2011年南开大学883语言学考研真题及参考答案

考试科目：语言学基础

Part I (20分)

1．Define the following terms. (本题20分)

(1) acoustic phonetics

【答案】Acoustic phonetics: It is one of the three branches of phonetics，it is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds.

(2) allophonic variation

【答案】Allophonic variation: The phenomenon of variation in the pronunciation of phonemes in different positions is called Allophony or Allophonic variation.

(3) back-formation

【答案】Back-formation. It refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example, from “editor” the word “edit” was generated.

(4) government

【答案】Government: In the traditional approach, it refers to a type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions.

(5) anaphor

【答案】Anaphor: The term anaphor is used in a narrow sense to include only reflexives like myself and reciprocals like each other.

(6) cognate

【答案】Cognate: cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. For example,length, height, width, breadth and depth, are cognates of the cover terms.

(7) spoonerism

【答案】Spoonerism: A spoonerism is an error in speech or deliberate play on words in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched.

(8) conversational maxim

【答案】Conversational maxim: A conversational maxim is any of four rules which were proposed by Grice 1975, stating that a speaker is assumed to make a contribution that follows the four maims of quantity, quality, relevance and manner.

(9) face validity

【答案】Face validity: Unlike the other three forms of validity, face validity is based on the subjective judgment of an observer. If the test appears to be measuring what it intends to measure, the test is considered to have face validity.

(10) negative transfer

【答案】Negative transfer: In the view of Lado and his followers, language learners attempt to transfer the features of their mother tongue to the second language. When the structures of the two languages are different, negative transfer or interference occurs and results in errors.

Part II (30分)

2．Write the phonetic symbol that corresponds to each of the following phonetic descriptions, and then give an English word that contains this sound.(本题8分)

phonetic description

phonetic symbol

English word

(1) voiceless bilabial unaspirated stop→[　　]

【答案】[b]; speak

(2) palatal glide→[　　]

【答案】[j]; yes

(3) high back tense rounded vowel→[　　]

【答案】[u]; good

(4) nasalized low-mid back lax rounded vowel→[　　]

【答案】[ɔ] ; not

3．In the African language Manika, the affix, the meaning of which is similar to that of the suffix-ing in English, has two phonetic forms, as shown in the data given below. You are required to:

(1) give the two phonetic forms of the affix;

【答案】The two phonetic forms are: [ni] and [li].

(2) give the underlying form of the affix;

【答案】The underlying form is [ni].

(3) write a formal phonological rule to derive the underlying form of the affix to its phonetic forms, using the words [dumuni] “eating” and [sungoli] “sleeping” to illustrate the process of derivation.（本题12分）

【答案】[ni] → [ni] / [-vowel] ______

[ni] → [li] / [+ vowel, -u] ______

In the word sungo, the last sound [o] is vowel so -ing form of the word is sungoli. While the last sound of the word dumu is [u], which is quite an exception, the -ing form of the word is dumuni.

4．Analyze the morphemic structure of the English words gentlemanliness and unlockable, using a labeled tree diagram to illustrate the morphemic structure of the word under analysis.（本题10分）

(1) gentlemanliness

【答案】

(2) unlockable

【答案】

Part III（30分）

5．The English sentences given below are ungrammatical. You are required to give the syntactic explanation to the ungrammaticality in each of the sentences.（本题6分）

(1) *Jack put his ball.

【答案】*Jack put his ball. Because of the word “put”, the sentence lacks a complement, which should be a PP. Therefore, it should be “Jack put his ball under the chair.”

(2) *I wonder Michael walked the dog.

【答案】*I wonder Michael walked the dog. The sentence is ungrammatical, for what follows the word “wonder” should be a clause. The correct form is “I wonder if Michael walked the dog.”

(3) *Frank thinks himself is a superstar.

【答案】*Frank thinks himself is a superstar. In English, the pattern of the word “think” is that think pluses a clause or a complement. So the correct form should be “Frank thinks himself as a superstar.” or “Frank thinks he is a superstar.”

