语言学

1.What are the major branches of linguistics? What does each of themstudy?Main branches of linguistics are:Phonetics- studies the sounds that are used in linguistic communication. Phonology-studies how sounds are put together and used in communication.Morphology- studies the way in which linguistic symbols representing sounds are arranged and combined to form words.Syntax-studies the rules which govern how words are combined to permissible sentences in language.Semantics- the study of meaning conveyed by language.Pragmatics-study of meaning in the context of language.2.What do langue and parole mean respectively?Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community.Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use.3.What are the main design features of human language?1)Arbitrariness 2) Productivity 3) Duality4) Displacement 5) Cultural transmission4. How does phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study? Phonetics focus on all the speech sounds used in all human language: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified.Phonology aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.5. What is phone? How is it different from phoneme? How are allophones related to a phoneme?A Phone is a phonetic unit or segment. A phoneme is a phonological unit. It is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.6. Given examples to show what are open class words, and what are closed class words?Closed class words: A word whose membership is fixed or limited. New members are not regularly added. Pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc. For example, with the growth of the feminist movement,some people have suggested that we use e, pronounced like the letter itself, as a new neutral third person singular pronoun, neither masculine nor feminine, which could be used as the general form.Open class words: A word whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Beatnik, for example, was added to the class of nouns meaning “a member of the Beat Generation”, or “a person w ho rejects or avoids conventional behavior.7. What is morpheme? And what are allomorphs?Morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.Allomorphs are the variant forms of a morpheme.8. What is derivational morpheme, and what is inflectional morpheme? Derivational morpheme:there are morphemes which change the category, or grammatical class of words. When they are conjoined to other morphemes or words, new words are derived, or formed. Inflectional morpheme: there are bound morphemes which are for the most part purely grammatical makers and signify such concepts as tense, number, case and so on. Such bound morphemes are called inflectional morphemes.9. What is category? What are the main lexical categories and what are minor ones.Category refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb.Main lexical categories: Major Lexical categories are often assumed to be the heads around which phrases are built. Noun, Verb, Adjective, PrepositionMinor lexical categories: Minor lexical categories are not assumed to be the heads around which phrases are built. Determiner, Degree words, Qualifier, Auxiliary, Conjunction.10. What is deep structure and what are surface structure?Deep Structure：The first, formed by the XP rule in accordance with the head’s subcategorization properties, is called deep structure.Surface Structure: The second, corresponding to the final syntactic form of the sentence which results from appropriate transformations, is called surface structure.11. What are the major types of synonyms in English?1)Dialectal Synonyms, 2)Stylistic synonyms, 3)Emotive or evaluativemeaning synonyms, 4)Collocational synonyms, 5)Semantically different synonyms12. What are the three acts a person is possibly performing while making an utterance?1)locutionary act 2)illocutionary act 3)perlocutionary act13. What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified?1)representatives/assertives, 2)directives, 3)commissives,4)expressives,5)declarations14. What do you think of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is a linguistic idea. It is the claim that the language people speak changes the way they think and act. Sapir and Whorf believe that language filters people’s perception and the way they categorize their experience. This interdependence of language and thought is now known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Since its formation, the hypothesis was subject to fierce controversy and scorn. The study of SWH has shed two important insights: 1) There is recognition that language, as code, reflects cultural preoccupations and constrains the way people think. 2) More than in Whorf’s days, however, we recognize how important context is in complementing the meaning encoded in the language.15. What are the traditional views concerning the study of meaning? 1)The naming theory, 2)The conceptualist view, 3)Contextualism, 4)BehaviorismTERMS:1.Morpheme(词素):The smallest unit of language that carriesinformation about meaning or function.2.Synonym(同义词):Words that are close in meaning are calledsynonyms.3.Antonym(反义词):Words that are opposite in meaning areantonyms.petence(语言能力):The ideal user’s knowledge of the rules ofhis language.5.Morphology(形态学，词法): It refers to the part of the grammar thatis concerned with word formation and word structure.6.Phone(音素): A Phone is a phonetic unit or segment.7.Pragmatics(语用学): It is the study of how speakers of a language usesentences to effect successful communication.8.Linguistic determinism(语言决定论)：The concept that languagedetermines, or at least influences our thoughts.plementary distribution(互补分布): If they are allophones of thesame phoneme, then they do not distinguish meaning, but complement each other in distribution, i.e. they occur in different phonetic environments.10.P olysemy(一词多义):While different words may have the same orsimilar meaning, the same one word may have more than one meaning.11.A rbitrariness(任意性):There is no logical connection betweenmeaning and sounds.12.D isplacement(位移性):Language can be used to refer to contextsremoved from the immediate situations of the speaker.。