语言学复习

I. Choose the best answer

Chapter 1 Introduction

1. Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human________.（B）

A. contact. B. communication C. relation D. community

2. Which of the following property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by the time and place, due to this feature of language, speakers of a language are free to talk about anything in any situation?(C)

A. Transferability B. Duality C. Displacement D. Arbitrariness

3. Study the following dialogue. What function does it play according to the function of language? (B)

--- A nice day, isn’t it?

--- Right! I really enjoy the sunlight.

A. Emotive B. Phatic C. Performative D. Interpersonal

4. ________ refers to the actual realization of the ideal language user’s knowledge of the rules of his language in utterance.(A)

A. Performance B. Competence C. Langue D. Parole

5. has been widely accepted as the fore father of modern linguistics.(B)

A. Chomsky B. Saussure C. Bloomfield D. John Lyons

Part 2 Phonology

5. Conventionally a ________ is put in slashes.(C)

A. allophone B. phone C. phoneme D. morpheme

6. Which one is different form the others according to places of articulation?(A)

A. /n/ B./m/C. /b/ D. /p/

7. Which vowel is different from the others according to the characteristics of vowels?(B)

A. /i:/ B. /u/ C./e/ D. /i/

8. What kind of sounds can we make when the vocal cords are vibrating?(B)

A. voiceless B. voiced C. Glottal stop D. Consonant

9. Which consonant represents the following description: voiceless labiodental fricative?(A)

A. /f/ B./v/C. /s/ D./z/

10. is one of the suprasegmental features(D)

A. Stop B. Voicing C. Deletion D. Tone

11. Velar refers to .（B）

A. larynx B. soft palate C. alveolar D. pharynx

Part 3 Morphology

12. Morphemes that represent tense, number, gender and case called________ morpheme.(A)

A. inflectional B. free C. bound D. derivational

13. There are ________ morphemes in the word denationalization. (C)

A. Three B. four C. five D. six

14. The word UNESCO is formed in the way of ________. (A)

are

A. acronnymy B. clipping C. initialism D. blending

15. NATO is a/an .(A)

A. acronym B. blending C. coinage D. clipping

16. The relation between words “rose” and “flower” is that of . (D)

A. synonymy B. antonymy C. homonymy D. hyponymy

17. “Semantics is the scientific study of meaning” is a . (D) A. hyponymy B. polysemy C. Antonymy D. tautology

18. “Wide/narrow” is an example of . (A)

A. gradable opposites B. relational opposites C. converseness D. complementarity

Part 4 Syntax

19. ________ is a sub-field of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language.(B)

A. Morphology B. Syntax C. Semantics D. Pragmatics

20. The phrase “my small child’s cot” is an ambiguous phrase, which can be revealed by ________ tree diagrams.(C)

A. one B. two C. three D. four

Part 5 Semantics

21. Cold and hot are a pair of ________antonyms.(A)

A. gradable B. complementary C. reversal D. converseness

22. ________ describes whether a proposition is true or false.(B)

A. Truth B. Truth value C. Truth condition D. Falsehood

23. Bull: [BOVINE] [MALE] [ADULT] is an example of ________. (A)

A. componential analysis B. predication analysis C. compositionality selection restriction

24. The semantic triangle holds that the meaning of a word________. (A)

A. is interpreted through the mediation of concept.

B. is related to the thing it refers to.

D.

C. is the idea associated with that word in the minds of speakers.

D. is the image it is represented in the mind.

25. When the truth of sentence (a) guarantees the truth of sentence (b), and falsity of sentence(b) guarantees the falsity of sentence (a), we can say that ________.(B)

A. sentence(a) presupposes sentence (b)

B. sentence(a) entails sentence (b)

C. sentence(a) is inconsistent with sentence (b)

D. sentence(a) contradictss sentence (b)

26. “Socrates is a man” is a case of ________.(B)

A. two-place predicate

B. one-place predicate

C. two-place argument

D. one-place argument

Part 6 Pragmatics

27. ________ is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication.(B)

A. Semantics B. Pragmatics C. Sociolinguistics D. Psycholinguistics

28. ________ found that natural language had its own logic and conclude cooperative principle.(C)

A. John Austin B. John Firth C. Paul Grice D. William James

29. ______proposed that speech act can fall into five general categories.(B)

A. Austin B. Searle C. Sapir D. Chomsky

30. Promising, undertaking, vowing are the most typical of the ________. (C)

A. declarations B. expressives C. commissives D. directives

31. The illocutionary point of the________ is to express the psychological state specified in the utterance.(B)

A. declarations B. expressives C. commissives D. directives

32. Y’s utterance in the following conversation exchange violates the

maxim of ________.(C)

X: Who was that you were with last night?

Y: Did you know that you were wearing odd socks?

