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2017年宁夏大学专业综合之语言学教程复试实战预测五套卷

  摘要

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1. Diglossia

【答案】 When two languages or language varieties exist together in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, the more standard variety can be called the high variety or H-variety , which is used in government , the media , education , and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety or L-variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

2. 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.

3. Linguistic determinism

【答案】 Linguistic determinism , is one of the two points of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , and has developed into the strong version of this hypothesis. It could be summarized as follows: (1) One’s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language. (2) The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems. Therefore , the following statement could represent this hypothesis 4tIf Aristotle had spoken Chinese , his logic would have been different”.

4. 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.

5. Lexical relations

【答案】 There are several types of lexical relations concerning the sense of the words. Those are synonymy , antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, homonymy, and so on. (a ) Synonymy refers to the sameness relation ; “autum”, and “full ” are synonyms , for example , (b ) Antonymy refers to the oppositeness relation ; for example , “buy” and “sell ” are antonyms , (c ) Hyponymy refers to the inclusiveness relation; for example, “apple” is a hyponym of “fruit”, (d ) Polysemy means one word that has more than one related meaning ,and “bank”,as an example, is a polysemous word. (e ) Homonymy refers to the relation of two different words which are identical either in sound, or spelling, or both, such as “bow” (bau ) and “bow” (b əu ).

6. Concordance

【答案】 The computer has the ability to search for a particular word , sequence of words , or perhaps even a part of speech in a text. The computer can also retrieve all examples of a particular word. It can also calculate the number of occurrences of a certain word so that information on the frequency of the word may be gathered. We may also be interested in sorting the data in some way—for example, alphabetically on words occurring in the immediate context of the word. This is usually referred to as concordance.

7. The Innateness Hypothesis

【答案】 The innateness hypothesis was proposed by Chomsky. It says that the ability to acquire a human language is part of the biologically innate equipment of the human being, and that an infant is bom with this knowledge of basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal.

8. Contrastive analysis

【答案】 Contrastive analysis is an approach to analysis of second language acquisition, based on a belief that a more effective teaching pedagogy would come out when the similarities and differences between native language and target language are taken into consideration. By such an analysis , it is supposed that some leaning difficulties could be predicted in terms of language transfer.

二、Essay-question

9. In interpreting utterances such as(1)and (2),the hearer generally treats the events described in the two sentences in each group as causally related even though such relationship is not encoded in the meanings of the sentences. That is . the hearer tends to think that Helen fell on the ground because of Torn's pushing and that the vase broke because it was dropped. Explain why.

(1)Tom pushed Helen. Helen fell on the ground.

(2)Peter dropped the vase. It broke.

【答案】 The phenomenon described can be illustrated by the theory of cohesion and coherence in discourse analysis , especially the conjunctive kind of cohesive relation. Text processing requires inferences for establishing coherence between successive sentences. The achievement of coherence partly relies on the cohesive relationships within and between the sentences. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another.

It is realized partly through grammatical device and partly through lexical cohesion. Conjunction is one of the grammatically cohesive relations. It is based on the assumption that there are forms of systematic relationships between sentences in the linguistic system. Conjunction can be realized by some conjunctive words and some adverbs , such as so , but , furthermore , and so on. But in fact , the conjunctive relation between the discourses need not be realized by conjunctive words, as can be seen in these two examples.

Yet it is not enough for the text to have connections between elements, there is also the coherence which distinguishes connected texts which make sense from those which do not. It enables people to make sense of what they read and hear, and then try to arrive at an interpretation which is in line with their experience of the way the world is. In fact, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to make sense of what we experience or perceive in the world.

Therefore , by the coherence which helps us to connect the discourse with the world we experience, we the hearers will tend to make the discourse fit some situation which could accommodate all the details , and just as in the two examples, the causal conjunctive relations are established.

10.Can you make a brief introduction to Systemic-Functional Grammar?

【答案】 Stemming from Firth’s theories in the London School, Halliday’s Systemic-Functional (SF ) Grammar is a socially oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the 20th century , exerting a strong impact on various disciplines related to language , such as language teaching , sociolinguistics , discourse analysis , stylistics , and machine translation.

It actually has two components : Systemic Grammar and Functional Grammar. They are two inseparable parts for an integral framework in Halliday^ linguistic inquiry. Systemic Grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. And this network consists of subsystems from which language users make choices. Functional Grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based on the assumption that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the users or functions which they serve.

11.What is characteristic of TG grammar?

【答案】 Chomsky’s TG grammar has the following features.

First , Chomsky defines language as a set of rules or principles.

Secondly , Chomsky believes that the aim of linguistics is to produce a generative grammar which captures the tacit knowledge of the native speaker of his language. This concerns the question of learning theory and the question of linguistic universals.

Thirdly , Chomsky and his followers are interested in any data that can reveal the native speaker^ tacit knowledge. They seldom use what native speakers say; they rely on their own intuition.

Fourthly , Chomsky’s methodology is hypothesis-deductive , which operates at two levels:(1) The linguist

formulates a hypothesis about language structure —a general linguistic theory ; this is tested by grammars for particular languages. (2) Each such grammar is a hypothesis on the general linguistic theory.

Finally , Chomsky follows rationalism in philosophy and mentalism in psychology.

12.Disambiguate the following sentences, using the tree diagram with labels or analyzing their syntactic structures.

(1)Times flies like an arrow.

(2)We got down from the duck.

(3)Old men and women will be served first.

(4)John passed the hammer and saw through the window.

(5)Who would you like to visit?

【答案】(1)