《英语语言学概论》配套习题（五）（问答题）答案Chapter 1 Introduction to Linguistics1.What are design features of language?Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of anima communication.2.What are the characteristics of human language?The characteristics of human language include arbitrariness, duality, productivity, displacement, discreteness, transferability and linearity.3・Explain the characteristic of arbitrariness・What are the relationship between arbitrariness and convention?Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation.4.What does productivity mean for language?It means language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. It refers to the property that language enables language users to produce or understand an indefinite number of sentences including novel sentences by use of finite set of rules.5・ What functions does language have?Language has at least seven funcitons: informative, interpersonal, performative, emotive, phatic, recreational and metalingual.6・ Explain the metalingual function of language・The metalingual function of language refers to the fact that language can be used to talk about itself.7・ What is the difference between synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics?Synchronic linguistics takes a fixed instant (usually, but not necessarily, the present) as its point of observation. In contrast, diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history; therefore, it is also called historical linguistics.8・ What distinguishes prescriptive studies of language from descriptive studies of language?The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are. To say that linguistics is a descriptive science is to say that the linguist tries to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, norms, of correctness, which are in the scope of prescriptive linguistics.Chapter 2 Phonology1・ What does phonetics concern?Phonetis is the scientific study of speech sounds of human beings. Phonetics can be suv-classified into articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. 2・ How do the three branches of phonetics contribute to the study of speech sounds?Articualtory phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics is the study of the physical properties of the sounds produced in speeech. Auditory phonetics is concerned with the perception of speech sounds.3・ How is the description of consonants different from that of vowels?Consonants are produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some place to divert, impede, or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity. By contrast, a vowel is produced without such obstruction so no turbulance or a total stopping of the air can be perceived.4.In which two ways may consonants be classified?The categories of consonants are established on two important factors, which are termed as manners of articulation and places of articulation.5.How do phoneticians classify vowels?The di scription of vowels includes four aspects: the height of tongue raising(high, mid, low); the position of the highest part of the tongue(front, central, back); the length or tenseness of the vowel (tense vs. lax or long vs. short) and lip-rounding (rounded vs. unrounded).6.T0 what extent does phonology differ from phonetics?Phonology is concerned with the linguistic patterning of sounds in human languages, with its primary aim being to discover the principles that govern the way wounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds while phonology studies the way in which speakers of a language systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning. 7.What do minimal pair refer? Give an example to illustrate・Certain sounds cause changes in the meaning of a word, whereas other sounds do not. For instance, the word big can be described in a phonetic transcription [big]. If [g] is replaced by [t], there is another word: bit.[g] and [t] are called minimal pairs. Therefore, when sound substitutions cause differences of meaning, these sounds are minimal pairs.8.What kind of phenomenon is complementary distribution?When two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in complementary distribution. For example, the aspirated English stops never occur after [s], and the unaspirated ones never occur initially. Sounds in complementary distribution may be assigned to the same phoneme. The allophones of [1], for instance, are also in complementary distribution. The clear[l] occur only before a vowel, the dark [1] occur after a consonant or at the end of a word.Chapter 3 Morphology1・ What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?Morpheme may be classified into free and bound. A free morpheme is one that can be uttered alone with meaning, it can exist on its own without a bound morpheme.A free morpheme is a word, in the traditional sense. Man, book, take and red are free morphemes.A bound morpheme cannot stand by itself as a complete utterance. It must appear with at least one other morphem, free or bound, like un- in unhappy, past tensemorpheme in worked.2・ What is the difference between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?An inflectional affix serves to express such meanings as plurality, tense, and the comparative or superlative degree. It does not form a new word with new lexical meaning when it is added to another word. Nor does it change the word-class of the word to which it is added. The inflecitonal affixes today are the plural marker, the genetive case, the verbal