语言学期末考试填空题题库

Chapter 1
1.Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes learning a language laborious. For learners of a foreign language, it is the conventionality of a language that is more worth noticing that its arbitrariness.
2.In Saussure’s view, the relationship between signifier (sound image) and signified (concept) is arbitrary.
3.Human language is arbitrary. This refers to the fact that there is no logical or intrinsic connection between
a particular sound and the meaning it is associated with.
4.The features that define our human languages can be called design features
5.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.
6.By duality is meant the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the level are composed of elements of the level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.
7.Halliday proposes a theory of metafunctions of language, that is, language has ideational, interpersonal and interpersonal functions.
8. Our language can be used to talk about itself. This is the metalingual function of language.
9.Interpersonal function is realized by mood and modality.
10.When language is used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than exchanging information or ideas, its function is phatic function.
11.Some sentences do not describe things. They cannot be said to be true or false. The utterance of these sentences is or is a part of the doing of an action. They are called performatives
12.Linguistics is usually defined as the scientific study of language.
13.The branch of linguistics which studies the sound patterns of a language is called phonetics.
14. The branch of grammar which studies the internal structures of words is called morphology.
15.Phonetics mainly studies the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription.
16.Semantics and pragmatics investigate different aspects of linguistic meaning.
17.In linguistics, syntax refers to the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentence.
18.Pragmatics can be defines as the study of language in use.
19.If a linguistics, synchronic study describes and analyzes the language people actually use, it is said to be descriptive; if it aims to lay down rules for “correct” behavior, it is said to be prescriptive
20.In modern linguistics, synchronic study seems to enjoy priority over diachronic study. The reason is that successful studies of various states of a language would be the foundation of a historical study.
ngue refers to the abstract linguistics system shared be all the members of a speech community; and parole refers to the realization of language in actual use.
22.Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, and performance, the actual use of this knowledge in linguistic communication.
23.”A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.This famous quotation from Shakespeare illustrates that language has the design feature of arbitrariness.
24.An English speaker and a Chinese speaker are both able to use language, but they are not mutually intelligible, which shows that language is culturally transmitted
25.Human capacity for language has a genetic basis, but the details of language have to be taught and learned.
Chapter 2
1.The different members of a phoneme, sounds which are phonetically different but do not make one word
different from another in meaning, are allophones.
2. The three cavities in the articulatory apparatus are the pharynx, mouth, and nose.
six places of articulation according to Fromkin and Rodman throat,palate,palate top,teeth,lips,nose,
4. Name five of English front vowels: i:, i, e, æ, a.
5.The sound [p] can be described with “ voiceless, bilabial, stop”
6.In the production of a velar sound, the back of the tongue is raised so that it touches the soft palate to form a kind of obstruction.
7. By the position of the highest part of the tongue, vowels are classified as front vowels, central vowels and back vowels.
8.Pitch,as a principal suprasegmental features, can be defined as the relative intensity of soundness with which a syllable is uttered.
9.In English, the sound [b] has the same phonetic features as the sound [p] except the feature of voicing.
10. Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
11. The oral stops in English are b, p, d, t, g and k.
12.When pitch, stress and length variation are tied to the sentence rather than to the word, they are collectively known as intonation.
1.The sound [p] can be described with " voiceless, bilabial, stop".
2.The sound [b] can be described with " voiced, bilabial, stop"
3.Consonant articulations are relatively easy to feel, and as a result are most conveniently described in terms of place and manner of articulation.
4.Consonants are produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some place to divert, impede, or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity.
5.The present system of the cardinal vowels derives mainly from one developed in the 1920s by the British phonetician, Daniel Jones (1881-1967), and his colleagues at University of London.
6.Consonant articulations are relatively easy to feel, and as a result are most conveniently described in terms of place and manner of articulation.
7.The sound /k/ can be described with “voiceless,velar,stop”.
8.Narrow transcription should transcribe all the possible speech sounds, including the minute shades.
9.Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sounds.
10.Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable.
11.The syllable structure in Chinese is CVC or CV or V.
