英语词汇学复习-题

Key to chapter 1

1 .What is a word? 1.A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.

2.In what way are words related to vocabulary?

V ocabulary refers to the sum total of all the words in a language. In other words, vocabulary is composed of words and words make up vocabulary. If we compare vocabulary to a family, words are family members.

3.Illustrate the relationship between sound and meaning with examples .

Sound is the physical aspect of a word and meaning is what the sound refers to. Sound and meaning are not intrinsically related and their collection is arbitrary and conventional. For example, tree/tri:/ means 树in English because the English-speaking people have agreed to do so just as Chinese people use/shù/ (树) to refer to the same thing. This explains why people of different languages use different sounds to express the same concept. However, in the same languages, the same sound can denote different meanings, e.g. /rait/ can mean right, rite, and write.

4 .Enumerate the causes for the differences between sound and form of english words

There are generally four major causes of the differences between sound and form. ⑴ There are more phonemes than letters in English, so there is no way to use one letter to represent one phoneme. ⑵ The stabilization of spelling by printing, which breaks the synchronized change of sound and spelling. ⑶ Influence of the work of scribes, who deliberately changed the spelling of words and ⑷ borrowing, which introduces many words which are against English rules of pronunciation and spelling.

5 .Give examples to show the influence of early scribes on english spelling

Early scribes changed the spelling of many words while copying things for others because the original spelling forms in cursive writing were difficult for people to recognize, such as sum, cum, wuman, munk and so on. Later, the letter u with vertical lines was replaced with o, resulting in the current spelling forms like some, come, woman, monk. The changed spelling forms are more distinguishable to readers.

6.What are the characteristics of basic word stock

Words of the basic word stock form the common core of the English language. They are the words essential to native speakers’ daily communication. Such words are characterized by all national character, stability, polysemy, productivity and collocability.

7.choose the standard meaning form from the list on the right to match each of the slang words on the left

A tart loose woman b. bloke fellow c.gat pistol d. swell great e. chicken coward

F .blue fight g. smoky police h full drunk i. dame woman j. beaver girl

8.given the modern equivalents for the following archaic words

haply = perhaps albeit= although methinks = it seems to me eke= also bade= bid

smooth= truth morn= morning troth= pledge ere= before quoth = said hallowed= holy billow= wave/ the sea

9.Explain neologisms with examples

Neologisms refer to newly-coined words or old words with new meanings. For example, euro(欧元), e-book(电子书), SARS(非典), netizen(网民), are newly-coined words. Words like mouse(鼠标),web(网络),space shuttle(航天飞机) etc. are old words which have acquired new meanings.

10.What is the fundamental difference between content and functional words

By notion, words fall into content words and functional words. Content words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and numerals, which have clear notions; whereas functional words are void of notions but are mainly used to connect content words into sentences. Content words are numerous and changing all the time, while functional words are small in number and stable. But functional words have much higher frequency in use than content words.

11.How do you account for the role of native words in english in relation to loan words ?

Native words form a small portion of the English vocabulary, but they make up the mainstream of the basic word-stock which belongs to the common core of the English language. Compared with most loan-words, native words are mostly essential to native speakers’ daily communication and enjoy a much higher frequency in actual use.