英语语言学练习题

《英语语言学》练习题一

一、

I Indicate the following statements true or false. Put T for true and F for false in the brackets:

1. In the phrases a herd of cattle, a flock of sheep, both cattle and sheep contain only one morpheme.

2. The meaning of compounds is always the sum of meaning of the compounds.

3. The Swiss linguist de Saussure regarded the linguistic sign as composed of sound image and referent.

4. Chinese is an agglutinating language.

5. Not all vowels are voiced.

6. If segments appear in the same position but the mutual substitution does not result in change of meaning, they are said to be in free variation.

7. A greenbottle is a type of bottle.

8. Productivity is the first and foremost striking feature of human language.

9. Language contains two subsystems, one of speaking and the other of writing.

10. Language can be used to refer to things real or imagined, past, present or future.

11. Modern linguistics is prescriptive rather than descriptive.

12. The study of speech sounds is called Phonology.

13. The voiceless bilabial stop in pin and the one in spin are in complementary distribution.

14. Tone is the variation of pitch to distinguish utterance meaning.

15. Compounding, the combination of free morphemes, is a common way to form words.

II Write the phonetic symbol that corresponds to the articulatory description.

Example: vowel front high [i:]

1.bilabial nasal

2.voiced labiovelar glide

3.literal liquid

4.voiced bilabial stop

5.front high lax

III Draw two tree diagrams of the following ambiguous sentence.

Pat found a book on Wall Street.

IV How would you read the phrases in the two columns? What does each of them mean?

Column I Column II

a. a bluebird a blue bird

b. a lighthouse keeper a light housekeeper

V.Explain the relation between bank1 (the side of a river) and bank2 (the financial institute).

VI.Tell the semantic relation within the given sentence and that between the two sentences.

a)My uncle is male.

b)The spinster is married.

c)Jim is an orphan. Jim lives with his parents.

d)Sam is the husband of Sally. Sally is the wife of Sam.

e)He has gone to London. He has gone to England.

VII.Answer the following questions:

a)How do sociolinguists classify the varieties of English?

b) What are the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle?

c) What are the components of metaphor?

二、

I、Fill in each of the following blanks with one word beginning with the letter given:

2.Modern linguistics is d__________ rather than prescriptive.

3.Consonants can be described in terms of p________ of articulation, manners of articulation, and

v_______.

4.A_________ are variants of the same phoneme in different phonetic contexts.

5.The smallest meaningful unit of language is called m________.

6.According to Saussure, a linguistic sign is composed of s________ and s_______.

7.General linguistics is based on the view that language as a system composed of three aspects: sound,

s________ and meaning.

8.Monophthongs and d_________ are two major types of vowels.

9.Sequences that are possible but do not occur yet are called a_________ gap, e.g. /blik/, /bilk/, /klib/, and

/kilb/.

10.M_________ and s________ make up two subsystems of language.

11.The language used to talk about language is called m___________.

12.According to M.A.K. Halliday, language plays three metafunctions simultaneously: the ideational

function, the i________ function and the t__________ function.

II、For each group of sounds listed below, state the phonetic feature(s) then share:

Example: [s] [f] [p] [h] voiceless

1、[g] [z] [d]

2、[v] [h] [s]

3、[m] [p] [b] [f] [v]

4、[t] [d] [n] [l] [s] [z]

5、[i:] [i] [u] [u:]

III、Explain the ambiguity of the following sentences.

a.This is a beautiful girl’s dress.

b.Those who went there quickly made a fortune.