2008年西安交通大学713语言学考研真题及参考答案

考试科目：语言学概论

I. Read each of the following statements carefully. Decide which one of the four choices best completes the statement and write your choice on the answer sheet. (20 points)

1．By saying “You have left the door wide open,” a speaker might be performing the three acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary ______.

A. at the same time

B. one after another

C. two first and then the other

D. one first and then the other two

【答案】D

2．Bound morphemes do not include ______.

A. roots

B. prefixes

C. suffixes

D. words

【答案】D

3．What separated the period of Middle English from that of Modern English was ______.

A. the Norman Conquest

B. the influence of the French language

C. the Europe renaissance movement

D. the influence of Latin

【答案】C

4．Which of the following words is entirely arbitrary?

A. tree

B. crash

C. typewriter

D. bang

【答案】A

5．Which branch of linguistics studies the similarities and differences among languages?

A. Diachronic linguistics

B. Synchronic linguistics

C. Prescriptive linguistics

D. Comparative linguistics

【答案】D

6．Nouns, verbs and adjectives can be classified as ______.

A. lexical words

B. grammatical words

C. function words

D. form words

【答案】A

7．______ is a way in which new words may be formed from already existing words by subtracting an affix which is thought to be part of the old word.

A. Affixation

B. Back-formation

C. Insertion

D. Addition

【答案】B

8．The word UN is formed in the way of ______.

A. acronymy

B. clipping

C. initialism

D. blending

【答案】A

9．Modern linguistics regards the written language as ______.

A. primary

B. correct

C. secondary

D. stable

【答案】C

10．Saussure took a（n） ______ view of language, while Chomsky looks at language from a ______ point of view.

A. sociological...psychological

B. psychological...sociological

C. applied...pragmatic

D. semantic...linguistic

【答案】A

11．Phrase structure rules allow us to better understand ______.

A. how people produce and recognize possible sentences

B. what constitutes the grammaticality of strings of words

C. how words and phrases form sentences.

D. All of the above.

【答案】D

12．______ rules may change the syntactic representation of a sentence.

A. Generative

B. Transformational

C. X-bar

D. Phrase structure

【答案】B

13．“We shall know a word by the company it keeps.” This statement represents ______.

A. the conceptualist view

B. contexutalism

C. the naming theory

D. behaviourism

【答案】B

14．______ deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world experience.

A. Reference

B. Concept

C. Semantics

D. Sense

【答案】A

15．Language change is essentially a matter of change ______.

A. in collocations

B. in meaning

C. in grammar

D. in usages

【答案】C

16．“Wife”, which used to refer to any woman, stands for “a married woman” in modern English. This phenomenon is known as ______.

A. semantic shift

B. semantic broadening

C. semantic elevation

D. semantic narrowing

【答案】D

17．According to F. de Saussure, ______ refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community.

A. parole

B. performance

C. langue

D. Language

【答案】C

18．The details of any language system is passed on from one generation to the next through ______ rather than by instinct.

A. learning

B. teaching

C. books

D. both A and B

【答案】D

19．______ is a phenomenon that in some speech communities two varieties of a language exist sides by side, with each having a different role to play.

A. Bilingualism

B. Diglossia

C. Pidgin

D. Creole

【答案】B

20．The Illocutionary Act was developed by ______.

A. John Austin

B. Levinson

C. John Lyons

D. John Searle

【答案】D

II. Define the following terms.(40 points)

1．Duality

【答案】Duality refers to the fact that in all languages so far investigated there are two levels of structure or patterning. At the first, higher level, language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units (such as morphemes, words etc.); at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which are combined to form units of meaning. For example, a syllable is the smallest unit that is normally spoken by itself, and scores of syllables become the carriers of hundreds of meaningful segments of words that are called morphemes.

