| 释义 |
ba·by-sit AHD[bāʹbē-sĭt'] D.J.[ˈbeɪbiːˌsɪt]K.K.[ˈbebiˌsɪt]v.（动词）ba.by-.sat[-săt'] ba.by-.sit.ting, ba.by-.sits v.intr.（不及物动词）- To take care of someone or something needing attention or guidance.临时照看：照看那些需要注意或指引的人或事
v.tr.（及物动词）- To take care of:照看：baby-sat the children; baby-sat the Soviet defector; baby-sit a breaking news story.照看孩子；看守苏联逃兵；注意爆炸性的新闻报道
注释- The verbbaby-sit is of interest to parents, children, and linguists. It is interesting to the last group because it illustrates one of two types of the linguistic process called back-formation.The first type is based on misunderstanding, as in the case of our wordpea. In Middle English the ancestor ofpea had plural forms, such aspese and pease, that were identical with singular forms.In other words, thes was part of the word, not a plural ending.But around the beginning of the 17th century people began to interpret the sound represented bys as a plural ending, and a new singular, spelledpea in Modern English, was developed. On the other hand, in the case ofbaby-sit, first recorded in 1947, andbaby sitter, first recorded in 1937, no misunderstanding is involved. The agent nounbaby sitter with its -er suffix could have been derived from the verb baby-sit, asdiver was from dive, but the evidence seems to show that the pattern was reversed,and the agent noun preceded the verb from which it would normally have been derived.动词baby-sit 会引起父母、孩子或语言学家的兴趣。 语言学家对此感兴趣是因为它说明了两种叫做逆序造词的语言形成类型中的一种。第一种类型源于误解，如pea 一词的例子。 在中古英语中pea 的原形有复数形式， 如pese 和 pease， 它们的单数形式是相同的。换句话说，s 是词的一部分， 不是复数词尾。但在17世纪初左右，人们开始把s 所代表的音理解为复数词尾， 因此，在现代英语中被拼作pea 的新的单数形式，发展起来。 另一方面，以baby-sit 为例，它第一次被记载于1947年， baby sitter 第一次被记录于1937年，没有歧义产生。 加上后缀-er 的动因名词 babysitter 可能是从动词 baby-sit 衍生出来的， 就象diver 是从 dive 衍生出来的一样， 但是迹象似乎表明这个模式是反向的，动因名词先于在正常情况下它从中衍生的动词出现
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