语言学试题集1

1 Competence is the ideal user`s knowledge of the rules of his language. That is , of its sound structure, its words, and its grammatical rules. The knowledge involved in competence is generally unconscious.

2 Allophone : the different members of a phoneme, sounds that are phonetically different but do not make one word different from another in meaning, are allophone. For example, the phoneme /l/ in english can be realized as dark〖l〗,clear〖l〗, which are allophones of the phoneme /l/.

3Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. It can`t be divided without destroying or altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. For example, “re” is not a word, but it does carry meaning. Thus “re” is a morpheme.

4 X-bar theory: a general and highly abstract schema that collapses all phrase structure rules into a single format: X—(spec) X(compel).

5 synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Synonymy can be divided into dialectal synonymy, stylistic synonymy, emotive synonymy, collocational synonymy and sematic synonymy.

6 language family: a group of historically or generally related languages that have developed from a common ancestral language. There are four main language families, that is , the indo-european family, the sino-tibetan family, the austronesian family, and the afroasiatic family.

7 Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. Morphology is divided into two sub-branches: inflectional morphology and lexical or derivational morphology. The former studies the inflections and later studies the word formation.

8 lingua franca: a variety of language that serves as a common speech for social contact among groups of people who speak different native languages or dialects.

9 the Sapir—Whorf hypothesis: a theory put forward by the american authropological linguists Sapir and Whorf (and also a belief held by some scholars) which states that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language.

10 Interlanguage: the approximate language system that a second language learner constructs which represents his or her transitional competence in the target language.

1 Please explain with examples what is a grammatical sentence.

A sentence is considered grammatical when it conforms to the grammatical knowledge in the mind of native speakers. If , on the other hand, a sentence violates a rule according to which words are organized , then native speaker will judge it to be an impossible sentence of their language.

Take the phrase structure rules for example, “ cheese fell from the moon,” is a grammatical sentence because it conforms to the rule of “ S—Np Vp”.on the other hand, “cheese fell the moon from”, is not grammatical because it violate the rule of “ PP—PNP”.

2 what are the four maxims of the CP? How does the violation of these maxims give rise to conversational implicatures?

There are four maxims of the CP (cooperative principle).

The maxim of quantity: 1 make your contribution as informative as required. 2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The maxim of quality: 1 Do not say what you believe to be false.2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The maxim of relation: Be relevant.

The maxim of manner: 1 Avoid obscurity of expression.2 Avoid ambiguity. 3 Be brief. 4 Be orderly.

Most of these violations of these maxims give rise to what Grice calls “ conversational implicatures”. In other words, when we violate any of these maxims , our language becomes indirect. In this way, we can convey more than is literally said.

语言学试题集2

1 Performance is a actual realization of the ideal language user`s knowledge of the rules of his language in linguistic communication.

2 Minimal pair: when two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in the string, the two words are called minimal pair. That is , minimal pair are word forms that different from each other only by one sound, for example, “Pin” and “Bin” are minimal pair.

3 Free morphemes: the words contain only one morpheme; they are called free morpemes, which are independent units of meaning and can be used by themselves.

4 Hierarchical structure: the sentence structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, such as NP and VP.

5 Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, that is , different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both . when two words are identical in sound, they are homophones. when two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs.

6 locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clause. It is the act of converying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.

7 Diachronic linguistics: a term used to refer to the study of language as it changes through time.

8 Diglossia: a sociolinguistic situation in which two varieties of language are used for different situation, one being more standard and higher, and used for more formal matters, and the other less prestigious, and used for colloquial situations.

9 Brain lateralization refers to the localization of cognitive and perceptual functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain.

10 Interference: the use of one`s first language rule which leads to an error or inappropriate form in the target language.

1 In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features?

In the light of componential analysis, the meaning of a word consists of a number of distinctive meaning features; the analysis breaks down the meaning of the word into these features;  it is these different features that distinguish word meaning. Similarly, a phoneme is considered as a collection of distinctive sound features; a phoneme can be broken down into these distinctive sound features and it is these sound features that distinguish different sounds.

2 Describe the processes of language perception, comprehension and production.

From the perspective of psycholinguistic analysis, language use in terms of perception, comprehension, and production follows a certain pattern which involves the coordination of various language centers. For example, when we speak , words are drawn from Wernick`s area and transferred to Broca`s area , which determines the details of their form and pronunciation. The appropriate instructions are then sent to the motor area which controls the vocal tract to physically articulate the words. When we hear something and try to comprehend it, the stimulus from the auditory cortex is transmitted to Wernicke`s area , where it is interpreted. When we perceive a visual image, a message is sent to the angular gyrus, where it is converted into a visual pattern.

语言学试题集3

1 Inflectional affixes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categoies such as number, tense, degree and case.

2 Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use, parole is concrete and varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.

3 Intonation: when pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: the falling tones, the rising tones, the fall-rise tone, and the rise-fall tone.

4 Syntactic category: words and phrases are organized according to the syntactic categories they belong to. A syntactic category usually refers to a word( called a lexical category) or a phrase( called a phrasal category) that performs a particular grammatical function, such as the subject in a sentence. Constituents that can be substituted for one another without loss of grammaticality belong to the same syntactic category.

5 Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word, the word which is more general in meaning is called the superordinate and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms to each other.

6 Componential analysis is a way proposed by the structural semanticists to analyze word meaning. The approach is based upon the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. For example, the word “man” is analyzed as comprising of +HUMAN+ADULT+ANIMATE+MALE.

