跨考专业课-北京师范大学2010年考研外国语言学及应用语言学专业大纲解析之重难点解析2

跨考教育倾力奉献，祝您2011考研成功北京师范大学2010年考研外国语言学及应用语言学专业大纲解析之重难点解析248. What is collocation?“Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.49. What is syntax?“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.50. What is a sentence?L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.51. What are syntactic relations?“Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence. “Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”. “Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”. By “relations of co-occurrence”, one means that words of different sets of clauses may permit or require the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.52. What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents (and ultimate constituents)?“IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two (or more) segments. This kind 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 called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”.53. What are endocentric and exocentric constructions?“Endocentric construction” is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable “centre” or “head”. Usually noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases belong to endocentric types because the constituent items are subordinate to thehead. “Exocentric construction”, opposite of endocentric construction, refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as whole; that is to say, there is no definable centre or head inside the group. Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate (verb + object) construction, and connective (be + complement) construction.54. What is a subject? A predicate? An object?In some language, an “subject” refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case, such as “pater” in the following example: “pater filium amat” (put literally in English: the father the son loves). In English, a “grammatical subject” refers to a noun which can establish correspondence with the verb and which can be checked by a tag-question test, e.g., “He is a good cook, (isn’t he?).” A “predicate” refers to a major constituent of sentence structure in a binary analysis in which all obligatory constituents other than the subject are considered together. e.g., in the sentence “The monkey is jumping ”, “is jumping ” is the predicate. Traditionally “object” refers to the receiver or goal of an action, and it is further classified into two kinds: direct object and indirect object. In some inflecting languages, an object is marked by case labels: the “accusative case” for direct object, and the “dative case ” for direct object, and the “dative case” for indirect to word order (after the verb and preposition) and by inflections (of pronouns). e.g., in the sentence “John kissed me”, “me” is the object. Modern linguists suggest that an object refers to such an item that it can become a subject in passive transformation.55. What is category?The term “category” in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense, e.g., noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender, case and countability; and of the verb, for example, tense, aspect, voice, etc.56. What is number? What is gender? What is case?“Number” is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc. In English, number is mainly observed in nouns, and there are only two forms: singular and plural. Number is also reflected in the inflections of pronouns and verbs.“Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we natural gender (the opposite is grammatical gender).“Case” identifies the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence. In Latin grammar, cases are based on variations in the morphological forms of the word, and are given the terms “accusative”, “nominative”, “dative”, etc. In English, the case category is realized in three ways: by following a preposition and by word order.57. What is concord? What is government?“Concord ” may be defined as requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories, e.g., “man runs”, “men run”. “Government” requires that one word of a particular class in a given syntactic class shall exhibit the form of a specific category. In English, government applies only to pronouns among the variable words, that is, prepositions and verbs govern particular forms of the paradigms of pronouns according to their syntactic relation with them, e.g., “I helped him; he helped me.”58. What is a phrase? What is a clause?A “phrase” is a single element of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of “clauses”. Traditionally, it is seen as part of a structural hierarchy, falling between a clause andword, e.g., “the three tallest girls” (nominal phrase). There is now a tendency to make a distinction between word groups and phrases. A “word group” is an extension of a word of a particular class by way of modification with its main features of the class unchanged. Thus we have nominal group, verbal group, adverbial group, conjunction group and preposition group.A “clause” is group of words with its own subject and predicate included in a larger subject-verb construction, namely, in a sentence. Clauses can also be classified into two kinds: finite and non-finite clauses, the latter referring to what are traditionally called infinitive phrase, participle phrase and gerundial phrase.59. What is conjoining? What is embedding? What is recursiveness?