语言学试题集
I. Tick off the correct or the best possible answers:
1. One of the properties of language is that a language user can understand and produce sentences he/she has never heard before. This property of language is called ________.
A. duality B. productivity C. displacement D. arbitrariness
Key: B
2. The ______ function refers to the fact that language can be used for establishing a favorable atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than for exchanging information or ideas.
A. phatic B. directive C. evocative D. performative
Key: A
3. From a functional approach, the _______ meaning of a language use consists of what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.
A. affective B. associative C. stylistic D. collocative
Key: A
4. When –ing in ‘gangling’ is removed to get a verb ‘gangle’, we call this way of creating words ________.
A. suffixation B. back-formation C. blending D. acronymy
Key: B
5. ______ refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance.
A. Degradation B. Specialization C. Elevation D. Extension
Key: C
6. As we know, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and special way of expressing his ideas in language. This language variety of individual users is called ______.
A. idiolect B. regional dialect C. temporal dialect D. social dialect
Key: A
7. When pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentence rather than to the word, they are collectively known as ________.
A. intonation B. tone C. phoneme D. sentence stress
Key: A
8. _______ refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
A. Addition of sound B. Loss of sound
C. Metathesis D. Assimilation
Key: D
9. Basically, all the languages in the world can be classified in terms of language family. Vietnamese and Korean are two languages in the ______ family.
A. Indo-European B. Sino-Tibetan
C. Hamito-Semitic D. Malayo-Polynesian
Key: B
10. A _______ is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.
A. morpheme B. phoneme C. grapheme D. letter
Key: C
11. All mono-morphemic words are constituted by free morphemes, and those poly-morphemic words which consist wholly of free morphemes are called_________.
A. hyponyms B. compounds
C. blends D. allomorphs
Key: B
12. The requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes which stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories is called _______.
A. concord B. government
C. recursiveness D. cohesion
Key: A
13. The formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another is called _____.
A. blending B. clipping
C. acronymy D. compounding
Key: A
14. The distinction of ‘linguistic potential’ and ‘actual linguistic behavior’ is proposed by _______.
A. N. Chomsky B. F. de Saussure
C. M. A. Halliday D. J. Austin
Key: C
15. The word meaning given in the dictionary is called _____ meaning.
A. denotative B. connotative
C. collective D. stylistic
Key: A
16. When we consider the variation relating to what a user is trying to do with language, we are dealing with addressee relationship—continually categorized as “______”.
A. tenor of discourse B. mode of discourse
C. field of discourse D. idiolect
Key: A
17. According to words’ structures, Turkish is a typical ______ language.
A. isolating B. fusional
C. analytic D. agglutinative
Key: D
18. ______ refer to the fact that one type of utterance is typically followed by a special type of utterance.
A. Minimal pairs B. Illocutionary acts
C. Social dialects D. Adjacency pairs
Key: D
19. The relation between “dead” and “alive” is labeled as ________.
A. gradability B. complementarity
C. hyponymy D. homonymy
Key: B
20. The words “encore” and “au pair ” are loanwords from _______.
A. French B. German
C. Italian D. Spanish
Key: A
21. The distinction of langue and parole is proposed by______.
a. N. Chomsky b. F. de Saussure c. M. A. Halliday d. J. Austin
Key: b
22. Which of the following is the exception to the feature of arbitrariness of language?
a. native English words b. borrowed words
c. echoic words d. one-syllable words
Key: c
23. Which of the following feature cannot be used to describe the phone [s]?
a. voiceless b. oral c. alveolar d. lateral
Key: d
24. In terms of place of articulation, the two consonants [f], [v] are ________.
a. dental b. alveolar c. palatal d. labiodental
Key: d
25. In terms of manner of articulation, the sounds [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g] are ________.
a. affricates b. fricatives c. bilabial d. oral stops
Key: d
26. Which of the following statements about allophone is NOT correct?
a. Allophones are different forms of the same phoneme
b. Allophones of the same phoneme are in complementary distribution.
c. Allophones distinguish meaning.
d. Allophones are language specific.
Key: c
27. Which of the following words is not a free morpheme?
a. able b. pet c. change d. dusty
Key: d
28. How many morphemes are there in the word discharged?
a. 2 b. 3 c. 4 d. 5
Key: b
29. Which of the following words is made up of bound morphemes only?
a. happiness b. television c. ecology d. teacher
Key: c
30. Language is passed on from one generation to the next by teaching and learning rather than by instinct. This property of language is called_____.
a. interchangeability b. productivity
c. cultural transmission d. arbitrariness
Key: c
31. The famous quotation from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ well illustrates _______.
A. the conventional nature of language
B. the creative nature of language
C. the universality of language
D. the big difference between human language and animal communication
Key: A
32. Of the following sound combinations, only _______ is permissible according to the sequential rules in English.
A. kibl B. bkil C. ilkb D. ilbk
Key: A
33. The sentence that has a NP and a VP can be shown in a _______ formula “S→NP VP”.
A. hierarchical B. linear C. tree diagram D. vertical
Key: B
34. It is the _______ on Case assignment that states that a Case assignor and a Case recipient should stay adjacent to each other.
