1.  What are the major branches of linguistics? What does each of them study? (语言学的主要分支是什么。每个分支的研究对象是什么？)

Linguistics mainly involves the following branches:

General linguistics, which is the study of language as a whole and which deals with the basic concepts, theories, descriptions, models and methods applicable in any linguistic study.

Phonetics, which studies the sounds that are used in linguistic communication.

Phonology, which studies how sounds are put together and used in communication.

Mor­phology, which studies the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words.

Syntax, which studies how morphemes and words are combined to form sentences.

Semantics, which is the study of meaning in lan­guage.

Pragmatics, which is the study of meaning not in isolation, but in context of use.

Sociolinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to society.

Psycholinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to the workings of mind.

Applied linguistics, which is concerned about the application of linguistic findings in linguistic studies; in a nar­row sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages.

Other related branches are anthropological linguistics, contextual linguistics, neurological linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

 

2. In What basic ways does modern linguistics differ from traditional grammar? (现代语言学与传统语法有什么区别?)

Traditional gram­mar is prescriptive; it is based on "high "(religious, literary) written lan­guage. It sets models for language users to follow. But Modern linguistics is descriptive; its investigations are based on authentic, and mainly spoken language data. It is supposed to be scientific and objective and the task of linguists is supposed to describe the language people actually use, whether it is "correct" or not.

 

3.  What is synchronic study? What is diachronic study? (什么叫共时研究？什么叫历时研究？)

The description of a language at some point in time is a synchronic study; the de­scription of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study. A synchronic study of language describes a language as it is at some particular point in rime, while a diachronic study of language is a historical study; it studies the historical development of language over a period of time.

 

4.  What are the design features of human language? (人类语言的甄别性特征是什么？)

1) Arbitrariness

It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For instance, there is no nec­essary relationship between the word dog and the animal it refers to. The fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages and that the same sound may be used to refer to different objects is another good example. Although language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. Some words, such as the words created in the imitation of sounds are motivated in a certain degree. The arbitrary nature of language makes it possible for language to have an unlimited source of expressions.

2) Productivity

Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the con­struction and interpretation of an infinitely large number of sentences, including those that people have never said or heard before.

3) Duality

It means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds at the lower level and the other of meanings at the higher level. At the lower or the basic level, there is the structure of individual and meaningless sounds, which can be grouped into meaningful units at the higher level. This duality of structure or dou­ble articulation of language enables its users to talk about anything within their knowledge.

4) Displacement

It means that language can be used to talk about what happened in the past, what is happening now, or what will happen in the future. Language can also be used to talk about our real world experiences or the experiences in our imaginary world. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker.

5) Cultural transmission

While we are born with the ability to acquire language, the details of any language are not genetically transmitted, but instead have to be taught and learned anew.

 

5. What do Chomsky’s competence and performance respectively mean? (Chomsky的语言能力和语言使用各指什么？)

American linguist N. Chomsky in the late 1950s proposed the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language. This internalized set of rules enables the language user to produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences and recognize sentences that are ungrammatical and ambiguous. According to Chomsky, performance is the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Although the speaker’s knowledge of his mother tongue is perfect, his performances may have mistakes because of social and psychological factors such as stress, embarrassment, etc. Chomsky believes that what linguists should study is the competence, which is systematic, not the performance, which is too haphazard.

 

6. How does Saussure distinct langue and parole? (Saussure是如何区分语言和言语的？)

The distinction between langue, and parole was made by the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure early this century. Langue and parole are French words. Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community, and parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use. Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow while parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules. Langue is abstract; it is not the language people actually use, but parole is concrete; it refers to the naturally occurring language events. Langue is relatively stable; it does not change frequently; while parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.

 

7. What are the two major media of linguistic communication? Of the two, which one is primary and why? (语言交际的两大媒介是什么？哪一个是基本的交际媒介？为什么？)

Speech and writing are two major media of linguistic communication. Modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary, but not the written form, because the spoken form is prior to the written form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of lan­guage.

 

8. What are the three branches of phonetics? What do they study? (语音学的三个分支是什么？它们研究的对象各是什么？)

The three branches of phonetics are articulatory phonetics, auditory phonetics, and acoustic phonetics. Articulatory phonetics studies the human speech organs and the way in which thee speech sounds are produced. Auditory phonetics is the study of the perception of sounds by the human ear. Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of the speech sounds; it deals with the sound waves through the use of such machines as a spectrograph.

 

*9. What is voicing and how is it caused? (什么叫浊音化？它是如何形成的？)

Voicing is the result of the vibration of the vocal cords. When the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration, the sounds produced in such a way are voiceless. When vocal cords are held together tautly so that the air stream vibrates them, the sounds produced in this way are voiced.