A. quality B. quantity C. relation D. manner

33. The violation of one or more of the conversational maxims of the Cooperative Principle can, when the listener full understands the speaker, create________, and humor sometimes.(A)

A. conversational implicature B. conversational breakdown C. locutionary act D. illocutionary act

34. The maxim of quantity requires that the speaker.(D)

A. contribute as informative as required

B. do not contribute more than is required

C. do not say what has little evidence

D. both A and B

35. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit

the speaker to some future course of action are called________.(A)

A. commissives B. directives C. expressives D. declaratives.

36. An illocutionary act is identical with . (B)

A. sentence meaning B. the speaker’s intention C. language D. social convention

37. is a branch of linguistics which is the study of meaning in the context of use. (C)

A. Morphology B. Syntax C. Pragmatics D. Semantics

Part 7 Language Change

Part 8 Language and Society

38. ________ are language varieties appropriate for use in particular speech situations.(C)

A. Slang B. Address terms C. Registers D. Education varieties

A. domain B. situation C. society D. community

39. ________ is defined as any regionally or socially definable human group

identified by shared linguistic system.(D)

A. A country B. A race C. A society D. A speech community

40. ________ refers to a marginal language of few lexical items and straight forward grammatical rules, used as a medium of communication.(C)

A. Lingua franca B. Creole C. Pidgin D. Standard language

41. ________ variety refers to speech variation according to the particular area where a speaker comes from.(A)

A. Regional B. Social C. Stylistic D. Idiolectal

42. Probably the most widespread and familiar ethnic variety of the English language is ________.(C)

A. British English B. American English C. Black English D. Australian English

43. ________ in a person’s speech, or writing, usually range on a continuum from casual to formal according to the type of communicative context.(D)

A. Regional variation B. Social variation C. Stylistic variation D. Idiolectal variation

Part 9 Language and Culture and Society

44. In the present day, the stability of seems to be decreasing. (D)

A. social-class dialect B. idiolect C. taboo D. regional dialect

Part 10 Language Acquisition

45. Negative transfer in learning a second language is known as ________.(D)

A. acculturation B. interlanguage C. fossilization D. interference

46. Besides the genetic predisposition for language acquisition, language________ is necessary for successful language acquisition.(D)

A. instruction B. correction C. imitation D. input and interaction

47. ________ is defined as a conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a second language usually obtained in school settings.(C)

A. Competence B. Performance C. Learning D. Acquisition

48. ________ sees errors as the result of the intrusion of L1 habits over which the learner had no control.(C)

A. error analysis B. performance analysis C. contrastive analysis D. discourse analysis

Part 11 Second Acquisition

Part 12 Language and Brain

Schools of Modern Linguistics

49. The person who is often described as “father of modern linguistics” is ________.(B)

A. Firth B. Saussure C. Halliday D. Chomsky

II. Fill in the following blanks

Introduction

1. Language, broadly speaking, is a means of ________ communication.(verbal)

2. Language has many functions. We can use language to talk about itself. This function is ________.(metalingual function)

3. Modern linguistics is ________ in the sense that the linguist tries to discover what language is rather than lay down some rules for people to observe.(descriptive)

4. The description of a language as it changes through time is a ________ study.(diachronic)

5. Saussure put forward two important concepts. ________ refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all members of a speech community (langue)

6. Human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present(in time and space) at the moment of communication. This quality is labeled as . (displacement)

7. Phonetics and phonology

8. ________ phonetics studies the movement of the vocal organs of producing the sounds of speech.(articulatory)

9. Consonants differ from vowels in that the latter are produced without________.(obstruction)

10. In phonological analysis the words fail-veil are distinguishable simply because of the two /f/and /v/. This is an example for illustrating.(minimal pairs)

Morphology

11. All words may be said to contain a root ________.(morpheme)

12. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are words rather than function words.(lexical)

13. As a result of , the negative morpheme in imperfect and

impossible in “im-” rather than “in-”.(assimilation)

14. A morpheme is one that cannot constitute a word by itself.(bound)

15. Antonyms antonyms.(relational)

like “husband” vs. “wife” are

16. Terms like “desk” and “stool” are of the term “furniture”.(hyponyms)

Syntax

17. XP may contain more that just X. For example, the “NP” the girl who is watering the flowers

consists of Det, N and Sen, with Det being the ________ , N the head, and S the complement.(specifier)

18. The level of syntactic representation that exists before movement takes place is commonly termed ________ structure.(deep structure)

19. The branch of general linguistics which is named studies the internal structure of sentences.(syntax)

20. IC is the short form of immediate used in the study of

syntax.(constituent)

Semantics

21. Charge and accuse are said to be ______synonyms.(Collocational)

22. Predication analysis is to break down predications into their constituents: ________ and ________.(argument, predicate)