A. Case Condition B. Case Parameter
C. Adjacent Condition D. Adjacent Parameter
Key: C
35. Predication analysis is a way to analyze _______ meaning.
A. phoneme B. word C. phrase D. sentence
Key: D
36. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called _______.
A. commisives B. directives C. expressives D. declaratives
Key: A
37. The term _______ linguistics may be defined as a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
A. synchronic B. diachronic
C. comparative D. historical comparative
Key: B
38. The way in which people address each other depends on their age, sex, social group, and personal relationship. The English system of address forms frequently used includes first name, last name, title+last name, _______, and kin term.
A. title+first name B. title+title
C. title alone D. first name+last name+title
Key: C
39. Language and thought may be viewed as two independent circles overlapping in some parts. When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard thought as “subvocal speech,” and speech as “_______”.
A. vocal thought B. subvocal thought
C. covert thought D. overt thought
Key: D
40.Whcih of the following best states the behaviorist view of child language acquisition?
A. Language acquisition is a process of habit formation.
B. Language acquisition is the species-specific property of human beings.
C. Children are born with an innate ability to acquire language.
D. Humans are equipped with the neural prerequisites for language and language use.
Key: A
41. The words “kowtow” and “tea ” are loanwords from _______.
A. Chinese B. German C. Italian D. Spanish
Key: A
42. The term _______ linguistics may be defined as a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
A. synchronic B. diachronic
C. comparative D. historical comparative
Key: B
43. The formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another is called _____.
A. blending B. clipping C. acronymy D. compounding
Key: A
44. According to words’ structures, Latin is a typical ______ language.
A. isolating B. fusional C. analytic D. agglutinative
Key: B
45. The relation between “animal” and “lamb” is labeled as ________.
A. gradability B. complementarity
C. hyponymy D. homonymy
Key: C
46. One of the property of language is that there is no logical connection between meaning and sounds. This property of language is called________.
A. duality B. productivity C. displacement D. arbitrariness
Key: D
47. The________ function refers to the use of language to create certain feelings in the hearer.
A. phatic B. directive C. evocative D. performative
Key: A
48. The _______ meaning of a word consists of the associations it acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.
A. associative B. affective C. stylistic D. collocative
Key: D
49. When –or in editor is removed to get a verb edit, we call this way of creating words ________.
A. suffixation B. back-formation C. blending D. acronymy
Key:
50. The relation between “rose” and “flower” is labeled as ________.
A. gradability B. complementarity
C. hyponymy D. homonymy
Key: C
51. Language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. This is what we mean by __________.
A. duality B. productivity C. displacement D. arbitrariness
Key: C
52. When language is used to get the hearer to do something, then it serves a _______ function.
A. directive B. informative C. interrogative D. expressive
53. The description of a language at some point in time is a ________ study.
A. diachronic B. synchronic C. descriptive D. prescriptive
Key: B
54. The distinction between “competence” and “performance” was made by______ .
A. N. Chomsky B. F. de Saussure
C. M. A. Halliday D. L. Bloomfield
Key: A
55. According to the places of articulation, sounds in English such as [t], [l], and[z] can be labeled as _______ ones.
A. dental B. bilabial C. velar D. alveolar
Key: D
56. According to the morphological analysis, the underlined part in the word “internationalism” should be regarded as a ___________ .
A. root B. stem C. prefix D. suffix
Key: B
57. Words such as “telex” and “workfare” are created through ___________.
A. affixation B. compounding C. conversion D. blending
Key: D
58. According to the syntactic construction analysis, simple sentence such as “John is a student.” belongs to __________construction.
