《语言学概论》练习测试题库及参考答案

《英语语言学》练习测试题及参考答案本科
I. Tick off the correct or the best possible answers:
1.One of the properties of language is that a language user can understand and produce sentences he/she
has never heard before. This property of language is called ________.
A. duality
B. productivity
C. displacement
D. arbitrariness
Key: B
2.The ______ function refers to the fact that language can be used for establishing a favorable atmosphere
or maintaining social contact rather than for exchanging information or ideas.
A. phatic
B. directive
C. evocative
D. performative
Key: A
3.From a functional approach, the _______ meaning of a language use consists of what is communicated
of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.
A. affective
B. associative
C. stylistic
D. collocative
Key: A
4.When –ing in ‘gangling’is removed to get a verb ‘gangle’, we call this way of creating words
________.
A. suffixation
B. back-formation
C. blending
D. acronymy
Key: B
5.______ refers to the process by which words rise from humble beginnings to positions of importance.
A. Degradation
B. Specialization
C. Elevation
D. Extension
Key: C
6.As we know, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and special way of expressing his
ideas in language. This language variety of individual users is called ______.
A. idiolect
B. regional dialect
C. temporal dialect
D. social dialect
Key: A
7.When pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentence rather than to the word, they are
collectively known as ________.
A. intonation
B. tone
C. phoneme
D. sentence stress
Key: A
8._______ refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
A. Addition of sound
B. Loss of sound
C. Metathesis
D. Assimilation
Key: D
9.Basically, all the languages in the world can be classified in terms of language family. Vietnamese and
Korean are two languages in the ______ family.
A. Indo-European
B. Sino-Tibetan
C. Hamito-Semitic
D. Malayo-Polynesian Key: B
10. A _______ is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.
A. morpheme
B. phoneme
C. grapheme
D. letter
Key: C
11.All mono-morphemic words are constituted by free morphemes, and those poly-morphemic words
which consist wholly of free morphemes are called_________.
A. hyponyms
B. compounds
C. blends
D. allomorphs
Key: B
syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories is called _______.
A. concord
B. government
C. recursiveness
D. cohesion
Key: A
13. The formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another is called
_____.
A. blending
B. clipping
C. acronymy
D. compounding
Key: A
14. The distinction of ‘linguistic potential’ and ‘actual linguistic behavior’ is proposed by _______.
A. N. Chomsky
B. F. de Saussure
C. M. A. Halliday
D. J. Austin
Key: C
15. The word meaning given in the dictionary is called _____ meaning.
A. denotative
B. connotative
C. collective
D. stylistic
Key: A
16. When we consider the variation relating to what a user is trying to do with language, we are dealing with
addressee relationship—continually categori zed as “______”.
A. tenor of discourse
B. mode of discourse
C. field of discourse
D. idiolect
Key: A
17. According to words’ structures, Turkish is a typical ______ language.
A. isolating
B. fusional
C. analytic
D. agglutinative
Key: D
18. ______ refer to the fact that one type of utterance is typically followed by a special type of utterance.
A. Minimal pairs
B. Illocutionary acts
C. Social dialects
D. Adjacency pairs Key: D
19. The relation between “dead” and “alive” is labele d as ________.
A. gradability
B. complementarity
C. hyponymy
D. homonymy
Key: B
20. The words “encore” and “au pair” are loanwords from _______.
A. French
B. German
C. Italian
D. Spanish
Key: A
21. The distinction of langue and parole is proposed by______.
a. N. Chomsky
b. F. de Saussure
c. M. A. Halliday
d. J. Austin
Key: b
22.Which of the following is the exception to the feature of arbitrariness of language?
a. native English words
b. borrowed words
c. echoic words
d. one-syllable words
Key: c
23.Which of the following feature cannot be used to describe the phone [s]?
a. voiceless
b. oral
c. alveolar
d. lateral
Key: d
24.In terms of place of articulation, the two consonants [f], [v] are ________.
a. dental
b. alveolar
c. palatal
d. labiodental
Key: d
25.In terms of manner of articulation, the sounds [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g] are ________.
a. affricates
b. fricatives
c. bilabial
d. oral stops
Key: d
26.Which of the following statements about allophone is NOT correct?
a. Allophones are different forms of the same phoneme
b. Allophones of the same phoneme are in complementary distribution.
c. Allophones distinguish meaning.
d. Allophones are language specific.
