词汇学论文赏析

词汇学论文赏析

Introduction

The expansion of vocabulary in modern English depends chiefly on

word

formation. There is a variety of means being at work now. The most

productive are

affixation, compounding and conversion. Talking about word formation

patterns

means dealing with rules. But not all words which are produced by

applying the rule

are acceptable. The acceptability is gained only when the word have

gained an

institutional currency in the language. Therefore rules only provide a

constant set of

models from which new word are created from day to day. Rules

themselves are not

fixed but undergo changes to a certain extent. For instance, affixes and

compounding

processes may become productive at one time or lose their productivity. By

word

formation processes, we concentrate on productive or on productive rules.

While applying the rules, we should keep in mind that there are always

exceptions. In my

opinion, the most important principle for all these rules of word formation

is

economy.

Chapter 1 the function of English word formation

1.1 Word formation is an effective way to enlarge our English vocabulary.

Nowadays, more and more people have taken notice of learning English.

The number of the people who begin to learn English has increased at a

high speed. How

can we improve our English effectively is undoubtedly the focus of

ourattention.

Generally speaking, vocabulary and grammatical rules are keys to

learning English

2

well. Among the two aspects, vocabulary apparently plays a more

important role.

V

ocabulary is the foundation of language. If a language learner doesn

‟t have enough vocabulary to express his or her opinions and understand

other people, even if his or her grammatical rules and pronunciations are excellent, but he can

not

communicate with others well, he shouldn

‟t be a good language learner.

Under the influence of traditional teaching mode, teachers often

emphasis more on

grammatical rules and pronunciations than vocabulary. As a result, students

spend a

lot of time on remembering new words, but the results are not so efficient.

However if

we have a knowledge of English word formation, the results will be not

that bad.

Word formation is really an effective way to enlarge our English vocabulary.

1.2 Word formation can help us have a better comprehension of an article.

When we are reading a new article, we often encounter with some new

words that

we have never seen before. In this case, most of us will leave out the new

word and go

on with the following sections. However, this is not a good habit. If we

want to

improve our English, we have to take every new word seriously either look them up in

the dictionary or search for the internet. But don

‟t you think that these methods are

inefficient? If we know something about English word formation, maybe

the article

would not be so difficult for us to understand. In this way, we can guess the

meaning

of the new word according to what we have learned about English word

formation. It

has been proved that our guess is correct in most cases. So we say word

formation can

help us have a better comprehension of a new article.

1.3 Many new words can be derived based on the rules of word formation

Recent years, the use of computers as a medium of communication has

given birth

to a new language phenomenon-cyber language. A large amount of cyber

language

has sprung up. Not all the new vocabulary can be recognized by human

society. Some

new words only emerged in a very short time and then disappeared,

however, there are still a lot of words are shared by many people. Finally, these words are

recognized

by the whole human society. Some are even added to the reversed dictionary.

Can we

say that these words are unreasonable and irrational?

The answer is absolutely

Most of the new words that have been recognized are derived based on

certain

rules of word formation. For example, the sentence

“3QUis widely used in the

chatting room on the internet by foreigners. This is also known as one

important

characteristics of English word-productivity. So it is necessary for us to

learn English

word formation.

Chapter 2 Affixation

Affixation is generally defined as the formation of words by adding

word-forming

or derivational affixes to bases. This process is also known as derivation,

by which new words derived from old or base forms. The words that are