语言学chapter2课后练习答案

A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English (2nd edition) 1 Chapter 2 Revision exercises reference 1. What are the two major media of communication? Of the two, which one is primary and why? Refer to section 2.1 The two major media of communication are speech and writing. Of the two, speech is considered primary for the following reasons: 1) from the point of view of linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system of any language is always a later invention. 2) In everyday communication, speech conveys a greater amount of information than writing. 3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later as part of formal education. 2. What is voicing and how is it caused? Refer to section 2.2.2 (1) Voicing is a phonetic feature of some speech sounds. It is caused by the vibration of the speakers vocal cords when he produces a certain sound. If a sound bears this feature, it is voiced. If such a feature is absent in the pronunciation of a sound, it is voiceless. All vowels in English are voiced; and some consonants in English are voiced such as d and v while others are voiceless such as p and s. 3. Explain with examples how broad transcription and narrow transcription differ. Both broad and narrow transcriptions are ways to transcribe speech sounds, i.e. ways of using written symbols to represent speech sounds. In broad transcription, only the letter symbols are used, and the principle is to use one letter for one sound, such as P and I. In narrow transcription, a set of symbols called diacritics are added to the letter symbols to show the finer differences between similar sounds, such asPh and . 4. How are the English consonants classified? As in the pronunciation of consonants the air stream coming from the lungs is somehow obstructed, it is possible and also necessary to classify them in terms of manner of articulation and place of articulation. In terms of manner of obstruction, the consonants are classified into the following groups: stops, fricatives, affricates, liquids, nasals and glides. In terms of place of obstruction, the consonants are classified into the following groups: bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal. A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English (2nd edition) 2 5. What criteria are used to classify the English vowels? To classify the English vowels, the following criteria can be applied: position of the tongue, openness of the mouth, length of the vowels, and the shape of the lips. According to the position of the tongue, the vowels are classified into front, central and back vowels; according to the openness of the mouth, the vowels are classified into close, semi-close, semi-open, and open vowels; and according to the length of the vowels, they are classified into long vowels and short vowels; and according to the shape of the lips, and the vowels are classified into rounded and unrounded vowels. 6. Give the phonetic symbol for each of the following sound descriptions: 1)voiced palatal affricate- d 2)voiceless labiodental fricative-f 3)voiced alveolar stop-d 4)front, close, short-i 5)back ,semi-open, long -: 6)voiceless bilabial stop-p Given the phonetic features of each of the following sounds: 1)d-voiced alveolar stop 2)l-voiced alveolar liquid 3)t-voiceless palatal/alveolar affricate 4)w-voiced bilabial glide 5)u-back,close,short(rounded) 6)-front,short,open(unrounded) 7. How do phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study? Who do you think will be more interested in the difference between, say, land , pandP,a phonetician or a phonologist? Why? Refer to section 2.3.1 Though both dealing with speech sounds, phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study in that the former focuses on the speech sounds themselves, their ways of pronunciation, their differences, their classifications, etc., while the latter focuses on the sound system of particular languages and the role sounds play in conveying meaning. Therefore, a phonetician will be more interested in the difference between two sounds. 8. What is a phone? How is it different from a phoneme? How are allophones related to a phoneme? Refer to section 2.3.2 A phone is simply a speech sound, every actual sound we use or hear in meaningful linguistic communication. For example, in pronouncing the two words “feel” and “leaf”, we actually use or hear four phones:fi:landl. A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English (2nd edition) 3 A phone differs from a phoneme in that the former is an actual sound we hear and it is the unit of study in phonetics, and the latter is not an audible sound, but an abstract entity, a collection of phonetic features, used as a unit of study in phonology. Take the “feel” and “leaf” example again. While four phones are used or heard in the pronunciation of these two words, only three phonemes are involved, i.e. /f/ /i: / and /l/. A phoneme, though as an abstract entity, is realized as different phones in different phonetic contexts. All these different phones are called the allophones of the same one phoneme. For example, the aspirated p and the unaspirated p are allophones of the same phoneme/p/. 9. Explain with examples the sequential rules, the assimilation rule, and the deletion rule. Sequential rules are rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language. For example, why “klib” is a permissible combination of the four sounds in English and why “kbli” is not can only be accounted for by a sequential rule. The assimilation rule assimilates one sound to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar. For example, the actual pronunciation of the letter “n” in the word “ incorrect” is not the alveolar n but the velar nasal is a manifestation of the assimilation rule at work. The deletion tells us when a sound is deleted although it is orthographically represented. For example, in the pronunciation of such words as sign, design, and paradigm, there is no g sound although it is represented in spelling by the letter g. But in their corresponding noun forms signature, designation and paradigmatic, the g represented by the letter g is pronounced. 10. What are Suprasegmental features? How do the major Suprasegmental features of English function in conveying meaning? Suprasegmental features refer to those phonological features occurring above the sound segment level. The major Suprasegmental features in English are stress and intonation. The shift of word stress may change the part of speech of words of the same spelling, such as “progress n.” and “progress v.” , and different stress may cause difference in the meaning of some compound nouns and noun phrases with the same components, such as “hotdog” and “hot dog”. Stressing words that are normally unstressed in a sentence may convey some extra meaning by the speaker. For example, by stressing the pronoun “my” in the sentence “He is driving my car” the speaker is emphasizing the fact that the car he is driving is no one elses but the speakers. The three often-used intonations in English are the falling tone, the rising tone, and the fall-rise tone. The basic role they each play is that the falling tone states a fact, the rising tone raises a question, and the fall-raise tone implies some meaning not literally expressed. For example, the same sentence “Thats not the book he wants” said in the three different intonations convey three different meanings. A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English (2nd edition) 4 Supplementary Exercises I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. If two phonetically similar sounds occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are said to be in complementary distribution. 2. A phone is a phonetic unit that distinguishes meaning. 3. English is a tone language while Chinese is not. 4. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. 5. In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. 6. Articulatory phonetics tries to describe the physical properties of the stream of sounds which a speaker issues with the help of a machine called spectrograph. 7. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important areas: the throat, the mouth and the chest. 8. Vibration of the vocal cords results in a quality of speech sounds called voicing. 9. English consonants can be classified in terms of place of articulation and the part of the tongue that is raised the highest. 10. According to the manner of articulation, some of the types into which the consonants can be classified are stops, fricatives, bilabial and alveolar. 11. Any sound produced by a human being is a phoneme. 12. Distinctive features of sound segments can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments. II. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given: 13. A _ refers to a strong puff of air stream in the production of speech sounds. 14. The four sounds /p/,/b/,/m/ and /w/ have one feature in common, i.e., they are all b_ sounds. 15. S_ features are the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments. They include stress, tone, intonation, etc. 16. The rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language are called s _ rules. 17. P_ is a discipline which studies the system of sounds of a particular language and how sounds are combined into meaningful units to effect linguistic communication. 18. Depending on the context in which stress is considered, there are two kinds of stress: word stress and s_ stress. III. There are four choices following each of the statements below. Mark t