评论
打印
The grammatical words which play so large a part in English grammar are for the most part sharply and obviously different from the lexical words. A rough
and ready difference which may seem the most obvious is that grammatical __1__ words have “less meaning”, but in fact some grammarians have called them __2__ “empty” words as opposed in the “full” words of vocabulary. But this is a rather __3__ misled way of expressing the distinction. Although a word like the is not the name __4__ of something as man is, it is very far away from being meaningless; there is a __5__ sharp difference in meaning between “man is vile” and “the man is vile”, yet the is the single vehicle of this difference in meaning. Moreover, grammatical words __6__ differ considerably among themselves as the amount of meaning they have even in __7__ the lexical sense. Another name for the grammatical words has been “little words.”
But size is by no mean a good criterion for distinguishing the grammatical words.” __8__ of English, when we consider that we have lexical words as go, man, say, car. __9__ Apart from this, however, there is a good deal of truth in what some people say:
we certainly do create a great number of obscurity when we omit them. This is __10__ illustrated not only in the poetry of Robert Browning but in the prose of telegrams and newspaper headlines.
