英语词汇学词义的变化.doc

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:
① 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.
② 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.
③ 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.
⑴ 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)
⑵ 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.
⑶ 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 is adapted or converted to a new word class without the addition of an affix. Hence the name zero-derivation. Words produced by conversion are primarily nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
Conversion to nouns (deverbal, de-adjectival, miscellaneous conversion ) Conversion to verbs (denominal, de-adjectival, miscellaneous conversion ) conversion to adjectives (voiceless to voiced consonant, initial to end stress) the other six means of word-formation includes:
Blending, Clipping, Acronymy, Back-formation, Sound reduplication, Communization of proper names.
Because the words limit, the six word-formation methods is not detailed introduced here. If you are interested in them, please refer to the lexicology.
Annotation: 《英语词汇学教程》 张伟友 著，《词汇学学习指南》
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