23. We call the relation between animal and cow as ________.(hyponymy)

Pragmatics

24. In making conversation, the general principle that all participants are expected to observe is called the ________ Principle proposed by P. Grice.(Cooperative)

25. While the meaning of a sentence is abstract and decontextualized, that of an ________ is concrete and context-dependent.(utterance)

26. A________ act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying

literal

meaning

by

means

of

syntax,

lexicon

and

phonology.(locutionary)

27. ________ are those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action. (Commissives)

28. The idea of Paul Grice is that in making conversation, the participants must first of all be willing to ________; otherwise it would be impossible for them to go on with the talk. The general principle is called the________.(cooperate, Cooperative Principle )

29. In the light of Cooperative Principle, four maxims are specified. They are maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation and maxim of . (manner)

30. The speech act theory explains the nature of linguistic communication. It says that a speaker, while making an utterance, is performing three acts simultaneously: a locutionary act, an _________act, and a perlocutionary act.(illocutionary)

Language, Culture and Society

31. The ______ language is a superimposed, socially prestigious dialect of language.(standard)

32. A________ language is originally a pidgin that has become established as a native language in some speech community. (creole)

33. Whorf proposed that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on ________.(language)

34. In terms of sociolinguistics, ________ is sometimes used to refer to the whole of a person’s language.(idolect)

Language Acquisition

35. In learning a second language, a learner will subconsciously use his L1 knowledge. This process is called language ________.(transfer)

36. The ________ of the learner’s interlanguage is believed to be major source of incorrect forms resistant to further instruction.(fossilization)

37. ________ holds that where two languages are similar, positive transfer would occur; where they are different, negative transfer, or interference, would result.(Contrastive analysis)

III. True or False(Decide whether each of the following statements is true or false)

Introduction

1. Duality is one of the characteristics of human language. It refers to the fact that language has two levels of structures: the system of sounds and the systems of meanings.(T)

2. Prescriptive linguistics is more popular than descriptive linguistics, because it can tell us how to speak correct language.(F)

3. Competence and performance refer respectively to a language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules and the actual use of language in concrete situations.(T)

4. Langue is relatively stable and systematic while parole is subject to personal and situational constraints.(T)

5. Applied linguistics is the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning.(T)

6. Descriptive linguistics is concerned with how languages work, not with how they can be improved.(T)

7. Paradigmatic relation in syntax is alternatively called horizontal relation.(F)

Phonetics and Phonology

8. Sound /p/ in the word spit is an unaspirated stop.（T）

9. [p] is voiced bilabial stop.(F)

10. Broad transcription represents phonemes of a language whereas narrow transcription denotes its particular allophones.(T)

11. The hard roof of the mouth is called hard palate.(T)

12. In English, we have the syllable structure of CCCVCCCC.(C stands for Consonant and V stands for Vowel)(T)

Morphology

13. In most cases, prefixes change the meaning of the base whereas suffixes change the word-class of the base.(T)

14. All roots are free and all affixes are bound.(F)

15. All words contain a root morpheme.(T)

16. Morphemes are regarded as abstract constructs in the system of sound.(F)

17. If a word has sense, it must have reference.(F)

18. “Tulip”, “rose” and “violet” are all included in the notion of “flower”, therefore they are superordinates of “flower”.(F)

Syntax

19. Application of the transformational rules yields deep structure.(F)

20. Transformational rules do not change the basic meaning of sentences.(T)

21. Major syntactic category refers to all phrasal syntactic categories such as NP, VP, and PP, and word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories such as N and V.(T)

22. Surface structure is a level of syntactic representation after the operation of necessary syntactic movement.(T)

Semantics

23. Componential analysis is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic feature.(T)

24. Conceptualists maintain that there is no direct link between linguistic form and what it refers to. This view can be seen by the Semantic Triangle.(T)

Pragmatics

25. If the context of use is considered, the study of meaning is being carried out in the area of pragmatics.(T)

26. A locutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention.(F)

27. When performing an illocutionary act of representative, the speaker is making a statement or giving a description which he himself believes to be true.(T)

28. The utterance meaning of the sentence varies with the context in which it

is uttered.(T)

29. Only when maxim under Cooperative Principle is blatantly violated and the hearer knows that it is being violated do conversational implicatures arise.(T)

30. Of the three speech acts, linguists are most interested in the illocutionary act because this kind of speech is identical with the speaker’s intention.(T)

31. Utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication or simply in a context.(T)

Language, Society and Culture

32. A regional variety of a language is intrinsically inferior to the standard variety of that language.(F)

33. According to the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines speaker’s perceptions and patterns their way of life.(T)

34. Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used either by an individual or by a group of speakers.(T)

