第一部分　名校考研真题

2017年中山大学837语言学考研真题及参考答案

考试科目：外国语言学与应用语言学

I. Explain the following terms. (10 points for each term)

1．allomorph

【答案】Those morphs which represent the same morpheme are called the allomorphs of the same morpheme. For instance, the noun plural morpheme {plural} in English has [-s], [-z], [-iz], [-ai], [-n], [-i] and other morphs, such morphs are termed as the allomorphs of the morpheme {plural}. Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, some others may have considerable variations; some morphemic shapes represent different morphemes and thus have different meanings, for instance, the morphemic shapes {-s} can express plurality in desks, person/ finiteness in speaks and case in girl’s.

Words such as illogical, imbalance, irregular and inactive share a common morpheme in-. In other words, il-, ira-, and ir- are exceptionally the variation forms of one morpheme in-. These variation forms are called ALLOMORPHs, i.e. allomorphs of the same morpheme owing to the influence of the sounds to which it attaches. Other instances are such as the variation of plural forms of nouns. -s, -es, -en, -ee-, o, -ce and -yes.

2．diglossia

【答案】The term diglossia, first used by Ferguson in 1959, refers to a sociolinguistic situation similar to bilingualism. But instead of two different languages, in a diglossic situation two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play. The language which Ferguson used as examples are Arabic, Modem Greek, Swiss German and Haitian Creole. Each of these languages has two varieties: the high variety (H) and the low variety (L). The two varieties have overt recognition in the community and have commonly known and used labels. H-variety is used in government, the media, education and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

One of the most important features of diglossia is the specialization of function of the two varieties. Each variety is the appropriate language for certain situations with very slight overlapping.

3．embedding

【答案】Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination which is also called center embedding in linguistics. Different languages accommodate this construction in various ways, but many of them allow for instances where a smaller, or more precise, unit of speech can be included in a fuller sentence. When this phrase is integrated whole into the larger one, it is often referred to as center embedding. One of the most common examples of center embedded phrases involves relative clauses that get injected into larger sentences. One basic example is a sentence like this one: “The man that the woman heard left.” – In this example of center embedding, if the relative clause was entirely taken out, a shorter sentence might read like this: “The man left.” The inclusion of the relative clause serves to show the reader that there was a woman who heard the man, and this leads to the appearance of the phenomenon of center embedding in the sentence. Thus the basic function of embedding is to demonstrate more details about the meaning of the original sentence.

4．idiom

【答案】An idiom is a phrase or an expression that has a figurative, or sometimes literal, meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom’s figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms, occurring frequently in all languages. It is estimated that there are at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language.

5．pragmatics

【答案】Pragmatics can be defined in various ways. A general definition is that it is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. As the process of communication is essentially a process of conveying and understanding meaning in a certain context, pragmatics can also be regarded as a kind of meaning study. Pragmatics is a comparatively new branch of study in the area of linguistics; its development and establishment in the 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study of linguistics, especially that of semantics. Pragmatics is the study of language in use, focusing on the study of speaker’s meaning, utterance meaning or contextual meaning. Pragmatics and semantics are both linguistic studies of meaning, so they are related to as well as different from each other. It differs from the kind of meaning we studied in semantics in that it takes context into consideration while semantics concentrate on the study of literal meaning without context.

6．loan translation

【答案】Loan translation is a special type of borrowing, in which each morpheme or word is translated in the equivalent morpheme or word in another language. For instance, the English word almighty is a literal translation from the Latin omnipotens. This is also called CALQUE, which may be a word, a phrase, or even a short sentence. The English expression free verse was translated from Latin’s verse libre, and black humour is a loan translation from French humour noir, so is found object from French objet trouve.

7．interlanguage

【答案】The type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language is often referred to as Interlanguage. Interlanguage is often understood as a language system between the target language and the learner’s native language. It is imperfect compared with the target language, but it is not mere translation from the learner’s native language either. However, interlanguage should not really be seen as a bridging language between or a mixture of the target language and native language. Interlanguage is a dynamic language system, which is constantly moving from the departure level to the native-like level. Therefore, “inter” actually means between the beginning stage and the final stage. Studies on interlanguage can be done in two ways: (1) investigating the psychological, biological or neurological mechanisms involved in the production of interlanguage; (2) investigating the linguistic features of interlanguage. The former type of research has been widely conducted, whereas the latter type has not received due attention.

