语言学课后习题答案

Chapter 1 Introduction 1. Dene the following terms briey.(1) linguistics: the scientic or systematic study of language. (2) language: a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.(3) arbitrariness: the absence of similarity between the form of a linguistic sign and what it relates to in reality, e.g. the word dog does not look like a dog.(4) duality: the way meaningless elements of language at one level (sounds and letters) combine to form meaningful units (words) at another level.(5) competence: knowledge of the grammar of a language as a formal abstraction and distinct from the behavior of actual language use, i.e. performance.(6) performance: Chomskys term for actual language behavior as distinct from the knowledge that underlies it, or competence.(7) stylistics: the study of how literary effects can be related to linguistic features.(8) phatic communion: Language is used to establish an atmosphere or maintain social contact between the speaker and the hearer.(9) functionalism: the study of the forms of language in reference to their social function in communication.(10) formalism: the study of the abstract forms of language and their internal relations.(11) synchronic linguistics: the study of language and speech as they are used at a given moment and not in terms of how they have evolved over time.(12) diachronic linguistics: the study of linguistic change over time in contrast to looking at language as it is used at a given moment.2. No, language is human-specic. Human language has seven design features, including arbitrariness, duality, productivity, interchangeability, displacement, specialization and cultural transmission. These features are found utterly lacking in dogs or pigs noises and thus set human language apart from animal cry systems.3. Arbitrariness refers to the fact that there is no logical or intrinsic connection bet ween a particular sound and the meaning it is associated with. For example, for the same animal dog, in English we call it /d0g/, in Chinese as “gou”, but “yilu” in Japanese; it barks wow wow in English but wang wang in Chinese. Of course, onomatopoetic words such as “quack-quack” and “bang” are exceptions, but words like these are relatively few compared with the total number of words in a language.4. A human baby does not speak any language at birth. What language the baby is going to speak is determined by the culture he is born into. A Chinese baby born and brought up in London by an English family will speak English, while an English child brought up in Beijing by a Chinese aunt will speak Chinese. That is to say, language cannot be transmitted through heredity. It is culturally transmitted.5. Firstly, linguistics describes languages and does not lay down rules of correctness while traditional grammar emphasizes correctness. Secondly, linguistics regards the spoken language as primary, while traditional grammar emphasizes the priority of the written language. Thirdly, traditional grammar is based on Latin and it tries to impose the Latin categories and structures on other languages, while linguistics describes each language on its own merits.6. A descriptive approach attempts to tell what is in the language while the prescriptive approach tells people what should be in the language. Most modern linguistics is descriptive, whereas traditional grammars are prescriptive. 7. Synchronic linguistics studies language at one particular time while diachronic linguistics studies language developments through time. Synchronic linguistics focuses on the state of language at any point in history while diachronic linguistics focuses on the differences in two or more than two states of language over decades or centuries.8. No, human language has the design feature of specialization. It refers to the fact that man does not have a total physical involvement in the act of communication. For example, a mother can tell a story to her child while slicing up a cake. However, wolves can only respond to a stimulus and is totally involved physically in the communication process. Thus, a wolf cannot have a language similar to mans, even though it could express a thousand different emotions. Besides, the aspect of productivity also distinguishes human language from wolf s postures.Chapter 2 The Sounds of Language 1. Dene each of the following terms briey.(1) articulator: the tongue, lips, and velum, which change the shape of the vocal tract to produce different speech sounds.(2) assimilation: a phonological process whereby a sound becomes phonetically similar (or identical) to a neighboring sound, e.g. a vowel becomes +nasal when followed by a +nasal consonant.(3) consonant: a speech sound produced by partial or complete closure of part of the vocal tract, thus obstructing the airow and creating audible friction. Consonants are described in terms of voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation.(4) elision: the leaving out of a sound or sounds in speech.(5) intonation: the variation in pitch and stress which gives beat and rhythm to the tune the voice plays in ordinary speech.