语言学平时思考练习

语言学平时思考练习

1. Would you say that language is arbitrary? What would language be like if it was not arbitrary?

No. Language is a means of verbal communication. It is instrumental in that communicating by speaking or writing is a purposeful act. It is social and conventional in that language is a social semiotic and communication can only take place effectively if all the users share a broad understanding of human interaction including such associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation, and socio-cultural roles. It has features as follows: arbitrariness, duality, creativity and displacement.

2. How has the TG grammar developed?

From its birth to the present day, TG Grammar has seen five stages of development. The Classical Theory aims to make linguistics a science. The Standard Theory deals with how semantics should be studied in a linguistics theory. The Extended Standard Theory focuses discussion on language universals and universal grammar. The Revised Extended Standard Theory focuses discussion on government and building. The latest is the Minimalist Program, a further revision of the previous theory.

3. In what ways do vowels differ from each other?

As the vowels cannot be described in the same way as the consonants, a system of cardinal vowels has been suggested to get out of this problem. The CARDINAL VOWELS, as exhibited by the vowel diagram in the IPA chart, are a set of vowels qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.

4. Why do we say that /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes?

For instance, the word tin in English consists of three separate sounds, each of which can be given a symbol in a phonetic transcription, [tin]. If we replace [t] by [d], a different word results: din. [t] and [d] are thus important sounds in English, because they enable us to distinguish tin from din, tie from die, and many more word pairs.

5. Is it true that the meaning of a compound is always predictable from the parts it contains? Illustrate with examples.

No, to understand a sentence, we need also knowledge about its syntactic structure. For example: The son of Pharaoh’s daughter is the daughter of Pharaoh’s son.

6. What is the IC analysis? Can you describe t he sentence “The tall men and women left “in terms of the analysis? What are the problems there?

In linguistics, IC analysis is a system of grammatical analysis that divides sentences into successive layers, or constituents, until, in the final layer; each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word. (A constituent is any word or construction that enters into some larger construction.) In the sentence “The tall men and women left,” the first division into immediate constituents would b e between “the tall men and women” and “left.” The immediate constituents of “the tall men and women” are “the” and “tall men and women.” At the next level “tall men and women” is divided into “tall” and “men and women.

There are some technical problems caused by the binary division and discontinuous constituents. But the main problem is that there are structures whose ambiguities cannot be revealed by IC analysis.