2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库
● 摘要
目录
2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库（一） ... 2
2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库（二） ... 6 2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库（三） . 10 2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库（四） . 14 2018年北京航空航天大学外国语学院821英语语言文学之语言学教程考研核心题库（五） . 18
一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms
1． Presupposition
【答案】 A presupposition is a proposition （expressed in a sentence） that is assumed to be true in order to judge the truth or falsity of another sentence. For example , John didn't pass chemistry presupposes that John took chemistry.
2． IPA
【答案】 IPA is the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet , which is devised by the International Phonetic Association in 1888. IPA is a set of symbols which can be used to represent the phones and phonemes of natural languages.
3． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）
【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.
4． Categorization
Categorization is the process of classifying our experiences into different categories based 【答案】
on commonalities and differences. There are three levels in categories: the basic level，the superordinate level ，and the subordinate level.
5． Back-formation
【答案】 Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example , the word “television” appeared before “televise”，and so does “editor” to “edit”.
二、Short-answer-questions
6． In English, the phonemeis pronounced differently in pat, spat, and tap, can you form a rule that can generalize this linguistic phenomenon?
【答案】 In English , there is a rule that a is unaspirated
after but aspirated in other places. So in pat , tap
is aspirated but unaspirated in spat since it is
after To bring out the phonetic difference , an aspirated sound is transcribed with a raised “h” after the symbol of the s ound. So a
phonetic transcription for peak isand that for speak isSo are two different phones and are variants of the phonemeSuch variants of a phoneme are called allophones of the same phoneme. The allophones are said to be in complementary distribution because they never occur in the same
context :
occurs after
while occurs in other places. We can present this rule as:
elsewhere
（note :
is the position in whichappears. ）
In addition, sometimes a phoneme may also have free variants. The final consonant of tap may not be released by some speakers so there is no audible sound at the end of this word. Such phenomenon is called free variation.
7． 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.
8． How would you describe this short exchange in terms of the ardors performed by the speakers?
Motorist : My car needs new exhaust system.
Mechanic : Fll be busy with this other car all day.
【答案】 In the motorist‟s utterance ，there are two types of speech acts performed , namely representative and directive，and as to the latter one, it is recognized as an indirect speech act, which is performed through the performance of the former one. Thus, by stating that his car needs new exhaust system , the motorist has in fact asked the mechanic to equip a new exhaust system for him.
Similarly ，in the mechanic‟s utterance , there are two types of speech acts performed ; one is representative , the other commissive. The commissive speech act in fact is an indirect one since it is recognized through the performance of representative action. That is to say, by stating that he will be busy with another car all day, the mechanic has in fact told the motorist that he could not repair his car right away.
9． What is a syntactic category?
【答案】 A syntactic category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics. The classification is based on similar structure and sameness of distribution （the structural relationships between these elements and other items in a larger grammatical structure） , and not on meaning. There are major and minor syntactic categories: major categories include all phrasal syntactic categories such as NP, VP, and PP, and word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories such as N and V; while minor categories are categories that do not project to a phrasal level such as the Yes-No question markers. More
specifically , a syntactic category also refers to the defining properties of these general units : the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender and case; and the categories of the verb, for example, include tense, aspect and voice, etc.
三、Essay-question
10．What is the relationship between speech event and speech act? （Explain with an example）.
【答案】 Speech act refers to an utterance as a functional unit in communication. There are many kinds of speech acts, such as requests, orders, commands, complaints, and promises. A speech act that is performed indirectly is sometimes known as an indirect speech act. Speech event refers to a particular instance when people exchange speech , e.g. an exchange of greetings , an enquiry , a conversation. Speech events are governed by the rules and norms for the use of speech, which may be different in different communities. The structure of speech events varies considerably according to the genre they belong to.
Both speech act and speech event are concerned about the actual utterance of sentences. But speech act deals with a particular utteranceh that has locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Speech event is related to certain speech situations that are composed of many utterances, though may be not speech act.
For example, when you ask for the time at a bus stop with the sentence, “What time is it?” your meaning is that you want to know the time. This speech act takes place within a speech event, which could be called asking for the time. Such an event is very brief and usually has three speech acts: asking the time, giving the time, and thinking.
Speech events usually take place within the larger context of speech situations. Based on the differences between speech act and speech event, the former is usually studied in pragmatics while the latter is the focus of socio-linguistics.
11．Please list and explain the 7 types of meaning recognized by G. Leech.
【答案】 The seven types of meaning were first postulated by G. Leech. They are respectively illustrated as follows:
（1）Conceptual meaning, which refers to logical, cognitive, or denotative content. This type of meaning is “denotative” in that it is concerned with the relationship between a word and the thing it denotes , or refers to.
（2）Connotative meaning, what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to. It refers to some additional, especially emotive, meaning.
（3）Social meaning, referring to what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.
（4）Affective meaning, which refers to what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.
（5）Reflected meaning, which refers to what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.
（6）Collocative meaning, what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.
The five types of meanings from （2） to （6） are collectively known as Associative meaning in the sense that an elementary associated theory of mental connections is enough to explain their use.