APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
Vocabulary
What does it mean to know a word?
To know a word consists of many factors. We can say that the learner knows a word if he knows its
1. meaning
Words may have different meanings depending on the context. Teachers have to teach only one meaning at a time. We can say that students know the meaning if they understand it in context and know its equivalent in their mother tongue. Sometimes words have meaning in relation to other words. In this case we speak about sense relations. We have to distinguish superordinates from hyponyms. Superordinates are so-called umbrella terms such as ‘vegetable’. ‘Vegetable’ is the superordinate of ‘carrots’, ‘potatoes’, etc. which are hyponyms. Synonyms and antonyms are further two terms we have to clarify here. A synonym refers to a word that has the same meaning as another word, for example, ‘table’ and ‘desk’. The term antonym refers to a word that means the opposite of another word, for example, ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’. We speak about denotation if we mean the first meaning of the word. By connotation we mean an additional idea or emotion that a word suggests to do, that is not part of its usual meaning, for example, the negative connotations of the word ‘feminist’, or ‘plump’ is a euphemism of the word ‘fat’.
2. use
Students need to be able to produce the word in the right context, they need to be aware of how the meaning is expanded or limited depending on how the word is used e.g. idioms cannot be understood if you know all the words in it, because it has a special meaning, for example, ‘pull one’s leg’ cannot be understood if you analyze its components. Students are supposed to know the collocations of the words, for example, we say ‘headache’ but we cannot say ‘*legache’ but ‘pain in the leg’. Students need to know the style and register of the target word or expression if a word is used only in colloquial expressions or in formal style if it is polite, or rude.
3. word formation
Word formation is in other words morphology. English words can often be used both as nouns and verbs which makes it a bit more bit difficult to teach which part of speech they belong to. When we speak about word formation we mean the grammatical context according to which the word changes, for example, present participles can refer to the past and to the present. Students have to know how suffixes and prefixes change the meaning of the stem, for example, ‘polite’, ‘impolite’.
4. spelling
We can say that the students know the word if they can spell it properly.
5. word grammar
The use of certain words can trigger the use of certain grammatical patterns, for example, in case of nouns the categories of countable and uncountable are very important factors. Uncountable nouns cannot be used in plural forms. In case of verbs transitivity plays an important role in forming passive structures. If an adjective is converted into an adverb, its position in a sentence will define the fact what part of speech it belongs to, for example, ‘The fast train goes fast.’ The first ‘fast’ is an adjective while the second ‘fast’ is an adverb.
6. phonology
It is important for the learner to know how the word is pronounced.
As a conclusion, we have to state that knowing a word is more than understanding its meaning/meanings. When we teach a new word we normally do not tell all these pieces of information about a word to students because word grammar is taught when we teach grammar, the use or register of a word is taught through practice, collocations and idioms are usually treated as separate vocabulary items and they are taught separately. If learners know the meaning, use and grammar of a word this word will belong to the students’ active vocabulary.
