单项选择题

Language When most of us think about language, we think first about words. Thus, the hardest part of learning a foreign language may seem to be memorizing 【51】 vocabulary; when we observe a child first acquiring speech, we talk of his progress 【52】 a matter of learning new words. We are also 【53】 to feel that the adult speaker with the largest vocabulary has the best 【54】 of English. To think 【55】 a language as just a stock of words is 【56】 , quite wrong. Words alone do not 【57】 a language; a grammar is 【58】 to combine them in some intelligible way. Moreover, words are relatively easy to learn, and indeed all of us go 【59】 learning them all our 【60】 . They are also the 【61】 stable part of language. Words come into 【62】 , change their pronunciations and meanings, and disappear completely all with comparative ease. Yet it is true that the 【63】 is focus of language. It is in words 【64】 sounds and meanings interlock to allow us to 【65】 with one another, and it is words that we arrange together to make sentences, conversations and discourse of all kinds. Thus we have a paradox in that the most short-lived part of language is also the centre where meaning, pronunciation, and grammar come together.