A. endocentric B. exocentric C. coordinate D. subordinate
Key: B
59. The sense relationship between “male” and “female” is _________.
A. complementarity B. gradability C. relational opposites D. hyponymy
Key: A
60. Componential analysis is a method of analyzing________ meaning.
A. sentence B. lexical C. grammatical D. utterance
Key: B
II. Are the following statements true (T) or false (F)?
1. A sentence cannot be a word or a fragment in strict sense, but an utterance can be a word or a fragment of a sentence. T/F
Key: T
2. It doesn’t make sense to ask what language a sentence belongs to. T/F
Key: F
3. A stem first of all refers to any morpheme or combination of morphemes, but an affix can be added to it. T/F
Key: T
4. Every word in a language can find at least one referent in the objective world. T/F
Key: F
5. In most cases, lexicon means vocabulary and is related to the analysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. T/F
Key: T
6. The use of the term ‘implicature’ is different from ‘implication’ in that it usually indicates a rather narrowly defined logical relationship between two propositions. T/F
Key: F
7. A phrase means two or more words in sequence, intended to have meaning, that form a syntactic unit that is less than a complete sentence. It is actually synonymous with word group. T/F
Key: F
8. Collocation is a term in lexicology used by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items, or collocates. This relation of co-occurrence usually cannot be accounted for. T/F
Key: T
9. In order to understand how conversational principles work, we may consider how each maxim actually works and how people observe these maxims in daily communication. T/F
Key: T
10. Syntax studies the rules which govern the ways words, word groups and phrases are combined to make grammatical sentences in a language, i.e. it deals with the relationships between elements in sentence structures. T/F
Key: T
11. Even in modern society, the primary medium is sound for all languages, and the fact that children acquire spoken language first before they can read or write also indicates that language is primarily vocal.
Key: T
12. The defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication are termed design features.
Key: T
13. There are other channels, besides language, for communicating our thoughts, so language is only one aspect of semiotics.
Key: T
14. Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as primary, written language as secondary.
Key: T
15. Descriptive linguistics aims to lay down rules for ‘correct’ language use, i.e., to tell people what they should say and what should not say.
Key: F
16. Phonology is the branch of linguistics which studies the characteristics of speech sounds and their patterns.
Key: F
17. The case category is used in the analysis of word classes to identify the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence.
Key: T
18. Language is genetically transmitted.
Key: F
19. The grammar taught today to language learners is still basically descriptive.
Key: F
20. All the sounds produced by human are speech sounds.
Key: F
21. Generally speaking, pragmatics can be understood as a branch of linguistic study that deals with the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.
Key: T
22. [f], [v], [s], [z], [] and [] are all fricative in English, but [] and [] are alveolar while [f] and [v] are dental.
Key: F
23. In most cases, sentence is synonymous with utterance.
Key: F
24. Syntax exclusively deals with the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structure, and it has nothing to do with exploring the syntactic relation beyond sentence boundary.
Key: F
25. The London School proposed a functional approach towards the concept of phoneme, and N. Trubetzkoy made the greatest contribution to the related study.
Key: F
26. A phoneme in a language is a distinctive sound which is capable of distinguishing one word or one shape of a word from another.
Key: T
27. Every language is part of a culture, and it cannot but serve and reflect cultural needs.
Key: T
28. Sentence can be extended either by conjoining or embedding, and a construction where constituents have been linked through the use of conjunction indicates a paratactic relation.
Key: F
29. Both Chinese and English are tone languages.
Key: F
30. Words are the smallest meaningful units of language.
Key: F
31. Derivation changes always result in change of the word class of the original words.
Key: T
32. Pitch variations may be distinctive like phonemes, and in this function they are called tones. Languages using tones, like Chinese, are called tone language.
Key: T
33. The notion of inflection just indicates the manifestation of grammatical relationships, rather than lexical ones, through the addition of inflectional affixes.
Key: T
34. The same morpheme always takes different forms in different contexts.
Key: T
35. According to P. Grice, whether a speaker follows or violates the Maxims of the Cooperative Principle, he produces some implicature, i.e. a kind of extra meaning that is not contained in the utterance.
Key: T
36. In the history of any language the writing system always came into being before the spoken form. T/F
Key: F
37.In English, long vowels are also tense vowels because when we pronounce a long vowel such as/i:/, the larynx is in a state of tension. T/F
Key: T
38.A compound is the combination of only two words. T/F
Key: F
39.“The student” in the sentence “The student liked the linguistic lecture”, and “The linguistic lecture” in the sentence “The linguistic lecture liked the student.” belong to the same syntactic category. T/F
Key: T
40.Linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations while linguistic forms with the same reference always have the same sense. T/F
Key: F
41.An important difference between presupposition and entailment is that presupposition, unlike entailment, is not vulnerable to negation. That is to say, if a sentence is negated, the original presupposition is still true. T/F
Key: T
42.The division of English into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English is non-conventional and not arbitrary. T/F
Key: F
43.Language reflects sexism in society. Language itself is not sexist, just as it is not obscene; but it can connote sexist attitudes as well as attitudes about social taboos or racism. T/F
Key: T
44.If a child is deprived of linguistic environment, he or she is unlikely to learn a language successfully later on. T/F
Key: T
45.When children learn to distinguish between the sounds of their language and the sounds that are not part of the language, they can acquire any sounds in their native language once their parents teach them. T/F
Key: F
46. Leonard Bloomfield maintained that linguistics should describe instead of prescribe what people actually say and should take a deductive approach in analyzing data.
Key: F
47. Chomsky believes that linguistic study and research can help explain what happens in the mind, and linguistics should be regarded as a branch of psychology.
Key: F
48. Halliday claims that if we are given an adequate specification of the semantic properties of the context in terms of field, tenor and mode, we should be able to predict the syntactic properties of texts.
