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. Vocabulary 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.

12. Denizens Aliens Translation loans Semantic loans

kettle confrere chopsticks dream die pro patria black humour

skirt parvenu long time no see

wall Wunderkind typhoon

husband Mikado

第二章

1. The Indo-Europe Language Family is one of the most important

language families in the world. It is made up of the languages of Europe ,

the Near East and India. English belongs to this family and the other

members of the Indo-European Language Family have different degrees

of influence on English vocabulary . A knowledge of the Indo-European

Language Family will help us understand English words better and use

them more appropriately.

2.Indo-European Language Family

Balto-Slavic (Lithuanian,Prussian, Polish, Slavenian, Russian, Bulgarian)

Indo-Iranian (Hindi, Perian)

Celtic (Breton, Scottish, Irish)

Italic(Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Roumanian)

Hellenic(Greek)

Germanic(English, Swedish, German, Norweigian, Icelangic, Danish,

Dutch)

3.The vocabularies of the three periods differ greatly from one anther. Old