2013年专四作文真题附范文:节约花钱

作者词汇基础很好，也能较灵活使用学术词汇，望继续努力；作者有一定功底，可在平时练习中增加长难句的记忆；文章结构不够严谨，应增加过程性词汇的使用。

In the course of the development of language old words die out, new words are added and existing words change their meanings. During the process,it is obvious that the gradual change of meaning in words is a universal feature of human language. What’s more, when a word loses its old meaning and comes to refer to something altogether different, then the result is a change of word meaning. Change of meaning can be brought about by many causes. First, historical cause is a key factor. In different phases of history, the world is quite different. Some old objects are substituted by new things, in the end, the form of those words describe the old objects may been retained, but in order to define the new things the conceptions and meaning of those words are transformed. For instance, in ancient time, the feather was called “pen” by westerners as a tool of writing. Then when it comes to a new age, people no longer use feather to write. Instead, what people use is ball-pen and gel ink pen. But the word “pen” is still used to mean a tool of writing. Similarly, the word car meant “two-wheeled vehicle for carrying loads”. With the emergence and prosperity of automobile industry, the word car was first applied to the automobile in 1895, that is to say, it means a usually “four-wheeled automotive vehicle designed for passenger transportation”. Second, linguistic cause is equally important, because it helps many words adding additional meaning. For instance, there has been a tendency towards ellipsis in English. The original sense of the word fall means to descend or go down freely, wheres the other meaning of this word is autumn because of the ellipsis of the phrase “fall of leaves”. In addition, English language incorporated new words into it from other languages. Deer used to denote animals. The word “animal” in Latin and “beast” in French shared the same meaning with “deer”. In order to distinguish the three synonyms, the meaning of “deer” was narrowed down into a certain kind of animal. “Animal” kept its original meaning. “Beast” was endowed with the meaning of danger and cruelty. Third, human being is changing. In the primitive society, there is no hierarchy, and everyone is equal. While with social progress and quick development of human beings, the social hierarchy came into being, so there are lowliness and nobleness among human beings. The nobility of a society had a prejudice against peasant, as a result, the meaning of words falls into dispute because the society prejudice. For example, villain now denotes a man guilty of evil deeds, but the original sense of villain is a farmer that is neutral. Wench is a word describing a country girl originally, while now it just means a girl of loose character. To put it in a nutshell, the world, the language, and human beings are all changing with the time goes. Change of meaning is a commonplace, and indeed it appears to be fundamental in living language. Almost every word we use today has a slightly different meaning from the one it has a century ago, and a century ago it had a slightly different meaning from the one it had a century before that.