语言学试题集6

1 Diachronic linguistics: the study of language as it changes through time is a dischronic study . For example, a study of the changes english has undergone since shakespeare`s time would be a diacchronic study.

2 Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world`s languages. There are three branches of phonetics, articulatory phonetics, auditory phonetics and acoustic phonetics.

3 Derivative: derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word. Such a way of word-formation is called derivation and the new word formed by derivation is called derivative. For example, “quick”+ “ly”—quickly.

4 Reference means that a linguistic form refers to in a real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.

5 Perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something. It is the consequence of , or the change brought about by the utterance.

6 Historical linguistics is the subfield of linguistics that studies language change. Historical linguists are concerned with the historical development of language and the process involved in language use. They also explore methods and techniques with which they can reconstuct linguistic history and establish the relationship between languages that belong to the same language family.

7 Linguistic taboo refers to a word or expression that is prohibited by the “polite” society from general use. Obscene , profane and swear words are all taboo words that are to be avoided entirely, or at least avoided in mixed company.

8 Dichotic listening refers to a research technique which has been use to study how the brain controls hearing and language, with which subjects wear earphones and simultaneously receive different sounds in the right and left ear, and are then asked to repeat what they hear.

9 Language transfer refers to the effects of one`s first language knowledge on the learning of a second language.

10 Error analysis: an approach to the study and analysis of the errors made by second language learners which suggests that many learner errors are not due to the learner`s mother tongue interference but reflect universal learning strategies such as overgeneralization and simplification of rules.

1 How is Saussure`s distinction between langue and parole similar to chomsky`s distinction between competence and performance? And what`s their difference?

Both Saussure and Chomsky make the distinction between the abstract language system and the actual use of language. their purpose is to single out the language system for serious study.

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 abide by, and parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules. Langue is relatively stable, it does not change frequently; while parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation. In Saussure`s opinion, parole is simply a mass of linguistic facts, too varied and confusing for systematic investigation, and what linguists should do is to abstract langue from parole, to discover the regularities governing the actual use of language and make them the subjects of study of linguistics.

Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user`s knowledge of the rules of his language , and performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Similar to Saussure, Chomsky thinks what linguists should study is the ideal speaker`s competence, not his performance. Although a speaker possesses an internalized set of rules and applies them in actual use, he can not tell exactly what these rules are. So the task of the linguists is to discover and specify these rules.

Saussure took a sociological view of language and his notion of langue is a matter of social conventions, and Chomsky looks at language from a psychological point of view and to him competence is a property of the mind of each individual.

 

2 Provide evidence for the view that there is a critical period for language acquisition.

Children`s acquisition of language is a rule-governed behavior. What they acquire is a set of rules for generating an infinite number of sentences. If language was learned through imitiation and memorization of individual words and expressions, children would only speak the kind of language that they were exposed to. However, it is widely recognized that children can comprehend sentences that they have never heard before, and they are heard producing utterances that cannot be possibly uttered by adults. Many errors in the speech of children are not the result of imitation and memorization but the restult of overgeneralization of rules. For example, the way a child learns to negate sentences and form questions can be considered examples of overgeneralizatin in syntax acquisition．

语言学试题集7

1 Arbitrariness: there is no connection between the sound that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. Language ia arbitray in the sense that there is no instrinsic connection between the word “pen”, for instance, and thing used to write with.

2 Superasegmental features: the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features. The main superasegmental features include stress, intonation, and tone.

3 Cognate: a word in one language which is similar in form and meaning to a word in another language because both languages have decended from a common source.

4 Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized.

5 Phrase structure rule: a rewrite rule that allows for the possible combinations of words to form phrases and sentences.

6 Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as the result of the influence of an adjacent sound. In an assimilative process, successive sounds is made identical or more similar to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation.

7 Semantic brodening: the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically early meaning. For example, the older meaning of “aunt” was father`s sister, but its modern referent can also be mother`s sister.

8 Register: a functional speech or language variety that involves degrees of formality depending on the speech situation concerned.

9 Linguistic lateralization refers to the hemispheric specialization or dominance for language.

10 Holophrase: a single word that appears in children`s early speech and functions as a complex idea or sentence.

1 How does phonetics differs from phonology?

Phonology and phonetics are studies of speech sounds, but 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. Phonology 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. For example, the 【t】sounds in the two english words “stop” and “top” are pronounced differently. The first one is what we call an aspirated 【t】and the second one an aspirated【th】. phoneticians have recognized how quite distinct sounds for【t】in english; but if we consider these two sounds from the phonological point of view, we would say these two sounds are fundamentally the same, since they have one and the same function in communication, in distinguishing between words and meanings.

语言学试题集8

1 Cultural transmission: language is passe on from one generation to next through teaching and learnng rather than by instinct.

2 Narrow transcription: a way to transcribe speech sounds. Narrow transcription is the transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics.

3 Universal grammar refers to a system of linguistic knowledge which consists of some general principles and parameters about natural languages.

4 Relational opposites: a kind of antonyms, refer to pairs of words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items. For example, “husband” and “wife”.

5 The great vowel shift: a series of systemantic sound change in the history of english that involves seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major discrepancies between english pronunciaton and its spelling system.

6 Speech community: a group of people who forms a community and share at least one speech variety as well as similar linguistic norms.

7 Subvocal speech: a term used to refer to thought when thought and language are identical or closely parallel to each other.

