语言学考试题型

Linguistic Exercises

ⅠExplain the following terms:

1. arbitrary

Arbitrary refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.

2. suprasegmental

Suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmentals are stress, tone, and intonation. 3. prefixes

Affix is a language are limited in number, and are generally classified into three subtypes ,namely, prefix , suffix and infix, depending on their position around the root or stem of a word. A prefix is an affix put before the root or stem of a word.

4. morpheme

Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in regard to the relationship between sounding and meaning, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning. Morpheme cannot be further analyzed.

5. place

6. recursiveness

it means that a phrasal constituent can be embedded within another constituent having the same category，Recursiveness has become an umbrella term, under which may be brought together several important linguistic phenomena such as coordination and subordination, conjoining and embedding, hypotactic and pratactic.

7. superordinate

The upper term in this sense relationship----hyponymy, i , e . The class name , is called superordinate.

8. gradable

The members of a pair of gradable antonymy differ in terms of degree, as the name suggests, they are gradable. Firstly, they can be modified by adverbials like "very"; Secondly, they may have comparative and superlative degrees ;

Thirdly ，they can be asked with "how".

9. tongue

Tongue is one of the most important speech organs, in phonetics, the tongue is divided into five parts: the tip, the front, the back and the root. In phonology, the corresponding sounds made with these parts of the tongue are often referred to CORONAL, DORSAL and RADICAL.

10.displacement

Displacement means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present ( in time and space ) at the moment of communication.

ⅡTrue or false. If they are false, correct them.

1. The study of how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived is called

phonetics.( T)

2. Sentences are words put together in a random order. ( F)

3. In English, hyponyms may be missing. (T)

4. Sentence meaning is not simply the sum total of the words. (T)

5. Two sentences using the same words may mean quite differently.(T)

6. Backformation is a productive way of forming nouns in Modern English.(T)

7. Conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns belong to open-class words. (F)

8. English is a tone language.(T)

9. Phonology studies the sound patterns and sound systems of languages.(T)

10. The writing system of a language is always a later invention used to record speech; thus there are still many languages in today’s world that can only be spoken, but not written.(T)

ⅢAnswer the following questions.

1. What are the design features of human language? Illustrate them with examples.

The features that define our human languages called design features.

First, Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning, one, arbitrariness relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning ,for instance the dog barks bowwow in English but 汪汪汪in Chinese .two,arbitrariness at the syntactic, for example , (a)He came in and sat down, (b)He sat down and came in ,three, arbitrariness and convention

Second , Duality, it means the property of having two levels of structures, such hat units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principle of organization .

Third, Creativity , language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness by creativity, for instance, we can write a sentence like the following and go on endlessly：He bought a book which was written by a teacher who taught in a school which was known for its graduates who….

Forth, Displacement , it means that human language enable their users to symbolize objects ,events and concepts which are not present at the moment of communication. For instance, a warning cry of a bird instantly announces danger.

2. What is Speech Act Theory?

This is the first major theory in the study of language in use, which originated with the Oxford philosopher John Langshaw Austin. Austin's first shot at the theory is the claim that there are two types of sentences: performatives and constatives. The utterance which are used to perform acts, do not describe or report anything at all, the uttering of the sentence is the doing of an action, these sentences are called performatives ; The utterances which roughly serves to state a fact, report the case or describe what something is, these sentences are called constatives.

In Austin's opinion ,speech acts can be analyzed on three levels. First, locutionary act. Locutionary act is the act of saying something in the full sense of "say". Second, illocutionary act. Illocutionary act is an act performed in saying something (the act of expressing the speaker's intention). Third. perlocutionary act . Perlocutionary act is the act performed by or as a result of saying ,the effects on the hearer.