Chapter 1 Introduction to Words 词的介绍.ppt

Chapter 1 Introduction to Words What is a word? What is a word and how words are defined? First consider the following sentence: 1) There are three tigers in the bushes. In the above sentence, there are seven words, of which, tigers and bushes consist of two free morphemes (自由语素): tiger and bush, that is to say, they can stand independently, and two two bound morphemes（黏着语素): -s and -es, which means they cannot, the other five words are all combined with free morphemes. Meanwhile, the above words all have their own meanings, including lexical meanings and grammatical meanings (for example, -s and -es have plural meanings) which are expressed by means of sound sequences (for example, tigers are expressed by [??????]) The sound and the meaning of a word can not be separated. morpheme The definition of a morpheme is “a minimal unit of meaning and grammatical function”. The police reopened the investigation. For the word ‘reopened’, one minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning ‘again’), and a minimal unit of grammatical function is –ed (indicating past tense). Definition of a Word The American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933) defined a word as a minimum free form. (the above definition excludes morphemes like “un-”, “-less”, “-ness” and also such word as “fireman”, the latter is definitely a word.) Descriptions of Word The above definition of word is scientific, but it is too abstract. A better way to know a word is probably to survey the following descriptions of word. A. A word is a unit of expression which is intuitively recognized by a native speaker, either in written form or spoken form. (but consider a unit like washing machine, is it one word or are they two words? How about washing-machine?) B. A word is unit of meaning or concept. (Such a description is not too helpful in that