(6) phoneme: the abstract element of a sound, identied as being distinctive in a particular language.(7) phonetics: the study of linguistic speech sounds, how they are produced, how they are perceived, and their physical properties.(8) phonology: the study of the abstract systems underlying the sounds of language.(9) stress: the prominence given to certain sounds in speech.(10) voicing: the vibration in the larynx caused by air from the lungs passing through the vocal cords when they are partly closed; speech sounds are said to be either voiced or voiceless.(11) voiceless: When the vocal cords are spread apart, the airstream from the lungs is not obstructed at the space between vocal cords and passes freely. The sounds produced in this way are described as voiceless sounds.(12) vowel: a speech sound produced without signicant constriction of the air owing through the oral cavity.2. Minimal pair test or substitution test.Minimal pair test or substitution test is to see whether substituting one sound for 4another results in a different word. If it does, the two sounds represent different phonemes. For example, as to the English word bear, if we substitute p for b, we get the word pear, the two are different words. Then /b/ and /p/ represent different phonemes. Other examples are chunk/junk, ban/bin, bet/beat, ne/vine, side/site, etc.3. Take the word big for example, in the word big /big/, /b/ is the onset, /i/ is the nucleus and /g/ is the coda. The difference between open syllables and closed syllables is whether the words have codas. If there are codas, they are closed syllables, such as pig, hat and at; if not, they are open syllables, such as do, I, tea and key.4. (1) stop, consonant(2) back, rounded, vowel5. (1) voiceless / voiced(2) bilabial / labiodental(3) close / semi-open(4) stop / nasal(5) alveolar / palatal(6) alveolar / dental(1) kit/git, bucker/bugger, bag/back(2) mark/nark, smack/snack, sum/sun(3) best/vest, ober/over, lib/live(4) bore/more, abate/amate, mob/mom(5) pat/fat, apt/aft (AmE), harp (BrE)/half 7. (1) The stresses are placed on the second syllable except for “promise”. We may easily conclude that the verbs usually are stressed on the second syllable.(2) Syllable representations of the words:collide k2#laid elect i#lekt consider k2n#sid2Chapter 3 Morphology 1. Dene the following terms briey.(1) morphology: the study of the structure of words.5(2) morpheme: the smallest unit of language that carries meaning or serves a grammatical function.(3) free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.(4) bound morpheme: a morpheme that can not stand alone as a word, e.g. ment (as in establishment), and -er (as in painter).(5) morph: the smallest meaningful phonetic segments of an utterance on the level of parole.(6) allomorph: a phonetic form in which a morpheme is realized, e.g. -s, -es, and en are all allomorphs (in writing) of the plural morpheme.(7) derivation: the formation of new words by adding afxes to other words or morphemes in morphology and word formation.(8) clipping: the process by which parts of a word of more than one syllable have been cut off, and reduced to a shorter form.(9) acronym: words which are composed of the rst letter of a series of words and are pronounced as single words. Examples: NATO, radar and yuppy.(10) initialism: Some new words are composed of the rst letters of a series of words and pronounced by saying each letter in them. Such words are called initialism.(11) blending: A single new word can be formed by combining two separate forms. Typically, blending is nished by taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end of another word. For example, brunch is formed by the shortened forms of breakfast and lunch.(12) root: the morpheme that remains when all afxes are stripped from a complex word, e.g. system from un- + system + atic + ally. (13) stem: the base to which one or more afxes are attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word. For example, book is the stem of bookish. (14) prex: Afxes can be joined to the beginning of the root or stem, in which case they are called prexes.(15) sufx: Afxes can be joined to the end of the root or stem, in which case they are called sufxes.2. (3), (5), (7) 3. (1) simple: y tree suite(2) bound morpheme rooty / yreuse re- usespiteful -ful spitepreplan pre- plandesks -s desktriumphed -ed triumphsuite / suiteoptionality -ality optionuntie un- tiedelight de- lightfastest -est fastprettier -ier prettytree / treejustly -ly justdeform de- formmistreat mis- treatdislike dis- likepayment -ment paydisobey dis- obeypremature pre- mature 4. (1) Column I: ablaut (vowel modication)Column II: suppletionColumn III: stress modication(2) The process in the Column I is nished by changing the vowel of each word, while in Column II, the process is nished by changing vowel and consonant of each word.