Explaining the Meaning of Words: A Descriptive Study on Strategies

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen (English Seminar/Applied English Linguistics), course: HS Lexical Semantics, language: English, abstract: This paper seeks to describe and analyze typical strategies employed for explaining unknown words. The empirical component is based on a small video-corpus comprising 4x6 interviews with native as well as non-native speakers of English, transcripts are included in the Appendix. The material is analyzed by means of a theoretical apparatus taken from lexical semantics and pragmatics.