语言学题库

语言学题库：

Chapter 1

1. Read the following passage carefully and then state your own position concerning the use of knowing some linguistics. ( 2007, 中国人民大学研究生入学试题)

One famous scholar says that language is an interesting subject to study on its own right, for the simple reason that everybody uses it every day. It is unbelievable that we know very little about something we are so familiar with. Just a few questions will arouse our interest in language. Why should we call the thing we sit on chair? Can’t we call chair table and table chair? How is ti that children don’t seem to make a big effort in learning their first language while we adults have to word very hard to learn a second language? Why can we talk about yesterday and last year while cats and dogs never seem to make noises about their past experience? Do you think we can think as clearly without language as with language? Does language determine what we think or thought determines what we say? These questions make us curious about language and linguistics can satisfy our curiosity. To seek the answer to any of these questions is a good reason for studying linguistics.

I. Please disambiguate each of the following ambiguous sentences by means of tree diagrams.

1. She showed her baby pictures.

2. The old man was drinking in the open air.

3. John left directions for Tom to follow.

4. The young bachelor hit the color ball.

5. Leave the book on the shelf.

6. John saw a girl with a telescope.

7. more beautiful flowers

8. I went to the bank. (? Polysemy/ homonymy)

II. To what extent can we say that constituent analysis is more informative than traditional linear structure analysis?

Key points: 1) what is IC Analysis?

2) What is traditional linear structure analysis? The weakness of the approach.

3) The advantage of IC Analysis

北京师范大学2007 年硕士研究生入学考试（英语语言学试题）

第一部分：基础题本专业所有方向的考生都必须答此部分试题（1-8题）

1. Define the following concepts. (20 points)

1) Phoneme

2) Deep Structure and Surface Structure

3) Speech Act Theory

4) The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

2. Explain why the sentence John saw a girl with a telescope is ambiguous, and explicate the ambiguity by drawing two or more syntactic trees for the sentence. (10 points)

3. What are gradable antonyms? Explain the concept with example. (10 points)

4. Read the following passage and state what wrong is with the use of “hello”from the

socio-cultural perspective.

A group of Chinese girls who just arrived at the U.S for their university education

decided to visit the city of New York together. Since their school was not very far from the city, so they planned to take a Greyhound bus to go there at the weekend. Saturday morning, they got up early and after two hours’ drive thy got to the downtown of the city. They stayed there for a couple of hours, shopping sn sightseeing happily. Everything seemed OK until it was the time for them to go back---- they suddenly realized that they lost their way back to the Greyhound bus station. What made the situation worse was that it was getting darker. In despair, they stopped at a corner on the street and decided to ask for help. At this moment they saw a young couple passing by so they said “Hello!” to this couple. To their surprise, thee couple looked at them coldly and hustled on. Having no way out, they approached to the next group of passersby and tried a louder “Hello!” this time. Again they got nothing but a cold shoulder from these city people.

5. Compare and Contrast the following Pairs of terms. Use examples if necessary. (20 points)

1) Language learning and language acquisition

2) Field dependence and field independence

3) Contrastive analysis and error analysis

6. Scholars have tried to explain how human beings acquire or learn the language. There are two

major schools of thought in language learning theories, empiricism and mentalism. Please define and explain these two terms, and then make comments with your own point of view. (10 points)

7. It is believed that the study of language (linguistics) is closely related to language teaching. In

what ways do you think linguistic studies contribute to the research and practice of language teaching? (10 points)

8. Some language teachers argue that we should “teach the language” rather than “teach about the

language”. What are the major differences between these two approaches to language teaching?

(10 points)

南开大学2007年硕士研究生入学考试英语语言学试题

I Define each of the following terms (8%)

1. Approximant

2. Coarticulation

3. Arbitrariness

4. Complementary distribution

II. Work out the distinction features of the following sounds. (10%)

1. [t h] ______________________________________________

2. [w] _______________________________________________

3. [v ] _______________________________________________