词汇学答案1-4章

第一章

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

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

5 .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. 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. a. loose woman b. fellow c. pistol d. great e. coward

f. fight

g. police

h. drunk

i. woman

j. girl

8. haply = perhaps albeit= although

methinks = it seems to me eke= also

smooth= truth morn= morning

troth= pledge ere= before

quoth = said hallowed= holy

billow= wave/ the sea bade= bid

9. 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. By notion, words fall into content words and functional words. Content words include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverds 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. 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.

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