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2018年温州大学外国语学院820英语语言学之语言学教程考研仿真模拟五套题

  摘要

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1. 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.

2. Construal and construal operations

【答案】Construal is the competence to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways through specificity, different mental scanning, directionality, vantage point, figure-ground segregation etc. Construal operations are conceptualizing processes applied in language process by human beings. That is, construal operations are the underlying psychological processes and resources employed in the interpretation of linguistic expressions.

3. Lingua franca

【答案】 It is language that is used for communication between different groups of people, each speaking a different language , lhe lingua franca could be an internationally used language of communication (e. g. English) , it could be the native language of one of the groups, or it could a language which is not spoken natively by any of the groups but has a simplified sentence structure and vocabulary and is often a mixture of two or more languages.

4. division of pragmatic labor

【答案】 Horn observes that the Q-based and R-based principles often directly collide and suggests the resolution comes from a division of pragmatic labor,which reads “The use of a marked (relatively complex and/or prolix) expression when a corresponding unmarked (simpler ,l ess “effortful”)alternate expression is available tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message (one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed) .

5. computational linguistics

【答案】 Computational linguistics is a branch of applied linguistics , dealing with computer processing of human language, h includes programmed instruction, speech synthesis and recognition, automatic translation, and computer mediated communication.

二、Short-answer-questions

6. What is behaviourism?

【答案】 Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement”,and the adult’s use of language is also a process of “stimulus-response”.

7. How do the three branches of phonetics contribute to the study of speech sounds?

【答案】 Phonetics looks at speech sounds from three distinct but related points of view. First, it studies the sounds from the speaker’s point of view , i.e. ,how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds. Then, it looks at the sounds from the hearer s point of view, i.e., how the sounds are perceived by the hearer. Lastly, it studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another. These three branches of phonetics are labeled articulatory phonetics , auditory phonetics , and acoustic phonetics respectively.

8. What makes language unique to human beings?

The design features of language which refer to the defining properties of human language 【答案】

tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.Arbitrariness is a core feature of language, which means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. Duality , which means the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization. Creativity means language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Because of duality the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic unites to form an infinite set of sentences , most of which are never heard before. Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters, in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. So all these features make language unique to human beings.

9. Explain three levels of categorization.

【答案】 Three levels of categorization

(1) Superordinate levels mean higher levels or more general levels. Furniture and animal are examples of superordinate category levels.

(2)Basic-level categories are more specific , but not too specific. Chair is an example of basic-level categories.

(3)Subordinate levels mean lower levels or more specific categories. Desk chair is an example of subordinate categories.

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1. 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.

2. Government

【答案】 Government is another type of control over the forms of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the forms of others in terms of certain category. In English, for example, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book. She gave a book to him. In other words , the verb , or the preposition , determines , or governs , the form of the pronoun after it.

3. Lexical relations

【答案】 There are several types of lexical relations concerning the sense of the words. Those are synonymy , antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, homonymy, and so on. (a ) Synonymy refers to the sameness relation ; “autum”, and “full ” are synonyms , for example , (b ) Antonymy refers to the oppositeness relation ; for example , “buy” and “sell ” are antonyms , (c ) Hyponymy refers to the inclusiveness relation; for example, “apple” is a hyponym of “fruit”, (d ) Polysemy means one word that has more than one related meaning ,and “bank”,as an example , is a polysemous word. (e ) Homonymy refers to the relation of two different words which are identical either in sound, or spelling, or both, such as “bow” (bau ) and “bow” (b əu ).

4. Surface structure

【答案】 It is a term used in generative grammar to refer to the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure we articulate and hear. For instance, “John is easy to please.” and “John is eager to please.” are two sentences with the same surface structure.

5. 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.