2009上海交通大学英语专业考博语言学试题

2009上海交通大学英语专业考博语言学试题

I.Terms with examples 4x10=40

1. Functional categories: Words which do not denote objects, ideas, etc., are known as function words

and they belong to classes known as functional categories. For example, Bill thinks that Tom and Dick have been visiting Harriet to ask for help with one of the assignments which have to be finished for the next morphonolgy class.

2. operator movement: Operator movement involves movement of an operator expression

into the specifier position within CP. For instance, in sentence What languages can you speak, the phrase what languages is moved into the specifier position within CP.

3. Null subject parameter:Null-subject parameter determines whether finite verbs and

auxiliaries do or don’t license(i.e. allow) null subjects. For example, in Italian: Maria non vuole mangiare.

"Maria does not want to eat."

Non vuole mangiare.

[She] "Does not want to eat."

The subject "she" of the second sentence is only implied in Italian. English, on the other hand, requires an explicit subject in this sentence.

4. lexical tone: Lexical tone is the distinctive pitch level carried by the syllable of a word which is an

essential feature of the meaning of that word. The pitch of voice is very important in language, and all languages make use of it for some purpose. In some languages different words are distinguished from each other by means of pitch. Here are some Yoruba words The word ti with the mark′over the vowel is pronounced at a higher pitch than the word ti, which is in turn is pronounced at a higher pich than ti.These different pitches are call tones.

Some languages distinguish only two levels of tone, while others distinguish up to four levels. When a language distinguishes words from each other using pitch in this way we say that it has lexical tone.

5. onset, necleus and coda: Words like bat, cat, rat, flat and sprat are said to rhyme, this is because

they have identical pronunciations after the first consonant or consonant cluster. We can divide a syllable therefore into two halves, the Rhyme and the Onset. We have already referred to the vowel in the middle of the syllable as the Nucleus. The consonant or consonant cluster after the Nucleus will be called Coda.

6. complementizer: A complementizer is a conjunction which marks a complement clause. A

complementizer, as used in linguistics (especially generative grammar), is a syntactic category (part of

speech) roughly equivalent to the term subordinating conjunction in traditional grammar. For example, the word that is generally called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining. The term "complementizer" was apparently first used by Rosenbaum (1967).

7. mood: A set of contrasts which are often shown by the form of the verb and which express the speaker’s