of connection between the sense that is finally developed and that which the term had at the beginning.
3.Homonyms: words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.
4.Homographs: words identical only in spelling but different in sound and meaning. 5.Homophones: words identical only in sound but different in spelling and meaning. 6.Perfect homonyms: words identical both in sound and spelling, but different in meaning.
7.Polysemy: a phenomenon that one form having more than one meaning.
8.Synonyms: words different in sound and spelling but most nearly alike or exactly the same in meaning.
9.Antonyms: words opposite in meaning.
10.Hyponymy: the relationship of semantic inclusion.
11.Semantic field: a meaning area where words share the same concept.
IV. Answer the following questions.
Discuss the major characteristics of Basic word stock with examples. Basic word stock contains the following characteristics: 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 language. Stability:
As they denote the commonest things necessary to life, they are likely to remain unchanged. Stability, however, is only relative. Productivity:
Words of the basic word stock are most root words or monosyllabic words; They can form new words with other roots and affixes Polysemy:
Words belonging to the basic word stock often possess more than one meaning because most of them have undergone semantic changes in the course of use and become polysemous. Collocability:
Many words of the basic word stock have strong collocability:
1. Morphemes are realized by allomorphs. Illustrate this point on the basis of the knowledge obtained from this chapter.
1. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {—s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, e.g. in cats /s/, in bags /z/, in matches /iz/. It can be realized by the change of an internal vowel as by zero morph as in “deer—deer, fish—fish”. The same is true of the past tense marker {—ed}, which is realized by /t/ after a verb ending with /p, k/ as in worked, helped; by /d/ after vowels and sounds like/m, n,η, l/ as in tried, warmed and by /id/ after /t, d/ as in wanted, landed, etc. This is also applicable to affixational morphemes. The prefix {in-} has allomorphs such as / im, ir, il/depending on the first sound of the base to which the prefix is added.
2. What are the inflectional affixes frequently used in English? Discuss the meaning each of them indicates.
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II.
-(e)s— plural number
-(e)s— third- person singular present tense -(e)d— past tense
-ing— progressive aspect -er— comparative degree -est— superlative degree -'s— possessive case
1. What is the relationship between concept and meaning?
1. Meaning and concept are closely connected but not identical. They are both related directly to referents and are notions of the words but belong to different categories. Concept, which is beyond language, is the result of human cognition, reflecting the objective world in the human mind. It is universal to all men alike regardless of culture, race, language and so on whereas meaning belongs to language, so is restricted to language use. A concept can have as many referring expressions as there are languages in the world . Even in the same language, the same concept can be expressed in different words.
2. What is the relationship between grammatical meaning and lexical meaning?
2. Grammatical meanings refer to that part of the meaning of the world which indicates grammatical concept or relationships such as part of speech of words, singular and plural meaning of nouns, tense meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms. Grammatical meaning of a word becomes important only when it is used in actual context. Different lexical items, which have different lexical meanings, may have the same grammatical meaning; on the other hand, the same word may have different grammatical meanings. Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning make up the word meaning. It is known that grammatical meaning surfaces only in use .But lexical meaning is constant in all the content words within or without context as it is related to the notion that a word conveys.
1. What is the difference between homonyms and polysemants? How to differentiate them?
Homonyms refer to different words which happen to share the same form and polysemants refer to the fact that the same word has several distinguishable meanings. By seeing their etymology, we can distinguish them, i. e. homonyms are from different sources while a polysemant is from the same source which has acquired different meanings in the course of development. The second principal consideration is semantic relatedness. The various meaning of a polysemant are correlated and connected to do with one another. Additionally, in dictionary, a polysemant has its meanings all listed under one headword whereas homonyms are listed as separate entries.
2. Discuss some of the characteristics of antonyms.
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1. Antonyms are classified on the basis of semantic opposition.
2 A word which has more than one meaning can have more than one antonym 3 Antonyms differ in semantic inclusion. Pairs of antonyms are seen as marked and unmarked terms respectively.
4 Contrary terms are gradable antonyms, differing in degree of intensity, so each has its own corresponding opposite.
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