“Conjoining” refers to a construction where one clause is co-ordinated or conjoined with another, e. g., “John bought a cat and his wife killed her.” “Embedding” refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (or main clause) in syntactic subordination, e.g., “I saw the man who had killed a chimpanzee.” By “recursiveness” we mean that there is theoretically no limit to the number of the embedded clauses in a complex sentence. This is true also with nominal and adverbial clauses, e.g., “I saw the man who killed a cat who…a rat which…that…”60. What is hypotactic relation? What is paratactic relation?“Hypotactic relation” refers to a construction where constituents are linked by means of conjunction, e.g. “He bought eggs and milk.” “Paratactic relation” refers to constructions which are connected by juxtaposition, punctuation or intonation, e. g., “He bought tea, coffee, eggs and milk” (pay attention to the first three nouns connected without “and”).61. What is semantics?“Semantics” refers to the study of the communication of meaning through language. Or simply, it is the study of meaning.62. What is meaning?Though it is difficult to define, “meaning” has the following meaning: (1) an intrinsic property; (2) the connotation of a word; (3) the words put after a dictionary entry; (4) the position an object occupies in a system; (5) what the symbol user actually refers to; (6) what the symbol user should refer to; (7) what the symbol user believes he is referring to; (8) what the symbol interpreter refers to; (9) what the symbol interpreter believes it refers to; (10) what the symbol interpreter believes the user refers to…linguists argued about “meaning of meaning” fiercely in the result of “realism”, “conceptualism/mentalism”, “mechanism”, “contextualism”, “behaviorism”, “functionalism”, etc. Mention ought to be made of the “Semantic Triangle Theory” of Ogden & Richards. We use a word and the listener knows what it refers to because, according to the theory, they have acquired the same concept/reference of the word used and of the object/referent.63. What is the difference between meaning, concept, connotation, sense, implication, denotation, notation, reference, implicature and signification?“Meaning” refers to the association of language symbols with the real word. “Concept” or “notion” is the impression of objects in people’s mind. “connotation” is the implied meaning, similar to “implication” and “implicature”. “Sense” is the lexical position in which a word finds itself. “Denotation”, like “sense”, is not directly related with objects, but makes the abstract assumption of the real world. “Reference” is the word-object relationship. “Implicature”, in its narrow sense, refers to conversational implicature achieved by intentionally violating one of the four CP maxims. “Signification”, in contrast with “value”, mean the meaning of situation may not have any communicative value, like “What’s this?”64. What is the Semantic/Semiotic Triangle?Ogden and Richards presented the classic “Semantic Triangle” as manifested in the following diagram, in which the “symbol” or “form” refers to the linguistic elements (word, sentence, etc.), the “referent” refers to the object in the world of experience, and “thought” or “reference” refers to concept or notion. Thus, the symbol a word signifies “things” by virtue of the “concept”, associated with the form of the word in the mind of the speaker of the language. The “concept” thus considered is meaning of the word.65. What is contextualism?“Contextualism” is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, observable context: the “situational context” and the “linguistic context”. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation, as the following factors are related to the situational context: (1) the speaker and the hearer; (2) the actions they are performing at the time; (3) various external objects and events; (4) deictic features. The “linguistic context” is another aspect of contextualism. It considers the probability of one word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another, which forms part of the meaning, and an important factor in communication.66. How many kinds of meaning did linguists find and study?C. C. Fries (1952) makes a traditional distinction between lexical meaning and structural meaning. The former is expressed by those “meaningful” parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and is given in the dictionary associated with grammar. The latter expresses the distinction between the subject and the object of a sentence, oppositions of definiteness, tense the number, and the difference between statements, questions and requests. In a word, “the total linguistic meaning of any utterance consists of the lexical meaning of the separate words plus such structural meaning…”G. Leech (1981) categorizes seven kinds of meaning, five of which are brought under the “associative meaning”. Different from the traditional and the functional approach, F. R. Palmer (1981) and J. Lyons (1977) suggest we draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, the former being directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, while the latter includes all the various types of meaning not necessarily associated thereto.67. What is synonymy?