语言学简答题

第1章 一．

1. Fill in the blanks

(1) Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes learning a language laborious. For learners of a foreign language, it is this feature of language that is more worth noticing than its arbitrariness. (大连外院2008）

(2) Human language is arbitrary. This refers to the fact that there is no logical or intrinsic connection between a particular sound and the meaning it is associated with. (人大2007）(3) The features that define our human language can be called __design____ features. （北二外2006）

(4) human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present at the moment of communication.

This

quality

is

labeled

as

____displacement________ .（北二外2006）

(5) Halliday proposes a theory of metafunctions of language, that is, language has ________ideational__, interpersonal and textual functions. （中山大学2008）

(6) Our language can be used to talk about itself. This is the ____metalingual_______ function of language. （中山大学2005）

(7) when language is used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than exchanging information or ideas, its function is __phatic_____ function. (北二外2005）

(8) linguistics is usually defined as the ___scientific_____ study of language. （北二外2003）

(9) __pragmatics________ can be defined as the study of

language in use. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, attempts to show the relationship between language and society.

(10) ___Descriptive________ grammars attempt to tell what is in the language, while _______prescriptive_____grammars tell people what should be in the language. Most contemporary linguists believe that whatever occurs naturally in the language should be described. (人大2006）

(11)

Chomsky

initiated

the

distinction

between

_____competence_______ and performances. （北二外2007）

（12) The description of a language as it changes through time is a _______Diachronic Linguistic___________ study.

3. Short answer questions

(1) briefly explain what phonetics and phonology are concerned with and what kind of relationships hold between the two. （北外2002）

(2) why do people take duality as one of the important design features of human language? Can you tell us what language will be if it has no such design feature? （南开2004）

(2)Duality makes language productive. A large number of different units can be formed out of a small number of elements(Sounds-words, human language.

If language had no such design feature, then it would be like animal communicational system which consists of only a number of basic sounds and this would be highly limited. Then we would not be able to produce a very large number of sound combinations, which are distinct in meaning. In other words, the number of messages one can send would be restricted to the number of basic sounds.

words-sentences).

Most

animal

communication systems do not have this design feature of

第2章

Ⅲ. Explain the following terms Assimilation （南大，武大，上大） 2. Distinctive features of speech sounds （中山，北师，北交大，浙江大学） 3. Syllable （川大）

4. Cardinal vowel （川大，大连外院）

2. The distinctive feature is a property which distinguishes one phoneme from another. For example, “voicing” is a distinctive feature, since it plays an important role in distinguishing obstruents in English.

4. The cardinal vowels are a set vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.

5. Minimal pairs （武大，浙大，川大，…) 6. Coarticulation（武大，川大，南大） 7. Voiceless （西安交大）

8. Broad and narrow transcription （中山） 9. Complementary distribution（武大，南开）

What are phonemes, phones, and allophones? Explain their relationship with examples from English.

（北外2005）

2. What are suprasegmental features? （西外2006） 第3章 1. Stem

2. inflectional morpheme 3. Allomorph

1. What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and

derivational affixes? （四川大学2007）

2. Illustrate the ways of lexical change. （武汉大学2005） 第5章

Ⅲ. True or false

1. In the sentence “Money is often said to be the root of all evil”, “root”is used in its conceptual meaning. （北二外2007）

2. Reference is one of the rarely used cohesive devices. （南开2005）

3. “Tulip”, “rose”and “violet”are all included in the notion of “flower”. Therefore they are superordinates of “flower”. （北二外2006）

4. The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words

and the way they are combined is usually known as the principle of COMPOSITIONALIT. （大连外院2008）

Ⅳ. Explain the following terms

1. Conceptual meaning （川大，武大，上交大） 2. Semantic Triangle （上外2008） 3. Homonymy （上海交大2007） 4. Relational opposites （武大2005） 5. Synonymy （西安交大2008）

6. Componential analysis (浙大2005，北航2008）

1.According to Leech , conceptual meaning refers to the logical, cognitive, or denotative

content of the meaning of a word. It is concerned with the relationship between a word and the thing it refers to. For example, the conceptual meaning of “human” is any person such as John and Mary.

2.Ogden and Richard presented the classic “semantic Triangle” as manifes ted in the following

diagram, in which the “symbol” or “form” refers to the linguistic elements (word, sentence, ect.), the “referent” refers to the object in the world of experience, and “thought” or “reference” refers to concept or notion. According to t his view, there is no direct link between symbol and referent, that is, between language and the world. The link is via thought, the concept in our minds.