Key: c
27.Which of the following words is not a free morpheme?
a. able
b. pet
c. change
d. dusty
Key: d
28.How many morphemes are there in the word discharged?
a. 2
b. 3
c. 4
d. 5
Key: b
29.Which of the following words is made up of bound morphemes only?
a. happiness
b. television
c. ecology
d. teacher
Key: c
30. Language is passed on from one generation to the next by teaching and learning rather than by instinct.
This property of language is called_____.
a. interchangeability
b. productivity
c. cultural transmission
d. arbitrariness
Key: c
31.The famous quotation from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet‘A rose by any other name would smell
as sweet’ well illustrates _______.
A. the conventional nature of language
B. the creative nature of language
C. the universality of language
D. the big difference between human language and animal communication
Key: A
32.Of the following sound combinations, only _______ is permissible according to the sequential rules in
English.
A. kibl
B. bkil
C. ilkb
D. ilbk
Key: A
33.The sentence that has a NP and a VP can be shown in a _______ formula “S→NP VP”.
A. hierarchical
B. linear
C. tree diagram
D. vertical
Key: B
34.It is the _______ on Case assignment that states that a Case assignor and a Case recipient should stay
adjacent to each other.
A. Case Condition
B. Case Parameter
C. Adjacent Condition
D. Adjacent Parameter Key: C
35. Predication analysis is a way to analyze _______ meaning.
A. phoneme
B. word
C. phrase
D. sentence
Key: D
36. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called _______.
A. commisives
B. directives
C. expressives
D. declaratives
Key: A
language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
A. synchronic
B. diachronic
C. comparative
D. historical comparative Key: B
38. The way in which people address each other depends on their age, sex, social group, and personal relationship. The English system of address forms frequently used includes first name, last name, title+last name, _______, and kin term.
A. title+first name
B. title+title
C. title alone
D. first name+last name+title
Key: C
39. Language and thought may be viewed as two independent circles overlapping in some parts. When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard thought as “subvocal speech,” and speech as “_______”.
A. vocal thought
B. subvocal thought
C. covert thought
D. overt thought
Key: D
40.Whcih of the following best states the behaviorist view of child language acquisition?
A. Language acquisition is a process of habit formation.
B. Language acquisition is the species-specific property of human beings.
C. Children are born with an innate ability to acquire language.
D. Humans are equipped with the neural prerequisites for language and language use.
Key: A
41. The words “kowtow” and “tea ” are loanwords from _______.
A. Chinese
B. German
C. Italian
D. Spanish
Key: A
42. The term _______ linguistics may be defined as a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
A. synchronic
B. diachronic
C. comparative
D. historical comparative Key: B
43. The formation of new words by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another is called _____.
A. blending
B. clipping
C. acronymy
D. compounding
Key: A
44. According to words’ structures, Latin is a typical ______ language.
A. isolating
B. fusional
C. analytic
D. agglutinative
Key: B
45. The relation between “animal” and “lamb” is labeled as ________.
A. gradability
B. complementarity
C. hyponymy
D. homonymy
Key: C
46. One of the property of language is that there is no logical connection between meaning and sounds. This property of language is called________.
A. duality
B. productivity
C. displacement
D. arbitrariness
Key: D
47. The________ function refers to the use of language to create certain feelings in the hearer.
A. phatic
B. directive
C. evocative
D. performative
Key: A
48. The _______ meaning of a word consists of the associations it acquires on account of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its environment.
Key: D
49. When –or in editor is removed to get a verb edit, we call this way of creating words ________.
A. suffixation
B. back-formation
C. blending
D. acronymy
Key:
50. The relation between “rose” and “flower” is labeled as ________.
A. gradability
B. complementarity
C. hyponymy
D. homonymy
Key: C
51. Language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. This is
what we mean by __________.
A. duality
B. productivity
C. displacement
D. arbitrariness
Key: C
52. When language is used to get the hearer to do something, then it serves a _______ function.
A. directive
B. informative
C. interrogative
D. expressive
53. The description of a language at some point in time is a ________ study.
A. diachronic
B. synchronic
C. descriptive
D. prescriptive
Key: B
54. The distinction between “competence” and “performance” was made by______ .
A. N. Chomsky
B. F. de Saussure
C. M. A. Halliday
D. L. Bloomfield
Key: A
55. According to the places of articulation, sounds in English such as [t], [l], and[z] can be labeled as
_______ ones.
A. dental
B. bilabial
C. velar
D. alveolar
Key: D
56. According to the morp hological analysis, the underlined part in the word “inter nation alism” should be
regarded as a ___________ .