endings, the comparative degrees and superlative degrees. Inflectional affixes have only their particualr grammatical meanings, so they are also called grammatical meanings, so they are also called grammatical affixes.A derivational affix serves to derive a new word when it is added to another morpheme. Derivational affix has lexical meaning, but less important than the meaning of the root in the same word, like -able in the word workable. Derivaitonal affixes are commonly subdivided into prefixes and suffixes.3・ What is compounding?Compounding or composition is a word-formation process by joining two or more bases to form a new unit, a compound word. Compounds can be divided into three categories according to parts of the speech: (1) noun compounds (like hearbeat);(2)adjective compounds (like dutyfree); (3) verb compounds (like housekeep).4.What are the criteria of a compound word?(1)Orthographically, compounds are written in three ways: solid (like airmail).hyphenated (like air-conditioning) and open (like air raid).(2)Phonologically, many compounds have a so-called compound accent, that is, asingle stress on the first element, as in "space rocket; or a main stress on the first element and a secondary stress on the second element.(3)Semantically, compounds can be said to have a meaning which may be relatedto, but cannot always be inferred from the meaning of its component parts.5.What is acronymy?Acronymy is a type of shortening by using the first letters of words to form a proper name, a technical term, or a phrase・ If the shortened word is pronounced letter by letter, it is an initialism like BBC; if the shortened word is pronounced as word rather than as a sequence of letters, it is an acronym like SAM(for surface-to-air missile).6.What is blending?Blending is a preocess of word・forniation in which a new word is formed by combining the meanings and sounds of two words, one of which is not in its full form or both of which are not in their full forms, like newscast (news+ broadcast), brunch (breakfast +lunch).7.Decide which way of word formation is used to form the following words.Comsat (from communications + satellite, by blending)Motel (from motor + hotel, by blending)Lase (from laser, by back-formation)Memo (from memorandom, by back clipping)Nightmare (from daymare, by analogy)ASEAN(from the Association for South-East Asian Nations, by acronymy)ROM(from read-only memory, by initialism)Bit(from binary + digit, by blending))Babysit(from babysitter, by back・fonnatioii)cock-a・doodle・do(from the sound produced by cock, by onomatopoeia))grunt (from the sound produced by pig, by onomatopoeia)8・ What are closed-class words and open-class words?A word that belongs to the closed-class is one whose membership is fixed or limited. New members are not regularly added. Therefore, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc., are all closed items.The open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited.With the emergence of new ideas, inventions, etc., new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs are all open-class items.Chapter4 Syntax1.What is syntax?Syntax is a sub-field of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language. Specifically, It is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are joined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.2.What is a simple, compound, or complex sentence?A simple sentence is made up of one independent clause with dependent clause attached. It consists of at least one subject and one predicate. Either the subject or the complement may be compound (consisting of more than one element joined with a coordinating conjunction), and modifiers and phrases may be added as well.A compound sentence is composed of at least two independent clauses, but no dependent clauses. The clauses are joined by a comma and a coordinating conjunction, a comma and a correlative conjunction, or a semicolon with no conjunction.A complex sentence uses one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses.For example, the following five sentences are simple, compound, complex, compound, and complex sentence respectively.(1)He and I understood.(2)Lucy watches football on television, but she never goes to a game.(3)You can borrow my pen if you need one.(4)Paul likes football and David likes chess.(5)We had to go inside when it started raining.3.What is the hierarchical structure?The hierarchical structure is the sentence structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, such as NP, VP and PP.4.Howto distinguish immediate constituents from ultimate constituents?An immediate constituent is any one of the largest grammatical units that constituent a construction. Immediate constituents are often further reducible.An ultimate constituent is one of the grammatically irreducible units that constitutea construction.For example, the immediate constituents of the sentence You eat bananas are you and eat bananas; the ultimate constituents of the sentence are you. eat. banana, and —s.5.What are subordinate and coordinate constructions?Subordinate and coordinate constructions are two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head, with the head being dominant and the other constituent dependent, are subordinate constructions. For example, the short expression Lovely Lucy is a subordinate construction with Lucy as its head. While coordinate constructions have more than one head. For example, boys and girls, coffee or tea, the city Rome, are