Key: F
49. Onomatopoeia indicates a non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.
Key: F
50. Traffic light system has the feature of duality.
Key: F
51. The distinction of ‘linguistic potential’ and ‘actual linguistic behavior’ is proposed by N. Chomsky.
Key: F
52. In English there are three nasal sounds. They are [m], [n], and [l].
Key: T
53. A morpheme is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.
Key: F
54. According to the functions of affixes, we can put them into groups: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes.
Key: T
55. Compounding is the formation of new words by joining two or more stems.
Key: T
56. Metathesis refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
Key: F
57. The requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes which stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories is called concord.
Key: T
58. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called directives
Key: F
59. The term synchronic linguistics may be defined as a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
Key: F
60. In terms of manner of articulation, the sounds [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g] are affricates
Key: F
III. Fill in the blanks:
1. It is generally believed that J. Austin and _______ made the greatest contribution to the proposition of Speech Act Theory, an important theory in pragmatic study.
Key: J. Searle
2. According to the positions affixes occupy in words, __________ falls into prefixation and suffixation.
Key: affixation
3. The signs “&”, “@”, “%” and “$” widely used today are examples of ______ writing.
Key: word
4. Two methods can be used to reconstruct an older form of a language: internal reconstruction and the _______ reconstruction.
Key: external
5. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has two major thrusts: linguistic determinism and linguistic _______ .
Key: relativity
6. In the course of communication, a speaker may change from the standard language to the non-standard language, may shift his subject matter, or may move from one point on the formality scale to another point. This linguistic behavior is referred to as ______.
Key: code switch
7. The different types of a language as different forms to realize a mere generalization of the language are called “sub-languages” or _______.
Key: (language) varieties
8. _________ construction refers to a construction in which the distribution of words is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents.
Key: Endocentric_
9. It’s commonly believed that the basic function of language is that it’s used for _________.
Key: human communication
10. The degree to which a test measures what it is meant to measure is termed _________ in language testing, and that is an important index used to evaluate the quality of a test.
Key: validity
11. By _______ is meant that language can refer to contexts removed from the immediate situation of the speaker.
Key: displacement
12. Language is a system of two sets of structures, the structure of sound and the structure of ___________.
Key: meaning
13. The three branches of phonetics are articulatory phonetics, auditory phonetics, and _________ phonetics.
Key: acoustic
14. There are two kinds of stress in English. They are word stress and ________ stress.
Key: sentence
15. In English there are three nasal sounds. They are [m], [n], and ________.
Key: [];
16. Morphology is divided in two branches: __________ morphology and derivational morphology.
Key: .inflectional
17. According to H. Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle, that one should avoid obscurity and ambiguity accords with the ________ Maxim.
Key: Manner
18. The speech sounds in the production of which there is an obstruction of the airstream at some point of the vocal tract are called_______.
Key: consonants
19. A linguistic study is ______ if it tries to lay down rules for the correct use of language.
Key: prescriptive
20.The sentence “He married a blonde heiress.” ______ the sentence “He married a blonde.”
Key: entaills
21. In the course of time, the study of language has come to establish close links with other branches of ________ studies, such as sociology and psychology.
Key: social
22. Clear［1］and dark［![](https://wkrtcs.bdimg.com/rtcs/image?w=9.2&md5sum=65ce714f10aad97d3743733de749f82b&sign=ab4851929a&rtcs_flag=1&rtcs_ver=3.1&l=webapp&bucketNum=10&ipr={"t":"img","w":"9.2","h":"17.533333333333","dataType":"gif","c":"word/media/image1.png"})
］are allophones of the same one phoneme /1/.They never take the same position in sound combinations, thus they are said to be in ________ distribution.
Key: complementary
23.A ________ is often seen as part of a word, but it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning.
Key: root
24.A ________ sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated in the other.
Key: complex
25.That the denial of one member of two words implies the assertion of the other is the characteristic of ________ antonyms.
Key: complementary
26.While the meaning of a sentence is abstract and decontextualized, that of an ________ is concrete and context-dependent.
Key: utterance
27.Phonological rules may move phonemes from one place in the string to another. For example, Modern English verb ask was Old English askian, with the /k/ preceding the/s/. Sound change as a result of sound movement is known as ________.
Key: metathesis
28.In many societies of the world, we find a large number of people who speak more than one language. As a characteristic of societies, ________ inevitably results from the coming into contact of people with different cultures and different languages.
Key: bilingualism
29.The brain’s neurological specialization for language is called linguistic ________, which is specific to human beings.
Key: lateralization
30.In order to acquire a second language, learners will subconsciously use their first language knowledge in learning a second language. This is known as language ________.
Key: transfer
31. _______ phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds when they are transmitted between mouth and ear.
Key: Acoustic
32. The function of establishing a set of vowels is to facilitate the_______ of vowels of languages.
Key: description
33. If two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast, that is, the substitution of one for the other does not produce a different word form, but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, then the two sounds are in ________variation.