A. root
B. stem
C. prefix
D. suffix
Key: B
57. Words such as “telex” and “workfare” are created through ___________.
A. affixation
B. compounding
C. conversion
D. blending
Key: D
58. According to the syntactic construction analysis, simple sentence such as “John is a student.” belongs to
__________construction.
A. endocentric
B. exocentric
C. coordinate
D. subordinate
Key: B
59. The sense relationship between “male” and “female” is _________.
A. complementarity
B. gradability
C. relational opposites
D. hyponymy
Key: A
60. Componential analysis is a method of analyzing________ meaning.
A. sentence
B. lexical
C. grammatical
D. utterance
Key: B
II. 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 a word or a fragment of
a sentence. T/F
Key: T
2.It doesn’t make sense to ask what language a sentence belongs to. T/F
3. A stem first of all refers to any morpheme or combination of morphemes, but an affix can be added to it.
T/F
Key: T
4.Every word in a language can find at least one referent in the objective world. T/F
Key: F
5.In most cases, lexicon means vocabulary and is related to the analysis and creation of words, idioms and
collocations. T/F
Key: T
6.The use of the term ‘implicature’ is different from ‘implication’ in that it usually indicates a rather
narrowly defined logical relationship between two propositions. T/F
Key: F
7. A phrase means two or more words in sequence, intended to have meaning, that form a syntactic unit that
is less than a complete sentence. It is actually synonymous with word group. T/F
Key: F
8.Collocation is a term in lexicology used by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of
individual lexical items, or collocates. This relation of co-occurrence usually cannot be accounted for. T/F Key: T
9.In order to understand how conversational principles work, we may consider how each maxim actually
works and how people observe these maxims in daily communication. T/F
Key: T
10.Syntax studies the rules which govern the ways words, word groups and phrases are combined to make
grammatical sentences in a language, i.e. it deals with the relationships between elements in sentence structures. T/F
Key: T
11.Even in modern society, the primary medium is sound for all languages, and the fact that children
acquire spoken language first before they can read or write also indicates that language is primarily vocal. Key: T
12.The defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of
communication are termed design features.
Key: T
13.There are other channels, besides language, for communicating our thoughts, so language is only one
aspect of semiotics.
Key: T
14.Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as primary, written language as secondary.
Key: T
15.Descriptive linguisti cs aims to lay down rules for ‘correct’ language use, i.e., to tell people what they
should say and what should not say.
Key: F
16.Phonology is the branch of linguistics which studies the characteristics of speech sounds and their
patterns.
Key: F
17.The case category is used in the analysis of word classes to identify the syntactic relationship between
words in a sentence.
Key: T
nguage is genetically transmitted.
19.The grammar taught today to language learners is still basically descriptive.
Key: F
20.All the sounds produced by human are speech sounds.
Key: F
21.Generally speaking, pragmatics can be understood as a branch of linguistic study that deals with the
factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others. Key: T
22.[f], [v], [s], [z], [︒] and [±] are all fricative in English, but [︒] and [±] are alveolar while [f] and [v] are
dental.
Key: F
23.In most cases, sentence is synonymous with utterance.
Key: F
24.Syntax exclusively deals with the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structure,
and it has nothing to do with exploring the syntactic relation beyond sentence boundary.
Key: F
25.The London School proposed a functional approach towards the concept of phoneme, and N.
Trubetzkoy made the greatest contribution to the related study.
Key: F
26.A phoneme in a language is a distinctive sound which is capable of distinguishing one word or one
shape of a word from another.
Key: T
27.Every language is part of a culture, and it cannot but serve and reflect cultural needs.
Key: T
28.Sentence can be extended either by conjoining or embedding, and a construction where constituents
have been linked through the use of conjunction indicates a paratactic relation.
Key: F
29.Both Chinese and English are tone languages.
Key: F
30.Words are the smallest meaningful units of language.
Key: F
31.Derivation changes always result in change of the word class of the original words.
Key: T
32.Pitch variations may be distinctive like phonemes, and in this function they are called tones. Languages
using tones, like Chinese, are called tone language.
Key: T
33.The notion of inflection just indicates the manifestation of grammatical relationships, rather than lexical
ones, through the addition of inflectional affixes.
Key: T
34.The same morpheme always takes different forms in different contexts.