12.The different members of a phoneme, sounds which are phonetically different but do not make one word different from another in meaning, are allophone of airstream.
13.In English, the two words cut and gut differ only in their initial sounds and the two sounds are two different phonemes and the 2 words are a minimal pair.
14.Consonants differ from vowels in that the latter are produced without obstruction of airstream.
15.In English there are a number of diphthong,.which are produced by moving from one vowel position to another through intervening positions.
16.According to the maximal onset principle, when there is a choice as to where to place a consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda
17.In phonological analysis the words fail-veil are distinguishable simply because of the two phonemes /f/ -/v/.This is an example for illustrating minimal pairs.
Chapter 3
1.Polymorphemic words other than compounds have two parts: the roots and the affixes
2. On, before and together are grammatical words ---- they are words which do not take inflectional endings.
3. Give the regular allomorphs of plural in English: /n/, /i:/, /s/, /z/, /iz/.
4. Give the regular allomorphs of past tense in English: /iə/, /t/, /d/.
5. Nouns, verbs and adjectives are context words other than function words.
6. In the addition of new words, smog is a(an) blending.
7.Waltz is borrowed from German.
8. As a result of assimilation, the negative morpheme in imperfect and impossible is “im-”rather than “in-”.
9. The linguistic term used for the common factor of a set of verbs, such as writing, wrote, written, write and writes is lexeme.
10. A bound morpheme is one that cannot constitute a word by itself.
1.As the lexical words carry the main content of a language while the grammatical ones serve to link its different parts together, the lexical words are also known as content words and grammatical ones affixes.
2.In traditional grammar, pronoun is the only word class which can function as a substitute for another item.
3.In terms of the meaning expressed by words, they can be classified into Grammatical words and lexical words.
4.The morpheme is the minimal distinctive unit in grammar, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether lexical or grammatical.
5.There are 2 fields of morphology: the study of inflectional morphology and the study of derivational morphology.
6.A bound morpheme is one that cannot stand by itself
7.Morphology is a branch of linguistics that studies that studies the interrelationship between phonology and morphology.
8.Blending is a relatively complex form of compounding in which a new word is formed by joining the initial part of one word and the final part of another word. For example, the English word smog is made from smoke and fog.
9.Back-formation”refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by detecting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language.
10.Word is a unit of expression that has universal intuitive recognition by native speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. It is the minimum free form.
11.Affix is the collective term for the type of formative that call be used only when added to another morpheme. Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes, namely, prefix, suffix, and infix.
12.Take is the lexeme of taking, taken and took.
13.Bound morphemes are classified into 2 types: affix and bound root,.
14.A word formed by derivation is called a derivative, and a word formed by compounding is called a compound.
Chapter 4
1.IC is the short form of immediate constituent used in the study of syntax.
2.Coordination and subordination belong to endocentric construction.
4.A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word, such as "and", "but", "or".
5.A clause that takes a subject and a finite verb, and at the same time stands structurally alone is known as a finite clause.
6.IC analysis emphasizes the hierarchical structure of a sentence, seeing it as consisting of word groups
7.Syntactic movement is dictated by rules traditionally called transformational rules, whose operation may change the syntactic representation of a sentence.
8.Syntactic relations include positional relation, relation of substitutability,relation of co-occurrence.
three of SVO languages:English, Chinese, French
2.IC is the short from of immediate constituent used in the study of syntax.
3.The category of case is prominent in the grammar of Latin, with six distinctions of nominative vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative.
4.The generative approach to linguistics refers to the theory originated with the American linguist Norm Chomsky, who published his book Syntactic Structures in 1957.
5.When the affirmative sentence “Jack sold his linguistics textbooks to Jill after the final examination” is transformed into “When did Jack sell his linguistics textbooks to Jill?”,three transformational rules are applied. They are Do -insertion, Subject-aux Inversion and Wh-movement.
6.The sentence “It was John who wore his best suit to the dance last night.” is called a cleft sentence by traditional grammarians.
7.Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate (verb+object) construction, and connective(be complement)construction.
