The grammatical words which play so large a part in English
grammar are for the most part sharply and obviously different from
the lexical words. A rough and ready difference
which may seem the most obvious is that grammatical words (1)______
have "less meaning", but in fact some grammarians have (2)______
called them "empty" words as opposed in the "full" words of (3)______
vocabulary. But this is a rather misled way of expressing the (4)______
distinction. Although a word like the is not the name of something
as man is, it is very far away from being meaningless; (5)______
there is a sharp difference in meaning between "man is vile"
and "the man is vile", yet the is the single vehicle of this (6)______
difference in meaning. Moreover, grammatical words differ
considerably among themselves as the amount of meaning they (7)______
have, even in the lexical sense. Another name for the grammatical
words has been "little words." But size is by no mean (8)______
a good criterion for distinguishing the grammatical words of
English, when we consider that we have lexical words as go, (9)______
man, say, car. Apart from this, however, there is a good deal
of truth in what some people say: we certainly do create a
great number of obscurity when we omit them. This is illustrated (10)______
not only in the poetry of Robert Browing but in the prose
of telegrams and newspaper headlines.
【参考答案】
将the去掉。当most不明确用来表示最高级而是用来表示"非常"、"极其"时前面不加冠词the。在现代英语中,most即使用作最高级形式,其前面的定冠词也经常可以省略,尤其是当它所修饰的成分作表语时。试比较:a. All the questions were difficult,but which ......