(3) Column I: awake/awoke bear/bore arise/arose blow/blew bite/bit hide/hidlie/lay know/knew foot/feetgoose/geese tooth/teeth louse/lice Column II: bad/worse are/were many/moreColumn III: combine/combine compress/compress7conduct/conduct insert/insertinsult/insult intern/intern5. (1) Omitted. (2) Other examples: rerun (n.) rerun (v.) contrast (n.) contrast (v.)convert (n.) convert (v.) desert (n.) desert (v.)export (n.) export (v.) increase (n.) increase (v.)conduct (n.) conduct (v.) object (n.) object (v.)content (n.) content (v.) protest (n.) protest (v.)insult (n.) insult (v.) produce (n.) produce (v.)When a word belongs to different word classes, the stress of the word will be sometimes placed on different syllables. When all the words above are stressed on the rst syllables, they are nouns, but if they have the second syllables stressed, the words become verbs.6. (1) It means “the inhabitant of ”.(2) It means “the person who does”.(3) The morphological rule working here is “n. + -er n.”, and the last phoneme of the noun, which the sufx -er is added to, should be a consonant.(4) The rule in (3) doesnt work in the word discoverer because the last phoneme of discoverer is a vowel /2/.7. (1) inection (2) derivation (3) inection (4) inection (5) derivationChapter 4 Syntax 1. Dene the following terms briey.(1) syntax: the term used to refer to the structure of sentences and to the study of sentence structure.(2) word class: a group of words which are similar in function; words which are grouped into word classes according to how they combine with other words, how they change their forms, etc. (3) prescriptive approach: This view regards grammar as a set of rules for the 8“proper” use of a language, thats to say, it tries to lay down rules to tell people how to use a language.(4) descriptive approach: the approach of linguistic studies, with which linguists collect samples of the language they are interested in and attempt to describe the regular structures of the language as they are used, not according to some view of how they should be used.(5) IC analysis: the approach to divide the sentence up into its immediate constituents by using binary cutting until obtaining its ultimate constituents. For example, the immediate constituents of “The man bought a car” are the man and bought a car. The immediate constituents of the man are the and man, and so on until no further cuts can be made. The ultimate constituents of “The man bought a car” at the word level are the, man, bought, a, and car.(6) structural analysis: a type of descriptive approach to study the distribution of linguistic forms in a language through such methods as the use of “test frames”.(7) immediate constituent: Linguistic units can be divided into small constituents, which can be further analyzed into smaller constituents. This process continues until no further divisions are possible. The rst division or units are known as immediate constituents.(8) ultimate constituent: Linguistic units can be divided into small constituents, which can be further analyzed into smaller constituents. This process continues until no further divisions are possible. The nal division or units are known as ultimate constituents.(9) constituent structural grammar: It refers to a grammar which analyzes sentences using only the idea of constituency, which reveals a hierarchy of structural levels.(10) transformational grammar: a type of grammar which attempts to dene and describe by a set of rules or principles all the grammatical sentences (without ungrammatical ones) of a language.(11) ideational function: the use of language as a means of giving structure to our experience of the real or imaginary world.(12) interpersonal function: the use of language for maintaining social roles and interacting with others.(13) textual function: to create written or spoken texts which cohere within themselves and which t the particular situation in which they are used.2. Yes. As we know, morphology is the study of the internal structure, forms and 9classes of words, while syntax focuses on the structure and ordering of components within a sentence. The major distinction between morphology and syntax is that the former is concerned with the internal composition of a word, while the latter is concerned with the combination of words.3. (2) Instead of using the form “suggest somebody to do something”, we usually use “suggest + that-clause” or “suggest doing”, here wed better substitute “advise” for “suggest”(4) The word “request” is a transitive verb which should take an object directly, so the word “for” should be omitted.(6) The word “donate” cannot be followed by double objects as “donate somebody something”. Instead we always use “donate something to somebody”.(10) The subject of the verb “write” is usually a human; an “article” cannot write itself. In this case the passive construction is normally used: The article was very well writen.(11) Usually we dont use “be bored of something/somebody”, but “be bored with something/somebody” which means losing interest in somebody/something. (13) Here “myself ” is a reexive pronoun, which cant be used as subject, and it should be replaced by “I”.(14) The word “surprise” is usually used as a transitive verb, so the expression “surprise for you” is ungrammatical, and it can be replaced by “surprise somebody (with something)” or “I was surprised by your getting married.”(15) The word “sleep” i