coordinate constructions, in which, both the two content constituents, boys and girls, coffee and tea, the city and Rome, are capable of serving as the head. They are of equal syntactic status, and no one is dependent on the other.6・ What are deep and surface structures?Deep structure is a central theoretical term in generative grammar, opposed to surface structure. It is the abstract syntactic representation of a sentence一an underlying level of structural organization which specifies all the factors governing the way the sentence should be interpreted.Surface structure is a central theoretical term in generative grammar, opposed to deep structure. It is the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure we articulate and hear.7. Can you describe the syntactic structure of the sentence “The old tree swayed in the wind” by using a tree diagram?8・ How to reveal the differences in sentential meaning in the sentence “The mother of the boy and the girl will arrive soon” by drawing tree diagrams?The sentence is an ambiguous sentence, which can be interpreted in two different ways, so it could assigned two tree diagram, as would be shown below: Tree Diagram (1):the wind The old tree swayed in NPDetTree Diagram (2):Chapter 5 Semantics1. What is a semantic field? Can you illustrate it?It is an organizational principle that the lexicon and groups of words in the lexicon can be semantically related, rather than a listing of words as in a published dictionary. On a very general and intuitive level, we can say that the words in a semantic field, though not synonymous, are all used to talk about the same general phenomenon, and there is a meaning inclusion relation between the items in the field and the field category itself. Classical examples of semantic fields include color terms (red, green, blue, yellow), kinship terms (mother, father, sister, brother), and cooking terms (boil, fry, broil, steam) as semantic fields.2・ What are the major types of synonyms in English?They are dialectal synonyms, stylistic synonyms, emotive synonyms, collocational synonyms, and semantic synonyms. Examples are as follows:fond of, keen on (collocational)autumn, fall (dialectal)dad, father (stylistic)thrifty, miserly, economical (emotive) escape, flee (semantic)3・ In what way do the following pairs offer contrast?earth l.our planet. 2. the soil on the surface of our planet.bank l.a financial institution. 2. side of a river, bear 1. a wild animal, bare:naked.bow a. an inclination of the head or body, as in greeting, consent, courtesy, acknowledgement, submission, or veneration.(e) lead a. go in front of a group of people. 2. a soft heavy easily melted grayish-blue metal(f) found: 1. of find. 2. establish or set upThe five entities show different semantic relations of words.(a) is an example of polysemy, and it is different from the next which fall into the category of homography. (b) is an example of perfect homonymy, while “beaf and “bare" in (c) are homophones, those in (d) are homographs, and the words in (e) are homophones. \JZ \)z \)z abed z(\ /(\ /k z(\Swill arrive soonAux VPPolysemy and homonymy both deal with multiple senses of the same phonological word, but polysemy is invoked if the senses are judged to be related. Homonymous senses, however, are unrelated. Homonymy can be classified into partial homonymy and perfect homonymy. Words falling under the category of partial homonymy can be homophones or homographs. Perfect homonymy is exemplified by the words which are identical in sound and spelling or both in sound-form and part of speech.4. Categorize the following pairs: child・kid，alive-dead, big-small, husband-wife・Child-kid can be categorized under synonymy, alive-dead complementary antonymy, old-young gradable antonymy, and husband-wife converse antonymy.5・What is hyponymy composed of? Illustrate whether there is always a superordinate to hyponyms, or hyponyms to a superordinate・Hyponymy is composed of a superordinate and hyponyms; the hyponyms under the same superordinate are co-hyponyms. there is not always a superordinate to hyponyms, or hyponyms to a superordinate. Sometimes a superordinate may be a superordiante to itself. For example, the word "animal" may only include beasts like “tigef, “lion", "elephant”，"cow”，“horse" and is a co-hyponym of “hum arT. But it is also the superordinate to both “human" and "animal" in contrast to “bircT,"行sh", and “insect”，when it is used in the sense of "mammal". It can further be the superordinate to “bird'',"行sh", "insect”，and "mammal" in contrast to “pbnt". From the hyponym's point of view, “animal" is a hyponym of itself, and may be called autohyponym.6・ How is meronymy different from hyponymy?Meronymy is a term used to describe a part-whole relationship between lexical items. We can identify this relationship by using sentence frames like "X is part of or 66Y has as in "A page is part of a book", or book has pages". While hyponymy has to do with inclusiveness, we cannot do the same with hyponymy. For example, bird is the superordinate to crow, hawk, duck, and se cannot say that bird has crows, or hawks'：and so on.Meronymy also differs from hyponymy in transitivity. Hyponymy is always transitive, for example bird is the superordinate to hawk, hawk is the superordinate to sparrowhawk, and thus bird is the superordinate to sparrowhawk. But meronymy may or may not be so. A transitive example is: nail is a meronym of finger, md finger of hand. We can see that nail is a meronym of finger, and finger of hand. We can see that nail is a meronym of hand. A non-transitive example is: pane is a meronym of window, and window of room; but pane is not a meronym of room.7. Why may a sentence be ambiguous?The ambiguity of a sentence may arise from lexical ambiguity or structural ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity arises from polysemy or homonymy which can not be determined by the context. For example,(a)The table is fascinating.