Building Your English Vocabulary

This thesis is on roots, affixes and transformation in roots and words, which have been tested by my study experience as an English major during four years in University. In the beginning, it introduces the history of the English language as a whole, during the process of which etymology and lexicology were individually established.

Then, it points out that each of them has its own practical value to today's word study, which should be recognized and widely applied to the building of vocabulary. Etymology, neglected by most of the English learners, is one of the bases used to support my ideas throughout the whole thesis. Besides an overview of the branch of linguistics, it also emphasizes one concept-cognates, which is the source of my ideas about the relation between certain words that have something in common with each other essentially. With a knowledge of etymology, we can go "out of the box" and develop a further and new understanding of English words both in shape and meaning. Another theoretical basis alongside is lexicology. Some of the concepts, such as morphemes, allomorphs, classification of morphemes, roots, and affixes including prefixes and suffixes, are necessary for us to form our new perspective on English words. Derivation, one of the main rules of word-formation, has also been mentioned in this thesis because we can know how the affix and root components put together to form various words.

Last but not least, according to personal practice of word study on the basis of the traditional theory mentioned, I bring my ideas about word study. In order to make it easier to understand, I explain my ideas by means of a set of equations. With the help of these equations and verbal explanation, I will make an effort to show the internal relations between vowels and vowels, consonants and consonants or combination of consonants. What's more, I have also found that we can make use of the transformations in words and roots