语言学考试试题

Model 1
I. Define the following terms, giving examples for illustration if it is necessary.
1. macrolinguistics::_______________________
2. compound:_____________________________
3. Reference: _____________________________
4. Idiolect:________________________________
5. Minimal pair:___________________________
6. Competence:___________________________
7. Diglossia: _____________________________
8. Sound assimilation:______________________
9. Arbitrariness:___________________________
10. Semantic shift:_________________________
II. Indicate the following statements true or false.
1. Language use is both systematic and non-systematic, subject to external as well as to internal
variation.
2. Corpus is a collection of texts input into a computer. Language corpora make it possible for material developers to select authentic, natural and typical
language.
3. Mistakes often occur when learners fail to perform their competence.
4. Root is understood in terms of meanings while syem is understood with emphasis on affix. Sometimes a linguistic element is both a root and stem.
5. All instances of NP--movement are related to changing
a sentence from the active voice to the passive
voice.
6. Word lays in the central position in language comprehension because of its extremely important role in transmitting the meaning.
7. A perlocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention.
8. 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.
9. Componential analysis is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can not be dissected into meaning components, called semantic feature.
10. Word recognition can be viewed in terms of recognition of spoken words and printed ones.
III. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word that begins with the letter given.
1. “ Words are names of labels for things.” This view is called n______ theory in semantic studies.
2. We call the relation between “animal” and “cow” as
h______.
3. Members that can be grouped under the same superordinate are called c______.
4. In general, language a_____ refers to children’s development of their mother tongue, that is, the one language used by the community where the children are brought up.
5. The description of a language development at some point in time is s______ study.
6. Linguistic potential is similar to Sausssure’s “langue” and Chomsky’s “c_____’.
7. There are two very important phonological rules in English : the a_____ rule and the d_____.
8. The view that b_____ is the source of human language and cognition goes back over 2000 years.
9. The localization of cognitive and perceptual functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain is called l_____.
10. G______ marking in Old English was not always related to the sex of the reference concerned.
VI. Mark the choice that would best complete the statement.
1. The semantic components of the word" husband" can be expressed as______.
A. + animate, + human, + male, -adult
B. + animate, + human, -male, -adult
C.+ animate, + human, + male, + adult
D. + animate, - human, + male, -adult
2. Saussure is a (n)_______ linguist.
A. American
B. British
C. Swiss
D. Russian
3. What is the meaning relationship between the two words " vegetable/tomato" ?
A. Polysemy
B. Homonymy
C. Hyponymy
D. Antonymy
4. The study of language development over a period of time is generally called ______ linguistics.
A. applied
B. synchronic
C. comparative
D. diachronic
5. Linguists give priority to the spoken language not the written language because_______.
A. vocal sounds are derived from writing systems
B. speech precedes writing everywhere in the world
C. we have recording devices to study speech
D. spoken language precedes written language only in Indo-European languages
6. A linguist regards the changes in language and languages use as________.
A. unnatural
B. something to be feared
C. natural
D. abnormal
7. The theory that language arose from instinctive emotional cries, expressive of pain or joy has been called the _________ theory.
A. yo-he-ho
B. pooh-pooh
C. contact
D.
sing-song
8. Which of the following sounds is a voiceless bilabial stop?
A. [p]
B. [m]
C. [ b ]
D. [ t ]
9. Morphemes that represent “tense, “number”, “gender”, “case” and so forth are called _____ morphemes.
A. inflectional
B. free
C. bound
D. derivational
10. Which of the following is not of the major lexical categories?
A. verb
B. determiner
C. adjective
D. noun
11. In English if a word begins with a [ l ] or [ r ], then the next sound must be a ______.
A. fricative
B. nasal sound
C. semi-vowel
D. vowel
12. There are ______morphemes in the word “boyish”.
A. one
B. two
C. three
D. four
13. In English “-ise” and “-tion” are called ______.
A. prefixes
B. suffixes
C. infixes
D. free morphemes
14. Which of the following two-term sets shows the feature of complementarity?
A. single/married
B. lend/borrow
C.
hot/cold. D. old/young
15. Which of the following languages is most pragmatic by nature?
A. Chinese
B. Japanese
C.
English D. French
16. Probably the most widespread and familiar
ethnic variety of the English language is _____.
