15
2. Function words seem to be mainly used to carry grammatical
meaning.”
18
According to Gass and Sclinker, vocabulary is classified into two kinds; they are Potential Vocabulary and Real Vocabulary. Potential vocabulary
consist of words learners will recognize even though they have not seen them in second language, and the real vocabulary is words the learners are familiar
with after and because of exposure.
19
No matter how many experts classifying vocabulary, words are a part of people’s way of living or words are tools to communicate in language which
used by a person for showing and telling their opinions and ideas.
7. The Function of Vocabulary
Before discussing vocabulary function, first of all we should know the meaning of it. Vocabulary is total number of words which with rules for
combining them make up a language, or range of words known to, or used by, a person, in trade, profession, etc
13
. The word “use” has a meaning as the function or the advantage. So we
can say that from the definition-above the vocabulary use is the function or the use of words which are used in language. It means that when we use words,
we should know the function or the use of our words our vocabularies because it can guide us in understating the language which we learn.
Moreover, vocabulary is central to both the system and the use of language. The words that we pronounce write and organize into sentences and
other grammatical combinations. Words are also, what ordinary users think of as language. For, they are accessible and reflected more fully the whole
18
Lynne Cameron, Teaching Language to Young Learners, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 82.
19
Susan M. Gass and Larry Sclinker, Second Language Acquisition: an Introductory Course Second Edition. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates inc, 2001, p. 374.
13
Hornby, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary., p. 1959.
16
culture and respond more quickly to changes in society than do other aspects of language
14
. Mastering vocabulary is the ability to get or and to receive lots of
words. By having and mastering vocabulary, we will know the meaning of vocabulary in the context. It can also help to avoid making the mistakes in
identifying a language with the dictionary and guide us in making the equivalence of the second language to the native language.
Here is some of the vocabulary use: Helping us master kinds or levels of meaning
In mastering the kinds or levels of meaning such as the words with their lexical meaning are, they are by no means the only essential meanings in
the symbols and devices of a language and also the lexical content of the various words- the words as listed and defined in a dictionary.
15
In the sentence “The old man killed the little bear”, the dictionary does tell us the
kind of beings to which the words man and bear refer it will explain the particular type of action for which the word will is a symbol. And it will give
us some notion of the qualities included in the meanings of such words as old and little. This is however practically all the help the dictionary can give. It
does not tell us whether old is to be taken as a characteristic of the man or of the bear; or whether the bear or the man or both are little. The dictionary
cannot tell us whether, in this particular sentence, the man bear performed the action. So the syntactical, the positions in which old and little stand in relation
to man and bear give us the essential meaning that it is the man that is old and bear that is little. The fact that the old man precedes the word killed and that
the little bear follows that word. Killed conveys the meaning that the man Rather than ear performed the action. Here, syntactical meaning absolutely
essential to any understanding of the utterance expressed by the word order.
14
Suzanne Romaine, The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV Cambridge: UK, 1998, p. 57
15
Charles C. Fries, Teaching and Learning English as Foreign Language, Michigan; 1970, p. 18.
