大学英语四级阅读理解每日一练四.pdfVIP

新东方英语四级：/kcnet1820/ 四级qq群：238407043 When one looks back upon the fifteen hundred years that are the life span of the English language, he should be able to notice a number of significant truths. The history of our language has always been a history of constant change—at times a slow, almost imperceptible change, at other times a violent collision between two languages.Ourlanguagehasalwaysbeenalivinggrowingorganism,ithasneverbeen static. Another significant truth that emerges from such a study is that language at all times has been the possession not of one class or group but of many. 『At one extreme it has been the property of the common, ignorant folk, who have used it in the daily business of their living, much as they have used their animals or thekitchenpotsandpans.』① Attheotherextremeithasbeenthetreasureofthose who have respected it as an instrument and a sign of civilization, and who have struggled by writing it down to give it some permanence, order, dignity, and if possible, a little beauty. As weconsiderourchanginglanguage,weshould noteheretwodevelopmentsthat are of special and immediate importance to us. One is that since the time of the Anglo-Saxons there has been an almost complete reversal of the different devices for showing the relationship of words in a sentence. Anglo-Saxon (old English) was a language of many inflections. Modern English has few inflections. We must now dependlargelyonwordorderandfunctionwordstoconveythemeaningsthattheolder language did by means of changes in the forms of words. Function words, you should understand,arewordssuchasprepositions,conjunctions,anda few othersthatare usedprimarilytoshowrelationshipsamongotherwords.Afewinflections,however, have survived. And when some word inflections come into conflict with word order, there may be trouble for the users of the language, as we shall see later when we turn our attention to such maters as WHO or WHOM and ME or I. The second fact we m