Chapter 1  A General survey of English vocabulary
一． Basic concepts of words and vocabulary
1 - The definition of a word comprises the following points:
(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.
A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound and meaning and syntactic function.
2- Sound and Meaning:  symbolic connection is almost always arbitrary and conventional.
A dog is called a dog not because the sound and the three letters that make up the word just automatically suggest the animal in question.
3- Old English, the speech of the time was represented very much more faithfully in writing than it is today. The internal reason for this is that the English alphabet was adopted from the Romans, which does not have a separate letter to represent each sound in the language so that some letters must do double duty or work together in combination.
Another reason is that the pronunciation has changed more rapidly than spelling over the years, and in some cases the two have drawn far apart. 
A third reason is that some of the differences were created by the early scribes.
Finally comes the borrowing, which is an important channel of enriching the English vocabulary.
5 - Vocabulary: All the words in a language make up its vocabulary.  Not only can it 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. We also use it to refer to all the words of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the words possessed by an individual person. The general estimate of the present-day English vocabulary is over million words.
6 - Words may fall into the basic word stock and nonbasic vocabulary by use frequency, into content words and functional words by notion, and into native words and borrowed words by origin.
7 - The basic word stock is the foundation of the vocabulary accumulated over centuries and forms the common core of the language. Though words of the basic word stock constitute a small percentage of the English vocabulary, yet it is the most important part of it. These words have obvious characteristics.
8 - All national character. Words of the basic word stock denote the most common things and phenomena of the world around us, which are indispensable to all the people who speak the languagearchaic
Natural phenomena/Human body and relations/Names of plants and animals/Action, size, domain, state/Numerals, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions
9 - Stability. Words of the basic word stock have been in use for centuries.
10 - Productivity . Words of the basic word stock are mostly root words or monosyllabic words. They can each be used alone, and at the same time can form new words with other roots and affixes.
11 - Polysemy. Words belonging to the basic word stock often possess more than one meaning because most of them have undertone semantic changes in the course of use and become polysemous.
12 - Collocability . Many words of the basic word stock quite a number of set expressions, idiomatic usages, proverbial sayings and the like.
13 - Terminology consists of technical terms used in particular disciplines and academic areas .
14 - Jargon refers to the specialized vocabularies by which members of particular arts, sciences, trades and professions communicate among themselves such as in business.
15 - Slang belongs to the sub-standard language, a category that seems to stand between
the standard general words including informal ones available to everyone and in-group words like cant, jargon, and argot, all of which are associated with, or most available to, specific groups of the population.
Slang is created by changing or extending the meaning of existing words though some slang words are new coinages altogether. Slang is colourful, blunt, expressive and impressive.
16 - Argot generally refers to the jargon of criminals.
17 - Dialectal words are words used only by speakers of the dialect in question.
18 - Archaisms are words or forms that were once in common use but are now restricted only to specialized or limited use.
19 - Neologisms are newly-created words or expressions, or words that have taken on new meanings.
20 - By notion, words can be grouped into content words and functional words. Content words denote clear notions and thus are known as notional words. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and numerals, which denote objects, phenomena, action, quality, state, degree, quantity.

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