2018年中国人民大学外国语学院816英语语言学与英语教学之语言学教程考研核心题库
● 摘要
一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms
1. Stylistics
【答案】 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics studies the features of situationally distinctive uses (varieties ) of language , and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.
2. MT
【答案】 It refers to machine translation, the use of machine (usually computers) to translate texts from one natural language to another
3. Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP )
【答案】 It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to art analysis of utterances (or texts) in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Pidgins and Creoles
【答案】 A pidgin refers to a variety of a language that is not native language of anyone, but is learned on contact situations such as trading. When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade language and becomes the first language of a social community , it becomes a creole. The process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called creolization.
7. Duality
【答案】Duality refers to the fact that in all languages so far investigated there are two levels of structure or patterning. At the first , higher level , language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units ; at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence (such as morphemes, words etc.)
of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which combine to form units of meaning. For example , a syllable is the smallest unit that is normally spoken by itself, and scores of syllables become the carriers of hundreds of meaningful segments of words that are called morphemes.
8. Phatic function ( communion )
【答案】 Phatic function: The phatic function of language refers to the use of the language which often consists of small , seemingly meaningless expression for setting up a certain atmosphere or maintaining social contacts rather than for exchanging information or ideas. For example , greetings , farewells , and comments on the weather in English could serve this function.
9. Metonymy
【答案】 Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by 也e name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance , “Washington ”,as the capital of the United States, can be used as a metonym (an instance of metonymy) for the United States government.
10.phoneme
Phoneme is a basic unit of phonological study, and it is an abstract collection of phonetic 【答案】
features which can distinguish meaning. For example, in English, is described as a phoneme.
二、Short-answer-questions
11.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.
12.What is reference?
Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with 【答案】
the relationship between linguistic elements and non-linguistic world of experience.
Reference in its wider sense would be the relationship between a word or phrase and an entity in the external world. For example, the word tree refers to the object “tree”.
Reference in its narrower sense is the relationship between a word or phrase and a specific object, e.g. a particular tree or a particular animal. For example, Peter's horse would refer to a horse which is owned , ridden by, or in some way associated with Peter.
13.What is register? Use an example to illustrate your idea.
【答案】 There are many social constraints that come into play in controlling which variety from the linguistic repertoire of a speaker is to be used on a particular occasion. The type of language that is selected as appropriate to the type of situation is a register. The register is determined by three social variables : field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. For example, an appropriate language to an academic lecture in a college should be formal and polite, which is called register.
14.deeded 6. bagged 7. killed 8. nabbed
【答案】
15.What are vowels glide about? What differentiates pure or monophthong vowel from vowel glides?
【答案】 When pure or monophthongs are pronounced, the quality remains constant throughout the articulatioin. In contrast, those where there is an audible change of quality are called vowel glides. V owel glides are produced by moving from one vowel position to another through intervening positions. If a single movement of the tongue is involved, the glides are called diphthongs. A double movement produces triphthongs.
16.How does modem language define “object ”? Provide an example.
【答案】 In modem language, object is defined as such an item that it can become a subject in passive transformation. For example, in sentence tcThe lion chased the tourist,, ? “the tourisf” acts as the object. In the passive voiced sentence “The tourist was chased by the lion”,“the tourist” acts as the subject of the sentence.
三、Essay-question
17.What are the special features of American structuralism?
【答案】 American Structuralism is a branch of synchronic linguistics that developed in a very different style from that of Europe. While linguistics in Europe started more than two thousand years ago, linguistics in America started at the end of the nineteenth century. While traditional grammar plays a dominating role in Europe, it has little influence in America. While many European languages have their own historical traditions and cultures, English is the dominating language in America, where there is no such a tradition as in Europe. In addition, the pioneer scholars in America were faced with the urgent task of recording the rapidly perishing native American Indian languages because there was no written record of them. However , these languages were characterised by features of vast diversity and differences which are rarely found in other parts of the world. To record and describe these exotic languages , it is probably better not to have any presuppositions about the nature of language in general. This explains why there was not much development in linguistic theory during this period but a lot of discussion on descriptive procedures.
Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution , and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense , mood and parts of speech , Firstly , structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules. However , its aim is confined to the description of languages, without explaining why language operates the way it does. Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all