语言学测试试题答案Concise Linguistics (1)Ⅰ.Directions: Read each of the following statements carefully. Decide which one of the four choices best completes the statement and put the letter A, B, C or D in the brackets. (2%×10=20%)1. The fact that different languages have different words for the same object is a good proof that human language is ______.A. arbitraryB. non-arbitraryC. logicalD. non-productive2. The level of syntactic representation that exists before movement takes place is commonly termed the ______.A. phrase structureB. surface structureC. syntactic structureD. deep structure3. The phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form is called ______.A. polysemyB. hyponymyC. antonymyD. homonymy4. The utterance …We?re already working 25 hours a day, eight days a week.? obviously violates the maxim of ______.A. qualityB. quantityC. relationD. manner5. 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 languageB. the creative nature of languageC. the universality of languageD. the big difference between human language and animalcommunication6. Of the following sound combinations, only _______ is permissible according to the sequential rules in English.A. kiblB. bkilC. ilkbD. ilbk7.The sentence that has a NP and a VP can be shown in a _______ for mula "S→NP VP".A. hierarchicalB. linearC. tree diagramD. vertical8. Predication analysis is a way to analyze _______ meaning.A. phonemeB. wordC. phraseD. sentence9. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called _______.A. commisivesB. directivesC. expressivesD. declaratives10. 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. synchronicB. diachronicC. comparativeD. historical comparative11.Chomsky uses the term _______to refer to the actual realization of alanguage user?s knowledge of the rules of his language in linguistic communication.A. langueB. competenceC. paroleD. performance12. Transformational Generative Grammar was introduced by_______in 1957.A. L. BloomfieldB. F. SaussureC. N. ChomskyD.M. A. K. Halliday13. Synonyms are cla ssified into several kinds. The kind to which …girl? and …lass? belong is called ( ) synonyms.A. stylisticB. dialectalC. emotiveD. collocational14. The illocutionary point of _______ is to express thepsychological state specified in the utterance.A. representativesB. commissivesC. expressivesD. declaratives15. The pair of words “lend” and “borrow” are ___.()A. gradable oppositesB. relational oppositesC. co-hyponymsD. synonyms16. A word with several meanings is called __word.A. a polysemousB. a synonymousC. an abnormalD. a multiple17. The function of the s entence “A nice day, isn't it?” is __.A. informativeB. phaticC. directiveD. performative18. The se mantic components of the word “gentleman” can be expressed as __.A. +animate, +male, +human, -adultB. +animate, +male, +human, +adultC. +animate, -male, +human, -adultD. +animate, -male, +human, +adult19. The kind of antonymy between "married "and "single" is one of__________.(A) converseness(B) relational opposites(C) complementarity (D) gradable opposites20. …This orphan has a father? is a case of ________(A) inconsistency (B) presupposition(C)semantic anomaly (D) tautology21. According to Austin , a speaker, while making an utterance, is in most cases performing _______ acts simultaneously.(A) two(B) three(C)four(D)five22. …Your money or your life?" is an example of _________(A)declarations (B) expressives(C)commissives (D) directives.23.______ are also called rewrite rules.(A) phonological rules(B) morphological rules(C) phrase structure rules(D) transformational rules24.The major components of a transformational grammar are __________(A) syntactic, phonological, and semantic(B)base, deep structure, and surface structure(C)deletion, copying ,addition, and reordering(D)generation and transformation25. …Rotten, addle, rancid, sour? can be best described as _________(A) dialectal synonyms(B) collocationally-restricted synonyms(C) words differing in …styles? or …registers?(D) words differing in emotive or evaluative meaningⅡ. Directions: Fill in the blank in each of the followin g statements with one word, the first letter of which is already given as a clue. Note that you are to fill in ONE word only, and you are not allowed to change the letter given.(1%×10=10%)1. As the first step of their scientific investigation of language,linguists have to observe and collect linguistic facts before they can do anything else.2. Phonological rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language are called sequential rules.3. An independent unit of meaning that can be used freely by itself is called a free morpheme.4. The study of the linguistic meaning of words, phrases, and sentences is called semantics.5. In making conversation, the general principle that all participants are expected to observe is called the Cooperative principle proposed by J. Grice.6. If a linguistic study describes and analyzes the language people actually use, it is said to be descriptive.7. Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.8. Referent is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between form and the reality.9. Although the development of a communicative system is not unique to human beings, the natural acquisition of language as a system of highly abstract rules and regulations for creative communication is what distinguishes humans from all other animal species.10. Language exists in time and changes through time. The description ofa language at some point of time is called a synchronic study of language.11. An essential difference between consonants and vowels is whether the air coming up from the lungs meets with any obstruction when a sound is produced.12. The morphemes that cannot be used by themselves, but must be combined with other morphemes to form words arecalled bound morpheme.13. XP may contain more than just X. For example, the NP "the boy who likes his puppy" consists of Det, N and S, with Det being the specifier, N the head and S the complement.14. Hyponymy is the relationship which obtains between specific and general lexical items. The word that is more general in meaning is called superordinate.15. V owels can be nasalized. The vowel nasalization rule is an assimilation rule, which, for the most part, is caused by articulatory or physiological process in which successive sounds are made identical, or more similar, to one another.16.Clear ［1］and dark［1］are allophones of the same one phoneme /1/.They never take the same position in sound combinations, thus they are said to be in complementary distribution.17. A root is often seen as part of a word, but it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning.18. A complex sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated in the other.19. While the meaning of a sentence is abstract and decontextualized, that of an utterance is concrete and context-dependent.