2．Free morphemes

【答案】Free morpheme is an element of meaning which takes the form of an independent word. They may occur alone, that is, they may make up words by themselves. For example, “dog”, “nation” and “close” are free morphemes. And such words are called mono-morphemic words. Thus all mono-morphemic words are free morphemes.

3．Synonymy

【答案】Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. Two or more forms with very closely related meanings are synonyms, which are often, but not always, intersubstitutable in sentences. For example, in English “hide” and “conceal” in: “He hid the money under the bed.” and “He concealed the money under the bed.” Often one word may be more appropriate than another in a particular situation, e.g. “conceal” is more formal than “hide”.

4．Blending

【答案】Blending is a process in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words. For example, the word “smog” is blended from “smoke” and “fog”.

5．Intrapersonal communication

【答案】Intrapersonal communication means that the process of using language within the individual to facilitate one’s own thought and aid the formulation and manipulation of concepts.

6．Behaviorist learning theory

【答案】Behaviorist learning theory is a theory of psychology which, when applied to first language acquisition, suggests that the learner s verbal behavior is conditioned or reinforced through association between stimulus and response.

7．Voiceless

【答案】When the vocal folds are apart, the air can pass through easily and the sound produced is said to be voiceless. For example, consonants [p, s, t] are produced this way, so they are voiceless consonants. “Voiceless” is defined in contrast with “voiced”. Consonants [b, z, d] are voiced consonants.

8．Universal Grammar

【答案】Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans (linguistic nativism). It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages. Universal grammar proposes a set of rules intended to explain language acquisition in child development.

9．Language acquisition

【答案】Language acquisition refers to the gradual development of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations.

10．Polysemy

【答案】It refers to the fact that one word may have several related meanings. For example, the word “bank” is polysemous in the sense that it can mean a financial establishment or the slope pf land adjoining a river, lake and the like.

III. Briefly explain or answer the following questions. (60 points)

1．What is the directive function?

【答案】Directive function is one of functions of language. Language is used to get the hearer to do something. Most imperative sentences are of this function. For example, the sentence “Close your book and listen to me carefully!” performs a directive function. Other syntactic structures or sentences of other sorts can, according to J. Austin and J. Searle’s “Indirect speech act theory” at least, serve the purpose of direction too, e.g., “If I were you, I would have blushed to the bottom of my ears!”

（本题考查语言的指令功能。）

2．What is linguistic potential? What is actual linguistic behaviour?

【答案】These two terms, or the potential-behavior distinction, were made by M. A. K. Halliday in the 1960s, from a functional point of view. There is a wide range of things a speaker can do in his culture, and similarly there are many things he can say, for example, to many people, on many topics. What he actually says （i.e. his “actual linguistic behavior”） on a certain occasion to a certain person is what he has chosen from many possible injustice items, each of which he could have said （linguistic potential）.

（本题考查语言潜势和语言行为的含义及其区别。）

3．What is syntax?

【答案】“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.

（本题考查句法学的定义。）

4．What is inflection/inflexion?

【答案】“Inflection” is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which does not change the grammatical class of the items to which they are attached.

（本题考查屈折变化的含义）

5．What are the advantages of using tree diagrams in the analysis of sentence structures?

【答案】The tree diagram can not only reveal a linear order, but also a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents. It can, in addition, show the syntactic category of each structural constituent, thus it is believed to most truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements.

（本题考查用树形图分析句子结构的好处。）

6．What is collocation?

【答案】“Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.

（本题考查搭配的定义。）

7．What are endocentric and exocentric constructions?

【答案】An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e. a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable center, or head. Hence an endocentric construction is also known as a headed construction. Noun phrases like Lovely Lucy are typical endocentric constructions.

Opposite of endocentric constructions, the exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole. There is no noticeable centre, or head, in it. Prepositional phrases like on the shelf are typical examples of this type.

（本题考查向心结构和离心结构。）

8．What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?

【答案】Phonetics studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received,  the sounds of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech, etc. Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. Put it simply, phonetics simply describes the articulatory and acoustic properties of phones （speech sounds） while honology studies how sounds interact as a system in a particular language.