8 Instrumental motivation: the learner`s desire to learn a second language because it is useful for some functional, “instrumental” goals, such as getting a job, passing an examination, or reading for information.

9 Telegraphic speech: the early speech of children, so called because it lacks the same sorts or words which adults typically leave out of telegrams(such as non-substantive words and inflectional morphemes).

1 what is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. Reference means what linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.

It is the matter of the relatonship between the form and the reality.

2 Describe three features of black english, including at least one phonological and one syntactic characteristics.

One of the phonological features of Black English is the simplification of a consonant cluster at the end of a word by dropping the word-final phoneme. As a result, for example, “pass”, “past” and “passed” are all pronounced the way as “pass” is.

One of the syntactic features of Black English is the constant absence of the copula, such as in “that mine” and “the coffee cold”.

Another syntactic feature that characterizes black English is the double negation construction with sentences like “ I don`t know nobody”.

语言学试题9

1 Phone: a phonetic unit or segment which occurs in the language is called a phone.

2 Morphological rules: the rules that govern which affix can be added to what type of stem to form a new word. For example, -ly can be added to a noun to form an adjective.

3 Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning through language.

4 Pragmaics is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication.

5 Internal borrowing: the applicaton of a rule form one part on the grammar to another part of the grammar by analogy to its earlier operation. For example, by analogy to the plural formation of “ foe-s” and “dog-s”, speaker started saying”cows” as the plural of “cow” instead of the earlier plural “kine”

6 Old english : a major period in the history of english development that begin in 449 and ended in 1100.

7 Standard english: 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.

8 Intrapersonal communication: the process of using language within the individual to facilitate one`s own thought and aid the formation and manipulation of concepts.

9 Integrative motivation: the learner`s desire to learn a second language in order to communicate with native speakers of the target language.

10 Behaviorist learning theory: a theory of psychology which ,when applied to first language acquisition, suggests that the learner`s verbal behavior is conditioned or reinforced through association between stimulus and response.

1 For linguists, why is the study of speech more important than that of writing?

Speech enjoys priority over writing in modern linguistic study for the following reasons: 1 speech precedes writing in terms of evolution. 2 a larger amount of communication is carried out in speech than in writing. 3 speech is the form in which infants acquire their native language.

2 what is miminal pair and what is minimal set? Why is it important to identify them in a language?

Minimal pairs are two words which are identical in every way except for one sound segments that occurs in the same position in the string. So in english ,Pill and Bill are a minimal pair, and so are pill and till, till and kill, kill and dill. Accordingly, we can conclude that /p/ ,/b/,/t/,/d/ are phonemes in english. Then all these sound combinations together constitute a minimal set; they are identical in form except for the initial consonant. By identifying the minimal pair or the minimal set of a language, a linguists can identify its phonemes.

语言学试题集10

1 Consonant: the sound in the production of which there is an obstruction of the air-stream at some point of the vocal tract are called consonant. Consonant are characterized in pronunciation by constriction of the air-stream in the vocal tract.

2 Assimilation rules assimilates one sound to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar.

3 Acoustic phonetics studies the vibrations of the air molecules. It studies the physical properties of speech sounds, as transimitted between mouth and ear.

4 S-structure: a level of syntactic representation after the operation of necessary syntactic movement.

5 Cooperative principle: Paul Grice`s idea is that in making converstation, the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate, otherwise, it would not be possible for them to carry on the talk. This general principle is called the cooperative principle, abbreviated as CP. It goes as follows: make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

6 Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquiring a new , sometimes related meaning.

7 Epenthesis: a change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel to the middle of a word is known as epenthesis.

8 Euphemism: a word or expression that is thought to be mild , indirect , or less offensive and used as a polite substitute for the supposedly harsh and unpleasant word or expression.

9 Contrastive analysis: a comparative procedure used to establish linguistic differences between two languages so as to predict learning difficulties caused by interference from the learner`s first language and prepare the type of teaching materials that will reduce the effects of interference.

10 Acculturation: a process of adapting to the culture and value system of the second language community.

1 what is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence semantically meaningless?

Grammaticality referts to the grammatical well-formed sentences. A sentence is considered grammatical when it conforms to the grammatical knowledge in the mind of native speakers. Whether a sentence is semantically meaningful in governed by rules called selectional restrictions. That is , constraints on what what lexical items can go with what others. Some sentence may be grammatically well-formed, but they may not be semantically meaningful. The reason is that they contain words which are not supposed to go together, thus violating the selectional restrictions, e.g.

“Green clouds are sleeping furiously”. The problem with the sentence is that no one has ever seen any green clouds, and clouds never sleep, still less sleep furiously. Thus in the sentence some selectional restrictions have been violated. This has led to the semantic ill-formed sentence.

2 Enumerate some causes that lead to the systematic occurrence of errors in second language acquisition.

Some major causes that lead to the systematic occurrence of errors in second language acquisition include: a) interference from the mother tongue, b) interlingual interference within the target language, c) overgeneralization.

1 Mother tongue interference is found at the level of pronunciation, morphology, syntax, vocabulary and meaning, and can be predicated by contrasting the grammatical or other systems of the native and target languages.

2 Interlingual interference: interlingual interference, or cross-association, occurs when the hearer mixes rules and patterns of the target language and produce hybrid structures.

3 Overgeneralization: the use of previously available strategies in new situations．