Motivations of Word
Abstract: Of course we know that a word is the combination of word-form and its meaning and the forms of the words bear no natural relationship to their meaning. Most words are non-motivated. But, there still exists five motivations.What is the meaning of the "word meaning"? What is the motivation of the meaning?
Key words: word-form meaning motivation
Motivations of Word
What is the meaning of the "word meaning"? What is the motivation of the meaning? After a period of studying lexicology, there is a general frame of all the basic knowledge in my mind. I still remember that Word meaning is a very important chapter of what we have learnt, and I get a lot from it. Now, I will give you my reflections of this chapter.
In this chapter, there are three important points, including word meaning, motivation and types of meaning. Because I have learnt about the word meaning and types of the meaning in last semester in the linguistic class, among these three points, I will emphasize the second part "motivation".
Of course we know that a word is the combination of word-form and its meaning and the forms of the words bear no natural relationship to their meaning, that is to say, the word-forms and their meaning are arbitrary and conventional. But the term is not as simple as it seems to be. There exists five kinds of motivations, which refer to the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning. They are onomatopoeic motivation, morphological motivation, semantic motivation, etymological motivation and logical motivation .
So, what is "Onomatopoeic motivation" on earth? The sounds of some words suggest their meanings, because they are created by imitating the natural sounds. But these onomatopoeic words are also largely conventional, because different languages may use different forms to indicate these sounds, such as crow by cocks, mew by cats, gibber by apes and so on. However, what is "Morphological motivation"? Morphological motivation tries to establish the connection of meaning of the word to its form from morphological point of view. Sometimes, we can work out the meaning of a word if we know the meaning of the morphemes that constitute that word, such as freshhand. In this word,"fresh"means "new" and "hand" means "a person". From these two single words, we may guess that the "freshhand" means "an inexperienced person". And what is "Semantic motivation"? Semantic motivation explains the relationship between the literal sense and the figurative sense through associations.
After these, what I interest most is the etymological motivation. What is "Etymological motivation"? Etymological motivation means that the meanings of words can be explained with reference to etymological information. Like human beings, the words have its own history. And also like human beings, some words's history are more interesting than the others'. Very often, the history of the word can explain why a form has acquired a particular meaning. Knowing this, it is very helpful for us to remember the new words and even use the words into our daily life. For example, the word "boycott" is from a person called Charles Cunningham Boycott in the history. In the nineteenth centur，英语毕业论文，英语论文 |
