping is the formation of new words by cutting a part off the original.
There are four common types of clipping: front clipping, back clipping, front and back clipping, and phrase clipping.
V. Analyze and comment on the following Point out the formation of the following words: Sitcom workfare copter dorm VOA TV NA TO G-man
1) Sitcom and workfare are blends. Sitcom is formed by combining the head of situation and that of comedy, and workfare is formed by combining the word “work” and the tail of welfare.
2) Copter and dorm are clipped words. Copter is formed by clipping the front of the word “helicopter”, and dorm is formed by clipping the back of the word “dormitory”.
3) VOA, TV, NA TO and G-man are new wo rds created through acronymy. VOA from “V oice of America” and TV from “television” are initialisms, and NATO from “the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” and G-man from “Government man” are acronyms.
2. She decided to winter in Australia.
In the above sentence, which word is a converted one? Explain the type of conversion and its effect.
1) In the above sentence, “winter” is a converted word. 2) The verb “winter” is converted from a noun. 3) The conversion is economical and vivid.
3. Find the blends in the following sentence and explain which types they belong to.
The lunarnaut stayed in that motel for two days. In the above sentence, lunarnaut and motel are blends. The word “lunarnaut” from (lunar + astronaut) is a word + tail blend, and the word “motel” from (motor + hotel) is a head + tail blend.
4. Explain the types of the following two converted nouns. If you find anything wrong, please explain the reasons and correct the mistake.
the necessary a wounded
1) There are two kinds of conversion from adjectives to nouns: full conversion and partial conversion.
2) The word “necessary”, when converted from an adjective to a noun, has all the characteristics of noun, so the conversion is full. Its plural form is necessaries.
3) The word “wounded”, when converted from an adjective to a noun, does not possess all the qualities
a noun does and it must be used together with a definite
article, so the conversion is partial. The expression “a wounded” should be corrected as “the wounded”.
1. What is reference? What are the characteristics of reference?
Reference refers to the relationship between language and the world. By means of reference, a speaker indicates which things in the world (including persons) are being talked about. The reference of a word to a thing outside the language is arbitrary and conventional. Reference is a kind of abstraction, but with the help of context, it can refer to something specific.
2. What is motivation? How is it classified?
1) Motivation accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning.
2) Motivation is classified into onomatopoeic motivation, morphological
motivation,
semantic
motivation
and
etymological motivation.
3. What is grammatical meaning?
Grammatical meaning refers to that part of the meaning of the word which indicates grammatical concept or relationships such as part of speech of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), singular and plural meaning of nouns, tense meaning of verbs and their reflectional forms. Grammatical meaning of a word becomes important only when it is used in actual context. Different lexical items may have the same grammatical meaning. On the other hand, the same word may have different grammatical meanings.
4. What is the difference between conceptual meaning and associative meaning?
Conceptual meaning is the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word-meaning. Being constant and
relatively stable, conceptual meaning forms the basis for communication as the same word has the same conceptual meaning to all the speakers of the same language. Associative meaning is the secondary meaning supplemented to the conceptual meaning. It differs from the conceptual meaning in that it is open-ended and indeterminate.
5. What is collocative meaning?
Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires in its collocation. In other words, it is that part of the word-meaning suggested by the words before or after the word in discussion. Collocative meaning overlaps with stylistic and affective meanings because in a sense both stylistic and affective meanings are revealed by means of collocation.
V. Analyze and comment on the following. 1. The pen is mightier than the sword.
What kind of motivation is used in the above sentence? What is the definition of that motivation? What do “pen” and “sword” mean?
1) Semantic motivation is used in the sentence.
2) Semantic motivation refers to the mental associations suggested by the conceptual meaning of a word. It explains the connection between the literal sense and figurative sense of the word.
3) “Pen” and “sword” are two semantically motivated words. Their literal meanings are “a tool for writing or drawing with ink” and “a weapon with a handle and a long metal blade” respectively, but their figurative meanings are “writing” and “war” respectively.
2. After casting a stone at the cops, they absconded with the loot.
Are all the words used in the above sentence appropriate? If not, explain the reasons and improve the sentence.
