词汇学

词汇学复习题2010 秋

1、morpheme – minimal meaningful unit

a) bound morphemes (e.g. ante-, ced, -ent, contra-, dict, -ion, etc. ) vs. free morphemes (e.g. man, earth, wind, car, anger, etc.)

b) bound morphemes include bound roots (e.g. sist, etc.) and affixes (e.g. ex-, pre-,-er, -ist, etc.)

c) monomorphemic words consist of one single free morpheme, e.g. bird, tree,green, sad, want, desire, etc.

d) multi-morphemic words consist of

1) one free morpheme and bound morpheme(s) (e.g. unfair, nonhuman, quickly, beautify,

unhappiness, dissatisfied, etc.)

2) or more than one free morphemes (e.g. classmate, readingroom, cocktail, drugstore, etc.)

mono-morphemic: sky

double-morphemic: chill + y, boy + ish

triple-morphemic: un+dress+ed, care+less+ness

four-morphemic: un+fruit+ful+ness

over-four-morphemic:

un+gentle+man+li+ness

2、classification of words (A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.)

a) content/notional words (denote clear notions) vs.

form/functional words (express the relation between notions, words and sentences)

b) basic word stock vs. non-basic words (terminology; jargon; slang; argot; dialectal words; archaisms; neologisms)

c) native words (Anglo-Saxon words) vs. borrowed/loan words or borrowings (denizens; aliens; translation-loans; semantic loans) the four major foreign contributors from Old English to the early periods of Modern English: French, Latin,Greek and Scandinavian

3、word formation

a) compounding:

i. major compounds: noun, adjective, and verb compounds;

ii. other compounds: prepositions e.g.without, throughout;

conjunctions e.g. moreover, however;

pronouns e.g. oneself, somebody

b) blending e.g. breakfast + lunch = brunch,

automobile + suicide = autocide,

television + broadcast = telecast; sky +laboratory = skylab; medical + care =medicare;

memorandum + conversation =memcon,

psychological + warfare =psywar

c) clipping e.g. omnibus _ bus, phone _telephone,

airplane/aeroplane _ plane;exposition _ expo, examination

_exam; bike _ bicycle, maths _ mathematics; refrigerator _ fridge, flu _ influenza

d) acronyms e.g. TOEFL, NATO, BASIC(beginner‘s all-purpose symbolic instruction code), Radar (radio direction and ranging), N-bomb, V-Day

e) initialisms e.g. ISBN, BYOB, UFO, c/o (care of), ID, TB, HQ (headquarters)

f) derivation/affixation– adding affixes to a root e.g.

i. employ + -ee = employee critic + -ize = criticize

un- + important = unimportant

ii. con- + sist = consist

iii. techn(o)- + -crat = technocrat

g) conversion e.g.

i. core n. _ to core v. coat n. _ to coat v.

ii. dump v. _ a dump n. native adj. _ a native n. unfortunate adj. _ the very unfortunate n.

iii. calm adj. _ to calm v. narrow adj. _ to narrow v.

iv. the how and why, a must, ifs and buts, but me no buts, the pros and the cons

h) back-formation e.g. to swindle _swindler, to burgle _