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大连外国语言学院

1992 年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试试题

1. List the six important characteristics of human language.

2. What are the types of morphemes?

3. Illustrate the deep and surface structures.

4. What do you know about the semantic features?

5. How does language change?

Key

1. Linguists are in broad agreement about some of the important characteristics of human language, and most of them would accept a tentative definition like the following: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

(1)Arbitrariness--When we say “language is arbitrary ” , we mean that there is no logical

connection between meanings and sounds. There is no reason why we should use the sounds [dag] to denote the animal “dog ”.

(2)Duality--Language is a system. The system has two sets of structures, one of sounds and the

other of meaning. This is important for the workings of language. A small number of sounds can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning (words),and the units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences. The nature of this relationship constitutes a most interesting problem. For instance, we make dictionaries of a language, but we cannot make a dictionary of sentences of that language. For the number of words is relatively finite, but the number of sentences is absolutely infinite. This feature of language offers its users the possibility to talk about anything within their knowledge. No animal communication system has duality, or ever comes near to possessing it.

(3) Productivity--Language is productive in the sense that users can understand and produce

sentences they have never heard before. Every day we send messages that have never

before been sent and understand novel messages. Much of what we say and hear we say and hear for the first time; yet there seems no problem of understanding. For example, the sentence "A red-eyed elephant is dancing on the hotel bed" must be new to all readers of this book and it does not describe a common happening in the world. Nevertheless, nobody has any difficulty in understanding it. Productivity seems peculiar to human language.

(4) Displacement--Language can be used to refer to things which are not present: real or

imagined matters in the past, present, or future or in far away places. In other words, language can refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. This is what we mean by “displacement ”. This property of language provides speakers with an opportunity to talk about a wide range of things, free from the warriers caused by remoteness in time and place.

(5) Cultural transmission--Animal call systems are genetically transmitted. That is, animals are

born with the capacity to produce the set of calls peculiar to their species. All cats, gibbons and bees, for example, have systems which are almost identical to those of all other cats, gibbons and bees. With human beings, things are different: a Chinese speaker and an English speaker are not mutually intelligible. This shows that language is culturally transmitted. That is, it is passed on from one generation to the next by teaching and learning, rather than by instinct. This is not to deny that human capacity for language has a genetic basis; in fact only human beings can learn a human language at birth and he has to be exposed to a language in order to acquire it.

(6) Interchangeability--Interchangeability means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. The communication systems of gibbons and bees have this

feature, but those of certain other animals do not. For instance some male birds possess