Study On The Kernel Words In English From The Perspective Of Typology

Kernel words are the most frequently-used words in the daily life of human and are closely related to human lives. The research on the semantic changes of kernel words has a positive effect on the construction and development of the history of vocabulary. The research on kernel words in China not only provides the reference for the Chinese kernel words research but also reveals the cognitive universals. This article tries to reveal the underlying general priciples, sometimes implicational universals of semantic change through the semantic idiosyncrasies.31nouns were selected from Swadesh second100-word list.31concepts which31nouns represent are elaborately examined. First all the expressions which can denote the concept are chosen from the dictionary. We try to find out the underlying semantic principals via combing with the other15languages.The full text consists of9chapters. The first chapter is the introduction, which gives a comprehensive introduction to the semantic typology research on the kernel words. The second chapter to the eighth chapter covers5categories:5kinship words (father, husband, mother, wife, child),5plant words (flower, grass, woods, stick, rope),3animal words (worm, snake, animal),6body words (left, right, back, leg, guts, wing),4natural substance words(river, lake, sea, salt),5natural phenomenon words (ice, snow, fog, wind, dust) and3spatical and temporal words (day, year, sky). The last chapter illuminates the motivation and mechanism of the semantic change with the help of the cognitive theoretical framework.The innovative parts of the text are the following:The English kernel words research is conducted from the onomasiological perspective. Conceptual teria is chosen and we try to find out all the expression means corresponding to each concept. This kind of new perspective research on kernel words is rare.Semantic typological method and synchrony-diachrony dichotomy are applied into15languages to reveal the universals of semantic change and also the cognitive universals of human being. In a word, the same paths of semantic change happen again and again which shows the semantic parallels are likely to be polygenetic in nature.