（本题考查语音学和音位学的主要区别。）

9．What’s conversational implicature?

【答案】The conversational implicature is a message that is not found in the plain sense of the sentence. The speaker implies it. The hearer is able to infer （work out, read between the lines） this message in the utterance, by appealing to the rules governing successful conversational interaction. Grice proposed that implicatures like the second sentence can be calculated from the first, by understanding three things: 1） the usual linguistic meaning of what is said; 2） contextual information （shared or general knowledge）; 3） the assumption that the speaker is obeying what Grice calls the cooperative principle.

（本题考查什么是会话含义。）

10．Why is speech considered prior to writing?

【答案】Speech and writing are two major media of linguistic communication. Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as the natural or the primary medium of human language for some obvious reasons. From the point of view of linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system of any language is always “invented” by its users to record speech when the need arises. Even in today’s world there are still many languages that can only be spoken but not written. Then in everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. And also, speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later when he goes to school. For modern linguistics, spoken language reveals many true features of human speech while written language is only the “revised” record of speech. Thus their date for investigation and analysis are mostly drawn from everyday speech, which they regard as authentic.

（本题考查言语与文字的关系，为什么言语比文字优先。）

11．What is contextualism?

【答案】“Contextualism” is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, observable context: the “situational context” and the “linguistic context”. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatio-temporal situation, as the following factors are related to the situational context: （1） the speaker and the hearer; （2） the actions they are performing at the time; （3） various external objects and events; （4） deictic features.

The “linguistic context” is another aspect of contextualism. It considers the probability of one word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another, which forms part of the meaning, and an important factor in communication.

（本题考查情境主义的含义。）

12．What’s your understanding of “Gender”?

【答案】“Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we are talking about natural gender. The opposite is grammatical gender. In English, the gender distinctions are on the whole natural, determined by the biological gender of the creature, e.g. actor, actress; hero, heroine; prince, princess; lion, lioness. In contrast, the gender distinctions in languages like French are grammatical. They may have nothing to do with the sex of the real-world entities at all. And all nouns have gender distinctions whether they refer to animate entities or not.

（本题考查词汇的“性”。）

13．What are the four maxims under the cooperative principle?

【答案】H. P. Grice (1975) believes that there must be some mechanisms governing the production and comprehension of these utterances. He suggests that there is a set or assumptions guiding the conduct of conversation. This is what he calls the Cooperative Principle. He formulates the principle and its maxims as follows:

Make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the exchange in which you are engaged.

The Maxim of Quality

Try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically

(i) do not say what you believe to be false;

(ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The Maxim of Quantity

(i) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange;

(ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The Maxim of Relevance

Make your contribution relevant.

The Maxim of Manner

Be perspicuous and specific:

(i) avoid obscurity;

(ii) avoid ambiguity;

(iii) be brief;

(iv) be orderly.

（本题考查合作原则的四项准则。）

14．How do you understand 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. nterlanguage 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. However, interlanguage should not really he seen as a bridging language between 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. There are many examples of interlanguage, such as I no have a book. I like read books.

（本题考查中介语的含义。）

IV. Answer the following questions with adequate examples or illustrations. （30 points）

1．What is NP movement? Illustrate it with examples.

【答案】NP movement involves the movement of a noun phrase. NP-movement occurs when, for example, a sentence changes from the active voice to the passive voice:

(A) The man beat the child.

(B) The child was beaten by the man.

B is the result of the movement of the noun phrases “the man” and “the child” from their original positions in (A) to new positions. That is, “the man” is postposed to the right and “the child” is preposed to the left. The following is the deep structure of the (B).

Due to the passivization, the patient “the child” cannot be assigned any case. The preposition phrase “by the man” is an adjunct here. But every overt NPs must be assigned case. Therefore, it moves to the vacant subject position to get case.

