文档介绍：1. Introduction
G. Leech, a famous linguist proposes three types of meaning in his Semantics, first published in 1974, as followings: lexical meaning, grammatical meaning and contextual meaning. Leech says that lexical meaning is the meaning of an isolated word in a dictionary, and ponent of meaning is identical in all forms of the word. Here is an example for illustration: The word forms begin, begins, began, begun, beginning possess different grammatical meaning of tenses, persons and so on. In each of these forms one finds the same lexical meaning expressing the process of movement.
Grammatical meaning is ponent of meaning identical in individual forms of different words. For instance, the tense meaning in the word-forms worked, studied, taught, or the plural meaning girl, girls or the case meaning boy’s, word’s and so on.
Except for lexical meaning and grammatical meaning, contextual meaning depends upon context. Different contexts give words different meanings. Therefore, one should pay close attention to the types of context. Generally speaking, there are four types of contexts: figures of speech, culture, technical area and humor.
Figure of speech refers to metonymy, metaphor, allusion and so on. That is to say, the contextual meaning ,which out of  all the possible meanings that the original related or suggested, including the characters of the original and enlightenments from the original, is the acceptable meaning to the word.
The News World Encyclopedia defines culture as “it is the totality of the spiritual, intellectual, and artistic attitudes shared by a group, including its tradition, habits, social customs, morals, laws and social relations. Sociologically, every society, on every level, has its culture.”(Guo & Li, 2003:11) Consequently, English word meaning, to some extent depends on the English culture.
It is natural that in the course of the development of society a number of new words are needed to describe new ideas. So there has been