Key: free
34. The principal _________features are stress, length, pitch and intonation, as all of them can be used to distinguish meaning.
Key: suprasegmental
35.________is the method of creating words by removing the supposed suffixes.
Key: Back-formation
36. Pronouns and prepositions are two kinds of ________ words to which new members are not regularly added.
Key: closed-class
37. The sentence “I promise to come here earlier tomorrow morning.” can be used as an example to indicate the ________ function of language.
Key: performative
38. A linguistic study is ________ if it tries to lay down rules for the correct use of language.
Key: perspective
39. The sounds in the production of which no articulators come very close together and the air-stream passes through the vocal tract without _________are called vowels.
Key: obstruction
40. The word “gentlemanly” consists of 4 syllables and ________morphemes.
Key: 3
41. Positional ______, or word order, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language.
Key: relation
42. English gender contrast can only be observed in pronouns and a small number of nouns, and they are mainly of the _________gender type.
Key: natural
43. Componential analysis defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of _______ components.
Key: semantic
44. ________refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination.
Key: subordination
45. ________ construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole.
Key: exocentric
46. The _______function is the use of language to reveal something about the emotions and attitudes of the speaker.
Key: expressive
47. As language is a product and capacity of the human brain, many psychologists and linguists have tried to examine the relation between language and the brain, developing a new branch of science called________.
Key: psycholinguistics
48. The production of any speech sound involves the movement of an airstream. The majority of sounds used in languages of the world are produced by ______ egressive airstream mechanism.
Key: oral
49. Some speech sounds involves the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English [w] has both an approximation of the two lips and that of the back of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed______.
Key: labial-velar
50. ________ is used to mean sameness or close similarity of meaning.
Key: synonymy
51. The ________family includes most of the European languages and marry languages spoken in North India and in the two Americas and Australia.
Key: Indo-European
52. _________or analytic languages refer to those which depend on invariable roots or stems and word order to indicate their grammatical relations.
Key: Isolating
53. When we consider the variation relating to what the user is trying to do with language, whether teaching, persuading, advertising or instructing, we are dealing with addressee relationship, contextually categorized as __________.
Key: tenor of discourse
54. ________means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages, but the communication systems of certain animals do not have this feature. For instance, some male birds posses calls which female birds do not have.
Key: Interchangeability
55. ________ refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another sound, so that the sounds become less alike.
Key: dissimilation
56. The __________ is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Key: morpheme
57. In English, prepositions and verbs determine particular forms of pronouns according to their syntactic relation with them. This requirement is called _______ in linguistics.
Key: collocation
58. The _______ meaning of a word consists of the associations it acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.
Key: collocative
59. __________ is the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance.
Key: Perlocutionary act
60. Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general and a more specific word. To put it more simply, when X is a kind of Y, the lower term X is the hyponym, and the upper term Y is the _________.
Key: superordinate
IV. Use your own words to explain the following terms:
1.cultural transmission (as a defining feature of human language)
Key: One of the major defining features of human language. Humans are born with the ability to acquire a language, but different from animals, the actual use of human language is not genetically transmitted, rather it is culturally transmitted, i.e. it has to be taught and learnt.
2.phonic medium of language
Key: The limited range of sounds that are used in human language communication, i.e. the speech sounds.
3.phoneme
Key: a collection of abstract sound features, unlike a phone, (which is a speech unit), it is a phonological unit; allophones are actual realization of a phoneme in different phonetic context.
4.inflectional morphemes
Key: Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that are used to indicate the grammatical relations and categories, such as-ed,-(e)s,-est in English.
5.reference
Key: Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality. For example, if we say, "The dog is barking," we must be talking about a certain dog known to both the speaker and the hearer in the situation. The actual dog the word "dog" refers to in this particular situation is the reference of the word "dog".
6.locutionary act
Key: Locutionary act refers to the act of uttering words, phrases, and clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. For example, by saying "You have left the door wide open", the locutionary act performed by the speaker is that he has uttered all the words and expressed what the words literally mean.
7.hyponymy
Key: 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.
8.ethnic dialect
Key: An ethnic dialect is a social dialect of a language, often cutting across regional differences. It is spoken mainly by a less privileged population that has experienced some form of social isolation, such as racial discrimination or segregation.
9.registers
Key: Registers are language varieties appropriate for use in particular speech situations, in contrast to language varieties that are associated with the social or regional grouping of their customary users. For this reason, registers are also known as situational dialects.
10. linguistic context
Key: Linguistic context is concerned only with the probability of one word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another, which forms part of the “meaning”, and an important factor in communication.
11. competence
Key: According to Chomsky, competence refers to the ideal language user's knowledge of the rules of his language.
12. Diachronic linguistics
Key: Diachronic linguistics is the a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
13. Allomorph
Key: The different phones that can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme. Allophones are positional variants of a phoneme.
