Linguistic Context And Word Meaning

Context is a popular research subject in modern linguistics, which includes linguistic context and non-linguistic context. In this paper, linguistic context is mainly concerned, along with its effect on word meaning. The effects of linguistic context on word meaning include: determining the meanings of polysemous words, eliminating ambiguities, indicating referents and providing clues for the inference word meanings.Detailed analyses in regard to these areas will be found in phonological context, lexical context, grammatical context and textual context, respectively. Therefore, linguistic context and word meaning are indivisible, linguistic context has great effect on word meaning and the understanding of word meaning depends greatly on contextual clues.Based on the knowledge of linguistic context and word meaning, a study is done in this paper by giving a vocabulary test to two groups of students respectively, and then the results of the two groups are compared. The purpose is to find students'proficiency to infer word meanings in linguistic context and whether the Chinese equivalence of word meanings is helpful for students to use proper words in a certain linguistic context.The results show that students are not good at identifying word meanings in linguistic context; what'more, the Chinese equivalence of word meanings is of little use for them to choose proper words in linguistic context, that is to say, students may not choose the word which is proper in certain linguistic context although they know the Chinese equivalence of the word. Therefore, more attention should be paid to applying linguistic context in learning and teaching vocabulary.