当前位置：问答库＞考研试题

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Inflection

【答案】 Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes , such as number , person , finiteness , aspect and case , which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. For example, the past form of the verb work is realized by the addition of the inflectional suffix: „„-ed‟‟； the plural form of the noun child is realized by the inflectional suffix: „„-ren‟‟.

2． Syllable

【答案】 Syllable : It refers to a unit of spoken language that is bigger than a speech sound. It consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following.

3． 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.

4． inflectional morpheme

【答案】 Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

5． 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.

6． Allomorph

【答案】 A morpheme may take various shapes or forms, and an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {-s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, as in “cats” /s/, in “bags” /z/，in “matches” /iz/.

7． Lexical word

【答案】 Lexical word, lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives , and adverbs.

8． Audiolingual method

【答案】 Audiolingual method refers to the teaching of a second language through imitation , repetition , and reinforcement. It emphasizes the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing and the use of mother tongue in the classroom is not allowed.

9． distinctive features

a means of working out a set of phonological contrasts or oppositions to capture particular 【答案】

aspects of language sounds , first suggested by Roman Jacobson in the 1940s and then developed by numerous other people.

10．Corpus

【答案】 Corpus is a collection of linguistic data , either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to verify a hypothesis about language~~for example , to determine how the application of a particular sound , word , or syntactic construction varies.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Why do we say language is primarily vocal?

【答案】 Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Language is primarily vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages, developed or “new”. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak （and listen ） before they write （and read） also indicates that language is primarily vocal , rather than written. The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific.

12．The following is a statement by a Japanese businessman: “You buy in your own language, but you sell in your customer’s language.” How do you understand it?

【答案】 This reflects some features of pidgin which is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it id used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. And also, it reflects the tendency of intercultural communication from the aspect of language.

13．What are the major concerns of the Prague School theory?

【答案】 Three points of the Prague School theory are of special importance.

First , it was stressed that the synchronic study of language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation.

Second , there was an emphasis on the systemic character of language.

Third , language was looked on as functional in another sense. Based on these ideas, the Prague School practiced a special style of synchronic linguistics, and made great contribution to phonology and the distinction between phonetics and phonology. Its most important contribution is that it sees language in terms of function.

14．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.

15．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.

16．How to understand a sentence?

【答案】 Besides decoding sounds and lexical meanings, comprehension also includes untangling the meaning of sentences. There are a few elements influencing the comprehension of sentences. The first is that the ambiguity of word meaning leads to difficulties in sentence understanding. The more complex information the word has , the more difficult the sentence is to be understood. The second factor is that the linguistic structure of the sentence affects the processing time. Psycholinguists have addressed th phenomena of sentence comprehension in different ways. Firstly , serial models propose that the sentence comprehension system continually and sequentially follows the constraints of a language‟ s grammar with remarkable speed. Secondly, parallel models emphasize the comprehension system is sensitive to a vast range