Quantitative analysis of polysemous words in College word" href="/13/2017/0419/70338.html">English vocabulary
Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
The rapid economic development of modern China and her strengthening cooperation with foreign countries have witnessed an ever-increasing demand for talents with the ability to use English in a well-around way, especially in listening and speaking. It is agreed that the proficiency of a language user in listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating activities largely depends on his or her mastery of vocabulary or its lexical meanings.
Therefore, how to help students or language users understand meanings of a word quickly, thereby effectively improving their mastery of the word and enlarging their vocabulary, is of great importance for advancing a learner's English application ability.
Such kind of awareness has promoted linguists or language teachers all over the world to step into explorations on word meaning from macro and micro perspectives. At the macro level, the lexical meaning of a word is closely related to the outside real world, the human thought and the specific context, and this viewpoint is well represented in, for example, the referential theory, the ideational theory and the meaning-is-use theory respectively. At the micro level, the lexical structure of a language is regarded as a network of sense-relations, in which each strand is one such relation and each knot is a different word (John Lyons, 2017: 102). Prominent structural approaches, like semantic field, collocation theory, and componential analysis, etc. focus on the meaning relations between words by viewing the vocabulary of a language as such kind of web structure (Li Fuyin, 2017: 1 O 1). Moreover, the rise and development of cognitive linguistics breathe new life into the lexical studies both at home and abroad. Lots of scholars research into word meaning and its formation, content, relation and understanding from the cognitive characteristics and methods of human beings, such as categorization, schema theory and conceptual metaphor and metonymy, etc. (Shu Dingfang, 2017: 7). Through a critical review of previous studies related to word meaning, we encouragingly find that the available literature to some extent presents systematicity and diversity, and that new ideas or theories are continuously introduced into lexical studies as a solution to practical problems and a challenge for existing theories. Meanwhile, it is also found that among the vast majority of lexical studies, few scholars take the influence of word length on its meanings into consideration.
References
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[3] Frege, G. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Peter Geach and Max Black. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.
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[5] Horn, L. R. Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-based and R-based Implicature. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: Linguisti，英语论文，英语毕业论文 |