8.According to Chomsky, grammar is a mechanism that should be able to generate all and only the grammatical sentences of a language.
Chapter 5
1.Human language is arbitrary. This refers to the fact that there is no logical or intrinsic connection between
a particular sound and the meaning it is associated with.
2.Predication analysis is to break down predications into their constituents:argument and predicate
3.The sense relation between “A lent a book to B” and “B borrowed a book from A” is synonymy
4.Antonyms like ”husband” vs. ”wife” are converse antonyms.
5. Terms like ”desk” and ”stool” are hyponyms of the term “furniture”.
6.According to D. Leech, conceptual meaning refers to logic, cognitive, or denotative content.
7.We use the term presupposition to refer to the relation between the following two sentences:
A. Jack‟s bike needs repairing.
B. Jack has a bike.
8.The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combined the principle of compositionality.
9. Inspired by the medieval grammarians, Ogden and Richard (1923) present the classic
“semantic triangle” in their book The Meaning of Meaning.
Chapter 6
1.Psycholinguistics is the study of language in relation to the mind.
2.According to Chomsky, competence is the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language.
3.The most important part of the brain is the outside surface of the brain,called the cerebral cortex
4.The brain is divided into two roughly symmetrical halves, called hemispheres, one on the right and one on the left.
5.Brain arterialization is genetically programmed, but takes time to develop,
6.In general, the two-word stage begins roughly in the second half of the child’s second year.
7.The relationship between the name and the meaning of a word is quite arbitrary.
8.When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard thought as
sub-vocal speech as overt thought.
9.Because language differs in many ways, Whorf believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently, relative to their linguistic background. This notion is called linguistic relativity.
10.Psycholinguists consider that the first language is acquired in the short period from about age two to puberty, which is called the critical period of the first language acquisition.
11. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has two aspects: linguistic determinism and linguistic reality.
12. The cohort model is a supposed doctrine dealing with the spoken word recognition, whose process features that the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input.
13.Metaphor involves the comparison of two concepts in that one is construed in terms of the other. It’s often described in terms of a target domain and a source domain.
14.Children frequently say tooths and mouses, instead of teeth and mice. These are examples of overgeneralization
16.Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.
17.According to critical period hypothesis, in child development there is a period during which language can be acquired more easily than at any other time. The period lasts until puberty (around 12or 13 years), and is due to biological development.
Chapter 7
1.Idiolect refers to varieties of a language used by individual speakers, with peculiarities of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. In fact, no two speakers speak exactly the same dialect. Each speaker has certain characteristic features of his own in his way of speaking.
2.We witnessed a change in language teaching in the middle of the 1970s when Hymes’ theory of communicative competence was introduced into the field as an antagonism to the traditional philosophy in language teaching.
3.The social group isolated for study is any given study is called the speech community.
4.Speech variety refers to any distinguishable from of speech used by speaker or group of speakers.
5.From the sociolinguistic perspective,a speech variety is no more than a dialectual variety of a language.
nguage standardization is also called language planning.
7.Social variation gives rise to sociolects which are subdivisible into smaller speech categories that reflect their socioeconomic, educational, occupational background,etc.
8.Stylistic variation in a person’s speech or writing usually ranges on a continuum from casual or colloquial to formal or polite according to the type of communicative situation.
9.A reginal dialect may gain status and become standardized as the national or official language of a country.
10.Variety is a neutral term, and it can be used instead of regional or official dialect, or pidgin.
11.Sociolinguistics is a multidisciplinary research field focusing on the relationship between language and society.
12.The differences between men and women’s language can be traced to many biological, psychological and social reasons.
13.The goal of sociolinguistics is to explore the nature of language variation and language use among a variety of speech communities and in different social situation.
14.Every speaker of a language is, in a stricter sense, a speaker of a distinct idiolect.
15.A pidgin usually reflects the influence of the higher, or dominant, language in its lexicon and that of the lower language in their phonology and occasionally syntax.
16.Social variation gives rise to sociolects which are subdivisible into smaller speech categories that reflect their socioeconomic, educational, occupational background.。