14. narrow transcriptions
Key: The way to transcribe speech sounds by using letter-symbol with diacritics to represent the finer differences between the variations of the same sound. This is called “narrow transcription”.
15. lexeme
Key: Lexeme is postulated as the abstract unit which refers to the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be distinguished from other smaller units.
16. grapheme
Key: A grapheme is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.
17. morpheme
Key: The morpheme is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
18. root
Key: A root is the base form of a word which cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity.
19. assimilation
Key: Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
20. tone language
Key: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. In some languages, pitch variations can distinguish meaning just like phonemes. Such languages are called "tone languages".
21. ideolect
Key: Idiolect is a personal dialect of an individual speaker characteristic of his geographical location, social and educational background, and personal preference in using the language.
22. dialect
Key: Dialect takes into account all variations of a language related to the user, which mainly involves geographical, social and personal factors.
23. free variation
Key: If two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast, that is, the substitution of one for the other does not produce a different word form, but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, then the two sounds are in free variation.
24. perlocutionary act
Key: perlocutionary act is the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance.
25. the maxim of quality
Key: The maxim of quality: Say what you believe to be true and that you have enough evidence for.
26. Diglossia
Key: Diglossia refers to the coexistence of two different varieties of the same language in a speech community with each serving a particular social function and used for a certain situations.
27. bilingualism
Key: Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are use either by an individual or by a group of speakers.
28. code-switching
Key: A speaker does not necessarily have to follow a particular variety or dialect all the time in the course of communication. He may change from the standard language to the non-standard language, he may shift his subject matter which dominates the incidence of vocabulary, he may move from one point on the formality scale to another point. This linguistic behavior is referred to as code-switching.
29. tenor of discourse
Key: When we consider the variation relating to what the user is trying to do with language, whether teaching, persuading, advertising or instructing, we are dealing with addressee relationship, contextually categorized as tenor of discourse.
30. syntactic category
Key: Syntactic category refers to a word or phrase that performs a particular grammatical function such as the subject and object. Words and phrases are organized to the syntactic categories they belong to. Apart from sentences and clauses, 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. Constituents that can be substituted for one another without loss of grammaticality belong to the same syntactic category.
V. Discuss the following questions:
1. Explain the following definition of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
Key: Linguistics investigates not any particular language, but languages in general. Linguistic study is scientific because it is based on the systematic investigation of authentic language data. No serious linguistic conclusion is reached until after the linguist has done the following three things: observing the way language is actually used, formulating some hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses against linguistic facts to prove their validity.
2. What features of human language have been specified by C. Hockett to show that it is essentially different from any animal communication system?
Key: Arbitrariness--- a sign of sophistication only humans are capable of
Creativity--- animals are quite limited in the messages they are able to send
Duality--- a feature totally lacking in any animal communication
Displacement--- No animal can “talk” about things removed from the immediate situation
Cultural transmisson--- Details of human language system are taught and learned while animals are born with capacity to send out certain signals as a means of limited communication.
3. What are the three branches of phonetics? How do they contribute to the study of speech sounds?
Key: Articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.
Articulatory phonetics describes the way our speech sounds and how they differ.
Auditory phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and reaches the important conclusion that phonetic identity is only a theoretical ideal.
Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, the way sounds travel from the speaker to the hear.
4. What is voicing and how is it caused?
Key: An articulatory dimension of speech sound production. It distinguishes meaning in many languages such as English; therefore it is a phonological feature. It is caused by the vibration of the vocal cords.
5. What is a phone? How is it different from a phoneme? How are allophones related to a phoneme?
Key: Phone--- a speech sound, a phonetic unit.
Phonology---a collection of abstract sound features, a phonological unit.
Allophones---actual realizations of a phoneme in different phonetic contexts.
6. What is a minimal pair and what is a minimal set? Why is it important to identify the minimal set in a language?
Key: Minimal pair---Two sound combination identical in every way except in one sound element that occurs in the same position.
Minimal set---A group of sound combinations with the above feature.
By identifying the minimal pairs or the minimal set of a language, a phonologist can identify its phonemes.
7. What are suprasegmental feature? How do the major suprasegmental features of English function in conveying meaning?
Key: Suprasengmental features---phonological features above the sound segment level.
The major suprasegmental features in English---word stress, sentence stress, intonation.
8. What are the main features of the English compounds?
Key: Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between.
Syntactically, 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.
9. Morpheme is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic whole?
Key: Since morpheme is defined as the smallest unit interms of relationship between expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and the semantic aspect of linguistic unit. A morpheme may overlap with a phoneme, such as I , but usually not, as in pig, in which the morpheme is the whole word, i.e. an independent, free morpheme, but the phonemes are/p/, /I /, and /g/.
10. Why is it important to know the relationships a sign has with others, such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?
Key: As the relation between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary, the value of a sign cannot be determined by itself. To know the identity of a sign, the linguist will have to know the signs it is used together with and those it is substitutable for. The former relation is known as syntagmatic and the latter paradigmatic.
