問題詳情
Speech and WritingIt is a widely held misconception that writing is more perfect than speech. To many people, writing somehow seems morecorrect and more stable, whereas speech can be careless, corrupted, and susceptible to change. Some people even go so far as toidentify language with writing and to regard speech as a secondary form of language used imperfectly to approximate the idealsof the written language.One of the basic assumptions of modern linguistics, however, is that speech is primary and writing is secondary. The mostimmediate manifestation of language is speech and not writing. Writing is simply the representation of speech in anotherphysical medium. Spoken language encodes thought into a physically transmittable form. Writing is a two-stage process. Allunits of writing, whether letter or characters, are based on units of speech, i.e. words, sounds, or syllables. When linguists studylanguage, they take the spoken language as their best source of data and their object of description (except in instances oflanguages like Latin for which there are no longer any speakers).What gives rise to the misconception that writing is more perfect than speech? There are several reasons. For one thing, theproduct of writing is usually more aptly worded and better organized, containing fewer errors, hesitations, and incompletesentences than are found in speech. This perfection of writing can be explained by the fact that writing is the result ofdeliberation, correction, and revision while speech is the spontaneous and simultaneous formulation of ideas; writing istherefore less subject to the constraint of time than speech is. In addition, writing is ultimately associated with education andeducated speech.
【題組】46. The word “approximate” is closest in meaning to _____.
(A) make better than.
(B) come close to
(C) take out of
(D) get on with
參考答案
答案：B
難度：簡單0.888889
統計：A(0),B(8),C(0),D(0),E(0)