Ⅴ. Short answer questions

1. What is the referential theory of meaning? （北交大2005） 2. How would you describe the oddness of the following sentences, using semantic

features? （浙大2004）

(a) The television drank my water. (b) His dog writes poetry.

3. Do you think there are true synonyms in English? why? (厦大2010）

2. (a) the verb drink represents a behavior of the animate beings, therefore, it is required

that the subject of this verb should have a semantic feature as (+ANIMATE), however, the word television, which is in position of subject, has an opposite feature (-ANIMATE). That is why such a collocation results in oddness.

2.(b) the action of writing poetry is normally one which only human beings could do,

therefore, the subject is required to have a semantic feature as (+HUMAN); however, the word dog in the subject position is featured as (-HUMAN). Therefore, the sentence is odd.

3. Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. It is used to mean

sameness or close similarity. Total synonymy is rare. The so-

called synonyms are all context dependent. They all differ in one way or another.

There are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects:

In stylistic meaning (buy, purchase) in emotive meaning (economical, stingy)

in range of use or collocative meaning (accuse, charge) in British and American English usages (autumn, fall) 第7章

Ⅲ. Explain the following terms

1. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis （武大2004） 2. linguistic relativity （川大2010，人大2006） 3. Linguistic determinism （上海交大2007） 4. Diglossia（南开2010） 5. Register （南开2010） 6. sociolect（首师2011） 7. Creole （上海交大2006） Ⅳ. Answer the following questions 1. How does language relate to culture? （中山大学2010）

2. How could you understand “register” in systematic functional linguistics?

（北航2010）

3.why do you think that, all other things being equal, women use more standard variants of

stable sociolinguistic variables than men? （北外2006） 2. Register is important in systemic linguistics because it is seen as the linguistic

consequence of interacting aspec ts of context, which

Halliday calls “field, tenor, and mode.”

…

By understanding the values for field, tenor, and mode, language users can predict the meanings that are likely to be exchanged and the language likely to be used.

3. The main causes of these differences are more of social ones rather than biological

ones.

Women are more status-conscious than men and they are aware of their low status in society and as a result, use more standard speech forms in their attempt to claim equality or even achieve higher social status.

Another reason might be attributed to the education. Women are educated to behaved “like a lady” when they are little girls. They realize it is more socially acceptable for them to speak more politely, and gently than it is for men.

The differences are brought about by women’s place in society. If we want to reform the language, the first thing we need to do is to try to change the society.

4.Explain briefly bilingualism and diglossia. （北航2007）

5. Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for

different types of sand, and in Arabic one must choose from a whole range of words which are subsumed under the western category CAMEL. Can you explain these phenomena with you linguistic knowledge?

（北航2008）

5. (1) Language can reflect the social environment of a society.

(2) Language system forms thought or is necessary for thought.

According to Sapir, Whorf,….

Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow. A child who grows up speaking such a language will develop more cognitive categories for snow than will an English speaking child. When the former looks out at a snowy environment, he will, in some sense, sees it differently from a child who has but one word snow.

第8章

Ⅲ. Explain the following terms

1. Locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act （北航2010，北交大）

2. Performatives（中山2008）

3. Conversational implicature（川大，武大，北交，北航…) 4. Cooperative principle （北二外，北师大） 5. Violation of maxims （北交大2006） Ⅳ. Short answer questions

1.Based on the Cooperative principle, analyze the implicature of the utterance “well, boys

are boys” and discuss the reasoning process of the implicature.

（北二外2011）

“Boys are boys” seem to violate the first quantity maxim. At the superficial level, the sentence is totally uninformative. But when people hear this sentence, he will think that the speaker is implying something and think about it at a deeper level. It conveys the meaning that “ boys are naughty and mischievous by nature”.

2.If you ask somebody “can you open the door?”and he

answered “Yes”but does not

actually do it, what would be your reaction? Why? Try to explain it in the light of speech act theory. （南开2010）

2. According to Austin, speech acts can be analyzed on three levels:….

In this context, locutionary act is the literal meaning: whether he has the ability to open the door. Illocutionary act:….

In this case, it is misunderstood as a question to ask whether the hearer has the ability to open the door, so he answered yes. If you want to realize his intention, you have to use more direct request, “I would like you to open the door, please.”…

3. How do you understand the cancellability of conversational implicature?

（南开2010）

4. How do you understand the CP postulated by Grice? What are the four maxims ?

（北二外2010）

3. It is known that the presence of a conventional implicature relies on a number of

factors: the conventional meaning of words used, the CP, the linguistic and situational contexts, ect. So if any of them changes, the implicature will also change.