8．communicative competence

【答案】Communicative competence includes both the knowledge about the language and the knowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations. It includes five main components of communicative competence. Namely, linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence, and fluency.

(1) Linguistic competence ‘is concerned with knowledge of the language itself, its form and meaning’ (Hedge, 2000:46). More specifically, it involves spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, word formation, grammatical structure, sentence structure, and semantics. Hedge emphasises that linguistic competence is an integral part of communicative competence and it is wrong to think that communicative language teaching does not aim for high standard of linguistic correctness.

(2) Pragmatic competence is concerned with the appropriate use of the language in social context. That is to say, the choice of the vocabulary and structure depends on the setting, the relative status of the speakers, and their relationships. The above tasks have illustrated this point. In Hymes’s words, to know ‘when to speak, when not, what to talk about with whom, when, where and in what manner’

(3) Discourse competence refers to one’s ability to create coherent written text or conversation and the ability to understand them (Canale and Swain, 1980). In other words, it is one’ s ability to express or to understand a topic logically and coherently by effectively employing or comprehending the cohesive markers used in the discourse such as: ‘by the same token’, ‘to put it in other words’, ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘at last’, and also the reference words such as ‘it’, ‘they’, ‘that’, etc. in the context. It is these cohesive words which hold meaning together in a sensible way. Discourse competence, according to Hedge (2000), also includes one’s ability to initiate, develop, enter, interrupt, check, or confirm in a conversation.

(4) Strategic competence is similar to communication strategies. It refers to strategies one employs when there is communication breakdown due to lack of resources. One can compensate for this by searching for other means of expression, such as using a similar phrase, using gestures, or using a longer explanation. For example, if you forget how to say ‘knife’, you can use gestures to show what you mean or to explain it by saying that it is a tool one can use to cut things. In this way, they can keep the conversation going and possibly get input from the other end.

(5) The last component is termed as fluency, which means one’s ability to ‘link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation’ (Hedge, 2000:54). Recent research suggests that teaching learners lexical phrases or chunks of language, also termed as ‘prefabricated language’, ‘can help learners produce the language more fluently’ because they can be easily retrieved from memory (ibid: 55). Lewis (2002; 121) also states that ‘fluency is achieved largely by combining chunks, reducing processing difficulty’. Some examples of these chunks are: ‘in my opinion’, ‘by the same token’, ‘to make a long story short’, ‘to be on the safe side’, ‘I agree with this but...’, ‘take things for granted’, ‘generally speaking’, etc.

9．critical period

【答案】The critical period hypothesis is a theory in the study of language acquisition which posits that there is a critical period of time in which the human mind can most easily acquire language. This idea is often considered with regard to primary language acquisition, and those who agree with this hypothesis argue that language must be learned in the first few years of life or else the ability to acquire language is greatly hindered. The critical period hypothesis is also used in secondary language acquisition, regarding the idea of a time period in which a secondary language ca be most easily acquired.

10．forensic linguistics

【答案】Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law, is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts: understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes, and the provision of linguistic evidence.

11．corpus linguistics

【答案】Corpus linguistics deals with the principles and practice of using corpora in language study. A computer corpus is a large body of machine-readable texts. Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of “real world” text. The text-corpus method is a digestive approach for deriving a set of abstract rules, from a text, for governing a natural language, and how that language relates to and with another language; originally derived manually, corpora now are automatically derived from the source texts. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference. The field of corpus linguistics features divergent views about the value of corpus annotation, ranging from John McHardy Sinclair, who advocates minimal annotation, and so allow texts to speak for themselves; to the Survey of English Usage team (University College, London) who advocate annotation as allowing greater linguistic understanding, by way of rigorous recording.

II. Write what you consider to be a good definition of the term language. Justify the choice of the elements that you have incorporated in your definition. (10 points)

【答案】Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. This definition has revealed five essential factors of language: systematic, arbitrary, vocal, symbolic and most importantly human-specific.

(1) Short as it is, this definition has captured the main features of language. First of all, language is a system, i.e. elements of language are combined according to rules. This explains why “iblk” is not a possible sound combination in English, and also why “Been the wounded has” is not a grammatically acceptable sentence in English.

