| 单词 | 如果有人 |
| 释义 | 〔hopefully〕And though this use ofhopefully may have been a vogue word when it first gained currency 30 years ago, it has long since lost any taint of jargon or pretentiousness for the general reader.The well-attested acceptance of the usage reflects an implicit popular recognition of its usefulness;there is no precise substitute.Someone who saysHopefully, the treaty will be ratified makes a hopeful prediction about the fate of the treaty,whereas someone who saysI hope (or We hope or It is hoped ) the treaty will be ratified expresses a bald statement about what is desired. Only the latter could be continued with a clause such asbut it isn't likely. · It might have been expected, then, that the initial flurry of objections tohopefully would have subsided once the usage became well established. Instead, increased currency of the usage appears only to have made the critics more adamant.In the 1969 Usage Panel survey the usage was acceptable to 44 percent of the Panel;in the most recent survey it was acceptable to only 27 percent.(By contrast, 60 percent accepted the analogous use ofmercifully in the sentence Mercifully, the game ended before the opponents could add another touchdown to the lopsided score. ) Yet the Panel has not shown any signs of becoming generally more conservative:in the very same survey panelists were disposed to accept once-vilified usagessuch as the employment ofcontact and host as verbs. · It seems that this use ofhopefully has been made a litmus test, which distinguishes writers who take an active interest in questions of grammar or usage from the great mass of people who keep their own linguistic counsel.No one can be blamed who useshopefully in blithe ignorance of the critics' disdain for it, since the rule could not be derived from any general concern for clarity or precision.But writers who are aware of the critical controversy face a more delicate decision.Some will simply flout the rule,seeing no reason that they should be deprived of a useful construction.Others may choose to avoid the usage,whether they are motivated by discretion or civility. ·Like other sentence adverbs such asbluntly and happily, hopefully may occasionally be ambiguous. In the sentenceHopefully, the company has launched a new venture, the word hopefully might be construed as describing the point of view of either the speaker or the subject. Such ambiguities can be resolved either by repositioning the adverb (as inThe company has launched the new venture hopefully ) or by choosing a paraphrase ( One may hope that the company has launched the new venture ). 尽管hopefully 的这一用法在30年前首次通用的时候曾是个时兴词， 但对于广大读者来说它早已失去了俚语或矫饰的色彩。屡经证实的对这一用法的接受反映了对其实用性的普遍默认；而且并不存在其他精确的代用词。有人如果说但愿条约能被批准 ， 便是对条约的命运作了充满希望的预测，反之如果有人说我希望 （或 我们希望 或 希望 ) 条约将会被批准 则表达了对其期望之物的大胆声明。 只有后者可以接从句象但这不大可能 。 也许我们本可以期待当这一用法已变得根深蒂固之后， 对hopefully 的一片反对声可稍事平息。 然而，这一用法的流行似乎反而使批评家们更为坚定。在1969年用法调查使用小组的调查中44%的成员接受这一用法；在最近一次的调查中却只有27%的成员接受。（相比之下，60%的人接受mercifully 在句子 幸好，在对手能够给这一边倒的比分再加上一分之前，比赛就结束了 中的类似用法） 但是并没有任何迹象表明调查小组成员正在普遍变得更保守：在同一次调查中小组成员们倾向于接受被一度废除的某些用法，如把contact 和 host 用作动词看来。 似乎hopefully 的用法已经成了一块试金石， 它把对语法和用法怀有浓厚兴趣的作家和保留着他们自己的语言学顾问的广大民众区分开来。那些全然忽视批评家们的蔑视使用hopefully 的人不该受到指责， 因为规则并不来源于任何对清晰和精确的关注。但是意识到了批评界争议的作者们面对着一个更为微妙的决定。有些人干脆违反规则，他们认为没有理由要失去这么一个实用的结构。另外一些人则选择避免这一用法，无论其动机是出于谨慎还是出于礼貌。象许多其它句中副词如bluntly 和 happily一样，hopefully 经常出现歧义。 