A Study On Relation Between Word Length And Its Meanings

Vocabulary plays an indispensable and significant role in the use of language. The proficiency of a language user in activities, like listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, largely depends on his or her mastery of vocabulary or its meanings. Word meaning is always an important topic in linguistic research. Traditional semantic approaches investigate the sematic change of a word in terms of its types, process and reasons from a historical perspective; modern lexical studies research synchronically into how the words are semantically related to each other and how a specific meaning of a word is decomposed into smaller semantic components under the guidelines of structuralism; and cognitive approaches to word meaning focus more on the influence of human beings'cognitive characteristics and methods on the formation and change of word meaning. Through a critical review of the available literature, it is easy to find that few scholars step into explorations of the influence of the length of a word on its meaning.Therefore, based on the interpretation of the principle of economy and metaphor and metonymy theories, the author boldly hypothesizes that the length of a word has a restrictive effect on the quantity of meanings carried by the word, and the length of a word is inversely proportional to its quantity of meanings. In other words, the longer the word is, the fewer meanings it carries; while the shorter the word is, the more meanings it carries. In this thesis, a quantitative study of 5579 polysemous words collected from college English vocabulary (7675 words in all) is conducted from three aspects, namely the distribution of word meaning, the distribution of word length, and the relation between word meaning and its length. Major findings of this study are as follows.(1) Each polysemous word on average has 2.1 syllables and 4.6 meanings.(2) Most polysemous words vary from 1 to 4 syllables and only 2% of them have more than 4 syllables.(3) The quantity of meanings carried by most polysemous words varies from 2 to 10 and only 6% of them carry more than 11 meanings.(4) As the length of a word increases, both the maximum quantity of meaning and the average quantity of meaning carried by the words decline dramatically.(5) As the quantity of meanings carried by the words increases, the average length of the words declines. Specifically speaking, when the quantity of meanings is smaller than 5, 2-syllabic words account for a large proportion of the polysemous words; when the quantity of meanings is larger than 5, monosyllabic words take the lead; and when the quantity of meanings is larger than 16, all the polysemous words are monosyllabic words.These findings effectively support our general hypothesis and in addition, are of far-reaching significance for college English vocabulary teaching and learning. As for the teachers, this study serves as a reminder to them that vocabulary teaching should focus more on explanation of the meanings of common monosyllabic and 2-syllabic words rather than those less meaningful poly-syllabic words; as for the students, this study can help them adjust their vocabulary learning strategies and quickly master the polysemous words, thereby improving their English application ability.