(b)She couldn't bear children.Table in (a) is an example of polysemy. It can be a piece of furniture, or the stated kind or quality of food served at a meal here. The ambiguity of (b) lies in the two meanings of the homonym bear一endure or produce children.The following sentence is an example of structural ambiguity.(c)The mother of the boy and the girl will arrive soon.8・ What predication analysis? What is a no-place, one-place，two-place, or three-place predicate? Give examples・Predication analysis is a new approach for sentential meaning analysis which is to break down the sentence into their smaller constituents: argument and predicate. The predicate is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. The argument is the logical participant.A no-place predicate is a predicate which governs no argument; a one-place predicate, one argument; a two-place predicate, two arguments; and a three-place predicate, three arguments. Respective examples are:(a)It is snowing. (SNOW)(b)Baby is sleeping. SLEEP(JOHN, MARY)(c)John loves Mary. LOVE(JOHN, MARY)(d)John gave Mary a book. GIVE(JOHN, MARY, BOOK)Chapter 6 Pragmatics1・ What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?Pragmatics studies how meaning is conveyed in the process of communication. It is a comparatively new branch of study in the area of linguistics; its development and establishment in the 1960s an dl970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study of linguistics, especially that of semantics. Generally it deals with how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. The scope of pragmatic study includes “speech act theory'', “context", '"conversational implicature,\ presupposition, etc.The basic difference between pragmatics and traditional semantics is that pragmatics considers meaning in context and traditionally semantics studies meaning in isolation from the context of use. It may be said that pragmatics studies the meaning that is not accounted by semantics. It can also be expressed in the formula: pragmatics=meaning-semantics. G. Leech, in his principles of pragmatics holds that: Semantics answers the question: What does X mean? Pragmatics answer the question: What did you mean by X?2・ How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?Utterance meaning is based on sentence meaning; the former is concrete and context-dependent and the latter is abstract and decontextualized.3・ What is contextual meaning?It is the meaning a linguistic item has in context, for example the meaning a word has within a particular sentence, or a sentence has in a particular paragraph. The question Do you know the meaning of wo厂？For example, may have two different contextual meanings:i.it may mean Do you know the meaning of the word war? , when said by alanguage teacher to a class of students.ii.It may mean war produces death, injury, and suffering, when said by an injured soldier to a politician who favors war.4.Explain the meanings of locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionaryact through examples.A distinction is made by Austin in the theory of Speech Acts between three different types of act involved in or caused by the utterance of a sentence.A locutional act is the saying of something which is meaningful and can be understood. For example, saying the sentence Shoot the snake is a locutionary act is hearers understand the words shoot, the. snake and can identify the particular snake referred to.5.What is cooperative principle(CP)?The "'cooperative principle", proposed and formulated by P Grice, a pragmatic hypothesis, is about that the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate; otherwise, it would not be possible to carry on the talk. The principle has the four following maxims:Quantityi.Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the currentpurposes of the exchange).ii.Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. QualityTry to make your contribution one that is true.(1)Do not say what you believe to false.(2)Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.RelationBe relevant.MannerBe perspicuous.(1)Avoid obscurity of expression.(2)Avoid ambiguity.(3)Be brief.(4)Be orderly.6・ What is conversational implicature?It is an additional unstated meaning that has to be assumed in order to maintain the cooperative principle, e.g. if someone says "The President is a mouse", something that is literally false, the hearer must assume the speaker means to convey more than is being said.7. How does the violation of the maxims of CP give rise to conversationalimplicature?There are circumstances where speakers may not follow the maxims of the cooperative principle. For example, in conversation, a speaker may violate the maxim expectations by using an expression like "No comment^^ in response to a question. Although it is typically not "as informative as is required?, in the context, it is naturally interpreted as communicating more than is said (i.e. the speaker knows the answer). This typical reaction (i.e. there must be