Основы теории английского языка. Листунова Е.И. - 6 стр.

the perspective opened up by the study of actual languages. In the
second place, our knowledge of psychology, particularly of the sym-
bolic processes in general, is not felt to be sound enough or far
reaching enough to help materially with the problem of the emer-
gence of speech. It is probable that the origin of language is not a
problem that can be solved out of the resources of linguistics alone but
that it is essentially a particular case of a much wider problem of the
genesis of symbolic behaviour and of the specialization of such be-
haviour in the laryngeal region which may be presumed to have had
only expressive functions to begin with. Perhaps a close study of the
behaviour of very young children under controlled conditions may
provide some valuable hints, but it seems dangerous to reason from
such experiments to the behaviour of precultural man. It is more
likely that the kinds of studies which are now in progress of the
behaviour of the higher apes will help supply some idea of the
genesis of speech.
                                                Edward Sapir. Language.
       II.
       In the Introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) its
chief editor G. A. Í. Murray presents the princi ples on which the
Dictionary is based. Following is a passage from it. Give examples to
illustrate its main points.
       Language presents yet another undefined frontier, when it is
viewed in relation to time. The living vocabulary is no more perma-
nent in its constitution than definite in its extent. It is not today what
it was a century ago, still less what it will be a century hence. Its
constituent elements are in a state of slow but incessant dissolution and
renovation. ‘Old words’ are ever becoming obsolete and dying out:
‘new words’ are continually pressing in. And the death of a word is not
an event of which the date can be readily determined. It is a vanishing
process, extending over a lengthened period, of which contemporaries
never see the end. Our own words never become obsolete: it is always
the words of our grandfathers that have died with them. Even after we
cease to use a word, the memory of it survives, and the word itself
survives as a possibility; it is only when no one is left to whom its use
is still possible, that the word is wholly dead. Hence there are many
words of which it is doubtful whether they are still to be considered
as part of the living language; they are alive to some speakers, and

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