week 4

Primitive

Let’s take a look at the five top nouns that follows “primitive” (=primitive + N.) in American English, namely “art”, “life”, “people”, “sculpture”, and “man”. I screenshot the examples from an online corpus. Read the examples and make a guess about the meaning of “primitive”. Think about whether “primitive” has a positive, negative, or neutral meaning in the examples (Click the example pictures to see th enlarged images).

(1)    Primitive art

(2)    Primitive life

(3)    Primitive people

(4)    Primitive sculpture

(5)    Primitive man

(6)    What does “primitive” mean in the five phrases mentioned above.

Ancient, prertaining to a preliterate or tribal people having cultural or physical similarities with their early ancestors,unaffected or little affected by civilizing influences, 

(7)    Does “primitive” in the following five cases have a positive, negative, or neutral meaning?

Primitive + N.	Positive	Neutral	Negative
Primitive art	x
Primitive life			x
Primitive people		x
Primitive sculpture	x
Primitive man			x

Primarily

(1)    What does “primarily” mean in the article. You may want to refer to the article to decide what it means.

mainly

(2)    Find a synonym of “primarily”.

originally, initially

(3)    “Primary” is the adjective of “primarily”. One of its meanings is “happening first”. Compare “primary” and “primitive”. Do you think the two adjectives have the same meaning in this sense? Why?

I think it is slightly different. The word "primary" has meanings of  "happening first" "earlier stage", on the other hand  "primitive" has meanings of "ancient" or "under developed".