11. How can the surface structure become the sole responsible structure for semantic interpretation?
Key: This is mainly achieved by the introduction of trace theory. That is, after the movement of any element, there will be a trace left in the original position, which is represented by the better t in the tree diagram. And the deep structure information concerning the underlying syntactic relations between words, such as the subject in the passive is the logical object, will be captured by the trace in the surface structure.
12. Why do we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure in analyzing the constituent relationship among linguistic elements? Support your statement with examples.
Key: In addition to revealing a linear order, a constituent structure tree has a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, and consequently is believed to most truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements. For example, the phrase " the old men and women" may have two interpretations, i.e. the adjective "old” may modify the noun "men", or the following two nouns "men and women". Linear order analysis cannot tell this difference, so it is ambiguous. Whereas, the constituent or tree diagrams analysis can make this difference clear. So, we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure analysis.
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NP NP
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NP NP NP NP
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The old men and the women the old men and the old women
13. What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?
Key: Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized. Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.
14. Explain with examples “homonymy,”, “polysemy”, and “hyponymy”.
Key: Homonymy---identical in form (either in sound or in spellin, or in both) but different in meaning, e.g. night-knight, lead v.-lead n., bank (a financial institution)-bank (side of a river)
Polysemy---one form having more than one meaning, e.g. earth our planet, the soil on its surface
Hyponymy---relation of semantic inclusion between a word which is more general and a word which is more specific, e.g. furniture- table.
15. In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features?
Key: In the light of componential analysis, the meaning of a word consists of a number 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.
16. How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?
Key: Utterance-meaning is based on sentence-meaning; the former is concrete and context-dependent and the latter is abstract and decontextualized.
17. What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is the illocutionary point of each type?
Key: Representative---stating what the speaker believes to be true
Directive---trying to get the hearer to do something
Commissive—committing the speaker himself to some future action
Expressive---expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state
Declaration---bringing about immediate changes by saying something
18. What distinction, if any, can you draw between bilingualism and diglossia?
Key: Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used in a speech community; whereas in a diglossic community, two varieties of language are used for different situations, one being more standard and higher, and used for more formal matters, and the other less prestigious, and used for colloquial situations.
〈语言学〉答疑库
1. Explain the following definition of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
Key: Linguistics investigates not any particular language, but languages in general. Linguistic study is scientific because it is based on the systematic investigation of authentic language data. No serious linguistic conclusion is reached until after the linguist has done the following three things: observing the way language is actually used, formulating some hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses against linguistic facts to prove their validity.
2. Is modern linguistics mainly synchronic or diachronic? Why?
Key: Modern linguistics is mainly synchronic, focusing on the present-day language. Unless the various states of a language are successfully studied, it will not be possible to describe language from a diachronic point of view.
3. How is Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance?
Key: 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.
4. What features of human language have been specified by C. Hockett to show that it is essentially different from any animal communication system?
Key: Arbitrariness--- a sign of sophistication only humans are capable of
Creativity--- animals are quite limited in the messages they are able to send
Duality--- a feature totally lacking in any animal communication
Displacement--- No animal can “talk” about things removed from the immediate situation
Cultural transmisson--- Details of human language system are taught and learned while animals are born with capacity to send out certain signals as a means of limited communication
5 What are the two major media of communication? Of the two, which one is primary and why?
Key: Speech and writing. Speech is considered primary over writing. The reason are: speech is prior to writing in language evolution, speech plays a greater role in daily communication, and speech is the way in which people acquire their native language.
6 What are the three branches of phonetics? How do they contribute to the study of speech sounds?
Key: Articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.
Articulatory phonetics describes the way our speech sounds and how they differ.
Auditory phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and reaches the important conclusion that phonetic identity is only a theoretical ideal.
Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, the way sounds travel from the speaker to the hear.
7 What is voicing and how is it caused?
Key: An articulatory dimension of speech sound production. It distinguishes meaning in many languages such as English; therefore it is a phonological feature. It is caused by the vibration of the vocal cords.
8 Explain with examples how broad transcription and narrow transcription differ?
Key: Broad transcription---one letter symbol for one sound
Narrow transcription---diacritics are added to the one-letter symbols to show the finer differences between sounds.
9 How do phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study?
Key: Phonetics: description of all speech sounds and their fine differences.
Phonology: description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds function to distinguish meaning.
10What is a phone? How is it different from a phoneme? How are allophones related to a phoneme?
Key: Phone--- a speech sound, a phonetic unit.
Phonology---a collection of abstract sound features, a phonological unit.
Allophones---actual realizations of a phoneme in different phonetic contexts.
11 What is a minimal pair and what is a minimal set? Why is it important to identify the minimal set in a language?
Key: Minimal pair---Two sound combination identical in every way except in one sound element that occurs in the same position.
Minimal set---A group of sound combinations with the above feature.
