On Words' Semantic Relations And Word Association By L2 Learners

Recent years have witnessed a lot of researches on lexical semantic relations among the English words from which many theories concerned are put forward by enthusiastic linguists. According to structural semantics, words do not exist in isolation and their meanings are defined through the implicit lexical relations they have with other words. These relationships can be classified as hyponymy, antonymy, synonymy, and so on. The commonest way for semanticists to deal with these relations is the approach of semantic feature analysis and semantic field. In recent years, due to the development of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, some linguists have begun their researches on word meanings from the perspective of mental realization of words and the cognitive role played by man's thinking in language. Furthermore, they have made in-depth explorations into the semantic network of mental lexicon. As a result, the approach of word association is applied in the study of semantic network as it can in part demonstrate the semantic relations between the stimulus words and the response words produced in the mind. Therefore, word association test has been viewed as an acceptable means forpeople to make a study on the semantic network of the second language learners and their vocabulary acquisition. It is taken as an effective way to help the transition from the receptive vocabulary into the productive vocabulary. Many researches show that the ratio of paradigmatic to syntagmatic responses in word association tests might be a ruler to distinguish language competence of the native speakers from that of the second language learners. This explains why more researches are focusing on the contrastive study of the word association of the native speakers and that of the L2 learners. Based on the previous studies by some scholars, this thesis aims to confine the study to the semantic relation models displayed in a word association test on a group of English majors, the paradigmatic and syntagmatic association in their word responses and the inclination of word class association in the test. It falls into four chapters as follows:The first chapter is a brief introduction to the objective of the study in this paper, that is, finding certain general rule in the psycho-semantic association in the subjects.The second chapter treats of three sub-parts. Firstly, it summarizes the role of semantic feature analysis and semantic field in the delimitation of the words' semantic relations and it also introduces a meaning-text model presented by Melcut in dealing with the various semantic relations. Secondly, it presents the semantic network, the words' mental organization and their retrieval from the angle of psycholinguistics, Three theories concerned are discussed, that is, hierarchical network, activation spreading network and prototype theory, aiming to give prominence to the salience and complexity of words' semantic role in the network, especially in the organization of the network. The last part in this chapter deals with some findings of the cognitive approach to the studies on the intra-lexical semantic relations, which is exemplified by a polysemous word "over". From the analysis in this part, we see that the image schemata in our cognitive thinking serve as a fundamental role in explaining the multiple meanings embedded in one word.The third chapter gives an introduction to the background of the word association test as well as some conclusions drawn by some linguists. Then it comes to the word association test that is designed in this paper in which the subjects, the process of the test and its findings are elaborated. The test aims to explore the cultural and word class...