03Chapter 3_lexicon 语言学概论 教学课件.pptVIP

Chapter Three Lexicon 1. What is word? A unit of expression that native speakers may recognize by intuition, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. – A vague definition. Three senses are involved in defining “word”, none of which is satisfactory to cope with all the situations. 1.1 Three senses of “word” A physical definable unit 自然的可界定单位 a cluster of sound segments or letters between two pauses or blanks, eg Phonological: [it iz 5wQndEful] Orthographic: It is wonderful. Three words are recognized. However, in casual speech or writing, liaison and contracted form often occurs, so it often becomes: Phonological: Orthographic: It’s wonderful. Are they two words or three? Also, when we are faced with a set of forms, such as walk, walks, walking, walked, it’s hard to determine how many words there are. They may be recognized as a lexeme(词位) , which includes all of its grammatical forms of walk , when we see WORD as a general term, but four lexical items (entries in a dictionary) if WORD is taken as specific items. So WORD can be seen as both a general tem and as a specific term. Lexeme (词位)：In order to reduce the ambiguity of the word “word”, the term “lexeme” is postulated as the abstract unit underlying the smallest unit in the lexical system of a language, which appears in different grammatical contexts. For example, “write ” is the lexeme of the following set of words: write, writes, wrote, writing, written. A grammatical unit: sentence clause phrase word morpheme Notice that the Word rank is located between morpheme and phrase. A word in this sense, is a grammatical unit. 1.2 Identification of words Stability: stable linguistic units. chairman, but not *manchair Relative uninterruptibility: though we recognize three components in the word disappointment, we cannot pause and add another component in between, as in *disinterestappointment. But we can add another word between words: Paul, (John) and Mary ... A minim