As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings. Since these do not necessarily, nor even usually, take the place of the old ones, we should picture this process as the analogy of a tree throwing out new branches which themselves throw out subordinate branches. The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old one but by no means always. We shall again and again find the earliest senses of a word flourishing for centuries despite a vast overgrowth of later senses which might be expected to kill them. When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often, make one of them dominant during a particular period. Thus "station" is now more likely to mean a railway station than anything else; "speculation" more likely to bear its financial sense than any other. Until this century "plane" had as its dominant meaning "a flat surface" or "a carpenter’s tool to make a surface smooth", but the meaning "an ae
A. stress the natural phenomena
B. picture the process of growth of new branches
C. explain what the analogy is
D. illustrate his view in a clearer way
As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings. Since these do not necessarily, nor even usually, take the place of the old ones, we should picture this process as the analogy of a tree throwing out new branches which themselves throw out subordinate branches. The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old one but by no means always. We shall again and again find the earliest senses of a word flourishing for centuries despite a vast overgrowth of later senses which might be expected to kill them. When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often, make one of them dominant during a particular period. Thus "station" is now more likely to mean a railway station than anything else; "speculation" more likely to bear its financial sense than any other. Until this century "plane" had as its dominant meaning "a flat surface" or "a carpenter’s tool to make a surface smooth", but the meaning "an ae
A. their dominant meanings have not been determined
B. sometimes they mean something different from their dominant meanings
C. our natural impulse makes a mistake
D. the dominant sense of a word is not accurate in our minds
Text 3
As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings. Since they do not necessarily, nor even usually, take the place of the old ones, we should picture this process as the analogy of a tree throwing out new branches which themselves throw out subordinate branches. The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old one but by no means always. We shall again and again find the earliest senses of a word flourishing for centuries despite a vast overgrowth of later senses which might be expected to kill them.
When a word has several meanings historical circumstances often make one of them dominantduring a particular period. Thus "station" is now more likely to mean a railway-station than anything else; "speculation" more likely to bear its financial sense than any other. Until this century "plane" had as its dominant meaning "a flat surface" or "a carpenter’s tool to make a surface smooth",
A. their dominant meanings have not been determined
B. sometimes they mean something different from their dominant meanings
C. our natural impulse makes a mistake
D. the dominant sense of a word is not accurate in our minds
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