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2018年武汉大学外国语言文学学院801英语综合(语言学、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. 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.

2. Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

3. Homonymy

【答案】 In any language there are words which have the same linguistic form but are different in meaning. These words are called homonyms. For example, bank (of a river) , and bank (financial institution ).

4. cohort model

【答案】 The cohort model is a supposed doctrine dealing with the spoken word recognition postulated by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990. It is suggested that the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed , candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process continues until only one word candidate matches the input- the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.

5. 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 ,less “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) .

6. Speech and thought presentation

【答案】 Speech and thought presentation: These two terms are used for the language in fiction, referring to the presenting forms for indicating the narrator‟s speech or thought. The speech presentation may have the following four possibilities : direct speech , indirect speech , narrator‟s representation of speech acts, and narrator‟s representation of speech. The Thought presentation can also be categorized into : narrator‟s representation of thought , narrator‟s representation of thought acts , indirect thought , free indirect thought, and direct thought.

7. 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.

8. Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

9. Register

【答案】 It is a speech variety used by a particular group of people , usually sharing the same occupation (e.g. doctors, lawyers) or the same interests. A particular register often distinguishes itself from others by having a number of distinctive words, by using words or phrases in a particular way, and sometimes by special grammatical constructions (e.g. legal language).

10.Conversational implicature

【答案】 Conversational implicature refers to a type of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words together with the context, under the guidance of the CP and its maxims. For example, the implicature of He is a tiger could probably be he has some characteristics of a tiger.

二、Short-answer-questions

11.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.

12.It is claimed in sociolinguistics that you are what you say. How would you comment on this theoretical claim?

【答案】 Everyone speaks differently. A personal dialect of an individual speaker combines elements regarding regional, social, gender, and age variations. In other words, an individual speaker^ regional and social back ground, his/her gender and age jointly determine the way he/she talks. From this point, we can claim that44You are what you say99.

Following this claim , we may expand the scope of our observation by introducing some social factors that are believed to influence our language behavior in a social context. Among these factors, some major ones include a) class ; b) gender ; c ) age ; d) ethnic identity; e) education background, f ) occupation , and g ) religious belief. In our daily speaking, the potential selection of linguistic forms can reflect the above factors, which determine our identities.

For example , women use more “fancy” color terms such as “mauve” and “beige”; use less powerful curse words; use more intensifiers such as “terrible” and “awful ”; use more tag questions. On the other hand, your way of speaking, to some extent, reflect your identity.

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.Cite an example to explain synchronic linguistics.

Synchronic Linguistics is the description of a language at some point of time in history. It 【答案】

focuses on the characteristics of the language at a certain time. For example, when we study English, we learn about the vocabulary, the language points and oral English etc. At this time, we are learning English of current time in synchronic method.

15.What are the three important points of the Prague School?

【答案】 The three important points developed in Prague School are:(a ) It was stressed that the synchronic study of

language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation but no rigid theoretical barrier is erected to separate diachronic study, (b ) There was an emphasis on the