Key: T
35. According to P. Grice, whether a speaker follows or violates the Maxims of the Cooperative Principle, he produces some implicature, i.e. a kind of extra meaning that is not contained in the utterance.
Key: T
36.In the history of any language the writing system always came into being before the spoken form.
T/F
37.In English, long vowels are also tense vowels because when we pronounce a long vowel such as/i:/, the larynx is in a state of tension. T/F
Key: T
38.A compound is the combination of only two words. T/F
Key: F
39.“The student” in the sentence “The student liked the linguistic lecture”, and “The linguistic lecture” in the sentence “The linguistic lecture liked the student.” belong to the same syntactic category. T/F
Key: T
40.Linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations while linguistic forms with the same reference always have the same sense. T/F
Key: F
41.An important difference between presupposition and entailment is that presupposition, unlike entailment, is not vulnerable to negation. That is to say, if a sentence is negated, the original presupposition is still true. T/F
Key: T
42.The division of English into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English is non-conventional and not arbitrary. T/F
Key: F
nguage reflects sexism in society. Language itself is not sexist, just as it is not obscene; but it can connote sexist attitudes as well as attitudes about social taboos or racism. T/F
Key: T
44.If a child is deprived of linguistic environment, he or she is unlikely to learn a language successfully later on. T/F
Key: T
45.When children learn to distinguish between the sounds of their language and the sounds that are not part of the language, they can acquire any sounds in their native language once their parents teach them. T/F Key: F
46. Leonard Bloomfield maintained that linguistics should describe instead of prescribe what people actually say and should take a deductive approach in analyzing data.
Key: F
47. Chomsky believes that linguistic study and research can help explain what happens in the mind, and linguistics should be regarded as a branch of psychology.
Key: F
48. Halliday claims that if we are given an adequate specification of the semantic properties of the context in terms of field, tenor and mode, we should be able to predict the syntactic properties of texts.
Key: F
49. Onomatopoeia indicates a non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.
Key: F
50. Traffic light system has the feature of duality.
Key: F
51. The distinction of ‘linguistic potential’ and ‘actual linguistic behavior’ is proposed by N. Chomsky. Key: F
52. In English there are three nasal sounds. They are [m], [n], and [l].
Key: T
53. A morpheme is the minimal contrastive unit in the writing system of a language.
54. According to the functions of affixes, we can put them into groups: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes.
Key: T
55. Compounding is the formation of new words by joining two or more stems.
Key: T
56. Metathesis refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.
Key: F
57. The requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes which stand in specific
syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories is called concord.
Key: T
58. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called directives
Key: F
59. The term synchronic linguistics may be defined as a way of referring to the approach which studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages.
Key: F
60. In terms of manner of articulation, the sounds [p], [b], [t], [d], [k], [g] are affricates
Key: F
III.Fill in the blanks:
1.It is generally believed that J. Austin and _______ made the greatest contribution to the proposition of
Speech Act Theory, an important theory in pragmatic study.
Key: J. Searle
2.According to the positions affixes occupy in words, __________ falls into prefixation and suffixation.
Key: affixation
3.The signs “&”, “@”, “%” and “$” widely used today are examples of ______ wri ting.
Key: word
4.Two methods can be used to reconstruct an older form of a language: internal reconstruction and the
_______ reconstruction.
Key: external
5.The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has two major thrusts: linguistic determinism and linguistic _______ .
Key: relativity
6.In the course of communication, a speaker may change from the standard language 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 switch
7.The different types of a language as different forms to realize a mere generalization of the language are
called “sub-languages” or _______.
Key: (language) varieties
8._________ construction refers to a construction in which the distribution of words is functionally
equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents.
Key: Endocentric_
Key: human communication
10.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: validity
11.By _______ is meant that language can refer to contexts removed from the immediate situation of the
speaker.
Key: displacement
nguage is a system of two sets of structures, the structure of sound and the structure of ___________. Key: meaning
13.The three branches of phonetics are articulatory phonetics, auditory phonetics, and _________
phonetics.
Key: acoustic
14.There are two kinds of stress in English. They are word stress and ________ stress.
Key: sentence
15.In English there are three nasal sounds. They are [m], [n], and ________.
Key: [ ];
16.Morphology is divided in two branches: __________ morphology and derivational morphology. Key: .inflectional
17.According to H. Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle, that one should avoid obscurity and ambiguity
accords with the ________ Maxim.
