Structural patterns. 1. A snob is a person who has too great a respect for wealth and social position, who is ashamed of connections with people in what are called the lower

NOTES

1. A snob is a person who has too great a respect for wealth and social position, who is ashamed of connections with people in what are called "the lower walks of life"; who despises anyone whose achievements in life are lower than his own.

The word snob (snobbery) came into wide use after the appearance of "The Book of Snobs", by the English satirist W.M. Thackeray, published in 1848. Its origin is unknown.

2.... and in his rather shabby clothes he looked very much like a working-man.

Once he looked anxiously at Grace...

Among these people... she looked tall and splendidly alone.

He looked up cautiously, for they were about eight feet away from his father.

As seen from the above examples the verb to look may enter into different' grammatical structures. The potential ability of a word to appear in specific grammatical structures is termed grammatical valency (грамматическая валентность).

As a rule a difference in grammatical structures signals a difference in the meaning of a word, e. g.

• to look like smb - to be similar in appearance to smb
• to look at smb - to deliberately turn one's eyes towards smb or smth
• to look + adj - to have a certain appearance
• to look up - to raise one's eyes

Another characteristic of vocabulary units is lexical valency (лексическая валентность) which is the aptness of a word to appear in different collocations (сочетание слов). For example, in the text we find the adjective easy combined with the noun words in the sentence: The young man's easy words trailed away... Непринужденность, с которой молодой человек разговаривал с девушкой, стала исчезать.

The adjective easy can also be found in many other combinations, e.g. an easy task (not difficult - легкое задание), an easy life (free rom trouble, anxiety, etc - лёгкая, беззаботная жизнь), an easy

path (comfortable to walk along - удобная тропа), easy manners (not showing embarrassment - непринужденные манеры), etc, thus displaying different shades of its meaning.

The grammatical valency of English and Russian words similar in meaning is not always identical and requires careful attention, e. g.

• to suggest that smb do smth - предлагать кому-л. сделать что-л.
• to operate on smb - оперировать кого-л.
• to think it wrong to do smth - считать неправильным сделать что л.

The same difficulty can be revealed when comparing the lexical valency of words in English and Russian. Words which correspond in their general meaning cannot always be combined in the same way, e.g.

• fresh water - пресная вода
• a bad mistake - грубая ошибка.
• high hopes - большие надежды
• to make tea - заварить чай

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