当前位置：问答库＞考研试题

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Speech community

【答案】 Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language. Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon , distinct social groups like high school students or hip-pop fans. In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as many internet forums, often constitute speech communities. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.

2． Subordinate construction

【答案】 Subordinate constructions are one of the two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head , with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent , are subordinate constructions.

3． Speech and thought presentation

【答案】 Speech and thought presentation: These two terms are used for the language in fiction, referring to the presenting forms for indicating the narrator‟s speech or thought. The speech presentation may have the following four possibilities : direct speech , indirect speech , narrator‟s representation of speech acts, and narrator‟s representation of speech. The Thought presentation can also be categorized into : narrator‟s representation of thought , narrator‟s representation of thought a cts , indirect thought , free indirect thought, and direct thought.

4． Categorization

Categorization is the process of classifying our experiences into different categories based 【答案】

on commonalities and differences. There are three levels in categories: the basic level，the superordinate level ，and the subordinate level.

5． Foregrounding

【答案】 This term is meant for what is unusual, attractive, unconventional, salient. In literature, foregrounding is often achieved through unconventional expressions which attract the readers9 attention. The main manifestations of foregrounding are deviation and parallelism.

6． Transformational-Generative grammar

【答案】 Transformational-generative grammar is proposed by Noam Chomsky. He postulated a syntactic base of language （called deep structure ） , which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of （possibly universal） rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure

of a sentence. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that is identical to an actual sentence of a language , after the mediating of a series of rules （called transformations ） that act upon the deep structures.

7． Open-class words

【答案】 Open-class words refer to words whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited and with the emergence of new ideas , inventions , and so on ; new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. For example , nouns , verbs , and adjectives all belong to this class.

8． Coarticulation

Coarticulation refers to the phenomenon of sounds continually show the influence of their 【答案】

neighbors. For example , as in lamb , when a is followed by m , the velum will begin to lower itself during the articulation of a so that it is ready for the following nasal. When such simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved, we call the process coarticulation. If the sound becomes more like the following sound, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation. If the sound displays the influence of the preceding sound, it is preservative coarticulation.

9． Diglossia

【答案】 When two languages or language varieties exist together in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, the more standard variety can be called the high variety or H-variety , which is used in government , the media , education , and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety or L-variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

10．Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is the purpose of studying language and mind?

【答案】 The study of language and mind aims to model the workings of the mind in relation to language ; for example, it helps explain how the language production and perception is achieved. Since structures and connections in the mind are inevitably unobservable, researchers put forward hypotheses based on fragmentary clues. The label most usually given to the study of “language and mind” is psycholinguistics ，a term which is often perceived as being trendy. Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.

12．What are the four obvious barriers to adult L2 acquisition?

【答案】 A variety of explanations have been put forward for the apparent decline in adults:

Physical factors such as the loss of “plasticity” in the brain and “lateralization” of the brain; social factors such as the different situations and relationships that children encounter compared to adults ; cognitive factors such as the interference with natural language learning by the adulfs more abstract mode of thinking; and input factors that adults spend only a few hours each week of school time, rather than via the constant interaction experienced by a child, with a lot of other occupations.

13．Decide which maxim of the cooperative principle has been flouted in the following utterances and what implicature can be drawn.

（1）A : Can you tell me the secret?

B : But John is there.

（2）A : Let‟s go to the movies.

B : Fll bring the Kleenex.

（3）A : Would you drive a Mercedes?

B : I wouldn‟t drive ANY expensive car.

【答案】 In the exchanges, the maxim of relation has been flouted. As to instance （1） , A will assume that if B is cooperative his reply must be relevant in a different sense: I will not talk about my secret now because I do not want to let John know. In （2 ），the answer of B seems irrelevant to A‟s utterance. By doing so, A will likely derive the implicature that B has accepted his suggestion, and is going to get prepared. In （3） , by violating the maxim of relation , B intends to implicate that Mercedes is an expensive car and he would not drive a Mercedes.

14．thrived 10. breathed 11. turned 12. hissed

【答案】

15．What are the differences between simile and metaphor?

【答案】 Simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing , and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like. For example, the phrase as cold as ice is a common simile.

Although metaphor also makes a comparison between two unlike elements , this comparison is implied rather than stated. That is , it differs from simile in that the words such as like or as do not appear. For example, uThe life is a stage” is a metaphor.

16．What are the three kinds of antonyms?

【答案】 The three kinds of antonyms are gradable antonyms , complementary antonyms and converse antonyms. Gradable antonyms refer to antonyms that differ in terms of degree. For example, good and bad. Complementary antonyms are a pair of antonyms complementary to each other: not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other; the denial of one also means the assertion of the other, such as male and female. Converse antonyms do not constitute a positive-negative opposition; they only show the reversal of a relationship between two entities, such as husband and wife.

三、Essay-question