英语词汇学词义的变化

On Word Formation Preface Learn a language you must learn pronunciation grammar vocabulary Among the three factors vocabulary has a very important role in your language studying A famous scholar Wilkins said without grammar very little can be conveyed without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed He emphasized that in most cases the vocabulary is more important than grammar Another famous lexicologist McCarthy said when a student learn the second language no matter how well the student learns grammar no matter how successfully he masters the seconds of a L2 without words to express a wide range of meanings communication in that language cannot happen in any manful way From these two examples and of course include many other cases that are not mentioned here now we can conclude that if you don t care vocabulary at all it is impossible to learn a language in some way What s more you cannot express your real feeling no matter you are happy sad fortune or you are unlucky because you don t know what words you can say or you can write Today I will tell you what I had learned in this class What I will teach you is word formation why do I choose this topic to talk Because in my opinion if you know the word formation very well you can remember and use the new words easily Absolutely it s very helpful for your language studying Don t you think so Summary English vocabulary has several of Word formation methods But the three greatest word formation powers are affixation compounding and conversion The other six kinds of word formation methods include blending clipping acronymy back formation sound reduplication and communization of proper names Keywords Morphemes classifying word formation Context Before talking about word formation maybe we should know the morphological structure of English words first So what we will discuss next is morphological structure of English words It includes morphemes morphs and allomorphs classifying morphemes identifying morphemes morphemes and word formation morphemes Traditionally words are usually treated as the basic and minimal units of a language to make sentence which are combinations of words according to syntactic rules Structurally however a word is not the smallest unit because many words can be separated into even smaller meaningful units These minimal meaningful units are known as morphemes In view of word formation the morpheme is seen as the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words Syntactically however a morpheme is the minimal form of grammatical analysis Morphemes are abstract units which are realized in speech by discrete units known as morphs They are actual spoken minimal carriers of meaning Morphemes vary in function Accordingly we can classify morphemes into several general categories Free versus Bound Morphemes morphemes which are independent of other morphemes are free These morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences Morphemes which cannot occur as separate words are bound They are so named because they are bound to other morphemes to form words or to perform a particular grammatical function Derivational versus Inflectional Morphemes morphemes which are used to derive new words are known as derivational morphemes because when these morphemes are conjoined new words are derived Content versus Grammatical Morphemes On a semantic and syntactic basis morphemes can fall into content and grammatical morphemes Content morphemes are lexical morphemes which are used as we see above to derive new words so also known as derivational morphemes Morphemes and Word formation We know that words can be analyzed into morphemes which are the minimal meaningful units in the composition of words In word formation formation however morphemes are conventionally labeled root stem base and affix Affixes are forms that are attached to words or elements to modify meaning or function Affixes are bound morphemes because none of them can stand as words in their own right According to the functions of affixes we can divide them into inflectional affixes and derivational affixes Derivational and inflectional affixes are identical with derivational and inflectional morphemes In view of their distribution in the formation of word affixes can fall into prefix and suffix Before we begin our actual discussion of word building processes there are some basic concepts that need clarifying 1 Root a root is the basic form of a word which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity 2 Stem a stem may consist of a single root morpheme or of two root morphemes It can be a root morpheme plus one or more affixational morphemes 3 Base a base is referred to a form to which affixes of any kind can be added It can be a root or a stem Word Formation 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 Affixation Affixation is generally defined as the formation of words by adding word forming or derivational affixes to base This process is also known as derivation by which new words are derived from old or base forms The words created in this way are called derivatives According to the positions affixes occupy in words affixation falls into two subcategories prefixation and suffixation Prefixation includes Negative Prefixes a dis in non un Reversative or Privative Prefixes de dis un Pejorative Prefixes mal mis pseudo Prefixes of Degree or Size arch co extra hyper macro micro mini out over sub super sur ultra under Prefixes of Orientation and Attitude anti contra counter pro Locative Prefixes fore inter intra super tele trans Prefixes of Time and Order ex fore post pre re Number Prefixes bi multi semi tri uni Conversion Prefixes a be en Miscellaneous Prefixes auto neo pan proto vice Suffixation includes Noun suffixes denominal nouns deverbal nouns de adjective nouns non and adjective suffixes Adjective suffixes denominal suffixes deverbal suffixes Adverb suffixes Omit example Verb suffixes Omit example Compounding Compounding is the formation of new words by joining two or more bases Wordsworth formed in this way are called compounds Compounds can be written solid hyphenated and open 1 Characteristics of compounds Compounds have noticeable characteristics which may in most cases differentiate themselves from noun phrases in the following four aspects Phonological features semantic features grammatical orthographical features 2 Formation of compounds Compounding can take place within any of the word class but the productive ones are nouns and adjectives followed by verbs to a much lesser extent Noun compounds adjective compounds verb compounds Conversion Conversion is the formation of new words by converting words of one class to another class Conversion is generally considered to be a derivational process whereby an item