Study On The Kernel Words In English

Kernel words, the core part of basic vocabulary, have great stability and low frequency in change. Generally speaking, one word has more than one meaning and designates different things, which correlate with each other. Meanwhile, the same concept can be expressed in different ways. These phenomena are not arbitrary but follow certain rules with a clear structure and reflect human beings' cognition of the world.Based on the Swadesh 100-word list, a careful study is carried out on the kernel words in English, including searching out all relevant words throughout the history, analysing the semantic and pragmatic development of each concept, and making reliable explanations on evolutionary rules.Kernel words, the subject investigated in this study, is in fact treated as kernel concepts which are embodied in a great number of words. That is, every word in the Swadesh 100-word list is considered as a concept. The study focuses on relevant words instead of just one word, which former researchers seldom concern.The words designating each concept are chosen through exhaustive investigation. After careful selection, simplex words and composite words are differentiated and a list of representative words is made. It is necessary to make comparison with languages in Indo-European and others in a different language system such as Chinese, and to illustrated linguistic rules by using a lot of facts. The study contributes to the study of English language and provides evidence for rules deduced as to the development of English.The full text consists of six chapters.The first chapter is the introduction, which gives a comprehensive introduction to the kernel word research, including research significance, materials and methods.The second chapter to the fifth chapter studies the noun, the pronoun, the adverb, the numeral of the kernel words in English respectively. Nouns account for the vast majority of this part. The study of nouns mainly focuses on two broad categories:body part term and an integral part of organisms.The last chapter is the concluding part which summarizes the characteristics and situation of the kernel words in English. Researches have shown that semantic partition is specified among the kernel words in English and semantic field tend to expand in terms of structure. The representative words changed at various speeds and in different modes, and the members of the same semantic field often appear jointly. The semantic development of kernel words in English are the results of analogies in appearance, position and function and relevance by means of metaphor and metonymy.At the same time, this part also points out the innovation point, the shortcomings and direction for further research.There are two distinctive features of this dissertation. On the one hand, we focus on the Swadish 100-word list to discuss the Kernel Words in English comprehensively and systematically, which is rare now. Meaning comparison is taken into consideration in the field of semantic typology with languages in Indo-European languages as well as languages in other systems, which enable us to find more cognates conveniently.On the other hand, we come up with some new ideas including the relation of "eye and light", "gore and dung", "bleed and blossom", "grease and bribe", "grease and flatter", onomatopoetic words for bird names, generalization of young animal as generic terms, and meaning shift between chin and face. All deserve further study in order to seek more linguistic evidence.