第一章词的概述
Exercises answer
Chapter 1
Ⅵ.
All the words belong to the native stock.
Ⅴ
1. from Danish
2. from French
3. from German
4. from Latin
5. from Italian
6. from Spanish
7. from Arabic
8. from Chinese
9. from Russian
10. from Greek
英语参考资料
Chapter 1
A General Survey of a Word
Ⅰ. Definition of a word
Aristotle defined a word as the smallest significant unit of speech - a definition which held sway until recently. Modern methods of analysis have discovered semantic units below the word level. A new term is therefore needed to denote the smallest significant element of speech; in contemporary linguistic theory it is known as a morpheme.
Bloomfield distinguishes between two types of linguistic forms: free forms and bound forms. Free forms can stand by themselves and sometimes act as a complete utterance whereas bound forms cannot. For example, the word nicely contains the free form nice, and the bound form -ly. The former can occur as an independent unit and even as a sentence (What about the other film? - Nice). But the suffix -ly cannot stand by itself, to say nothing of acting as a complete utterance. According to Bloomfield, a word is a minimal free form.
Lexicology deals by definition with words and wordforming morphemes, that is to say, with significant units. It follows that these elements must be investigated in their form and in their meaning.
Therefore, from the lexicological point of view, a word is a combination of form (phonological) and meaning (lexical and grammatical). In addition, a word acts as a structural unit of a sentence.
Ⅱ. Sound and meaning
The Naturalists have argued that the origin of language lies in onomatopoeia, that people began talking by creating iconic signs to imitate the sounds heard around them in nature. They maintain that there is a natural connection between sound and meaning. The Conventionalists, on the other hand, hold that the relations between sound and meaning are conventional and arbitrary. Facts have proved this argument to be valid. Words that convey the same meaning have different phonological forms in different languages - for example, English meat / mi:t /,Chinese ròu. Alternatively, the same phonological forms may convey different meanings - for example, sight, site, cite.
Ⅲ. Meaning and concept
Meaning is closely related to a concept. A concept is the base of the meaning of a word. A word is used to label a concept. It acts as the symbol for that concept. The concept is abstracted from the person, thing, relationship, idea, event, and so on, that we are thinking about. We call this the referent. The word labels the concept, which is abstracted from the referent; the word denotes the referent, but does not label it. This approach to meaning can be diagrammed as follows:
word - concept - referent
The formula shows that the word refers to the referent through a concept.
A concept is an abstraction from things of the same kind.
When someone says "chair" to you, how do you know it is a chair? It is simply because it shows certain characteristics shared by all the objects you call chairs. You have abstracted these characteristics from your experience of chairs, and from what you have learned about chairs. From this it can be deduced that a concept refers to something in general, but not something in particular. A word, however, can refer to both, as is shown in the following two sentences:
...some have begun to realize that the automobile is a mixed blessing.
The automobile was stalled in a snowstorm.
The word "automobile" in the first sentence refers to something in general whereas the word in the second sentence refers to a specific one.
There are two aspects to the meaning of a word: denotation and connotation. The process by which the word refers to the referent is called