6．Phrases are considered to be syntactic units, or constituents. The phrases labeled in the sentence given below can be independently verified with the help of some special tests. You are required to use two tests as they apply to XP-level constituents for verification. You may draw a tree diagram for demonstration if you think it is necessary. (本题10分)

[The children]_NP will [stop[at the corner]_PP]_VP if they see us do so.

【答案】(1) The first test of the phrase of “the children”. It is a noun phrase and it can be verified by the substitution of a simple noun word such as “they”. Then the sentence will become “They will stop at the corner…”

(2) The second way of testing “stop at the corner”. It is a verb phrase and the head is “stop”, which is the maximal projection of the verb “stop”. The phrase can serve as a sentence fragment, illustrated as the following.

7．The English sentence is given below. You are required to (1) give the Deep Structure of the sentence, (2)give all the rules relevant Interrogative Transformation, and (3) transform the Deep Structure of the sentence into its Surface Structure by applying the rules you have given. Tree diagram for DS and SS are necessary. (本题14分)

What did John eat?

【答案】Surface structure: what_i did John eat t_i?

Deep structure: John ate what?

（本题主要考查学生对深层结构和表层结构的理解和把握程度。）

Part IV (50分)

8．What is a “slip of the tongue”? What has research into “slip of the tongue” phenomena revealed about speech production process? (本题13分)

【答案】A slip of the tongue is a kind of speech errors, which is conscious or unconscious deviations from the apparently intended form of an utterance.

In the process of speech sound production, a slip of sound is easily occurred. In the perspective of speech sound production, it refers to some phonological process.

(1) Addition: something is added to the target utterance,e.g. “I didn’t explain it clarefully enough” for “I didn’t explain it carefully enough”.

(2) Anticipation: in anticipation of a forthcoming segment, we replace an earlier segment with the later segment, e.g. “bake my bike” for “take my bike” .

(3) Perseverance: an earlier segment replaces a later one( while also being articulated in its correct location), e.g. “…he pulled a pantrum.” for “…he pulled a tantrum”.

(4) Blends: occur when more than one word is being considered, and the two blend into a single item, e.g. “Don’t bother me in the sleast.” for “Don’t bother me in the slightest.”

(5) Deletion: something is omitted, e.g. “…mutter _intelligibly.” for “… mutter unintelligibly.”

9．Please give a brief account of the relevance theory. (本题12分)

【答案】This theory was formally proposed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition in 1986. They argue that all Gricean maxims, including the CP itself, should be reduced to a single principle of relevance, which is defined as：

Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.

Sperber and Wilson’s theory begins with some watershed assumptions that are typical of pragmatic theories. Namely, it argues that all utterances are encountered in some context and that utterances convey a number of implicatures. In addition, they posit the notion of manifestness, which is when something is grasped either consciously or unconsciously by a person.

They further note that it will be manifest to people who are engaged in inferential communication that each other have the notion of relevance in their minds. This will cause each person engaged in the interaction to arrive at the presumption of relevance, which is the notion that (a) implicit messages are relevant enough to be worth bothering to process, and (b) the speaker will be as economical as they possibly can be in communicating it.

10．In your opinion in what ways can corpus data contribute to lexical studies? (本题13分)

【答案】The most important use that we can make of corpora is that we can find very useful information about how language is actually used. Corpora usually provide a few types of information, and these types of information are helpful to our lexical studies.

(1) Frequency information.

Corpora can tell us how frequently certain language items or structures are used. This kind of information is useful when we try to select what to focus on, and decide what senses to focus on in lexical study.

(2) Context and co-text information.

Contexts are the situational environments in which language is used. Co-texts are the linguistic environments. Sometimes it is very difficult to tell the differences of two words or phrases which have similar meaning. However, if we look at the context and co-text in which they are used, the difference becomes clear.

(3) Grammatical information.

We usually refer to grammar books for grammatical information. However, what the corpora show is far more complicated than what grammar books tell about grammar. It helps to grasp lexical in a grammatical way.