“Synonymy” is used to mean sameness or close similarity of meaning. Dictionary makers (lexicographers) rely on the existence of synonymy for their definitions. Some semanticians maintain, however, that there are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects: In shades of meaning (e.g., finish, complete, close, conclude, terminate, finalize, end, etc.); In stylistic meaning; In emotive meaning (or affective meaning); In range of use (or collocative meaning); In British and American English usages [e.g., autumn (BrE), fall (AmE)]. Simeon Potter said,“ Language is like dress. We vary our dress to suit the occasion. We do not appear at a friend’s silver-wedding anniversary in gardening clothes, nor do we go punting on the river in a dinner-jacket.” This means the learning of synonyms is important to anyone that wishes to use his language freely and well.68. What is Antonymy? How many kinds of antonyms are there?The term “antonymy” is used for oppositions of meaning; words that stand opposite in meaning are called “antonyms”, or opposites, which fall in there categories1) gradable antonyms (e.g, good-bad); (2) complementary antonyms (e.g., single-married); (3) relational antonyms (e.g., buy-sell).69. What is hyponymy? What is a hyponym? What is superordinate?“Hyponymy” involves us in the notion of meaning inclusion. It is a matter of class membership. That is to say, when X id a kind of Y, the lower term X is the “hyponym”, and the upper term Y is the “superordinate”. Two or more hyponyms sharing the same one superordinate are called “co-hyponyms”. For example, “flower” is the superordinate of “tulip”, “violet” and “rose”, which are the co-hyponyms of “flower”.70. What is polysemy? What is homonymy?“Polysemy” refers to the semantic phenomenon that a word may have than one meaning. For example, “negative”, means (1) a statement saying or meaning “no”, (2) a refusal or denial, (3) one of the following words and expressions: no, not, nothing, never, not at all, etc., (4) a negative photograph or film. But we can sometimes hardly tell if a form has several meanings or it is a different word taking this form; hence the difference between polysemy and homonymy.71. What is entailment?“Entailment” can be illustrated by the following two sentences, with Sentence A entailing Sentence B:A: He married a blonde heiress.B: He married a blonde.In terms of truth value, the following relationships exist between these two sentences:(1) When A is true, B is necessarily true;(2) When B is false, too;(3) when A is false, B may be true or false; (4) When B is true, A may be true or false. Entailment is basically a semantic relation or logical implication, but we have to assume co-reference of “He” in sentence A and sentence B, before we have A entail B.72. What is presupposition?Similar to entailment, “presupposition” is a semantic relationship or logical connection. The above-mentioned “When phrase No.1”is also true with presupposition. For example:A: The girl he married was an heiress.B: He married a girl.But there is an important difference: Presupposition is not subject to negation, i.e., when A is false, B is still true. Other statements about the truth value in presupposition are:(1) When B is true, A can either be true or false;(2) When B is false, A has no truth value at all. Presupposition does not have to be found between two propositions. An example in point is: “ When did you stop beating your wife?” This presupposes that he has been beating his wife.73. What is componential analysis?“Componential analysis” defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. For example, we may “clip” the following words “Man”, “Woman”, “Boy” and “Girl” so that we have only separate parts of them. Man: + Human + Adult + MaleWoman: + Human + Adult -MaleBoy: +Human –Adult +MaleGirl: +Human –Adult –Male74. What is predication analysis? What is a one-place predicate? What is a two-place predicate? What is a no-place predicate? What are down-graded predications?“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 now distinguish a “two-place predicate” (which governs two arguments, 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).75. What is a logical operator?