语言学答疑.doc

语言学答疑库1. Explain the following definition of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language.Key: Linguistics investigates not any particular language, but languages in general. Linguistic study is scientific because it is based on the systematic investigation of authentic language data. No serious linguistic conclusion is reached until after the linguist has done the following three things: observing the way language is actually used, formulating some hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses against linguistic facts to prove their validity.2. Is modern linguistics mainly synchronic or diachronic? Why?Key: Modern linguistics is mainly synchronic, focusing on the present-day language. Unless the various states of a language are successfully studied, it will not be possible to describe language from a diachronic point of view.3. How is Saussures distinction between langue and parole similar to Chomskys distinction between competence and performance?Key: Both Saussure and Chomsky make the distinction between the abstract language system and the actual use of language. Their purpose is to single out the language system for serious study. 4. What features of human language have been specified by C. Hockett to show that it is essentially different from any animal communication system?Key: Arbitrariness- a sign of sophistication only humans are capable of Creativity- animals are quite limited in the messages they are able to sendDuality- a feature totally lacking in any animal communicationDisplacement- No animal can “talk” about things removed from the immediate situationCultural transmisson- Details of human language system are taught and learned while animals are born with capacity to send out certain signals as a means of limited communication5 What are the two major media of communication? Of the two, which one is primary and why? Key: Speech and writing. Speech is considered primary over writing. The reason are: speech is prior to writing in language evolution, speech plays a greater role in daily communication, and speech is the way in which people acquire their native language.6 What are the three branches of phonetics? How do they contribute to the study of speech sounds?Key: Articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.Articulatory phonetics describes the way our speech sounds and how they differ.Auditory phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and reaches the important conclusion that phonetic identity is only a theoretical ideal.Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, the way sounds travel from the speaker to the hear.7 What is voicing and how is it caused?Key: An articulatory dimension of speech sound production. It distinguishes meaning in many languages such as English; therefore it is a phonological feature. It is caused by the vibration of the vocal cords.8 Explain with examples how broad transcription and narrow transcription differ?Key: Broad transcription-one letter symbol for one soundNarrow transcription-diacritics are added to the one-letter symbols to show the finer differences between sounds.9 How do phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study? Key: Phonetics: description of all speech sounds and their fine differences.Phonology: description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds function to distinguish meaning.10What is a phone? How is it different from a phoneme? How are allophones related to a phoneme?Key: Phone- a speech sound, a phonetic unit.Phonology-a collection of abstract sound features, a phonological unit.Allophones-actual realizations of a phoneme in different phonetic contexts.11 What is a minimal pair and what is a minimal set? Why is it important to identify the minimal set in a language?Key: Minimal pair-Two sound combination identical in every way except in one sound element that occurs in the same position.Minimal set-A group of sound combinations with the above feature.By identifying the minimal pairs or the minimal set of a language, a phonologist can identify its phonemes.12 What are suprasegmental feature? How do the major suprasegmental features of English function in conveying meaning?Key: Suprasengmental features-phonological features above the sound segment level.The major suprasegmental features in English-word stress, sentence stress, intonation.13 What are the main features of the English compounds?Key: Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between.Syntactically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calculable from the meanings of all its components.Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.14 Morpheme is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic whole?Key: Since morpheme is defined as the smallest unit interms of relationship between expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and the semantic aspect of linguistic unit. A morpheme may overlap with a phoneme, such as I , but usually not, as in pig, in which the morpheme is the whole word, i.e. an independent, free morpheme, but the phonemes are/p/, /I /, and /g/.15 Why is it important to know the relationships a sign has with others, such as syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?Key: As the relation between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary, the value of a sign cannot be determined by itself. To know the identity of a sign, the linguist will have to know the signs it is used together with and those it is substitutable for. The former relation is known as syntagmatic and the latter paradigmatic.16 How can the surface structure become the sole responsible structure for semantic interpretation?Key: This is mainly achieved by the introduction of trace theory. That is, after the movement of any element, there will be a trace left in the original position, which is represented by the better in the tree diagram. And the deep structure information concerning the underlying syntactic relations between words, such as the subject in the passive is the logical object, will be captured by the trace in the surface structure.17 What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?Key: Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized. Reference is what a linguistic form refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.18 Explain with examples “homonymy,”, “polysemy”, and “hyponymy”.Key: Homonymy-identical in form (either in sound or in spellin, or in both) but different in meaning, e.g. night-knight, lead v.-lead n., bank (a financial institution)-bank (side of a river)Polysemy-one form having more than one meaning, e.g. earth our planet, the soil on its surfaceHyponymy-relation of semantic inclusion between a word which is more general and a word which is more specific, e.g. furniture- table.19 In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features?Key: In the light of componential analysis, the meaning of a word consists of a number distinctive meaning features; the analysis breaks down the meaning of the word into these features; it is these different features that distinguish word meaning. Similarly, a phoneme is considered as a collection of distinctive sound features; a phoneme can be broken down into these distinctive sound features and it is these sound features that distinguish different sounds.20What is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence semantically meaningless?Key: Grammaticality-the grammatical well-formedness of a sentence. A sentence may be well-formed grammatically, i.e. it conforms to the grammatical rules of the language, but it is not necessarily semantically well-formed, i.e., it may not make sense at all.21What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?Key: Pragmatics studies how meaning is conveyed in the process of communication. 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.22 How is the notion of context interpreted?Key: Context is regarded as constituted by all kinds of knowledge assumed to be shared by the speaker and the hearer.23How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?Key: Utterance-meaning is based on sentence-meaning; the former is concrete and context-dependent and the latter is abstract and decontextualized.24 According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly performing while making an utterance. Give an example.Key: Locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.Example omitted.25 What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is the illocutionary point of each type?Key: Representative-stating what the speaker believes to be trueDirective-trying to get the hearer to do somethingCommissivecommitting the speaker himself to some future actionExpressive-expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing stateDeclaration-bringing about immediate changes by saying something26 What are the four maxims of the CP? How does the violation of these maxims give rise to conversational implicatures?Key: Maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation, maxim of manner. Examples omitted.27. Why do we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure in analyzing the constituent relationship among linguistic elements? Support your statement with examples. Key: In addition to revealing a linear order, a constituent structure tree has a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, and consequently is believed to most truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements. For example, the phrase the old men and women may have two interpretations, i.e. the adjective old” may modify the noun men, or the following two nouns men and women. Linear order analysis cannot tell this difference, so it is ambiguous. Whereas, the constituent or tree diagrams analysis can make this difference clear. So, we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure analysis. NP NP NP NP NP NP The old men and the women the old men and the old women28 Characterize the nature of language change.Key: All living languages change with time. Language change is not only universal and inevitable, but also systematic, extensive, ongoing, and gradual. Language change is a rule-governed behavior, involving all components of the grammar.29 Explain the purpose o reconstruction in historical linguistics and the method employed by historical linguists.Key: Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of somparative reconstruction, the genetic relationship between and among variou