词汇学大院复习资料.docVIP

2012年词汇学 1. Excerpts from the coursebook: Lexicology is the study of the vocabulary or lexicon of a given language. It deals not only with simple words, but also with complex and compound words. Morphology is the study of the forms of words and their components. The major purpose of morphological study is to look at morphemes and their arrangements in word formation. Semantics is the study of meaning. It tries to explain and describe meaning in natural language. Etymology is the study of the whole history of words. Lexicography involves the writing and compilation of dictionaries, especially dealing with the principles that underlie the process of compiling and editing dictionaries. The word is an uninterruptible meaningful unit of linguistic structure consisting of one or more morphemes. The main features of words are: 1) a word is a sound or combination of sounds which we make voluntarily with our vocal equipment; 2) a word is symbolic and used to stand for something else; 3) the word is an uninterruptible unit; 4) a word has to do with its social function; 5) a word may consist of one or more morphemes; 6) words are part of the large communication system we call language; 7) a word occurs typically in the structure of phrases. English words can classified into lexical words and grammatical words. Generally speaking, lexical words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and verbs. Grammatical words are words like pronouns, prepositions, demonstratives（指示词）, determiners（限定词）, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and so on. The semantic field theory takes the view that the vocabulary of a language is not simply a listing of independent items, but is organized into areas or fields, the members of which are joined together by some common semantic component, such as the concept of color or kinship. Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit which may constitute words or parts of words, an arbitrary union of a sound and a meaning and a linguistic unit that cannot be further analyzed. Le