Key: Manner
18.The speech sounds in the production of which there is an obstruction of the airstream at some point of
the vocal tract are called_______.
Key: consonants
19.A linguistic study is ______ if it tries to lay down rules for the correct use of language.
Key: prescriptive
20.The sentence “H e married a blonde heiress.” ______ the sentence “He married a blonde.”
Key: entaills
21.In the course of time, the study of language has come to establish close links with other branches
of ________ studies, such as sociology and psychology.
Key: social
22. Clear［1］and dark［1］are allophones of the same one phoneme /1/.They never take the same position in sound combinations, thus they are said to be in ________ distribution.
Key: complementary
23.A ________ is often seen as part of a word, but it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning.
Key: root
24.A ________ sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated in the other.
Key: complex
25.That the denial of one member of two words implies the assertion of the other is the characteristic of ________ antonyms.
Key: complementary
26.While the meaning of a sentence is abstract and decontextualized, that of an ________ is concrete and context-dependent.
Key: utterance
English verb ask was Old English askian, with the /k/ preceding the/s/. Sound change as a result of sound movement is known as ________.
Key: metathesis
28.In many societies of the world, we find a large number of people who speak more than one language. As
a characteristic of societies, ________ inevitably results from the coming into contact of people with different cultures and different languages.
Key: bilingualism
29.The brain’s neurological specialization for language is called linguistic ________, which is specific to human beings.
Key: lateralization
30.In order to acquire a second language, learners will subconsciously use their first language knowledge in learning a second language. This is known as language ________.
Key: transfer
31. _______ phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds when they are transmitted between mouth and ear.
Key: Acoustic
32. The function of establishing a set of vowels is to facilitate the_______ of vowels of languages.
Key: description
33. If two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast, that is, the substitution of one for the other does not produce a different word form, but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, then the two sounds are in ________variation.
Key: free
34. The principal _________features are stress, length, pitch and intonation, as all of them can be used to distinguish meaning.
Key: suprasegmental
35.________is the method of creating words by removing the supposed suffixes.
Key: Back-formation
36. Pronouns and prepositions are two kinds of ________ words to which new members are not regularly added.
Key: closed-class
37. The sentence “I promise to come here earlier tomorrow morning.” can be used as an example to indicate the ________ function of language.
Key: performative
38. A linguistic study is ________ if it tries to lay down rules for the correct use of language.
Key: perspective
39. The sounds in the production of which no articulators come very close together and the air-stream passes through the vocal tract without _________are called vowels.
Key: obstruction
40. The word “gentlemanly” consists of 4 syllables and ________morphemes.
Key: 3
41. Positional ______, or word order, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language.
Key: relation
42. English gender contrast can only be observed in pronouns and a small number of nouns, and they are mainly of the _________gender type.
Key: natural
43. Componential analysis defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of _______ components.
44. ________refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination.
Key: subordination
45. ________ construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole.
Key: exocentric
46. The _______function is the use of language to reveal something about the emotions and attitudes of the speaker.
Key: expressive
47. As language is a product and capacity of the human brain, many psychologists and linguists have tried to examine the relation between language and the brain, developing a new branch of science called________.
Key: psycholinguistics
48. The production of any speech sound involves the movement of an airstream. The majority of sounds used in languages of the world are produced by ______ egressive airstream mechanism.
Key: oral
49. Some speech sounds involves the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English [w] has both an approximation of the two lips and that of the back of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed______.
Key: labial-velar
50. ________ is used to mean sameness or close similarity of meaning.
Key: synonymy
51. The ________family includes most of the European languages and marry languages spoken in North India and in the two Americas and Australia.
Key: Indo-European
52. _________or analytic languages refer to those which depend on invariable roots or stems and word order to indicate their grammatical relations.
Key: Isolating
53. When we consider the variation relating to what the user is trying to do with language, whether teaching, persuading, advertising or instructing, we are dealing with addressee relationship, contextually categorized as __________.
Key: tenor of discourse
54. ________means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages, but the communication systems of certain animals do not have this feature. For instance, some male birds posses calls which female birds do not have.
Key: Interchangeability
55. ________ refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another sound, so that the sounds become less alike.
Key: dissimilation
56. The __________ is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Key: morpheme
57. In English, prepositions and verbs determine particular forms of pronouns according to their syntactic relation with them. This requirement is called _______ in linguistics.。