当前位置：问答库＞考研试题

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Displacement

Language can be used to refer to what is present, what is absent, what happens at present, 【答案】

what happened in the past, what will happen in the future or what happens in a far-away place. This property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by time and place. For example , we can talk about Sapir, who is already dead; we can even talk about next week, which is in the future.

2． Entailment

【答案】 It refers to the relation between propositions one of which necessarily follows from the other. If X is true, Y is necessarily true，and if X is false, Y may be true or false. For example, the sentence “He has been to France” entails “He has been to Europe”.

3． Locutionary Act, Illocutinary Act and Perlocutionary Act

【答案】 According to Austin , a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking.

A locutionary act is the uttering of words, phrases, and clauses, which conveys meaning by giving out meaningful sounds. Therefore, when somebody says „„Morning‟‟，we can ask a question like “What did he do?‟‟，and the answer could be “He offered a greeting.”

An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker‟s intention; it is the act performed in saying something. Therefore, for the same example，we can say “He meant it as a greeting”.

A perlocutionary act is the effect of the utterance. Thus，by saying “Morning!” the speaker has made it clear that he wants to keep friendly relations with the hearer.

4． 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.

5． Meaning shift

Meaning shift: In a narrow sense, meaning shift is used to refer to the change of meaning 【答案】

that has nothing to do with generalization or restriction such as broadening or narrowing of meaning.

6． stream of consciousness writing

【答案】 The term was originally coined by the philosopher William James in his Principle of Psychology （1890） to describe the free association of ideas and impressions in the mind. It was later

applied to the writing of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others experimenting early in the 20th century with the novelistic portrayal of the free flow of thought. Note, however, that the majority of thought presentation in novels is not stream of consciousness writing. The examples we have discussed above are not stream of consciousness writing because they are too orderly to constitute the free association of ideas. Perhaps the most famous piece of stream of consciousness writing is that associated with Leopold Bloom in Joyce‟s Ulysses. Here he is in a restaurant thinking about oysters.

“Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. （sic ） He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar （sic ） no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old , blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery.66 This cognitive meandering is all in the most free version of direct thought. It is also characterised by a highly elliptical sentence structure , with as many grammatical words as possible being removed consistently allowing the reader to be able to infer what is going on. The language is not very cohesive ，and breaks the Gricean maxims of Quantity and Manner. But we must assume that apparently unreasonable writing behaviour is related to a relevant authorial purpose. It is the assumption that Joyce is really cooperating with us at a deeper level , even though he is apparently making our reading difficult, that leads us to conclude that he is trying to evoke a mind working associatively.

7． Semantic field

【答案】 It is the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation , sex , membership of the father's or mother's side of the family.

8． CAI and CAL

【答案】 Computer-assisted instruction （CAI ） means the use of a computer in a teaching program. This includes:

a. A teaching program which is presented by a computer in a sequence. The student responds on the computer , and the computer indicates whether the responses are correct or incorrect.

b. The use of computers to monitor student progress, to direct students into appropriate lessons, material , etc. This is also called computer-managed instruction.

Parallel to CAI , there is CAL （Computer-Assistant Learning ） . The former aims at seeing educational problems on the part of the teacher, whereas the latter emphasizes the use of a computer in both teaching and learning in order to help the learner achieve educational objectives. The first kind of CAL programs which were developed reflected principles similar to programmed instruction. The computer leads the student through learning task step-by-step, asking questions to check comprehension. Depending on the studenfs response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material （see branching ）. In more recent CAL courseware students are able to interact with the computer and perform higher-level tasks while exploring a subject or problem.

9． Concatenation

【答案】 What makes a word separate from other words is that all the letters are lined up together with no intervening spaces. That is, in a word, all letters are concatenated. Sometimes new words can be made by concatenating two existing words—for example, “airline” is a concatenation of the words

“air” and “line” into a new word.

10．Back-formation

【答案】 Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example , the word “television” appeared before “televise”，and so does “editor” to “edit”.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Why do people take duality as one of the important design features of human language? Can you tell us what language will be if it has no such design feature?

【答案】 Duality makes our language productive. A large number of different units can be formed out of a small number of elements——for instance, tens of thousands of words out of a small set of sounds. And out of the huge number of words, there can be astronomical number of possible sentences and phrases, which in turn can combine to form unlimited number of texts. Most animal communication systems do not have this design feature of human language.

If language had no such design feature , then it would be like animal communicational system which consists of only a number of basic sounds and this would be highly limited. Then we would not be able to produce a very large number of sound combinations （e.g. words ） , which are distinct in meaning. In other words, the number of messages one can send would be restricted to the number of basic sounds.

12．In English, the phonemeis pronounced differently in pat, spat, and tap, can you form a rule that can generalize this linguistic phenomenon?

【答案】 In English , there is a rule that a is unaspirated

after but aspirated in other places. So in pat , tap

is aspirated but unaspirated in spat since it is

after To bring out the phonetic difference , an aspirated sound is transcribed with a raised “h” after the symbol of the sound. So a

phonetic transcription for peak isand that for speak isSo are two different phones and are variants of the phonemeSuch variants of a phoneme are called allophones of the same phoneme. The allophones are said to be in complementary distribution because they never occur in the same context :

occurs after

while occurs in other places. We can present this rule as:

elsewhere

（note :

is the position in whichappears. ）

In addition, sometimes a phoneme may also have free variants. The final consonant of tap may not be released by some speakers so there is no audible sound at the end of this word. Such phenomenon is called free variation.

13．What is assimilation? Is it similar to coarticulation? What dose it include?

【答案】 Assimilation is a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighbouring sound. It is often used synonymously with coarticulation. Nasalization, dentalization and velarization are all instances of assimilation. There are two possibilities of assimilation: if a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, it is regressive assimilation; the converse process, in which a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, is known as progressive assimilation.