 

10. What is the difference between the broad transcription and the narrow transcription? (宽式标音和严式标音有什么区别？)

The broad transcription is the transcription of sounds by using one letter to represent one sound. The narrow transcription is the transcription with diacritics to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.

 

11. How are the English consonants classified? (英语的辅音是如何分类的？)

English consonants can be classified in two ways: one is in terms of manner of articulation and the other is in terms of place of articulation.

1) By manner of articulation:

a. stops: [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g]

b. fricatives: [f], [v], [s], [z], [θ], [ð], [ʃ], [ʒ], [h]

c. affricates: [tʃ], [dʒ]

d. liquids: [l], [r]

e. nasals: [n], [m], [ŋ]

f. glides: [w], [j]

2) By place of articulation:

a. bilabial: [p], [b], [m], [w]

b. labiodental: [f], [v]

c. dental: [θ], [ð]

d. alveolar: [t], [d], [s], [z], [n], [l], [r]

e. palatal: [ʃ], [ʒ], [tʃ], [dʒ], [j]

f. velar: [k], [g], [ŋ]

g. glottal: [h]

 

12. How are the English vowels classified? (英语的元音是如何分类的？)

1) Vowels may be distinguished as front vowels such as [i:], [i], [e],[æ], [ɑ], central vowels such as [ɜ:], [ə], [Λ] and back vowels such as[u:], [u], [ɒ:], [ɒ], [ɑ:] in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.

2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels such as [i:], [i], [u:], [u], semi-close vowels such as [e], [ɜ:], semi-open vowels such as [ə], [ɒ:], and open vowels such as [æ], [ɑ], [Λ], [ɒ], [ɑ:].

3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.

4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound. The long vowels include [i:], [ɜ:], [ɒ:], [u:], [ɑ:], while the rest are short vowels.

 

13. What is the difference between Phonetics and Phonology? (语音学和音系学有什么区别？)

They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.

 

14. What are the differences among phone, phoneme and allophone? (音素、音位和音位变体有什么区别？)

Phones are the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning; some do, some don’t. A phoneme is a basic unit in phonology; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit. It is not a sound, but a collection of distinctive phonetic features. In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.

 

15. What are suprasegmental features? How do the major supra-segmental features of English function in conveying meaning? (什么是超音位特征？它是如何影响语义的？)

The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features; these are the phonological properties of such units as the syllable, the word, and the sentence. The main suprasegmental features include stress, intonation, and tone.

1) Stress

The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as ´import and im´port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress. For example, `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black ´bird is a bird that is black. Sentence stress refers to the relative force given to the components of a sentence. The more important words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.

2) Tone

The meaning-distinctive function of the tone is especially in tone languages. English is not a tone language, while Chinese is a typically tone language. It has four tones: level, rise, fall-rise and fall. The role of the tone can be well illustrated by pronouncing the same sound combination such as “mɑ” in the four different tones: mā(妈) má(麻) mǎ(马) mà(骂).

3) Intonation

English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone, and the rise-fall tone. When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said.

 

17. What are features of a compound? (复合词有什么特点？)

Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calcu­lable from the meanings of all its components. Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.

 

*18. How to classify morphemes? And how many? (词素可以划分成哪些类别？)

Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, e. g. “book-” in the word “bookish”.

Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound morphemes can be subdivided into roots and affixes. A root is seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it has a clear and definite meaning, such as “gene-”in the word “generate”. Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as “-s” in the word “books” to indicate plurality of nouns. Derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word such as “mis-” in the word “misinform”. Derivational affixes can also be divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word such as “dis- ” in the word “dislike”, while suffixes occur at the end of a word such as “-less” in the word “friendless”.

 

20. What are the three basic sentence structures of English? (英语的句子中的三种基本类型是什么？)

Traditionally, three major types of sentences are distinguished. They are simple sentence, coordinate or compound sentence and complex sentence.

1) A simple sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone as its own sentence. For example, ①John reads extensively. ②Mary decided to take a linguistic class the next semester. Each of the two sentences contains a single clause and can stand structurally independent.

2) A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”, “but”, “or”. The two clauses in a coordinate sentence are structurally equal parts of the sentence; neither is subordinate to the other. For example, ①John is reading a linguistic book, and Mary is preparing for her history exam. ②John likes linguistics, but Mary is interested in history.

3) A complex sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated into the other. The two clauses in a complex sentence have unequal status, one subordinating the other. The incorporated, or subordinate, clause is normally called an embedded clause, and the clause into which it is embedded is called a matrix sentence. For example, ①Mary told Jane [that John liked linguistics]. ② [That John likes linguistics] puzzles everyone. ③Mary showed interest in linguistics [after John gave her a lecture]. In the above three examples, the clauses in the square brackets are embedded clauses. They are subordinate to the clauses outside the brackets which are called matrix clauses.