中国人民大学语言学考研真题及参考答案(2002～2007)【圣才出品】

2．中国人民大学语言学考研真题及参考答案（2002～2007）

中国人民大学2007年语言学考研真题

考试科目：专业英语

I. Fill in the blanks with the right linguistic concepts (10 points).

1.Human language is arbitrary. This refers to the fact that there is no logical or intrinsic connection between a particular sound and the ______ it is associated with. 【答案】meaning

2. ______ is a type of word-formation by which a shorter word is coined by the deletion of a supposed affix of a longer form already present in the language. For example，the verb edit was formed from editor by dropping the supposed derivational suffix -or.

【答案】Back-formation

3.Some morphemes like –ish,-ness，-ly，-dis，trans-.un-are never words by themselves but are always parts of words. These affixes are ______ morphemes. 【答案】bound

4. ______ can be defined as the study of language in use. Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, attempts to show the relationship between language and society. 【答案】Pragmatics

5. One of the important distinctions in linguistics is ______ and parole. The former is the French word for “language”, which is the abstract knowledge necessary for speaking，listening，writing and reading. The lager is concerned about the actual use of language by people in speech or writing. Parole is more variable and may change according to contextual factors.

【答案】langue

6. H.P.Grice believes that there is a set of assumptions guiding the conduct of conversation. This is what he calls the Cooperative Principle. According to the maximum of ______: Do not say what you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence. In other words，speak truthfully; do not lie.

【答案】quality

7. ______ proposes that every speaker knows a set of principals which apply to all languages and also a set of parameters that can vary from one language to another, but only within certain limits.

【答案】Generative Grammar

8. ______ refers to varieties of a language used by individual speakers，with peculiarities of pronunciation，grammar and vocabulary. In fact，no two speakers speak exactly the same dialect. Each speaker has certain characteristic features of his own in his way of speaking.

【答案】Idiolect

9.According to ______ period hypothesis，in child development there is a period during which language can be acquired more easily than at any other time. The period lasts until puberty (around age 12 or 13 years), and is due to biological development.

【答案】Critical

10. ______ refers to ties and connections which exist within texts. They are also called formal links between sentences and between clauses.

【答案】Cohesion

II. Give short answer to the following questions (10 points)

I. Explain criterion-referenced and norm-referenced language tests.

【答案】

Tests can be categorized into two major groups: norm-referenced tests and

criterion-referenced tests. These two tests differ in their intended purposes, the way in which content is selected, and the scoring process which defines how the test results must be interpreted.

A test that measures student knowledge and understanding in relation to specific standards or performance objectives is called criterion-referenced testing (CRT). It measures students’ performance in relation to standards, not in relation to other students; all students may earn the highest grade if all meet the established performance criteria. CRTs report how well students are doing relative to a pre-determined performance level on a specified set of educational goals or outcomes included in the school, district, or state curriculum.

A test designed to measure and compare individual students’ performances or text results to those of an appropriate peer group (that is, norm group) at the classroom, local or, national level is called norm-referenced testing (NRT). Students with the best performance on a given assessment receive the highest grades. It is generally used to help teachers select students for different ability level reading or mathematics instructional groups.

2. Explain the seven types of meaning and use examples to illustrate your ideas. 【答案】

The seven types of meaning were first postulated by G. Leech. They are respectively illustrated as follows:

(1) Conceptual meaning, which refers to logical, cognitive, or denotative content. This type of meaning is “denotative”in that it is concerned with the relationship between a word and the thing it denotes, or refers to. It overlaps to a large extent to the concept of reference, but Leech also uses the short form “sense”for the same indication. So Leech’s conceptual meaning contains two parts: sense and reference.

(2) Connotative meaning, what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to. It refers to some additional, especially emotive, meaning.

(3) Social meaning, referring to what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.

(4) Affective meaning, which refers to what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.

(5) Reflected meaning, which refers to what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.

(6) Collocative meaning, what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

The five types of meanings from (2) to (6) are collectively known as Associative meaning in the sense that an elementary associationist theory of mental connections is enough to explain their use.

(7) Thematic meaning, what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis. It is more peripheral since it is only

determined by the order of the words in a sentence and the different prominence they each receive.

III. Read the following passage carefully and then state your own position concerning the use of knowing some linguistics. (10 points)

One famous scholar says that language is an interesting subject to study on its own right, for the simple reason that everybody uses it every day. It is unbelievable that we know very little about something we are so familiar with. Just a few questions will arouse our interest in language. Why should we call the thing we sit on chair? Can’t we call chair table and table chair? How is it that children don’t seem to make a big effort in learning their first language while we adults have to work very hard to learn a second language? Why can we talk about yesterday and last year while cats and dogs never seem to make noises about their past experience? Do you think we can think as clearly without language as with language? Does language determine what we think or thought determines what we say? These questions make us curious about language and linguistics can satisfy our curiosity. To seek the answer to any of these questions is a good reason for studying linguistics.

【答案】

Language is essential to human beings; it plays a central role in our lives as individual and social beings. We have to be fully aware of the nature and mechanism of our language, or we will be ignorant of what constitutes our essential