PDF #31 – Ewa Dabrowska – Words as Constructions
The average English speaker with secondary school education knows about 60,000 words; many speakers know 100,000 words or more (Miller 1996). ‘Knowing a word’ involves knowing a variety of things: its phonological form, grammatical properties, meaning, and, for some words at least, the social contexts and genres in which it is normally used (e.g. the word horsy is used primarily in informal spoken language, while equestrian is much more formal).
It is also a matter of degree: a person may have only passive knowledge of a particular word, i.e. be able to recognize it but not produce it, or have only a rough idea of its meaning: for example, one might know that trudge is a verb of motion without being aware what specific kind of motion it designates. At the other extreme, many speakers have very detailed representations which enable them to distinguish trudge from near-synonyms such as plod, yomp, and lumber.
How is such knowledge acquired? To answer this question, it will be useful to make a distinction between ‘basic’ and ‘non-basic’ vocabulary. By ‘basic vocabulary’ I mean words designating relatively concrete entities which are learned early in development in the context of face-to-face interaction, where the extralinguistic context offers a rich source of information about meaning.
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