Chapter6word classification

This chapter covers 2 parts, and is planned to becompleted in 3 hours.

Teaching Aims:

1. To help students know the nature of this course.

2. General introduction to English words.

3. To let students know the development of Englishvocabulary.

4. To help students Understand the basic concepts of

words and vocabulary

Teaching Procedures:

Step one: Introduction

Questions and Answers

1. How many languages do we have?3.000

2. In which countries is English used as the native language? second language?

foreign language?

As the native language:England,America,Australia,New Zealand, the Republic ofIreland,Canada;as the second language:India,Pakistan,Singapore,Malaysia;as the foreign language:China,Korean,France.

Introduction of this course

Lexicology is a branch oflinguistics, inquiring the origins and meanings of words. English lexicologystudies the development, formation, structure and forms of words, and usage.English lexicology is a theoretically-oriented course. It is chiefly concernedwith the basic theories of words in general.

Development of English words

We have about 3,000languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families. Englishbelongs to Indo-European language family, Germanic, the same as German, Dutch,whereas Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan family. English has three stages:

Old English(450-1500)

The first inhabitants inEnglandwere Celts, or Britons then it had Roman invasion. After the Romans, theGermanic tribes called Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came in and their language asAnglo-Saxon dominated. Now people generally refer to Anglo-Saxon as OldEnglish. At that time, some Latin words came into English because of the spreadof Christianity. However, users of Old English did not borrow as heavily fromLatin or other languages in this period. Language features: Old English was ahighly inflected language just like modern German. Therefore, nouns, pronouns,adjectives, verbs, and adverbs had complex endings or vowel changes, or both, whichdiffer greatly from the language that we use today. Suffix like –dom, -hood,-ship, -ness, -ful.

Middle

English(1150-1500)

Norman Conquest started acontinual flow of French words into English. Only people in upper class usedit. By the end of the 13thcentury, English gradually came back toschool, the court, and government because of the English translation of Bibleand the writings of Chaucer. Language features: Middle English retained muchfewer inflections. Words of Middle English almost had no inflexion ending.

Modern

English(1500-up to now)

We have early and latemodern English. Renaissance, Latin and Greek came into English. Industrialrevolution, advances in science and technology. Language features: wordsendings were mostly lost with just a few exceptions.

Present-day

English vocabulary(after WWII)

Reasons:①the rapid development of modern science and technology:green revolution, astrobiology, chain

reaction, radioactivity, clean bomb, software, mouse

②socio-economic, political and cultural changes: soy milk, talk show, high-rise, milk shake, house sitter③the influence of other cultures and languages:kungfu, sputnik (f

Three main sources of new words

We can conclude that

modern English vocabulary develops through three channels: creation, semantic

change, borrowing. Example such as: green house, happy girl, milkshake belong

to creation; wife, flour (the finest part) ,now面粉, beauty belong to semantic change;shampoo borrowed from Hindi.

Step two: key points

(1) Definition of words

Two often quoted definitions for words:

A word is a free formwhich does not consist entirely of (two or more) lesser free forms; in brief, aword is a minimum free form (Bloomfield,1933)

A word is defined by theassociation of a given sense with a given group of sounds capable of a givengrammatical use. (French linguist Antoine Meillet)

In brief, a word may bedefined as a fundamental unit of speech and a minimum free form; with a unityof sound and meaning (both lexical and grammatical meaning).

The definition of a word

comprises the following (张维友，P6-7)

A word is a minimal freeform of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.(1) a minimal free form of a language; (2) a sound unity; (3) a unit of meaning;(4) a form that can function alone in a sentence.

(2)Sound and meaning

A word is asymbolthat stands for something elsein the world. Sounds will represent certain persons, things, places,properties, processes, and activities. Thesymbolic

connectionis almost alwaysarbitrary,and there is no logical relationship between the sound which stands for a thingor an idea and the actual thing and idea itself. (Lodwig and Barrett, 1973) Adog is called a dog not because the sound and three letters that make up theword just automatically suggest the animal in question. It is only symbolic.The relationship between them isconventionalbecause people of the same speech community have agreed to refer to the animalwith this cluster of sound.

(3) Sound and form

It is generally acceptedthat the written form of a natural language is the written record of the oralform. Naturally the written form should agree with the oral form. In otherwords, the sound should be similar to the form. This is true of English in itsearliest stage. With the development of the language, more and more differencesoccur between the two. The eternal reason for this is that the English alphabetwas adopted form the Romans, which does not have a separate letter to representeach sound in the language so that some letters must do double duty or togetherin combination. Another reason is that the pronunciation has changed morerapidly than spelling over the years, and in some cases the two have drawn farapart. A third reason is that some of the differences were created y the earlyscribe. Finally comes the borrowing, which is an important channel of enrichingthe English vocabulary.

(4) Vocabulary

All the words in a language make up its vocabulary.The termvocabulary can not only refer to the total number of the words in a language,but it can stand for all the words used in a particular historical period, e.g.Old English vocabulary, and we also use it to refer to all the words of a givendialect, a given book, a given discipline, and the words possessed by an individualperson. The general estimate of the present-day English vocabulary is overone million words.

(5) Classification of words

Words may be classified bytheir origin intonativeandloanwords. By level of usage, wordsmay be classified into common words, literary words, colloquial words, slangwords, and technical words. Words can also be classified into content andfunction words. Content words denote clear notions and thus are known asnotional words, including noun, verb, adjective, adverb; functional words do nothave notions of their own, but have grammatical meanings and functions,including determiner, pronoun, preposition, conjunction.

Step three: exercises/assignments:

(1) What is a word?

(2) What are the main features of words?

(3) What is the relation between sound and meaning?

(4) What’s the relation between sound and form?

(5) Explain the word “vocabulary” in Lexicology.

Summary (made after class): Students are required topreview the unit before the class, so in the class they are very active in discussingthe problems, getting the answers to the questions. But some students can notfinish the exercises by themselves.