7 Blending is a way of forming a new word by combining parts of two other words. For example, smog(smoke+fog).

8 Pidgin ia a marginal contact language with a limited vocabulary and reduced grammatical structures, used by native speakers of other language as a means of business communication.

9 Psycholinguistics : the study of language in relation to the mind, with focus on the process of language production, comprehension and acquisition.

10 Input: the language which a learner hears or receives and from which he or she can learn.

1 Draw a tree diagram of its underlying structure

Mary advised John to see the dentist.

Mary promised John to see the doctor.

2 Explain how the inventory of sounds can change, giving some examples in english for illustration.

The inventory of sounds can change, and sound change include changes in vowel sound , sound loss, sound addition and sound movement.

Vowel sound change: a series of systematic sound change in the history of english that involved seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major discrepancies between the pronunciation and the spelling.

Sound movement: sound changes as a result of sound movement known as metathesis involves a reveral in position of two adjoining sound segments. For example, bridd is an old english word. When metathesis occurred to this word, the movement of /r/ sound to the right of the vowel resulted in its modern english counterpart “bird”.

语言学试题集4

1 Duality language is a system, which consists of two sets of structures, or two levels. At the lower or the basic level there are a limited number of sounds, which are meaningless, but the sounds of language can be grouped and regrouped into an unlimited number of units of meaning, which are found at the higher level of the system.

2 Complementary distribution: when two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in “ complementary distribution”. For example, 【p】and 【ph】never contrast each other, they are two allophones of the same phoneme/p/. they occur in different environments; when speakers of english pronounce a word which begins with/p/, they choose the aspirated allophone【ph】; and if the /p/ occurs after the sound/s/, they will choose the unaspirated allophone【p】. these two allophones of the same phoneme are said to be in complementary distribution.

3 Bound morphemes: the morphemes cannot be used by themselves, but must be combined with other morphemes to form words that can be used independently. They are called bound morphemes. Bound morphemes include two types: roots and affixes.

4 Grammatical relation refers to the structural and logical functional relations between every noun phrase and verb in a sentence.

5 Complementary antonyms: a pair of complementary antonyms is characterized by the feature that the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the other. In other words, it is not a matter of degree between two extremes, but a matter of either one or the other. For example, “alive” and “dead”

6 Context is regarded as constituted by all kinds of knowledge assumed to be shared by the speaker and the hearer, for example, the knowledge of the language used and the knowledge of the world, including the general knowledge about the world and specific knowledge about the situation in which linguistic communication is taking place.

7 Protolanguage refers to the original form of a language family which has ceased to exist.

8 Sociolect refers to a variety of language used by people belonging to a particular social class.

9 The critical period: an early period of one`s life extending to the age of puberty, during which the human brain is most ready to acquire language naturally and effortlessly, a period that coincides with the period of brain laterlization for language functions.

10 Language acquisition: a general term used to refer to the development of a person`s first, second , or forengn language.

1 How is modern linguistics different from traditional grammar?

Modern linguistics differs from traditional grammar in two ways. Traditional grammar is based on “high”(literary reilgious) written language. Modern linguistics studies whatever occurs in the language people use and mainly spoken language. Traditional grammar is prescriptive. They set models for language users to follow. On the other hand, moder linguistics is mostly descriptive. Linguistic study is supposed to describe the language people actually use, be it correct or not.

2 Discuss two contrasting views with reference to the behaviorist learning model and the nativist biological model.

The behaviorist view: language acquisition is a process of habit formation. Language is learned through stimulus and response. Reinforcement of selected responses is the key to understanding language development. Children learn to produce correct sentences because they are positively reinforced when they say something right and negatively reinforced when they say something wrong.

The nativist view: language acquisition is the species-specific property of human beings. Children are born with an innate ability to acquire language. They are predisposed to develop their native language along a universal , predetermined route through similar stages. They go about acquiring the grammar of their native language using principles unique to language acquisition.

语言学试题集5

1 langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community. Langue is abstract and relatively stable.

2 Board transcription: a way to transcribe speech sounds. The basic principle is to use one letter to indicate one sound. It is generally used in dictionaries and language teaching textbooks.

3 Syntax: a subfield of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language.

4 Polysemy: one word may have more than one meaning. This is what we called polysemy, and such a word is called a polysemic word.

5 Semantic narrowing is the reverse process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For example, the word “deer” was used earlier to refer to any animal, but its moden reference has been narrowed down to only a specific species.

6 Apocope: the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.

7 Sociolinguistics: the subdiscipline of linguistics that studies language variation and language use in social contexts.

8 Cerebral cortex refers to the outside surface of the brain which receives the messages from all the sensory organs and where human cognitive abilities reside.

9 Fossilization: a process that sometimes occurs in the second language learning in which incorrect linguistic features( such as the accent or a grammatical pattern) become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes in the target language.

10 Caretaker speech refers to simple ,modified speech used by parents and babysitters when they talk to young children who are acquiring their native language.

1 what are the main featues of english compounds?

All compounds share the following features.

Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without 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 it components.

Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.

2 what is the difference between standard language, national language and offical language?

Standard language is a superposed prestigious variety of language of a community or nation, usually based on the speech and writing of educated native speakers of the language.

While the imposition of a dialect as a “standard language” is executed more in informal ways than through government intervention, it is not the case for the imposition of a “ national language” onto a newly liberated country or a multinational one, which needs greater efforts on the part of government or public institution, by restoration, by imposing a prestige language, or by preserving the former ruler`s language.

An “ official language”, similar to a standard or national language, is under formal, official situations( or in mass-media) and so distinction lies in its social function.