大二期末词汇练习.doc

【精品文档】如有侵权，请联系网站删除，仅供学习与交流大二期末词汇练习.精品文档.1. What connotations do you think the word atomic might have for each of the following people? 1) A scientist working in a project to develop industrial use for nuclear power. 2) A Japanese resident of Hiroshima. 3) A student of nuclear physicsConnotation refers to what which a word suggests or implies, traditionally known as connotations (内涵). It is not an essential part of the word-meaning, but associations that might occur in the mind of a particular user of the language. In the three sentences above, different people have different connotations for the word atomic. For a scientist, something atomic is what he studies, he has a very deep understanding about this field and might also have accumulated many valuable experiences in the relevant experiments. For a Japanese in Hiroshima, he might himself have been involved in the nuclear bomb attack made by the US Air Forces, so may have the connotation of terror, pain, blood and death. However, for a student of nuclear physics, he might be fascinated with the mysterious atomic world and is eager to learn the knowledge on atomic physics2. What is polysemy? What is the fundamental difference between the processes of radiation and concatenation? 3. How do you understand the statement that true synonymy is nonexistent? 4. Homonyms seem to be similar to Polysemants, but actually they are different. How can we differentiate homonyms from Polysemants? 5. What is hyponymy? What is the difference between superordinates and subordinates?1. What is polysemy? What is the fundamental difference between the processes of radiation and concatenation? Answer: Polysemy refers to a type of sense relation about words which have more than one meaning. Words of this feature are called polysemants or polysemic words. Basically, the development of word-meaning from monosemy to polysemy follows two courses, traditionally known as radiation and concatenation. They differ from each other in that radiation is a semantic process in which the primary meaning stands at the centre and the secondary meanings proceed out of it in every direction like rays whereas in concatenation the meaning of a word moves gradually away from its first sense by successive shifts until, in many cases, there is not a sign of connection between the sense that is finally developed and that which the term had at the beginning. In radiation, the secondary meanings developed are all related to the primary meaning while in concatenation each of the later meanings is only related to the preceding one like chains and sometimes there is no direct connection between the latest sense and the original sense3. How do you understand the statement that true synonymy is nonexistent? Answer: Synonymy is a sense relation about words which share the same or similar essential meanings and the same part of speech. Since the term meaning is multi-faceted and the meaning of a word consists of different types of meanings, it is very difficult to find words which are the same in meaning of all aspects. Even though English does have a very small number of words of this type called absolute synonyms, they are rare in natural languages and therefore some people even claim that true synonymy is nonexistent.4. Answer: The fundamental difference between homonyms and polysemants lies in the fact that homonyms refer to different words which happen to share the same form and the latter is the one and same word which has several distinguishable meanings. One important criterion is to see their etymology. Homonyms are from different sources whereas a polysement is from the same source which has acquired different meanings in the course of development. The second principle consideration is semantic relatedness. The various meanings of a polysement are correlated and connected to one central meaning to a greater or lesser degree. On the other hand, meanings of different homonyms have nothing to do with one another. In dictionaries, a polysemant has its meaning all listed under one headword while homonyms are listed as separate entries.5. Answer: Hyponymy is the sense relation that deals with the semantic inclusion, or the meaning of a more specific word is included in that of another more general word. The general words which include the more specific words are called the superordinate terms while the more specific ones are called subordinate terms. The status either as superordinate or subordinate is relative to other terms. It varies under different circumstances. For example, horse, dog, pig are subordinates in relation to animal, but superordinates of mare, hound and boar