Definition of Word：A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.
Grammatical Meaning & Lexical Meaning：Grammatical meaning indicates grammatical concept or relationships such as part of speech of words, singular and plural meaning of nouns, tense meaning of verbs and their inflectional paradigm.
Lexical meaning is the meaning of an isolated word in a dictionary. This component of meaning is identical in all the forms of the word.
What’s the relationship？between meaning and concept?
They are closely connected but not identical.
They are both related directly to referents and are notions of the words but belong to different categories.
Concept, which is beyond language, is the result of human cognition, reflecting the objective world in the human mind. Concept is universal to all men alike regardless of culture, race, language and so on.
What is a morpheme？：It is the minimal meaningful unit of language. Or it is the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words.
The definition of morphs：The phonetic or orthographic strings or segments which realize morphemes are termed ‘morphs’.
What is an allomorph? ：An allomorph is one of the variants of the same morpheme.
Free vs. bound morphemes
Morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are free. Free morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences.
Free morphemes are all roots /free roots, which are capable of being used as words or as word-building elements to form new words.
Bound morphemes consist of either roots (bound roots) or affixes.
Content / lexical vs. grammatical morphemes
Free morphemes and bound morphemes are also called “content morphemes” and “grammatical morphemes” respectively, because, as their names suggest, free morphemes often carry the meaning and bound morphemes often show grammatical features.
What are derivational and inflectional morphemes?
1. Derivational morphemes are used to derive new words when they are added to another morpheme. In English derivatives and compounds are all formed by such morphemes.
2. Inflectional morphemes indicate the syntactic relationships between words and function as grammatical markers. Inflectional morphemes are confined to suffixes.
What’s the difference between them？
Inflectional
1. Doesn’t change meaning or part of speech of the stem. (work—works)
2. Indicates syntactic relations between different words in a sentence. ( grammatical meaning)
3. Occurs with all members of some large class of morphemes.
4. Occurs at margins of words. (radio—radios)
Derivational
1. Changes meaning or part of speech of the stem.
2. Indicates semantic relations within the word.
3. Occurs with only some members of a class of morphemes
4. Occurs before any inflectional suffixes added.
Affixes are forms that are attached to words or word elements to modi
fy meaning or function. All affixes are bound morphemes.
Inflectional affixes (or inflectional morphemes) serve to indicate the syntactic relationships between words and function as grammatical markers.
Affixation falls into two categories: prefixation and suffixation and the differences between them are just the differences between prefixes and suffixes.
Why is the classification of suffixes different from the classification of prefixes?
1. Prefixes primarily function as a semantic modification of the base, while suffixes have only a small semantic role and their primary function are to change the grammatical function of the base.
2. Prefixes are classified on a semantic basis and suffixes on a grammatical basis
What is conversion? Why is it called zero-derivation?
Compounding is a process of word formation by which two independent words are put together to make one word.
Blending is a process of word formation by which a word is created by combining parts of other words. Words formed in this way are called blends.
Backformation is a process of word formation by which a word is formed by deleting the supposed affixes.
What is motivation?：It refers to the connection between the linguistic symbol (name) and its meaning (sense).
Primary onomatopoeia means the imitation of sounds by sounds.
Secondary onomatopoeia：It means that certain sounds and sound sequences are associated with certain senses in an expressive relationship.
Metaphor（隐喻）is a figure of speech containing an implied comparison, in which a word or phrase ordinarily and primarily used of one thing is applied to another. It is a simile without “like” or “as”.
Synecdoche (提喻）
Use the part for the whole, or the whole for the part or the material for the thing.
Synecdoche Vs. Metonymy
Both metonymy and synecdoche involve substitution of names, yet they differ in that the former is a case of using the name of one thing for another closely associated with it and the latter is that of substituting part for the whole and vice versa.
Logical motivation（逻辑理据）deals with the problem of defining a concept by means of logic. It means, first, identify the concept of a genus（种概念）, second, to identify the attributes distinguishing one species（属差）from other similar species in the same genus.
What is componential analysis? 成分分析
1. The analysis of word meanings (componential analysis) is often seen as a process of breaking down the sense of a word into its minimal components, which are known as semantic features or sense components.
2. Componential analysis is on the basis of semantic contrast.
3. Conventionally, these minimal components can be symbolized in terms of binarity/binary opposition.
Extension of Meaning：It is also called widening of meaning or generalization. It’s a process by which a word which originally had a specialized meaning has now become generalized.
Elevat
ion of Meaning： Words often rise from a humble beginning to a position of greater importance. This change is called elevation of meaning.
Degradation of meaning：It is a process whereby words of good origin or affective neutrality fall into ill reputation or come to be used in a derogatory sense.
Four Kinds of Degradation of Meaning
1. A word falls into disrepute because of social prejudice
2. A word becomes less respectable because of euphemism
3. Middle terms which are neutral in meaning and take on favorable or unfavorable meaning according to context
4. Sometimes a word shows deterioration in some of its uses, but maintain itself in others.
Transference of Meaning：Some words which were used to designate one thing but later changed to mean something else have experienced the process of semantic transfer, known as transference or transfer of meaning.
Animal metaphors：A great many inanimate objects, including various instruments, machines and parts of machines are called after an animal.
Synaesthetic metaphors：They are metaphors used to refer to direct association between the form and the meaning of language. This type of metaphor is based on the similarity of two things.
Sense & reference
1. Sense and reference are the two terms often encountered in the study of word meaning.
2. Sense------the inherent meaning of the linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and de-contextualized. It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in.
3. Reference-----What a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; It deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements and the non-linguistic world of experience.
Relationship between sense and reference
1. To some extent, we can say every word has a sense. But not every word has a reference
2. linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations. linguistic forms with the same reference might differ in sense.
Hyponymy ( a matter of class membership)
It is the sense relation between two words in which the meaning of one word is included in the meaning of another word.
Synonym
Synonyms are words different in sound and spelling but most nearly alike or exactly the same in meaning.
Synonyms share a likeness in denotation as well as part of speech, for a verb cannot have an adjective as its synonym.
Discrimination of synonyms
Difference in range and intensity of meaning
Difference in stylistic features
Difference in emotive colouring
Difference in application
Antonyms can be defined as words which are opposite in meaning.
Complementaries are forms of antonyms which truly represent oppositeness of meaning.
Some of the Characteristics of Antonyms
Words denoting nature, quality or state of things have in many cases antonyms. This accounts for abundance of antonyms among adjectives. Next come verbs which denote action or activity. Least antonyms ar
e found among nouns which generally denote names of objects, domain, idea, etc.
Homonymy
Homonyms are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.
Syntagmatic relation: a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present.
COHERENCE
Coherence concerns the way in which concepts and relations are mutually accessible and relevant.
Relationship between cohesion and coherence
Cohesion and coherence are related notions, but they are clearly distinct. There are two types of views concerning their relationship.
Context ：constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and hearer
Lexical context: paper
The word “paper” has a number of meanings in the dictionary, but in each of the following context, it conveys only one meaning.
a white paper today’s paper a term paper
It is obvious that the main reason for bringing out this or that meaning of the word “paper” is the specific words which the word “paper” is combined with.