词汇学复习重点(1)

3 Word-formation:

Addition of prefix or suffix to a given word;

Provide full forms and Chinese equivalent for some acronyms and initialism: BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation

VIP: a very important person

NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization

OPEC: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

UNESCO: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization SALT: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks

TEFL: teaching English as a foreign language

SHAPE: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe

GMT: Greenwich Mean Time

POW: Prisoner of War

ASEAN: Association of South-east Asia Nations

EEC: European Economic Community

EPA: Environmental Protection Agency

CIA: the Central Intelligence Agency of the US

IOC: International Olympic Committee

UN: the United Nations

6 Term definition:

Aliens: referring to words borrowed from a foreign language without any change of the foreign sound and spelling, which are easily recognizable as foreign in origin. E.g. French borrowing: resume.

Denizens: referring to foreign words which have been conformed to native English in accent, spelling and even in adoption of an English affix. E.g. French borrowing: uncertain, faultless.

Radiation: is a semantic process leading to polysemy in which the primary or central meaning stands at the center while secondary meanings radiate from it in every direction like ray. E.g. “power”has the meaning (1)ability to do or act (2)energy (3)influential person, body, or thing…(4)government…

Concatenation: is a semantic process leading to polysemy in which the meaning of the word moves gradually away from its first sense by successive shifts, like the links of a chain, until there is no connection between the sense that is finally developed and the primary meaning. E.g. “board” originally means a piece of timber, but after shifts it has a meaning of ”company”, which has no connection with “a piece of timber”.

Homonymy: In English, many pairs or groups of words, though different in meaning, are pronounced alike (homophone), or spelled alike (homograph), or both (perfect homonyms).

Morpheme: the smallest meaningful linguistics unit of language, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. E.g. nation

Allomorph: any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. E.g. –ion/-tion/-sion/-ation are the variant forms of the same suffix.

Derivation(or affixation): is generally defined as a word –formation process by which new words are created by adding a prefix, or suffix, or both, to the base. E.g. unexpected

Composition (compounding): is a word-formation consisting of joining two or more bases to form a new unit. E.g. flashlight, sunrise

Blend: is a process of word-formation in which a new word is formed by combining the meanings and sounds of two words, one of which is not in its full form or both of which are not in their full forms. E.g. brunch, newscast.

Root: that part of a word structure which is left when all the affixes have been removed. A root is the basic unchangeable part of a word, and it conveys the main lexical meaning of a word. E.g. in the word undesirable, the root is desire.

Stem: it is the part of the word-form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. E.g. in the word undesirable, the stem is undesirable; in the word desired, the stem is desire.

Hybrid: referring to words formed from elements of two or more different language. Complementaries: a type of binary semantic opposition. “The assertion of one of the items implies the denial of the other”. The complementary pair is actually an either/or contrast. E.g. alive-dead, single-married

Conversives: a type of binary opposition. “There is an interdependence of meaning, such that one member of the pair presupposes the other member”. E.g. lend-borrow, husband-wife

Restriction(narrowing of meaning): it means a word of wide meaning acquires a narrower sense, in which it is applicable only to some of the objects it had previously denoted, or a word of wide usage is restricted in its application and comes to be used in a specialized sense. E.g. stink-stench

Elevation: the opposite of degeneration, it is a process in which a word meaning takes a turn for the better in the course of the time, and has either risen from a “snarl” word to a “purr” word, or from a slang word to a common term. E.g. pioneer Semantic field: it took the view that the vocabulary of a language is not simply a listing of independent items, but is organized into areas of fields, within which words interrelate and define each other in various ways. And the members within the field are joined together by some common semantic component. And the members are not synonymous. E.g. the concept of color

Snarl words: some words (like scholar, masterpiece and generous)are used not as a mere statement of fact, but to express the speaker’s approval of the person or thing he is talking about. They are purr words.

Purr words:words like gang, niggardly, and to boast show disapproval or contempt on the part of the speaker. They are snarl words.