词汇学答案1-4章.pdfVIP

第一章 1.A word is a minimal free form of a languagethat 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/sh/(树 ) to refer to the same thing. This explainsù 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. ⑶ influence 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 co