“Logical operator ” make only one kind of the “logical factors” or “logical means”, others being “definiteness”, “coreference”, “tense” and “time”, since predication is not the whole of a sentence or proposition. All these factors play a part in prepositional actualization of the predication ---the pining of a predication down a claim about reality. Example of logical operators are “not”, “and”, “or”, “some”, “if”, “false”, etc. The term “logical operation” reflects the fact that these meaning elements are often thought of as performing operations, controlling elements of the semantic system, so to speak.76. Why is writing important? Why is speech considered prior to writing?Language can take the form of speech or writing, the former using sound as medium and the latter employing visual symbols. No one could tell when mankind first spoke; nor could people tell when mankind developed the first writing. A writing system consists of a graphemes plus characteristic features of their use, resulting in the diversion of the writing forms; word writing, syllabic writing and sound writing. It is widely considered that speech is the primary medium, and writing the secondary medium. But this comparative diminution does not mean that writing is unimportant. With the shot-lived memory and the finite capacity of information storing, writing is used, partly for compensation and partly for better communication. We cannot trust the negotiation counterpart so we turn to the writing and signing of an agreement. Writing leads people to the acme of science, study and research, and to the ultimate joy of literature77. What is a pictogram? What is an ideogram?A “pictogram” refers to an inscription representing the features of a physical object. The Hebrew and the Chinese orthography still reflects traces of their pictorial origin. For instance, the letter “a” (aleph) imitates the head of an ox and the letter “b” (beth) imitates a horse. And “niú”, “mǎ”, “hǔ”and hundreds more of Chinese words derived from, and still keep the pictorial resemblance to, the shapes of the things or objects. The advantage of pictograms is that they can be easily understood by anyone. That explains why international road signs and public-toilet signs make a wide use of them.An “ideogram” means an idea picture or idea writing. In order to express the attribute of an object or concepts associated with it, the pictogram’s meaning had to be extended. For instance, a picture of the sun does not necessarily represent the object itself, but connotes “warmth”, “heat”, “light”, “daytime”, etc. In spite of its disadvantages, the later form of ideograms turned out to be linguistic symbols, symbols for the sounds of these objects. The process is called the “Rebus Principle” indicating that writing is like a riddle composed of words or syllables depicted by symbols or pictures that suggest the sound of the words or syllables they represent.78. What is word writing? What is sound writing? What is syllabic writing?Word writing refers to the writing system based on ideograms and/or pictograms, like Chinese. “Sound writing ” or “alphabetic writing”, which dominates the world, derived form the Latin alphabet with mild adjustments. Most of the European alphabets belong to the sound writing system, e.g., Spanish, German, French, English, etc. “Syllabic writing” is a word-syllabus writing, developed by the Egyptians. Japanese is a typical syllabic-writing language, though derived from Chinese, a Sino-Tibetan language. The Japanese modified the Chinese characters they had borrowed from ancient China so that the Japanese syllables (to the number of fifty) were each represented, either by what is called “hiragana” or by what is name “katakana”.79. What is a grapheme? What is orthography?A “grapheme” is the minimal constructive unit in the writing system of a language. The English grapheme A is represented by A,α,a etc.Orthography means correct spelling, spelling rules or attempts to improve spelling.80. What is affixation, conversion and compounding?“Affixation” is the morphological process whereby grammatical of lexical information is added to the base (root or stem). It has been the oldest and the most productive word-formation method in the English language and some other European languages. “Prefixation” means addition of a prefix to make a new word, while “suffixation” means adding a suffix to a word. The word “unfaithful” is result of both prefixation and suffixation.“Conversion” (called sometimes “full conversion”) is a word-formation process by which a word is altered from one part of speech into another without the addition (or deletion) of any morpheme. “Partial conversion” is also alteration when a word of one word-class appears in a function which is characteristic of another word-class, e.g., “ the wealthy” (=wealthy people).”Compounding” is so complex a word-formation process as far as English is concerned that there is no formal criterion that can be used for the definition of it, though it may mean simply that two words or more come together used as one lexical item, like “dustbin”.81. What is blending, abbreviation and back formation?“Blending” is a relatively complex form of compounding in which two roots are blended by joining the initial part of the first root and the final part of the second root, or by joining the initial parts of the two roots, e.g., smog→smoke+fog, boatel→boat + hotel, etc.