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/sh/(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.There are more phonemes than letters in English, so there is no way to use one letter to represent one phoneme.The stabilization of spelling by printing, which breaks the synchronized change of sound and spelling. influence of the work of scribes, who deliberately changed the spelling of words and borrowing, 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. cowardf. 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= beforequoth = said hallowed= holybillow= wave/ the sea bade= bid9. 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 FamilyBalto-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. OldEnglish has (1) a small vocabulary (50 00060 000), (2) a small number of borrowings from Latin and Scandinavian only and (3) the words full of endings. Middle English has (1) a comparatively large vocabulary, (2) a tremendous number of foreign words from French and Latin and (3) word endings leveled. Modern English has (1) a huge an