Basic Concepts of Words and Vocabulary
What is lexicology?
☐Lexicology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of the vocabulary of a given language. It deals with words, their origin, development, structure, formation, meaning and usage. In short, it is the study of the signification and application of words.
What Is a Word?
A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.
What is vocabulary?
The total number of the words in a language.
All the words used in a particular historical period.
All the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person.
Vocabulary Size
⏹Speaking vocabulary----active vocabulary
⏹writing vocabulary------active vocabulary
⏹reading vocabulary------passive vocabulary
⏹guess vocabulary--------passive vocabulary
⏹Language can be defined as “an arbitrary vocal system used for human communication”. By system we mean that the elements in a language are arranged according to certain rules, but not at random. Elements at a lower level are combined according to certain rules to form elements at a higher level.
⏹Specially, Language presents itself as a hierarchy in different aspects. As is shown in the following hierarchical rank scale, language rises form morpheme at the bottom up to the sentence at the top in terms of lexicography. (词典编纂)
2.1 Morpheme
⏹1.What is a morpheme(词素)?
The morpheme is the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words, not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms.
⏹What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes:
⏹One morpheme---nation
⏹Two morphemes---nation-al
⏹Three morphemes---nation-al-ize
⏹Four morphemes---de-nation-al-ize（使…非国有化）
⏹More than four morphemes---de-nation-al-iz-ation
⏹So we can define morpheme in this way:
the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which can not be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
■A morpheme is a two-facet language unit in that it possesses both sound and meaning.
A morpheme vs. A word
Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words. They can not be used independently, although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Nor are morphemes divisible into smaller meaningful units. That is why the morpheme may be defined as the minimum meaningful language unit.
⏹Sometimes a morpheme may have two or more different morphological forms or phonetic forms, depending on the context in which it occurs.
⏹For example, the prefix sub can be realized as sub as in subway, sup as in support and suppress, suc as in succeed, and sus as in sustain. That is, when sub occurs before a root beginning with the sound /p/ it is realized as sup and when it is added a root with a beginning sound /k/ and a beginning letter c it is realized as suc.
⏹ These different morphological or phonetic forms of a morpheme are allomorphs of the morpheme.
Allomorphs（词素变体）:
⏹An allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For example
☐ion/-tion/-sion/-ation are the positional variants of the same suffix.
☐Verbs ending with the sound /t/ usually take –ion (as in invent, invention);
☐verds ending with consonants other than /t/ take –tion (as in describe, description);
☐verbs ending in –ify and –ize take –ation (as in justify, justification; modernize, modernization);
☐verbs ending in –d, -de, or –mit, take –sion (as in expansion, decision, omission); there are exceptions: attend, attention; convert, conversion, etc.
Allomorphs also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the first letter of the verb to which they will be added.
e.g.
im- before p,b, or m, imperfect, imbalance, immobile;
ir- before r, irresponsible, irregular;
il- before l, what are words下载illegal, illogical;
in- before all other consonants and vowels, inflexible, inexcusable;
im-,ir-, and il- are thus allomorphs of the morpheme, in-.
2.2 Classification of Morpheme
1.Free morphemes and bound morphemes
Free morphemes(自由词素）： Morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are considered to be free. Free morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences. A free morpheme is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself, in the traditional sense.
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