- •Seminar 1
- •Practice: Task 11
- •Task 12
- •Seminar 2
- •Practice: Task 13
- •Seminar 3
- •Practice: Task 48
- •Task 49
- •Seminar 4
- •Practice: Task 56
- •Task 57
- •Task 58
- •Task 64
- •Task 65
- •Task 68
- •Task 69
- •Task 70
- •Task 71
- •Task 72
- •Etienne de Silhouette → silhouette
- •Louis Braille → Braille / braille
- •Samuel Pickwick →Pickwick
- •Joseph I. Guillotine → guillotine
- •John Duns Scotus → dunce
- •Levi Strauss → Levis
- •Task 73
- •Seminar 5
- •Practice: Task 130
- •Task 131
- •Task 132
- •Idiomatic Diet (how to lose weight without exercise)
- •Seminar 6
- •Practice: Task 50
- •Task 51
- •Task 52
- •Task 53
- •Task 54
- •Task 55
- •Seminar 7
- •Practice: Task 127
- •Task 128
- •Task 129
- •Seminar 8
- •Practice: Task 14
- •Task 15
- •Task 16
Task 57
Determine the extralinguistic causes of semantic development of the words:
a) historical;
b) social;
c) psychological.
1. Primarily pen comes back to the Latin word penna ("a feather of a bird"). As people wrote with goose pens, the name was transferred to steel pens, which were later on used for writing. Still later any instrument for writing was called a pen.
2. The word case along with its general meaning of "circumstances in which a person or a thing is", possesses a number of special meanings: in law ("a question to be decided in a court of law"), in grammar ("changes in the form of a word showing its relationship with other words in a sentence"), in medicine ("a person having medical treatment", "an illness").
3. Engine was formerly used in the general meaning of "a mechanical contrivance" (especially of war and torture), but since the Industrial Revolution it has come to mean "a mechanical source of power".
4. Today the word client is viewed euphemistically as "a person who is a subject of regulation by a government agency or public authority".
5. The word supper was borrowed from French. There is a supposition that supper comes from sup, which originates from an Indo-European base relating to drinking. Supper is the name of a meal taken at the end of the day. In old times when people had little heat in their houses, they used to have a hot drink before going to bed. That was supper, so first supper meant "drinking at bed-time", later it began to refer to the last meal of the day.
6. In everyday communication, the noun noise means "sound, especially a sound that is loud, unpleasant, unexpected, or undesired". It also has other, more specialized meanings: for instance, in physics it means Ha disturbance, especially a random or persistent disturbance, that obscures or reduces the clarity of a signal", in computer science - "irrelevant or meaningless data".
7. The noun don means "a (university) teacher, a leader, a master". However, to divert people's attention from some negative phenomena, in the criminal circles this word has come to be used in the meaning "the head of Mafia family or other group involved in organized crime".
8. The adjective plastic, meaning "capable of being moulded", arrived in English in the early 1600s. Now it is used to refer to synthetic materials.
9. Besides the meaning "a simple garment worn over the front part of one's clothes to keep them clean while one is cooking, doing something dirty, etc.", the word apron developed a number of technical senses. In the theatre, it refers to the part of the stage that extends into the auditorium in front of the curtain, whereas in an airport it would name the hard surface on which planes are turned round, loaded, unloaded, etc. Alternatively, for example, in sport it denotes the part of the floor of a boxing ring that extends outside the ropes. In geology apron stands for a deposit of gravel and sand at the base of a mountain or extending from the edges of a glacier.