(4) Collocation and phraseology information.

It is usually difficult for second and foreign language learners to learn which words are frequently used together, e.g. should we say make effort or take effort? A search in corpus will do the job. It’s quick and efficient.

(5) Pragmatics information.

Information from corpora can tell us how language is actually used in communication. For example, “Watergate” is used to indicate President Nixon’s political scandal.

11．Please describe error analysis procedures in second language research (本题12分)

【答案】The procedure of error analysis consists of the following steps:

(1) Recognition. Dealing with a sentence produced by the language learner, we should first ask whether the sentence is grammatically correct. If the answer is negative，then errors exist. If the answer is positive，then we further check whether the sentence is appropriate in the communicative context. A negative answer indicates a mistake.

(2) Description. If the erroneous sentence is intelligible, we compare it with the correct sentence produced by a native speaker and list the errors and mistakes. If the meaning of the sentence is not clear，we may refer to the learner’s native language to find out what he means and carry out a contrastive analysis. Taking into consideration the use of language in social contexts，we can describe mistakes as well as errors.

(3) Explanation. When an error is recognized and described，we attempt to answer the question “Why did the learner commit this error?” In other words，we make hypothesis about the psychological processes which have caused the learner to commit the error. This will lead us to provide answers to a fundamental question “How do people learn language?”

Part V (20分)

12．State about ONE of the two topics given below (minimally 200 words) (本题20分)

(1) In English, the plurality of countable nouns can be represented in several forms, or suffixes. The following are examples of some of such forms. Are these suffixes of plurality the allomorphs of one and the same morpheme, or are they different morphemes? State the reasons for your answer to the question.

【答案】These suffixes of plurality are allomorphs of one and the same morpheme.

Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, such as dog, bark, cat, but in other instances, a morpheme may have different shapes or phonetic forms.

From the above examples, it is clear that plural sememe in English can be represented by the voiceless /s/ , the voiced /z/, the vowel-consonant structure /i:z/, the diphthong /ai/ found in the word stimuli, the nasal sound /n/ in oxen, and others. Each would be said to be an allomorph of the plural morpheme.

Thus, morpheme, like phoneme, as held by American structuralists, is an abstract unit, but at a different linguistic level. It consists of a sequence of phonemes and either lexical or helps construct grammatical structure. In morphemic transcription, morphemes are put between braces like {}. Take the plural morpheme for example, it can be expressed in the form of{-s~-z~-i:z ~-ai~-n}. But, they are the allomorphs of the same morpheme only in different shapes.

It should be noted that some morphemic forms represent different morphemes and thus have different sememes. For example, the morphemic shape –s, can express plurality (e.g. tables, apples, and cars), person/finiteness (e.g. talks, opens, and shouts) and case (e.g. boy’s, John’s, and university’s).

Therefore, all the above examples of suffixes are the allomorphs of the same morpheme.

(考查对音位变体的掌握程度。)

(2) State about any speech production model that you are familiar with. Use an utterance example to illustrate your understanding of the chosen model and explain how it accounts for the exchange error of “This is the happiest life of my day”.

【答案】Garrett argued that producing speech is a much more complex matter than it might appear to be from our everyday experience. According to his model, there are altogether five different levels of representation involved in speaking a sentence, and they occur in the following sequence:

①The message-level representation: this is an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to communicate.

②The functional-level representation: this is an outline of the proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no actual words to fill the slots.

③The positional-level representation: this differs from the functional level representation in that it incorporates the words of the sentence that is to be produced.

④The phonetic-level representation: this indicates some of the necessary information about the ways in which words in the intended sentence are pronounced.

⑤The articulatory-level representation: this is the final representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the words in the sentence in the correct order.

For example, the utterance of “I want to go home now.” shows the different levels of the representations. First, it expresses the abstract meaning of wishing to go home. Then it has grammatical level and the correct order.

An exchange error occurs when two items within a sentence are swapped as the given example “This is the happiest life of my day”. The correct form should be “This is the happiest day of my life”.