当前位置：问答库＞考研试题

一、Short-answer-questions

1． What are the four maxims of the co-operative principle? Which maxim does this speaker seem to be particularly careful about: "'Well, to be quite honest, I do not think she is ill today.

【答案】 The four maxims of the co-operative principle are as follows:

Quantity. （1） Make your contribution as informative as is required （for the current purposes of the exchange）. （2） Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

Quality. Try to make your contribution one that is true. （1） Do not say what you believe to be false. （2） Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

Relation. Be relevant.

Manner. Be perspicuous. （1） Avoid obscurity of expression. （2） Avoid ambiguity. （3） Be brief. （4） Be orderly.

In the utterance given , it is probable that the speaker is particularly careful about the maxim of Quality , which rules that do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

2． How to analyze dramatic language?

【答案】（1） Turn quantity and length

How much a character talks can be indicative either of their relative importance in the play, or of how important they appear to think they are. Generally speaking , central characters have longer and more speeches than minor characters.

（2）Exchange sequence: The patterns of exchange of a dramatic dialogue which are considered appropriate by speakers of English. For example , the two-part exchanges such as greeting-greeting , question-answer.

（3）Production errors: Deliberately used forms such as hesitation to convey something about the character

（4）The cooperative principle : this principle is proposed by Grice. He asserted people used to make sense of their conversation by enabling them to distinguish between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. He also suggested that people actually break these maxims quite often when they talk.

（5）Status marked through language: Many of the properties of language discussed can be used to signal the relative status and changes in status , of characters. Particularly , language can be used to signal to what extent the relationship between an addresser and addressee is based on a social power difference , and to what extent it is based on solidarity.

（6）Register : It is the term used in linguistics to describe the relationship between a particular style of language and its context of use. An example of a linguistic register is legal discourse, we recognize a legal document when we see one, but lawyers are the only people who are trained to produce them using

appropriate linguistic choices.

（7）Speech and silence: Concerning female characters in plays, there is evidence that men tend to talk more than women in mixed sex conversations.

3． What is the relationship between linguistics and behaviorism according to Bloomfield?

【答案】 For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of the positivistic brand of psychology known as “behaviourism”. When the behaviourist methodology entered linguistics via Bloomfield, s writings, the popular practice in linguistic studies was to accept what a native speaker says in his language and to discard what he says about it. This is because of the belief that a linguistic description was reliable when based on observation of unstudied utterances by speakers; it was unreliable if the analyst had resorted to asking speakers questions such as “Can you say ... in your language?”

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

【答案】

二、Essay-question

5． List different types of Speech presentation and Thought presentation.

【答案】（1） Speech presentation:

Direct speech （DS ） : With the direct speech, what the character said is in its fullest form and with quotation marks.

Indirect speech （IS ） : The propositional content of what the speaker said is presented, but it is not stated in the original words.

Narrator’s representation of speech acts （NRSA ） : We don’t know what the speaker said, and all we know is that he used the speech act of doing something. It can be regarded as a summary of a longer piece of discourse and give more background information than indirect speech.

Narrator’s representation of speech （NRS ） : It is a sentence which merely tells us that speech occurred , and which does not even specify the speech act involved.

（2） Thought presentation : The categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters are exactly the same as those used to represent a speech.

Direct thought （DT ） : DT tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought.

Free indirect thought （FIT ）: It refers to a kind of thought presentation between DT and IT, which is certainly not DT，but takes on some features of the thoughts in the character’s mind.

6． Can you make a brief introduction to Systemic-Functional Grammar?

【答案】 Stemming from Firth’s theories in the London School, Halliday’s Systemic-Functional （SF ） Grammar is a socially oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the 20th century , exerting a strong impact on various disciplines related to language , such as language teaching , sociolinguistics , discourse analysis , stylistics , and machine translation.

It actually has two components : Systemic Grammar and Functional Grammar. They are two inseparable parts for an integral framework in Halliday^ linguistic inquiry. Systemic Grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. And this network

consists of subsystems from which language users make choices. Functional Grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based on the assumption that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the users or functions which they serve.

7． Why do you think that, all other things being equal, women use more standard variants of stable sociolinguistic variables than men?

【答案】 Language is a social, value-loaded practice, which reflects an intricate network of social, been explained in terms of a great political, cultural, and age relationships within a society.

Womens speech closely approaches the standard variety than the speech of men , this has consciousness of status on the part of women. Women are more usually more status-conscious than men in the English-speaking world, they are aware of their low status in society and, as a result, use more standard speech forms in their attempt to claim equality or achieve high social status. In a sense, they are up in arms against men's society. The status of men has been traditionally defined by their occupation and wealth, while women have had to find other ways of establishing their position and one of these has been their speech.

A second explanation relates to the ways in which society treats women. Women are expected to behave better than men, traditionally, just as society has been harsher on women with regard to such vices as promiscuity and drunkenness，a better standard of language may have been required.

A third explanation is that, by using standard or polite forms, a woman is trying to protect her face. In other words , a woman claims more status in society. Her greater use of standard forms may also imply that she does not attend solely to her own face needs but also to those of the people she is interacting with, thus avoiding disagreement and seeking agreement and rapport.