Ⅲ. Directions: Judge whether each of the following statements is true or false. Put a T for true or F for false in the brackets in front of each statement. If you think a statement is false, you must explain why youthink so and give the correct version. (2%×10=20%)(T ) 1.Radar is an example of acronym.(T ) 2.What is a permissible sequence in one language may not be so in another language.( F) 3.English has only three bilabials,which are [p][b][m]. ([W]) (T) 4.Phonetically similar sounds might be related in two possible ways: phonemic contrast and complementary distribution.(F ) 5.In the history of any language the writing system always came into being before the spoken form. (The opposite is right.) ( T) 6.Bloomfield's theory of syntax has two central ideas: one is the notion of discovering procedures and the other is that of constituent structure.( F ) 7.A compound is the combination of only two words. (It can combine more than two words, e.g. stay-at-home ) (T ) 8.Transformational rules are also called rewrite rules.( T) 9. The writing system of a language is always a later invention used to record speech; thus there are still many languages in today?s world that can only be spoken, but not written.(F ) 10.The task of the semantic component is to convert deep structures into surface structures. (transformational component)(T ) 11.Sense relations are in fact a part of the semantic structures of English.( F) 12. In such sound combinations as /bi:p/, /geip/ and /su:p/, the voiceless stop /p/, occurring in the final position, is unaspirated, i.e. pronounced with the strong puff of air withheld to some extent. (aspirated)(F )13. Linguists suggest that language is very variable phenomenon, and that this variability is not governed by any rules. That is one of the reasons why we say language is arbitrary. (The fact that different languages have different words for the same object is a good proof that human language is arbitrary.)(F ) 14.Chomsky thinks that human beings are innately endowed with the capacity to form some concepts rather than others. (…form universal concepts.)(F) 15. The part of speech of the compound is always determined by the part of speech of the second element, without exception. (…not necessarily…. e.g. …Eight-year-old? is an adjective.)(T ) 16. The relationship between the embedded clause and its matrix clause is one of a part to the whole.(T ) 17. The contextualist view of meaning holds that meaning should be studied in terms of the situational context and linguistic context.(T ) 18. Searle?s classification of illocutionary acts is based on the classification of performative verbs.(T )19. A general difference between phonetics and phonology is thatphonetics is focused on the production of speech sounds while phonology is more concerned with how speech sounds distinguish meaning.(F ) 20. Only words of the same parts of speech can be combined to form compounds. (Not necessarily. e.g. open-minded, stay-at-home, etc.)(T ) 21. Sentences are not formed by randomly combining lexical items, but by following a set of syntactic rules that arrange linguistic elements in a particular order.( F) 22. According to Searle's classification of illocutionary acts, inviting, ordering, advising, promising and apologizing all fall into the category of directives. (Promising falls into the category of commissives.)Ⅳ.Directions: Explain the following terms, using one or twoexamples for illustration. (3%×10=30%)1. cultural transmission (as a defining feature of human language)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. (P11)2. phonic medium of languageThe limited range of sounds that are used in human language communication, i.e.the speech sounds. (P13)3. inflectional morphemesInflectional morphemes are morphemes that are used to indicate thegrammatical relations and categories, such as number, tense, degree and case. E.g.-ed,-(e)s,-est in English. workers, children; walking, walked; biggest ; John?s. (P37)4. suprasegmental featuresSuprasegmental features refers to the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments (phoneme), they are phonological properties of such linguistic units as syllable, word and sentence. The main suprasegmental features include stress, intonation, and tone. (P28)5. locutionary actLocutionary 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.6. bound morphemesThe morphemes that cannot be used by themselves, but must be combined with other morphemes to form words are called bound morpheme. For example, -s in dogs, -al in national, and dis- n disclose, cannot occur alone. (P35)7.duality of structureLinguists refer duality (of structure) to the fact that in all languages so far investigated, one finds two levels of structure or patterning. At the first,higher level, language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units (such as morphemes, words etc.); at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which combine to form units of meaning. According to Hu Zhanglin et al. (p.6), language is a system of two sets of structures, one of sounds and the other of meaning. This is important for the workings of language. A small number of semantic units (words), and these units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences (note that we have dictionaries of words, but no dictionary of sentences!). Duality makes it possible for a person to talk about anything within his knowledge. No animal communication system enjoys this duality, or even approaches this honor. (P11)8. hyponymyHyponymy is the relationship which obtains between specific and general lexical items.The word that is more general in meaning is called superordinate.9. surface structureThere are two levels of syntactic structure, deep structure and surface structure. Surface structure correspond to the finalsyntactic form of the sentence which results from appropriate transformations. (P57)10. assimilation ruleThe …assimilation rule? assimilates one segment to another by …copying? afeature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar.(This rule accounts for the raring pronunciation of the nasal[n] that occurs within a word. The rule is that within a word the nasal consonant[n] assumes the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The negative prefix “in-“ serves as a good example. It may be pronounced as [in], or [im] when occurring in different phonetic contexts: e. g., indiscrete-[ ](alveolar) inconceivable-[ ](velar) input-[…imput](bilabial)) (P27) The …deletion rule?tells us when a sound is to be deleted although is orthographically represented. While the letter …g?is mute in …sign?, …design?and …paradigm?, it is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives: …signature?, …designation?and …paradigmatic?. The rule then can be stated as: delete a [g] when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. This accounts for some of the seeming irregularities of the English spelling. (P28)11. rootA root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning; it must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word. A “root” is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed witho ut total loss of identity. In other words, a “root”is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “Internationalism” is a four-morpheme derivative which keepsits free morpheme “nation” as its root when “ inter-”, “-al” and “-ism” are tak en away. (P35)12. narrow transcriptionIn handbook of phonetics, Henry Sweet made a distinction between “narrow” and “broad” transcriptions, which he called “Narrow Romic”. The former was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the most minute shades of pronunciation while Broad Romic or transcription was intended to indicate only those sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language.13. stemA “stem” is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as, and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word “friends”, “friend” is both the root and the stem, but in the word “friendships”, “friendships” is its stem, “friend” is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e.g., “mailman” , “girlfriend” ,e tc. (P35)14. derivational affixesA kind of bound morphemes, added to existing forms to create new words. There are three kinds according to position in the new words: prefix, suffix and infix. (P35)15. predication…Predication analysis? is a new approach for sentential meaning analysis. …Predication? is usually considered an important common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Predication is to break down the sentence into their smaller constituents: argument (logical participant) and predicate (relation element). The …predicate?is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. We may nowdistinguish a …two-place predicate?(which governs two argu ments, e.g., subject and object), a …one-place predicate?(which governs one argument, i.e., subject) and a …no-place predicate?that has simply no argument(no real subject or object).Ⅴ. Answer the following questions.(10%×2=20%)1. 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.2. One of the main features of our human language is arbitrariness. Can you briefly explain what is this feature refers to? Give examples if necessary. (10 points)By “arbitrariness”, we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds (see I .1). A dog might be a pig if only the first person or group of persons had used it for a pig. Language is therefore largely arbitrary. But language is not absolutely seem to be somesound-meaning association, if we think of echo words, like “bang”, “crash”, “roar”, which are motivated in a certain sense. Secondly, some compounds (words compounded to be one word) are not entirely arbitrary either. “Type” and“write” are opaque or unmotivated words, while “type-writer” is less so, or more transparent or motivated than the words that make it. So we can say “arbitrariness” is a matter of degre e.3. The phonological features that occur above the level of individual sounds are called suprasegmental features. Discuss the main suprasegmental features, illustrating with examples how they function in the distinction of meaning.…Suprasegmental phonology?refers to the study ofphonological properties of linguistic units larger than the segment called phoneme, such as syllable, word and sentence.Hu Zhuanglin et al.,(p,73) includes stress, length and pitch as what they suppose to b e “principal suprasegmental features”, calling the concurrent patterning of three “intonation”. Dai Weidong(pp23-25) lists three also, but they are stress, tone and intonation.4. Explain with examples the three notions of phone, phoneme and allophone, and also how they are related.5. What is the speech act theory advanced by John Austin? Please give examples for illustration.Speech act theory was proposed by J. L. Austin and has been developed by J. R. Searle. Basically, they believe that language is not only used to inform or to describe things, it isoften used to “do things”, to perform ac ts. Austin suggests three basic senses in which in saying something one is doing something and three kinds of acts are performed simultaneously: locutionary act言内行为:------the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. I t’s an act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax,lexicon,and /doc/c93918915.html,ly.,the act of saying something :the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference.言内行为指的是用句子来叙述，报告，描写。