By identifying the minimal pairs or the minimal set of a language, a phonologist can identify its phonemes.
12 What are suprasegmental feature? How do the major suprasegmental features of English function in conveying meaning?
Key: Suprasengmental features---phonological features above the sound segment level.
The major suprasegmental features in English---word stress, sentence stress, intonation.
13 What are the main features of the English compounds?
Key: Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between.
Syntactically, 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.
14 Morpheme is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic whole?
Key: Since morpheme is defined as the smallest unit interms of relationship between expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and the semantic aspect of linguistic unit. A morpheme may overlap with a phoneme, such as I , but usually not, as in pig, in which the morpheme is the whole word, i.e. an independent, free morpheme, but the phonemes are/p/, /I /, and /g/.
15 Why is it important to know the relationships a sign has with others, such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?
Key: As the relation between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary, the value of a sign cannot be determined by itself. To know the identity of a sign, the linguist will have to know the signs it is used together with and those it is substitutable for. The former relation is known as syntagmatic and the latter paradigmatic.
16 How can the surface structure become the sole responsible structure for semantic interpretation?
Key: This is mainly achieved by the introduction of trace theory. That is, after the movement of any element, there will be a trace left in the original position, which is represented by the better in the tree diagram. And the deep structure information concerning the underlying syntactic relations between words, such as the subject in the passive is the logical object, will be captured by the trace in the surface structure.
17 What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?
Key: Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized. Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.
18 Explain with examples “homonymy,”, “polysemy”, and “hyponymy”.
Key: Homonymy---identical in form (either in sound or in spellin, or in both) but different in meaning, e.g. night-knight, lead v.-lead n., bank (a financial institution)-bank (side of a river)
Polysemy---one form having more than one meaning, e.g. earth our planet, the soil on its surface
Hyponymy---relation of semantic inclusion between a word which is more general and a word which is more specific, e.g. furniture- table.
19 In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features?
Key: In the light of componential analysis, the meaning of a word consists of a number 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.
20What is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence semantically meaningless?
Key: Grammaticality---the grammatical well-formedness of a sentence. A sentence may be well-formed grammatically, i.e. it conforms to the grammatical rules of the language, but it is not necessarily semantically well-formed, i.e., it may not make sense at all.
21What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?
Key: Pragmatics studies how meaning is conveyed in the process of communication. The basic difference between pragmatics and traditional semantics is that pragmatics considers meaning in context and traditionally semantics studies meaning in isolation from the context of use.
22 How is the notion of context interpreted?
Key: Context is regarded as constituted by all kinds of knowledge assumed to be shared by the speaker and the hearer.
23How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?
Key: Utterance-meaning is based on sentence-meaning; the former is concrete and context-dependent and the latter is abstract and decontextualized.
24 According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly performing while making an utterance. Give an example.
Key: Locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.
Example omitted.
25 What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is the illocutionary point of each type?
Key: Representative---stating what the speaker believes to be true
Directive---trying to get the hearer to do something
Commissive—committing the speaker himself to some future action
Expressive---expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state
Declaration---bringing about immediate changes by saying something
26 What are the four maxims of the CP? How does the violation of these maxims give rise to conversational implicatures?
Key: Maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation, maxim of manner. Examples omitted.
27. Why do we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure in analyzing the constituent relationship among linguistic elements? Support your statement with examples.
Key: In addition to revealing a linear order, a constituent structure tree has a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, and consequently is believed to most truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements. For example, the phrase " the old men and women" may have two interpretations, i.e. the adjective "old” may modify the noun "men", or the following two nouns "men and women". Linear order analysis cannot tell this difference, so it is ambiguous. Whereas, the constituent or tree diagrams analysis can make this difference clear. So, we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure analysis.
NP NP
NP NP NP NP
The old men and the women the old men and the old women
28 Characterize the nature of language change.
Key: All living languages change with time. Language change is not only universal and inevitable, but also systematic, extensive, ongoing, and gradual. Language change is a rule-governed behavior, involving all components of the grammar.
29 Explain the purpose o reconstruction in historical linguistics and the method employed by historical linguists.
Key: Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of somparative reconstruction, the genetic relationship between and among various languages based on the evidence of systematic form-meaning resemblance in cognate items, and thereby to reconstruct the protolanguage of a language family.
30What distinction, if any, can you draw between bilingualism and diglossia?
Key: Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used in a speech community; whereas in a diglossic community, two varieties of language are used for different situations, one being more standard and higher, and used for more formal matters, and the other less prestigious, and used for colloquial situations.
31Describe three features of Black English, including at least one phonological and one syntactic characteristics.
Key: 1) 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.
2) One of the syntactic features of Black English is the constant absence of the copula, such in “ That mine” and “The coffee cold.”
3) Another syntactic feature that characterizes Black English is the double negation construction with sentences like “ I don’t know nobody” and “ He don’t go nowhere.”
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