“Abbreviation”, also called in some cases “clipping”, means that a word that seems unnecessarily long is shortened, usually by clipping either the front or the back part of it, e.g., telephone→phone, professor→prof., etc.Broadly speaking, abbreviation includes acronyms that are made up from the first letters of the long name of an organization, e.g., World Bank→WB, European Economic Community→EEC, etc. Other examples of acronyms can be found with terminologies, to be read like one word, e.g., radio detecting and ranging→radar. Test of English as a Foreign Language→TOEFL , etc.“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 present in the language. It is a special kind of metanalyais, combined with analogical creation, e.g., editor→edit, enthusiasm→enthuse, etc.82. What is analogical creation? What is borrowing?The process of “analogical creation”, as one of the English tendencies in English word-formation, refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, “marathon” appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modern English created such words as “telethon”, “talkthon”, etc. Analogy may create single words (e.g., sunrise-moonrise, earthrise, etc.; earthquake-starquake, youthquake, etc.) and phrases (e.g., environmental pollution-sound pollution, air pollution, cultural pollution, etc.).“Borrowing” means the English language borrowed words from foreign languages, which fall in four categories: aliens, denizens, translation-loans and semantic borrowings.“Aliens” are foreign loans that still keep their alien shapes, i. e., morphological and phonological features, e.g., “elite”, “coup détat”, “coupé”, etc.(from French). “Deniens” , also foreign words, have transformed their foreign appearance, i.e., they have been Angolcized (or Americanized), e. g., “get” (a Scandinavian borrowing), “theater” (a French loan), etc. “Hybrids” are also denizens, because they are words made up of two parts both from foreign soil, such as “sociology” (“socio-” from French and –logy from Greek).“Translation-loans” are words imported by way of translation, e. g., “black humor” from French(“humor noir”), “found object” form French ,too (“object trouve”), etc. Finally, semantic borrowings have acquired new meaning under the influence of language or languages other than the source tongue. For example, “gift” mean “the price of a wife ” in Old English (450-1150AD), and after the semantic borrowing of the meaning of “gift or present” of the Scandinavian term “gipt”, it meant and still means “gift” in the modern sense of it.83. What is assimilation, dissimilation and metathesis?“Assimilation” refers to change of a sound as the result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation. The assimitative processes at word in language could be explained by the “theory of least effort” ,i.e., in speaking we tend to exert as little effort as possible so that we do not want to vary too often places of articulation in uttering a sequence of sounds. Assimilation takes place in quick speech very often. In expressions such as “immobile”, “illegal”, etc., the negative prefixes should be or have been “in-” etymologically.“Dissimilation”, opposite of assimilation, is the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another sound, so that the sounds become less alike than expected. As there are two[r] sounds in the Latin word “peregrines”, for instance, the first segment had to dissimilate into[l], hence the English word “pilgrim”.“Metathesis” is a process involving an alteration in the sequence of sounds. Metathesis had originally been a performance error, which was overlooked and accepted by the speech community. For instance, the word “bird” was “bird” in Old English. The word “ask” used to be pronounced [ask] in Old English, as still occurs in some English dialects.84. What is pragmatics?Pragmatics can be simply defined as the study of language in use. It is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). It has, consequently, more to do with the analysis of what people mean by their utterances than what the words or phrases in those utterances might mean by themselves.85. What is speech act theory?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 is often used to “do things”, to perform acts. Austin suggests three basic senses in which in saying something one is doing something and three kinds of acts are performed simultaneously:1) Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference;2) Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc, in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it;3) Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances.86. What’s Searle’s classification of illocutionary acts?Searle suggests five basic categories of illocutionary acts:Assertives: sentences that commit the speaker to the truth of something. Typical cases are "I think the train is moving" and "I'm sure John has stolen the book". The degree of commitment varies from statement to statement. The commitment is small in "I guess John has stolen the book" but very strong in "I solemnly swear that John has stolen the book".Directives: sentences by which the speaker tries to get the hearer to do something. "I beg you to give me some help" and "I order you to do it right now" are both attempts to get something done by the hearer. Among the verbs that fall into this group are "ask", "plead", "entreat", "command", or "advise".。