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2018年西安理工大学人文与外国语学院860语言学概论之语言学教程考研仿真模拟五套题

  摘要

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1. subordination

【答案】 Subordination refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other. Thus the subordinate constituents are words which modify the Head. Consequently, they can be called modifiers. In the phrase swimming in the lake , swimming is the head and in the lake are the words modifying the head.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Concordance

【答案】 The computer has the ability to search for a particular word , sequence of words , or perhaps even a part of speech in a text. The computer can also retrieve all examples of a particular word. It can also calculate the number of occurrences of a certain word so that information on the frequency of the word may be gathered. We may also be interested in sorting the data in some way—for example, alphabetically on words occurring in the immediate context of the word. This is usually referred to as concordance.

6. 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.

7. Textual function

【答案】 Textual function : The textual function is one of the three meta-functions language is composed of. It refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living message different from a random list of sentences.

8. 1-narrator

【答案】 The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this ease the critics call the narrator a FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR or I- NARRATOR because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun I is used. First-person narrators are often said to be “limited” because they don‟t know all the faces or “unreliable” because they trick the reader by withholding information or telling untruths. This often happens in murder and mystery stories.

9. Achievement test

【答案】 Achievement test is a test which measures how much of a language someone has learned with reference to a particular course of study or program of instruction.

10.IC analysis

【答案】 IC analysis: IC analysis (immediate constituent analysis) refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents---word groups (or phrases ) , which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own , and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. In practice, for the sake of convenience, we usually stop at the level of word.

二、Short-answer-questions

11.What is entailment? What are the sources of entailment?

Entailment is basically a semantic relation . If sentence A entails 【答案】(or logical implication)

sentence B, it must observe that, in terms of truth value, when sentence A is true, sentence B must be also true; when sentence B is false, sentence A must also be false, and that when sentence B is true, sentence A may be true or false.

The source of entailment may be lexical or syntactical. Lexical source of entailment can be shown in the example like,

(a )The anarchist assassinated the emperor.

(b )The emperor died.

The relationship of entailment between and derives from the lexical relationship between (a )(b )

assassinate and die. In some sense the meaning of assassinate contains the meaning of die.

Other sources for entailment are syntactic: for example, active and passive versions of the same sentence will entail one another. Sentences below show this well:

(c )The Etruscans built this tomb.

(d )This tomb was built by Etruscans.

12.What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of 【答案】

all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. For example the sense of the word “dog” is “a domesticated canine mammal , occurring in many breeds that show a great domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form”. It does not refer to any particular dog that exists in the real world, but applies to any animal that meets the features described in the definition.

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world ; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic unit and the non-linguistic world of experience. If we say “The dog is barking”,we must be talking about a certain dog existent in the situation. The word ^dog^ refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference of the word “dog” in this particular situation.

It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

13.What is your opinion on “true synonymy is non-existent”?

【答案】 Generally speaking , synonyms are the words which have different forms but similar meaning. There are several types of synonyms: dialectal synonyms, such as lift/elevator, flat/apartment; synonyms of different styles , as shown in gentleman/guy; synonyms of different registers , such as salt/sodium chloride ; synonyms differing in affective meaning , such as attract/seduce; synonyms differing in collocation, such as beautiful/handsome, able/capable.

14.How is the illocutionary act different from the perlocutionary act?

【答案】 An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker^ intention; it is the act performed in saying something. Thus, if someone says “Morning”,we can ask questions like “What did he mean?” and the answer could be “He offered a greeting.”

A perlocutionary act, however, is the effect of the utterance. By telling somebody something the speaker may change the opinion of the hearer on something, or mislead him, or surprise him, or induce him to do something, and so on. Therefore,the perlocutionary act of the saying “Morning” could be to keep friendly relations with the hearer.

15.Why is Saussure hailed as the father of modem linguistics?

【答案】 Saussure occupies such an important place in the history of linguistics that he is often described as ''father of modem linguistics”:

A. The book Course in General Linguistics (1916),which is the most important source of Saussure‟s ideas, marked the beginning of modem linguistics.

B.Saussure was the first to notice the complexities of language. He believed that language is a system of signs, called conventions. He held that the sign is the union of the signifier and the signified.

C.By providing answers to questions concerning many aspects of language, Saussure made clear the object of study for linguistics as a science. His ideas on the arbitrary nature of sign, on the relational