Not all instances of NP-movement, however, are related to changing a sentence from the active voice to the passive voice. For example:

(C) It seems they are quite fit for the job.

(D) They seem quite fit for the job.

Apart from the passivization, the raising construction can also lead to the NP movement. The deep structure of (D) is also provided below.

The theme “they” cannot be assigned case in the original position (t_i) either because “seem” is incapable of assigning case due to its own characteristics. Hence, it must move to the subject position to get the nominative case assigned by INFL.

From the two examples, we can observe that NP movement occurs in passivization and raising construction. The movement of certain words leaves a trace, and altogether they form a chain.

（本题考查名词短语的转移，并举例说明。）

2．How does Halliday relate the functions performed by language to its structures, or systems?

【答案】Halliday has tried to relate the functions of language to its structures.

Systemic-Functional linguistics aims to provide a taxonomy for sentences, a means of descriptively classifying particular sentences. Systemic Grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. This network consists of subsystems from which language users make choices. Functional grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based or, the position that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the uses or functions which they serve.

Systemic Grammar contains a functional component, and the theory behind Functional Grammar is systemic. The system network in Systemic Grammar chiefly describes three components of function, or three metafunctions. Each of the metafunctions is a complex system consisting of other systems, and choices are simultaneously made from the three metafunctions. Halliday believes that language is what it is because it has to serve certain functions. In other words, social demand on language has helped to shape its structure. The three metafunctions are ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.

According to Halliday, a clause is the simultaneous realization of ideational, interpersonal, and textual meanings. For example:

Thus, in this way, Halliday related the functions performed by language to its structures, or systems.

（本题考查韩礼德的系统功能语法，重点阐释韩礼德如何将语言的功能与语言系统结构联系起来，并举例说明。）

3．What are the causes of language change? Discuss them in detail.

【答案】Language change is the manner in which the phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of a language are modified over time. All languages are continually changing. Many factors can cause the change of language.

1) Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach their communicative goals. Speaking involves therefore a planning of costs and benefits.

2) Analogy: An analogy can reduce word forms perceived as irregular by remaking them in the shape of more common forms that are governed by rules. For example, the English verb “help” once had the preterite “holp” and the past participle “holpen”. These obsolete forms have been discarded and replaced by “helped” by the power of analogy. However, irregular forms can sometimes be created by analogy; one example is the American English past tense form of “dive: dove”, formed on analogy with words such as “drive: drove”. Neologisms can also be formed by analogy with existing words. A good example is “software”, formed by analogy with “hardware”.

3) Language contact: Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Generally there are five forms of influences. (1) Borrowing of vocabulary. The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words, like “toufu” is borrowed from Chinese “豆腐” for “bean curd”. (2) Borrowing of other language features. The influence can go deeper, extending to the exchange of even basic characteristics of a language such as morphology and grammar. For example, as to morphology change, English has become less inflectional than ancient English influenced by other languages. (3) Language shift. The result of the contact of two languages can be the replacement of one by the other. This is most common when one language has a higher social position. This sometimes leads to language endangerment or extinction. (4) Substratal influence. However, when language shift occurs, the language that is replaced (known as the substratum) can leave a profound impression on the replacing language (known as the superstratum), when people retain features of the substratum as they learn the new language and pass these features on to their children, leading to the development of a new variety. For example, the distinct pronunciation of the dialect of English spoken in Ireland comes partially from the influence of the substratum of Irish. (5) Creation of new languages: Creolization and mixed languages. Language contact can also lead to the development of new languages when people without a common language interact closely, developing a pidgin, which may eventually become a full-fledged creole language through the process of creolization. A much rarer but still observed process is the formation of mixed languages. Whereas creoles are formed by communities lacking a common language, mixed languages are formed by communities fluent in both languages.

4) The medium of communication. The most distinct example is internet language, which is caused by the development of internet communication, with new characteristics.

（本题考查引起语言发展变化的原因，并举例说明。）