2012词汇学复习资料The development of the English Vocabulary1.Indo-European Language FamilyThe Indo-European Language Family is considered as one of the most important language families. It includes most languages of Europe, the Near East, and India. Those languages, which are believed to have originated from this language family and developed alone different lines, show various degrees of similarity to one another. They fall into eight principal groups, which can be grouped into an Eastern Set东部诸语族: Balto-Slavic波罗的-斯拉夫语, Indo-Iranian印度伊朗语族, Armenian 亚美尼亚语族and Albanian阿尔巴尼亚语族; a Western Set: 西部诸语族Celtic凯尔特语族, Italic 意大利语族, Hellenic希腊语族, Germanic日尔曼语族. All the languages in both sets shed some influence on English to a greater or lesser extent because each has lent words into the English vocabulary.Prussian普鲁士语Lithuanian立陶宛语Polish波兰语Balto-Slavic波罗的-斯拉夫语Czech捷克斯洛伐克语Bulgarian保加利亚语Slovenian斯洛文尼亚语RussianAlbanian阿尔巴尼亚Persian波斯语Hindi北印度语Indo-Iranian印度伊朗语系Bengali孟加拉语Romany,吉卜赛语Armenian亚美尼亚语PortugueseSpanishItalic意大利语族ItalianRoumanian罗马尼亚语FrenchIndo-EuropeanLanguage FamilyIrishCeltic凯尔特语BretonScottishNorwegian挪威语Icelandic,冰岛语Danish丹麦语Germanic Swedish瑞典语日尔曼语言EnglishDutchFlemishGermanHellenic,古希腊语- GreekChapter 1A General Survey of A WordThe Definition of Word• A word is(1) A minimal free form of a language;(2) a sound unity;(3) a unity of meaning;(4) a form that can function alone in a sentence.A word is a minimal free form that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.A word is a smallest unit of a language.1. The development of English vocabularyThe history of English language can be divided into 3 periods:a/ Old English period (449—1100)The former inhabitants, the Celtic, the Germanic tribes called Angles, Saxons and Jutes Anglo-Saxon as Old English, Old English contains 50-60 thousand words, which consists of the basic word stock.b/ Middle English period (1100-1500)characterized by the strong influence of French following the Norman Conquest in 1066.The French loan words were found in law and governmental administration (judge, justice)c/ Modern English period (1500--)the early stage of this period ( including the years between 1500-1700), the Renaissance brought great changes to the vocabulary. borrowing from Latin, Latin were now mostly connected with science and abstract ideas. Greek borrowings were mostly literary, technical and scientific words2.Classification of English Words According to Different CriteriaA. By Origin: native words and loan (borrowed ) wordsIn English language, most native words in Modern English are monosyllabic. They form the great majority of the basic word stock of English language.The fundamental features of the basic word stock are:1. National character;2. Stability;3. Word-forming ability;4. Ability to form collocationsSince the great majority of the basic word stock are native words, they are naturally the ones used most frequently in everyday speech and writing.B. By level of usage1. Common words ( P11 words connected with ordinary things or activities necessary to everyday life: “The repeated telephone calls only annoyed me but made my sister very angry.”)2. Literary words (P12 words are chiefly used in writing, formal speeches, e.g. Feeling fatigued, Tom retired early.): a. Archaic words; b. Poetical words See P133. Colloquial words: Words used mainly in spoken English, in conversation among friends and colleagues,e.g. “John was fired for petty thieving”4. Slang wordsC. By notion: function words and content ( P 17)function words are short words such as determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliaries, and so on, they serve grammatical meaningContent words have lexical meaning, such as nouns, main verbs, adj and adv.e.g. The passerby was hit by the truck.Chapter 2Word-Structure and Word-Formation(1)1. The definition of morpheme1.1 What is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language?- morphemeWhat are words composed of? - Words are formed by morphemes. A word is the smallest unit that stands alone to communicate meaning.1.2 What are the Chinese equivalents of morpheme? 语素词素-形位2.1 Morphemes may be classified into free and bound.Free morphemes,also called content morphemes, may constitute words by themselves. These morphemes have complete meanings in themselves and can be used as free grammatical units in sentences. So we may say that free morphemes are free roots.Bound morphemes = Bound root + affixes, known as grammatical morphemes, must appear with at least one other morpheme, either free or bound. Bound morphemes are chiefly found in derived words, e.g. recollection, idealistic, ex-prisoner2.2 Morphemes may also be classified into roots (or root morphemes) and affixes (or affixational morphemes).Task:(1) Read the following words and find the root in each word.heart, hearten, dishearten, heartless, hearty, heartiness,sweetheart, heartbroken, kind-hearted, whole-heartedly.(2) What is your definition of root?A root is the part of the word-form which remains when all the affixes have been removed.(3) Is a root necessarily a free morpheme? Why?2.2.1 Two types of roots- Free rootIn English, many roots are free morphemes, such as black in black, blackboard, blacksmith.- Bound rootHowever, there are quite a number of roots which cannot exist on their own and thus belong to the class of bound morphemes. For example, ceive in receive, conceive, perceive, deceive; mit in permit, commit, submit; tain in retain, contain, maintain; cur in recur, occur, incur, etc.these roots cannot be used to form new words.2.2.2 Two types of affixesAffix is a collective term for the type of formative (构词成分) that can be used only when added to another morpheme.- Inflectional affixes (or inflectional morphemes) serve to expressthe following meanings:(1) plurality: e.g. -s in chairs, pens; -es in boxes, tomatoes;en in oxen.(2) the genitive case: e.g. ’s in boy’s, children’s.(3) the verbal endings: for example,a. -(e)s in words like eats, teaches shows the third personsingular present tense.b. -ing in words like eating, teaching shows the presentparticiple or gerund.c. -(e)d in words like worked, saved shows the past tense or pastparticiple.(4) the comparative and superlative degrees:e.g. -er in words like smaller, harder; -est in words like smallest,hardest.- Derivational affixes (or derivational morphemes) can be further divided into prefixes and suffixes.•(1) Prefixes are affixes before the root, e.g: unjust, rewrite.As a rule, most prefixes modify the meaning of roots, but not their parts of speech. task: list some prefixes that can modify the parts of speech.- en-(em-) as in words like embody, enrich- be- as in words like befriend, belittle- a- as in words like asleep, aside•(2) Suffixes are affixes after the root, e.g.: darkness, worker.By the addition of the suffix,the word is usually changed from one part ofspeech into another, e.g. liberation, modernize.2.3 Relationship between the two classifications of morphemesMorphemeIt is the minimal meaningful unit of language. Or it is the smallest functioning unit in the composition of words.a)Bound morphemes are morphemes which alone can be used as words.What is an allomorph?An allomorph is one of the variants of the same morpheme.语素/形位变体是同一个语素的不同形式。