1) Structurally, the sentenc e with a gerund structure is very formal, but the words “cops” and “loot” used in the sentence are all slang/slangy words, and they are not consistent with the gerund structure. 2) The slang/slangy words “cops” and “loot” should be replaced by “police” and“money” respectively. The revised sentence “After casing a stone at the police, they absconded with the money” is appropriate in style.
3. Women are flowers; women are tigers.
Explain the grammatical, conceptual and connotative meaning of the word “women”which appears twice in the above sentence.
1) The word “women” in the first part of the sentence and the one in the second have the same grammatical and conceptual meanings. Their grammatical meanings are: plural nouns and subjects; their conceptual meaning is: female adult.
2) The connotative meaning of the word “women” in the first part is “beautiful”, or “lovely”, and that of the word “women” in the second part is “fierce” or “malicious”.
1. What is the difference between radiation and concatenation?
Unlike radiation where each of the derived meanings is directly connected to the primary meaning, concatenation describes a process where each of the later meanings is related only to the preceding one like chains.
2. What is the main difference between homonyms and polysemants?
The fundamental difference between homonyms and polysemants lies in the fact that the former refers to different
words which happen to share the same form and the latter is the one and same word which has several distinguishable meanings.
V. Analyze and comment on the following.
1. Comment on the following two sentences in terms of superordinates and subordinates.
a. The man said he would come to our school next week. b. The visiting scholar said he would come to our university next Monday.
In the first sentence, “man”, “school”, and “week” are all superordinates while “visiting scholar”, “university”, and “Monday” in the second sentence are all subordinates compared with the corresponding expressions in the previous sentence.
The second sentence is clearer because subordinates are vivid, precise and concrete.
The relationship between some words used in the above two sentences is hyponymy.
2. Male/female
Explain what kind of antonymy they belong to and the characteristics of this kind of antonymy.
They are contradictory antonyms.
Contradictory antonyms truly represent oppositeness of meaning. They are so opposed to each other that they are mutually exclusive and admit no possibility between them. The assertion of one is the denial of the other. In other words, if one of the pair is true, then the other cannot be.
1. What is transfer? What are the main types of transfer? Transfer or semantic transfer refers to a process of the change of word-meaning whereby a word used to designate one thing has been changed to mean something else. The four main
types of semantic transfer are: associated transfer, transfer between abstract and concrete meanings, transfer between subjective and objective meanings, and transfer of sensations.
2. What are the two major factors that cause changes in meaning? How are they classified?
The two major factors that cause changes in meaning are: linguistic factors and extra-linguistic factors. Linguistic factors include shortening, the influx of borrowings and analogy. Extra-linguistic factors include the historical reason, the class reason and the psychological reason.
3. What is the difference between elevation and degradation? Elevation refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance, but degradation of meaning is the opposite of semantic elevation. Degradation is a process whereby words of good origin fall into ill reputation or non-affective words come to be used in derogatory sense.
V. Analyze and comment on the following.
1. The word “deer” originally meant “animal”, but now it refers to a specific animal. What kind of word-meaning change has the word experienced? What accounts for the change of word-meaning?
The word “deer” has experie nced narrowing or specialization of meaning.
The narrowing of word-meaning is caused by the influx of borrowings, one of the major linguistic factors leading to the change of word-meaning. The word “deer” originally meant “animal”, and later the word “animal” from Latin and the word “beast” from French found their way into English. As the three terms were synonymous, “animal” retained the original meaning, the meaning of “deer” was narrowed and “beast”
changed in colour.
2. The word “nice” formerly meant “ignorant” and “foolish”, but its modern meanings are “delightful” or “pleasant”. What kind of change in meaning has the word undergone? Explain the reasons and then list all the types of word-meaning changes.
1) The word “nice” has undergone elevation or a melioration.
2) The meaning of the word “nice” has been elevated because the word has risen from a humble beginning to the present position of importance.
3) The main types of word-meaning changes are: extension, narrowing, degradation, elevation, and transfer.
1. How is context classified?
Context is used in different senses. In a narrow sense, it refers to the words, clauses, sentences in which a word appears. This is known as linguistic context which may cover a paragraph, a whole chapter and even the whole book. In a broad sense, it includes the physical situation as well. This is called extra-linguistic context, which embraces the people, time, place, and even the whole cultural background.