在下句 Hopefully, the company has launched a new venture 中， hopefully 一词可以解释为记述说话者的观点或者句中主语的观点。 这种歧义可以通过调换副词位置（如公司已经满怀希望地到办了一个新企业 )或选择另一种说法( 有人希望这个公司已经创办了一个新企业 )来消除 〔equal〕It has been argued thatequal is an absolute term— two quantities either are or are not equal—and hence cannot be qualified as to degree.Therefore one cannot logically speak ofa more equal allocation of resources among the departments. However, this usage was accepted by 71 percent of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey.What is more, objection to the usage betrays a widespread but questionable assumptionthat it is in mathematics and logic that we find the model of accuracy most appropriate to the everyday use of language,a supposition that also underlies traditional grammatical discussions of words such asunique, parallel, and center. According to this account,the "precise" or "literal" meaning ofequal is realized in the use of the equal sign in an arithmetic expression such as 5 + 2 = 7; and the ordinary-language uses of the term,though they may be permissible,represent "loose" or "imprecise" extensions of that sense.But in fact the mathematical concept of equality is a poor model for using the wordequal to describe relations between things in the world. As applied to such things,statements of equality are always relative to an implicit standard of tolerance.When someone saysThe two boards are of equal length, we assume that the equality is reckoned to some order of approximation determined by the context;if we did not,we would be required always to usenearly equal when speaking of the dimensions of physical objects. What is more,we often want to predicate equality of things that do not admit of quantitative measurement,as when we sayThe college draft was introduced in an effort to make the teams in the National Football League as equal as possible, orThe candidates for the job should all be given equal consideration. In all such cases,equality is naturally a gradient notionand so is amenable to modification in degree.This much is evident from the existence of the wordunequal. The prefixun- attaches only to gradient adjectives: we sayunmanly but not unmale; and the worduneven can be applied to a surface (whose evenness may be a matter of degree) but not to a number (whose evenness is an either-or affair). ·The adverbequally is generally regarded as redundant when used in combination with as, and the following examples employingequally as were termed unacceptable by 63 percent of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey: 单词equal 一向被认为是一个很绝对的词语—— 两个数量要么相同要么不同——这样就不能有程度上的差别。所以，如果有人说在各部门间对资源更公平的分配 ，那么就不合逻辑了。 但是这种用法在早先的用法调查中被百分之七十一用法使用小组的人接受。而且，对这种用法的反对体现出了一种很流行但却值得怀疑的假设，那就是我们从数学和逻辑中得出适用于日常语言准确性的实例，而这种假设也可从我们对一些词，如unique，parallel 和 center 传统的语法讨论中体现出来。 根据这个解释，equal “准确”或“书面”的意思则是由在算术表达式，如5+2=7中所运用的相同的符号而表达清楚的； 而该词在日常语言中的用法，虽然被允许，但却代表了其含意“松散”或“不严谨”的引申。但是实际上用数学概念上的相等来运用equal 这个词描述世上各种事物之间的关系是一个很差劲的例子。 当该词应用于生活中的事物时，相等的观念往往与暗含的容忍相关联。当有人说两块木板同样长 时， 我们会认为由于上下文的关系，相等可以被看作大约近似；如果我们不这样想，那么当我们谈到物体的尺寸时，就要经常使用nearly equal 。 另外，我们常常会预测和数量无关的事物的相同性，比如我们会说，引入大学的要求是为了使全国足球联合会中的各队尽可能平等 ， 或者应给予该项工作的应征者同等的考虑 。 在所有这些例子中，相等是个可变化的概念，所以可在程度有所不同。Unequal 这个词的存在就是很好的证明。 un- 这个前缀只附加于有程序变化的形容词， 我们说unmanly 但不说 unmale ； 而uneven 这个词只能用于某物的表面（其平坦可有程度上的差别）， 而不能用于数目（数目只能说相等或不相等）。Equally 这一副词在与 as 连用时通常被认为是多余的， 在早先的用法调查中，以下这些使用equally as 的句子遭到百分之六十三使用小组的人反对： |
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