《词汇学5-词的意义课件》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《词汇学5-词的意义课件（33页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Word Meaning,Overview,Word Meaning Conventionality people have meaning for them.” -Eric Partridge,To sum up, Most English words are conventional, arbitrary symbols; consequently, there is no intrinsic relation between the sound-symbol and its sense.,Motivation,Motivation refers to the connection bet
2、ween word-symbol and its sense. From the point of view of motivation, the great majority of English words are non-motivated, however, there is a small group of words that can be described as motivated. That is, a direct connection between the symbol and its sense can be observed.,Phonetic motivation
3、,Words motivated phonetically are called echoic words or onomatopoeic words, whose pronunciation suggests the meaning. The sounds of some words suggest their meanings because they are created by imitating the natural sounds, such as the cries of animals: bow-wow , moo , miaow But these echoic words
4、are largely conventional, because different languages may use different forms to indicate these sounds. 汪汪 哞哞 喵喵,Except imitating the cries of animals, many echoic words refer to the noises that resemble those associated with the object or action to be named. 雷声隆隆 rumble, roll 溪水潺潺 babble, purl,Morp
5、hological motivation,Morphological motivation tries to establish the connection of meaning of the word to its form from morphological point of view. We can work out the meaning of a word if we know the meaning of the morphemes that constitute that word. readable, anticancer, kilogram, modernize,Comp
6、ound words may be morphologically motivated. good-looking, headache, daydream Not all compounds are motivated. eggplant, Indian summer, dog days We can not infer the meanings of words like these.,Semantic motivation,Semantic motivation explains the relationships between the literal sense and the fig
7、urative sense through associations. The figurative meaning can be readily understood by those who know the literal meaning. a stony heart, hour hand/minute hand leg of the desk,Etymological motivation,Etymological motivation means that the meanings of words can be explained with reference to etymolo
8、gical information. Very often, the history of the word can explain why a form has acquired a particular meaning. Japan, China, Walkman,Main Types of Word Meaning,Word meaning is made up of various components which are interrelated and interdependent. These components are commonly described as types
9、of meaning. Lexical and grammatical,Grammatical meaning,Grammatical meaning may be defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. Words with the similar lexical meaning can have different grammatical meanings, and words with different lexical
10、meanings can have the same grammatical meaning. Grammatical meaning is in use. It consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm. modern, modernize, modernization cat-cats, mouse-mice; high-higher, good-better; to write, writes, wrote (tense meaning) the case meaning ( boys, girls),Lexical meaning
11、,Lexical meaning is identical in all the forms of the word while the grammatical meaning varies from one word-form to anther. Every word has a different lexical meaning, whereas the grammatical meaning is the same in identical sets of individual forms of different words.,Denotative meaning,The denot
12、ative (extensional) or conceptual meaning of a word is its definition in a dictionary. Denotative (conceptual) meaning is often described as dictionary meaning or literal meaning of a word. It is the core of the meaning of a word. It is relatively constant and stable, because it is the meaning agree
13、d upon by all the members of the same speech community. It is the central factor in linguistic communication. chair: a piece of furniture for one person to sit on, having a back and usually, four legs,Associative Meaning,Associative meaning is that part of meaning which has been supplemented to the
14、conceptual meaning. It is the meaning which arises of the associations a word acquires. It is open-ended, unstable and indeterminate, because it varies with culture, time, place, class, individual experiences, etc. Associative meaning includes connotative, stylistic, affective and collocative meanin
15、gs.,Connotative meaning,Connotative (intentional) meaning refers to the emotional association which a word or a phrase suggests in ones mind. It is the supplementary value which is added to the purely denotative meaning of a word Mother: female parent love, care, and tenderness,Social or stylistic m
16、eaning,Social meaning is that which a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use. “Language is like dress. We vary our dress to suit the occasion.” parent-fatherdad father: stylistically neutral dad: colloquial parent: bookish.,Affective meaning,Affective meaning is concerned with the expression of feelings and attitudes of the speaker or writer. Some words are used to express the speakers approval of the person or thing he is talking about. (sc
