Motivation in English Compound Nouns [4]
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关键词:MotivationEnglishCompound Nounsmeaninglanguage
much of its motivation by borrowing Latin or Greek elements.
3.2 Motivation obscured by semantic change
Any language is in constant change. Semantic change is thus one of the contributors to the loss of motivation in some compound nouns. Take 'pineapple' as an instance. Apparently, it has nothing to do with pine nor apple. However, traced back to the fourteenth century, 'pineapple' was fully motivated with 'apple' denoting any kind of fruit and the pineapple similar with pinecone in shape. Therefore, motivation for the word 'pineapple' is lost as a result of the later semantic narrowing of the word 'apple'.
3.3 Motivation obscured by cross-cultural communication
As is pointed out by Sapir (1921), different peoples have different ways of segmenting and encoding the real world, thus leading to a third reason for non-motivation, that is, motivation can be obscured by cross-cultural communication. To be exact, 'Sunday best' and 'church mouse' are semantically motivated concerned with psychological association on the English cultural background. However, for foreigners ignorant of such a background, these compounds may become non-motivated.
4. Conclusion
4.0 After a detailed discussion of motivation in English compound nouns and factors inducing non-motivation, now we can reach two conclusions.
4.1Returning to the problem of arbitrariness, we can say that it is both relative and hierarchical. That is, while the smallest component or the ultimate constituent of language is non-motivated except it is phonetically motivated, compounds, as combinations of smaller components, are mostly motivated and thus transparent.
4.2 As is analyzed above, the meaning of compounds is free from constrains of "the ordinary syntactic structures" and ordinary grammatical constructions. So we can conclude that the ever-strengthening tendency of compounding in modern English contributes to increase the degree of lexicalization and to weaken the degree of hypotaxis of the English language.
Bibliography
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英语词汇学. 上海外语教育出版社.
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