(2) Second, language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between a linguistic symbol and what the symbol stands for, for instance, between the word “pen” and the thing we write with. The fact that different languages have different words for the same object is a good illustration of the arbitrary nature of language. This also explains the symbolic nature of language: words are just symbols; they are associated with objects, actions, ideas, etc. by convention. This conventional nature of language is well illustrated by a famous quotation from Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

(3) Third, language is vocal because the primary medium for all languages is sound. All evidence points to the fact that writing systems came into being much later than the spoken forms and that they are only attempts to capture sounds and meaning on paper. The fact that children acquire spoken language before they can read or write also indicates that language is primarily vocal.

(4) The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human-specific, i.e. it is very different from the communication systems other forms of life possess, such as bird songs and bee dances.

III. Why might a person avoid using the standard language? (10 points)

【答案】Standard language is the variety of a language which has the highest status in a community or nation and it is usually based on the speech and writing of educated native speakers of the language. However, because of some social factors, some people may avoid using the standard language. There are several reasons which can explain why some people avoid using the standard language.

(1) Speech community: speech community can influence the kind of language people use. If everyone speaks dialect within the community, nobody will speak standard language because dialect can make them more closely and intimate.

(2) Education: Generally speaking, standard language is used by people who process high social status or have received good education. Those who did not get good education won’t speak standard language.

(3) Solidarity: in some specific situations, a person avoids using the standard language in order to show his solidarity with others. For example, a politician may deliberately speaks the dialect in certain areas in order to show his or her affiliation with the local people and close the distance between them so that he or she may receive support of the local people. On the other hand, avoiding using the standard language can also show one’s identity which is also can help him or her become a member of certain group.

IV. What is a conversational analysis and what aspects of conversation can be studied?(10 points)

【答案】Conversational analysis is a method of studying the sequential structure and coherence of conversations. It studies recordings of real (natural) conversations, in order to discover what the linguistic characteristics of conversation are and how conversation is used in ordinary life. Conversational analysis includes the study of how speakers decide when to speak during a conversation (turn-taking); how the sentences of two or more speakers are related; the different functions that conversation is used to establish rules, and to communicate politeness or for intimacy.

The following aspects of conversation can be studied.

(1) Conversational structure: Conversation is a string of at least two turns. Some turns are more closely related than others, they are called adjacency pair. The characteristics of adjacency pair is that they are two utterances long and that the utterances are produced successively by different speaker. The utterances are ordered—the first belongs to the class of first pair parts, the second to the class of second pair parts. The utterances are related, not any second pair can follow any first pair part, but only an appropriate one. The first pair part often selects next speaker and always selects next action.

(2) Topic: The pressure on people to transmit relevant news are increased by the existence of the telephone—one no longer needs to wait until one meets friends or relatives nor does one need to make special or difficult journeys to pass on information. There are certain things which one must say to particular people and certain things which are tellable if one happens to meet them. This leads to the idea of reason for a call or visit. Conversations tend to begin with the topic which is the reason for the encounter and then move on to other topics.

V. What is Whorfian Hypothesis? What are some criticisms of the hypothesis? (10 points)

【答案】That the commonly held belief that the cognitive processes of all human beings possess a common logical structure which operates prior to and independently of communication through language is erroneous. It is Whorf’s view that the linguistic patterns themselves determine what the individual perceives in this world and how he thinks about it., Since these patterns vary widely, the modes of thinking and perceiving in groups utilizing different linguistic systems will result in basically different world views. The Whorf hypothesis is the view that language shapes cognition; that is, concepts and ways of thinking depend on language. People who speak significantly different languages, then, view the world differently.

Also called the hypothesis of linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis was named after the early twentieth-century linguist Benjamin Whorf, who claimed that, because the Hopi language expressed statements about time in importantly dissimilar ways than other languages, the Hopi held a different conception of time than other peoples. Related to linguistic relativity is linguistic determinism, the view that language necessitates how one thinks (thinking outside the bounds of one’s language is impossible). Some psychologists believe the Whorf hypothesis helps explain cognition; like linguistic determinism, however, it is highly controversial.

There are some arguments against the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. According to the strong version of the hypothesis, there is no real translation and it is impossible to learn the language of a different culture unless the learner abandons his own mode of thinking and acquire that of the target language. Actually successful translation can be made between languages. For example, the conceptual uniqueness of a language such as Hopi can nonetheless be explained in English. In field of second language acquisition, according to the hypothesis, languages have different conceptual systems, if it is true, then someone who speaks one language will be unable to right conceptual system. However, since people can learn radically different languages, those languages couldn’t have different conceptual system.