2. What are the main types of linguistic context?
Linguistic context can be subdivided into lexical context and grammatical context. Lexical context refers to the words that occur together with the word in question. This meaning of the word is often affected and defined by the neighbouring words. Grammatical context refers to the structure in which a word occurs. The meanings of a word may be influenced by the structure. Though less common, it is by no means rare
3. What are the causes of ambiguity?
Ambiguity often arises due to the following three main causes: polysemy, homonymy and grammatical structure. When a word with multiple meanings is used in inadequate context, it creates ambiguity. Homonymy is another cause of ambiguity as two separate words share the same form. Grammatical structure can also lead to ambiguity.
V. Analize and comment on the following. 1. Peter and Betty are married.
Study the above sentence. If you find anything inappropriate, explain the reasons and then improve
the sentence.
1) The sentence is ambiguous, which is caused by grammatical structure.
2) The sentence can be understood as “Both Peter and Betty are married,” or “Betty is married to Peter.”
3) The sentence can be improved as: “Both Peter and Betty are married,” or “Betty is married to Peter.”
2. She is a hard student.
Study the above sentence. If you find anything inadequate, explain the reasons and then improve the sentence.
1) The sentence is ambiguous, which is caused by polysemy. 2) The word “hard” in this sentence can be understood as “hardworking” or “difficult”. The context fails to narrow down the meaning so that it is difficult for the reader to decide what exactly the speaker means. But there would be no misunderstanding if the original sentence is extended as “She is a hard student and she is often praise d by her teachers,” or “She is a hard student to deal with.”
3. The ball was attractive.
Study the above sentence. If you find anything improper,
please explain the reasons and then improve the sentence.
1) The sentence is ambiguous, which is caused by homonymy. 2) The word “ball” in the sentence may mean “a round object to play in a game” or “a dancing party”.
3) The ambiguity can be eliminated by altering the context a little as “The ball was attractive with nice music and a lot of people,” or “The ball was attractive with the bright colours.”
IV. Answer the following questions. 1. What are the characteristics of idioms?
English idioms have two major characteristics: semantic unity and structural stability. Semantically, each idiom is a semantic unity although it consists of more than one word. Though the various words forming the idiom have their respective literal meanings, in the idiom they have lost their individual identity. Quite often an idiom functions as one word. Structurally, each idiom is usually fixed and does not allow changes in most cases.
2. What is the difference between metonymy and synecdoche in English idioms?
Both metonymy and synecdoche involve substitution of names, yet they differ from each other. Metonymy, a kind of figures of speech used in English idioms, is a case of using the name of one thing for that of another closely associated with it, but synecdoche is a case of substituting part for the whole or vice versa
3. What are the rhetorical features of idioms?
The rhetorical features of idioms include phonetic manipulation, lexical manipulation and figures of speech.
Phonetic manipulation includes alliteration and rhyme. Lexical manipulation includes reiteration, repetition and juxtaposition.
Figures of speech include simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, personification and euphemism. V. Analyze and comment on the following.
1. He is as strong as a horse.
Pick out the idiom in the above sentence, and then point out its structure, grammatical function and figure of speech.
1)The idiom is “as strong as a horse”. 2) Its structure is: as + adj. + as + n.
3) Its grammatical function is that it is an idiom adjectival in nature and it functions as the predicative in the sentence.
4) It is a simile.
2. She has been looking for the lost key here and there for two days.
Pick out the idiom in the above sentence, and then point out its structure, grammatical function and rhetorical feature
1) The idiom is “here and there”. 2) Its structure is “adv. + and + adv.”.
3) Its grammatical function is that it is an idiom adverbial in nature and it functions as adverbial.
4) Its rhetorical feature is juxtaposition IV. Answer the following questions.
1. What is a dictionary? What is the relationship between a dictionary and lexicology?
A dictionary is a book which presents in alphabetic order the words of English, with information as to their spelling, pronunciation, meaning, usage, rules of grammar, and in some, their etymology. It is closely related to lexicology, which deals with the same problems: the form, meaning, usage and origins of vocabulary units.
2. What are specialized dictionaries? What are their
characteristics?
Specialized dictionaries concentrate on a particular area of language or knowledge, treating such diverse topics as etymology, synonyms, idioms, pronunciation, usage in language, and computer, engineering, literature and a variety of other subjects.
These dictionaries may not be very large in size, yet each contains much more detailed information on the subject than you can find in a general unabridged one.
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