35. There are words of more or less the same meaning used in different regional dialects.(T)

Language Acquisition

36. Formal instruction hardly affects the natural route of Second Language Acquisition.(T)

37. In language classrooms nowadays the grammar taught to students is basically descriptive, and more attention is paid to developing learners’ communicative skills.(T)

38. Learners with different first languages would learn a second language in different way.(F)

39. Regardless of their ethnic and cultural background, children of all colors and societies follow roughly the same route/order of language development, though they may differ in the rate of learning.(T)

40. IV. Match each of the following linguistic terms with its corresponding definitions

Introduction

1. Design features: It refers to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

2. Parole: It refers to the actual phenomena or data of linguistics.

3. Competence: It is an essential part of performance. It is the speaker’s knowledge of his or her language: that is, of its sound structure, its words, and its grammatical rule.

4. Displacement: It means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts, which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.

5. Phatic function of language: It refers to the social interaction of language. For example: Mrs. P sneezes violently.

Mrs. Q: Bless you.

Msr. P: Thank you.

6. Diachronic linguistics: It is the study of a language through the course of its history; therefore, it is also called historical linguistics.

7. Descriptive linguistics: It is to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, or norms, of correctness.

Phonetics and phonology

8. Minimal pair: When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except in one sound element that occurs in the same position in the string, the two

forms are said to orm a minimal pair.

9. Suprasegmental feature: The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features; These are the phonological properties of such units as the syllable, the word, and the sentence. The main suprasegmental ones includes stress, intonation, and tone.

10. allophones: two or more variants of the same phoneme that do not distinguish meaning are called allophones of the same phonemes.

11. Complementary distribution: When two or more allophones of one phoneme never occur in the same linguistic environment they are said to be in complementary distribution.

12. Distinctive features: It refers to the features that can distinguish one phoneme from another.

Morphology

13. Allomorph ：it is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds.

Syntax

14. Phrase structure rules: They are rewrite rules that allow for the possible combinations of words to form phrases ad sentences.

15. IC analysis: IC analysis (Immediate constituent analysis) is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two (or more) segments. This sort of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are. What remain of the first cut are “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are “ultimate constituents”.

16. Deep structure : It is a central theoretical term in generative grammar, opposed to surface structure. It is the abstract syntactic representation of a sentence — an underlying level of structural organization which specifies all the factors governing the way the sentence should be interpreted.

Semantics

17. Sense: It 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 decontextualized.

18. Reference: It is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

19. Conceptualism: It is the view which holds that there is no direct ling between a linguistic form and what it refers to ; rather, in the interpretation of meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind.

20. Synonymy : It refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning.

21. Homonymy: It refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, e.g. different words re identical in sound or spelling, or in both.

Pragmatics

22. Sentence meaning: The meaning of a sentence is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication.

23. Utterance meaning: It is the meaning a speaker conveys by using a particular utterance in a particular context situation.

24. illocutionary act: It is using a sentence to perform a function. For example, Shoot the snake may be intended as an order or a piece of advice.

Sociolinguistics

25. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: It is a belief that our language helpsmould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world.

26. Diglossia: When two languages or language varieties exist side by side in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia.

27. Standard language(standard variety): It is the variety of a language which has the highest status in a community or nation and which is usually based on the speech and writing of educated native speakers of the language.

Language acquisition

28. Instrumental motivation: It refers to the learner’s desire to learn a language because it is a useful functional instrument, such as getting a job, passing an exam.

29. Fossilization: It refers to a process that sometimes occurs in second language learning in chich incorrect linguistic features become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes in the target language.

30. Error analysis: It is 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.

31. Interlanguage: It refers to a separate linguistic system based on the observable out-put which results from a learner’s attempted production of a target language form. It is formed when he attempts to learn a new language, and it has features of both the first and the second language but is neither.

32. LAD: It is posited by Chomsky in the 1960’s as a device effectively

present in the minds of children by which a grammar of their native language is constructed.

33. An Innativist view of language acquisition: It is proposed by Noam Chomsky, which states that the human species is prewired t acquire language and that the kind of language is also determined.

IV. Answer the following questions

1. What does productivity means for language?

2. What distinguishes prescriptive studies of language from descriptive

studies of language?

3. In which two ways may consonants be classified?

4. Please use examples to explain the definitions of phones, phonemes and

allophones.

5. What is sentence meaning? What is utterance meaning?

6. What is the difference between synchronic linguistics and diachronic

linguistics?

7. What is the difference between langue and parole?

8. What are suprasegmental features? How do the major suprasegmental

features of English function in conveying meaning?

9. What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

10. What is standard language?

11. What are design features of language?

12. What is the difference between langue and parole?

13. What do minimal pairs refer? Use an example to illustrate this linguistic phenomenon.

14. Illustrate what hyponymy is?

15. What is Cooperative Principle and its four maxims?