something “special" here) of listeners to any apparent violation of the maxims is actually the key to the notion of conversational implicature.When we violate any of these maxims, our language becomes indirect. In this way, we can convey more than is literally said.8.What is adjacency pair?It refers to a sequence of two utterances by different speakers in conversation. The second is a response to the first, e.g. question-answer.Chapter 8 Language and Society1. What is sociolinguistics?Sociolinguistics is the field that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live.2・ What is speech community?It is a group of people who form a community, e.g. a village, a region, a nation, and who have at least one speech variety in common as well as similar linguistic norms.In bilingual and multilingual communities, people would usually have more than one speech variety in commons.3.What is dialect?It is a variety of a language, spoken in one part of a country, or by people belonging to a particular social class, which is different in some words, grammar, an/or pronunciation from other forms of the same language.4.What is Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?It is a belief that our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the one hand, language may determine out thinking patterns; one the other hand, similarity between languages is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. As this hypothesis was strongly put forward by the American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf, it has often been called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.5.What is speech variety?It is a term sometimes used instead of language, dialect, sociolect, pidgin, creole, etc. because it is considered more neutral than such terms. It may also be used for different varieties of one language, e.g. American English, Australian English, Indian English.6.What is standard language?It is also called standard variety. It is the variety of a language which has the highest status in a community or nation and which is usually based on the speech and writing of educated native speakers of the language.7.What is pidgin?It is a language which develops as a contact language when groups of people who speak different languages try to communicate with one another on a regular basis. For example, this might occur where foreign traders have to communicate with the local population or groups of workers from different language backgrounds on plantations or in factories. A pidgin usually has a limited vocabulary and a reduced grammaticalstructure which may expand when a pidgin is used over a long period and for many purposes.8.What is bilingualism?It is the use of at least two languages either by an individual or by a group of speakers.A bilingual is a person who knows and uses two languages.9.What is multilingualism?It refers to the use of three or more languages by an individual or by a group of speakers such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation. Multilingualism is common in, for example, some countries of west Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, and Israel.Chapter 10-11 Language Acquisition1.What is psycholinguistics?It is the study of language in relation to the mind, with focus on the processes of language comprehension, production and acquisition. It takes upon itself the job of exploring the biological basis of human language, critical periods for child language acquisition, and the relationship between the language and thought.2.What is bottom-up processing and what is top-down processing?We may define bottom-up processing as that which proceeds from the lowest level to the highest level of processing in such a way that all of levels. That is, the identification operate without influence from the higher levels. That is, the identification of phonemes is not affected by the lexical, syntactic, or discourse levels; the retrieval of words is not affected by syntactic or discourse levels; and so on.A top-down processing model, in contrast, states that information at the higher levels may influence processing at the lower levels. For instance, a sentence context may affect the identification of words within that sentence.3.What are the six major types of speech error? Give examples of each・Six major types of speech error are:i.Exchange errors: hissed all my mystery lectures (missed all my historylectures)ii.Anticipation errors: a leading list (reading list)iii.Perseveration errors: a phonological fool (phonological rule)iv.Blends: moinly(mostly, mainly), impostinatiorfimposteE impersonator)v.Shifts: Mermaid_moves (mermaids move) their legs togethervi.Substitutions: sympathy for symphony (form), finger for toe (meaning) 4.What is the critical period for language acquisition?Language development takes place during a very specific maturational stage of human development. Sometime during the second year of life (at roughly anywhere from 12 to 18 months), children begin uttering their first words. During the following 4 to 5 years, linguistic development occurs quite rapidly. By the time children enter school, they have mastered the major structural features of their language. Refinements of the major features continue to appear, and the ability to learn language (one's native language or foreign languages) continues to be strong until the onset of puberty. At this point, for reasons that are not fully understood, the '"knack for languages95 begins to decline, to a。
