Test 7

Test 7I. Tick off the correct or the best possible answers:1.One of the properties of language is that a language user can understand andproduce sentences he/she has never heard before. This property of language is called ________.A. dualityB. productivityC. displacementD. arbitrariness Key: B2.The ______ function refers to the fact that language can be used for establishing afavorable atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than for exchanging information or ideas.A. phaticB. directiveC. evocativeD. performative Key: A3.From a functional approach, the _______ meaning of a language use consists ofwhat is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.A. affectiveB. associativeC. stylisticD. collocative Key: A4.When –ing in …gangling‟is removed to get a verb …gangle‟, we call this way ofcreating words ________.A. suffixationB. back-formationC. blendingD. acronymy Key: B5.______ refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings topositions of importance.A. DegradationB. SpecializationC. ElevationD. Extension Key: C6.As we know, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and specialway of expressing his ideas in language. This language variety of individual users is called ______.A. idiolectB. regional dialectC. temporal dialectD. social dialect Key: A7.When pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentence rather than to theword, they are collectively known as ________.A. intonationB. toneC. phonemeD. sentence stress Key: A8._______ refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacentsound.A. Addition of soundB. Loss of soundC. MetathesisD. AssimilationKey: D9.Basically, all the languages in the world can be classified in terms of languagefamily. Vietnamese and Korean are two languages in the ______ family.A. Indo-EuropeanB. Sino-TibetanC. Hamito-SemiticD. Malayo-PolynesianKey: B10. A _______ is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.A. morphemeB. phonemeC. graphemeD. letterKey: CII. Are the following statements true (T) or false (F)?1. A sentence cannot be a word or a fragment in strict sense, but an utterance can be aword or a fragment of a sentence. T/FKey: T2.It doesn‟t make sense to ask what language a sentence belongs to. T/FKey: F3. A stem first of all refers to any morpheme or combination of morphemes, but anaffix can be added to it. T/FKey: T4.Every word in a language can find at least one referent in the objective world. T/F Key: F5.In most cases, lexicon means vocabulary and is related to the analysis and creationof words, idioms and collocations. T/FKey: T6.The use of the term …implicature‟ is different from …implication‟ in that it usuallyindicates a rather narrowly defined logical relationship between two propositions.T/FKey: F7. A phrase means two or more words in sequence, intended to have meaning, thatform a syntactic unit that is less than a complete sentence. It is actually synonymous with word group. T/FKey: F8.Collocation is a term in lexicology used by some linguists to refer to the habitualco-occurrences of individual lexical items, or collocates. This relation of co-occurrence usually cannot be accounted for. T/FKey: T9.In order to understand how conversational principles work, we may consider howeach maxim actually works and how people observe these maxims in daily communication. T/FKey: T10.Syntax studies the rules which govern the ways words, word groups and phrases arecombined to make grammatical sentences in a language, i.e. it deals with the relationships between elements in sentence structures. T/FKey: TIII. Fill in the blanks:1.It is generally believed that J. Austin and _______ made the greatest contributionto the proposition of Speech Act Theory, an important theory in pragmatic study.Key: J. Searle2.According to the positions affixes occupy in words, __________ falls intoprefixation and suffixation.Key: affixation3.The signs “&”, “@”, “%” and “$” widely used today are examples of ______writing.Key: word4.Two methods can be used to reconstruct an older form of a language: internalreconstruction and the _______ reconstruction.Key: external5.The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has two major thrusts: linguistic determinism andlinguistic _______ .Key: relativity6.In the course of communication, a speaker may change from the standardlanguage to the non-standard language, may shift his subject matter, or may move from one point on the formality scale to another point. This linguistic behavior is referred to as ______.Key: code switch7.The different types of a language as different forms to realize a meregeneralization of the language are called “sub-languages” or _______.Key: (language) varieties8._________ construction refers to a construction in which the distribution of wordsis functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents.Key: Endocentric_9.It‟s commonly believed that the basic function of language is that it‟s used for_________.Key: human communication10.The degree to which a test measures what it is meant to measure is termed_________ in language testing, and that is an important index used to evaluate the quality of a test.Key: validityIV. Use your own words to explain the following terms:1. cultural transmission (as a defining feature of human language)Key: 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.2. phonic medium of languageKey: The limited range of sounds that are used in human language communication, i.e. the speech sounds.3.phonemeKey: a collection of abstract sound features, unlike a phone, (which is a speech unit), it is a phonological unit; allophones are actual realization of a phoneme in different phonetic context.4. inflectional morphemesKey: Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that are used to indicate the grammatical relations and categories, such as-ed,-(e)s,-est in English.5. referenceKey: Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality. For example, if we say, "The dog is barking," we must be talking about a certain dog known to both the speaker and the hearer in the situation. The actual dog the word "dog" refers to in this particular situation is the reference of the word "dog".V. Discuss the following questions:1. Explain the following definition of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.Key: Linguistics investigates not any particular language, but languages in general. Linguistic study is scientific because it is based on the systematic investigation of authentic language data. No serious linguistic conclusion is reached until after the linguist has done the following three things: observing the way language is actually used, formulating some hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses against linguistic facts to prove their validity.2. What are the three branches of phonetics? How do they contribute to the study of speech sounds?Key: Articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.Articulatory phonetics describes the way our speech sounds and how they differ.Auditory phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and reaches the important conclusion that phonetic identity is only a theoretical ideal.Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, the way sounds travel from the speaker to the hearer.3. What are the main features of the English compounds?Key: Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between.Syntactically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calculable from the meanings of all its components.Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.4. How can the surface structure become the sole responsible structure for semantic interpretation?Key: This is mainly achieved by the introduction of trace theory. That is, after the movement of any element, there will be a trace left in the original position, which is represented by the better in the tree diagram. And the deep structure information concerning the underlying syntactic relations between words, such as the subject in the passive is the logical object, will be captured by the trace in the surface structure.5. What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?Key: Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized. Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.。