词汇学 名词解释

1.What is language?

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a specific social action and a carrier of information.

“Language is man’s way of communication with his fellow man and. It is language alone which separate him from the lower animals”

2.What is linguistics?

Generally speaking, linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language. To be more exact, linguistics studies the general principles upon which languages are constructed and operate as systems of human communication.

4.What is lexicology?

Lexicology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the vocabulary of a given language. It deals with words, their origin, development, structure, formation, meaning and usage. In short, it is the study of the signification and application of words.

5.What is the Vocabulary?

Broadly speaking, all the words in a language together constitute what is known as vocabulary. The term vocabulary usually refers to a complete inventory of the words in a language. But it may also refer to the words and phrases used in the variants of a language, such as dialect, register, terminology, etc. There is a total English vocabulary of more than 1 million.

11. What Is a Word?

A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.

词是具有一定的声音、意义和语法功能，能独立运用的最小的语言单位。

A word can be defined the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used independently

14. What is a morpheme(词素)?

The morpheme is the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms.

We can difine morpheme in this way, the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which can not be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.

15. What is a allomorph (形位变体，词[语]素变体）

16. Free morphemes(自由词素）：

Morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free. Free morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences. A free morpheme is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, in the traditional sense.

17. Bound morphemes(粘附词素):

Morphemes that can not occur as separate words. It can not stand by itself as a complete utterance; it must appear with at least one other morpheme, free or bound. Unlike free morphemes, they do not have independent semantic meaning; instead, they have attached meaning or grammatical meaning.

18. Root (or root morphemes) :

the basic unchangeable part of a word, and covers the main lexical meaning of the word. That is to say, it is the part of the word left, whether free or bound, when all the affixes are removed. It carries the main component of meaning in a word. 19. Free root:

In English many roots are free morphemes, such as boy, moon, walk, black ( i.e. they can stand alone as words).

20. Bound roots:

Quite a number of roots derived from foreign sources, esp. from Greek and Latin, belong to the class of bound morphemes.

A bound root is that part of the word that carries the fundamental meaning just like a free root. Unlike a free root, it is a bound form and has to combine with other morphemes to make words.

21. Affixes(词缀):

Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modify meaning or function. According to the functions of affixes, we can put them into two groups: inflectional and derivational affixes.

22. Inflectional affixes (inflectional morphemes)曲折词缀:——不改变词义

Affix attached to the end of words to indicate grammatical relationships are inflectional, thus known as inflectional morphemes. The inflectional affix does not form a new word with a new lexical meaning when it is added to another word. Nor does it change the word-class of the word to which it is affixed. It just adds some grammatical information to the word. 23. Derivational affixes (derivational morphemes):——改变词义