A. British English
B. American English
C. Black English
D. Australian
17. ______ in a person’s speech, or writing, usually ranges on
a continuum from casual to formal according to the type of communicative context.
A. Stylistic variation
B. Ideolectal variation
C. Social variation
D. Regional variation
18. By studying sound correspondences from many languages, European linguists eventually claimed that most of the languages of
____ belonged to the same Indo-European language family.
A. Europe and northern part of India
B. Europe and northern part of Asia
C. Europe and Persia and northern part of India
D. Europe and Persia
19. Which of the following goes along best with London School?
A. Firth
B. Bloomfield
C. Saussure
D. Sapir
20. Phonetically, the stress of a compound always falls on
the___ element, while the ____ element receives the secondary stress.
A. first…second
B. second…first
C. any…any
D. none of above
V. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible, giving examples if necessary.
1. How can a linguist make his analysis of language as scientific as possible?
2. What arc the design features of language?
3. What is displacement as a design feature of language?
4. The following are some well-known ambiguous sentences in syntactic studies of language Can you disambiguate them?
(1) The chicken is too hot to eat.
(2) Flying planes can be dangerous.
5. What organs are involved in speech production?
Keys
I. 1. It is a broad conception of linguistic enquiry, including
psychological, cultural, social, computational, literary, foreign
language teaching, cognitive etc.
2. It refers to the words that consist of more than one lexical
morpheme or the way to joint two separate words to produce a
single form, such as classroom, mailbox, fingerprint, sunburn.
3. 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.
4. Every speaker has his or her own pet words and expressions and special way of conveying ideas. Therefore within
one linguistic community, there are all sorts of differences among
individual speakers. We call this phenomenon as idiolect.
5. Two sound combinations identical in every way except in
one sound element that occurs in the same position in the string.
6. “Competence” refers to the ideal user’s knowledge of rules
of his language, that is, of its sound structure, its words and its
grammatical rules. Competence enables a speaker to produce and
understand verbal expressions. A speaker’s competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and
social factors.
7. Diglossia is a sociolinguistic situation in which two very
different varieties of language co – exist in a speech community,
each serving a particular social function and used for a particular
situation.
8. Speech sounds seldom occur in isolation. In connected
speech, under the influence of their neighbors, are replaced by
other sounds, Sometimes two neighboring sounds influence each
other and are replaced by a third sound which is different from both
the original sounds. This process is called sound assimilation.
9. Arbitrariness is one of the features of human language. It says that language is a sign of sophistication only humans are capable of. Animals cannot establish artificial /learned means to express themselves.
10. It is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its
former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning.
II. 1.T 2.T 3.T 4. T 5. F 6. T 7. F 8. T 9. F T
III. 1. naming 2. hyponymy 3. co-hyponyms 4.acquisiton 5. synchronic petence 7.assimilation; deletion 8.brain 9. lateralization 10.gender
IV. 1.C 2.C 3.C 4.D 5.B 6.C 7.A 8.A 9.A
10.B 11.D 12.B 13.B 14.A 15.A 16.C 17.B
18.C 19.A 20.A
V. 1. He should base his linguistic study 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. During the whole process of his research, a linguist usually follows four principles: exclusiveness, consistency, economy and objectivity.
2. As far as the book is concerned, five features have been discussed. They respectively are: Arbitrariness; Creativity; Duality; Displacement; Cultural transmission
3. No animal can “talk” about things removed from the immediate situation. A dog can never purposefully phonetically
/vocally tell its owner what happened three days before.
4. There are two meanings to ex. (1): (a) The chicken meat is too hot, so it cannot be eaten at the moment; (b) The chicken feels so hot (maybe after some intense aerobic exercises ) that it cannot start eating and needs to calm down first.
The ambiguity of ex. (2) comes from “flying planes”. It can be deciphered as “the planes that is flying”, or “to fly planes”.
5. Quite a few human organs are Involved in the production of speech: the lungs, the trachea (or windpipe), the throat, the nose, and the mouth.
The pharynx, mouth, and nose form the three cavities of the vocal tract. Speech sounds are produced with an air-stream as their sources of energy. In most circumstances, the air-stream comes from the lungs. It is forced out of the lungs and then passes through the bronchioles and bronchi, a series of branching tubes, into the trachea. Then the air is modified at various points in various ways in the larynx, and in the oral and nasal cavities: the mouth and the nose are often referred to, respectively, as the oral cavity and the nasal cavity.。