2018年天津外国语大学英语语言文学801(英语语言文学)之语言学教程考研基础五套测试题
● 摘要
一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms
1. Cross-cultural communication
【答案】 Cross-cultural communication is an exchange of ideas , information , etc , between persons from different cultural backgrounds. The cultural conventions of the participants may widely different , and misinterpretation and misunderstanding can easily arise , even leading to a total communication breakdown.
2. Denotation
【答案】 The core sense of a word or a phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world. In the case of linguistic signs, the denotative meaning is what the dictionary attempts to provide. It is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning, opposite to connotation.
3. 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.
4. Lexical word
【答案】 Lexical word, lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives , and adverbs.
5. The London School of Linguistics
【答案】 The London School generally refers to the kind of linguistic scholarship in England. The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth.
6. Relational opposites
【答案】 This is a type of antonymy , in which the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities. For example, “buy/sell” is such a pair. X buys something from Y means Y sells something from X.
7. Applied linguistics
【答案】 It is a branch of linguistics which studies the application of linguistics in reality. For example , there are studies on multilingualism, language acquisition, first and second language teaching and learning.
8. distinctive features
a means of working out a set of phonological contrasts or oppositions to capture particular 【答案】
aspects of language sounds , first suggested by Roman Jacobson in the 1940s and then developed by numerous other people.
9. Predication analysis
【答案】 Predication analysis is an important step in the analysis of sentential meaning. The predication is the common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Such analysis is to break down the sentence into its smaller constituents: argument and predicate. The predicate is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. The argument is the logical participant.
10.Concord (or : Agreement)
【答案】 It may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category (or categories ) . For example, the syntactic relationship between that girl and she in the following dialogue: A: Who is that girl? B: Oh, she is my sister.
二、Short-answer-questions
11.What are suprasegmental features? How do the major suprasegmental features of English function in conveying meaning?
【答案】 A suprasegmental feature refers to the phonemic features that occur above the level of sound segment. The major suprasegmental features in English include word stress, sentence stress, tone, and intonation. The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning.
For example , a shift of stress may change the part of speech of a word from a noun to a verb although its spelling remains unchanged. Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. Pitch variations can distinguish meaning just like phonemes. When pitch , stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation , they are collectively known as intonation. Intonation plays an important role in the conveyance of meaning in almost every language, especially in a language like English.
12.What are the different views of input hypothesis and interaction hypothesis on discoursed contribution to language acquisition?
【答案】 Input hypothesis proposed by Krashen, holds that language acquisition takes place when a learner understands input that contains grammatical forms that are at “i + 1”(i. e. are a little more advanced than the current state of the
learner‟s interlanguage ) . In other words, language acquisition depends on comprehensible input. Interaction hypothesis by Michael Long, also emphasizes the importance of comprehensible input but claims that it is most effective when it is modified through the negotiation of meaning.
13.Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for different types of sand, and in Arabic one must choose from a whole range of words which are subsumed under the Western category CAMEL. Can you explain these phenomena with your linguistic knowledge?
【答案】 These phenomena can be explained from the following perspectives:
(1)These phenomena show a relationship between language and society. Language changes from region to region , from one social group to another and from individual to individual. The living environment makes great impact on the changes of language. As Eskimo are always living in an environment of a snow world, they have made a good cognition to snow and classified it in different types. Human use language to describe the world they have cognized.
(2)These phenomena can be explained from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that : our language helps mould our way of thinking and , consequently , different languages may probably express speaker‟s unique ways of understanding the world. So Eskimos^ different words for different types of snow reflect their different ways to understand snow.
14.What is the view of the environmentalist theories of language acquisition? What are the representatives?
【答案】 Environmentalist theories of learning hold that an organism^ nurture, or experience, is of more importance to development than its nature, or innate contributions. The best known examples are the various forms of behaviourist and neo-behaviourist stimulus-response learning theories.
Schumann 's pidginization hypothesis and acculturation model is among the current claims in this line. Schumann proposed that pidginization in L2 acquisition results when learners fail to acculturate to the target-language group, which is clue to social distance and psychological distance.
15.Why do we say language is primarily vocal?
Language is system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Language 【答案】
is primarily vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages, developed or 6'new, 5. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak (and listen ) before they write (and read) also indicates that language is primarily vocal , rather than written. The term “human” in the definiti on is meant to specify that language is human specific.
16.What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?
【答案】 The distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes could be illustrated in the following four aspects.
Inflectional affixes very often only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem, for instance , those inflectional affixes in words such as toys, walks, John's, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast , derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning , e.g. cite, citation; generate, generation.
Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to,such as flower, flowers ; whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.
Very often inflectional affixes are conditioned by non-semantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. Whereas, derivational affixes are more often based on