《英语语言学概论》题与答案

Exercises

I.Multiple Choice

1. __________ studies language change over time in contrast to looking at language as it is used at a given moment.

A. Diachronic linguistics

B. Synchronic linguistics

C. Prescriptive linguistics

D. Comparative linguistics

2. Of all the speech organs, the ______ is/are the most flexible.

A. mouth

B. lips

C. tongue

D. vocal cords

3. In terms of place of articulation, the following sounds [p], [b], [m] and [w]share the feature of ______.

A. palatal

B. alveolar

C. bilabial

D. dental

4. A(n) ______ is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit, a collection of distinctive phonetic features.

A. phone

B. sound

C. allophone

D. phoneme

5. Which of the following sound description is for [d]

A. voiced labiodental fricative

B. voiced alveolar stop

C. voiceless labiodental fricative

D. voiceless alveolar stop

6. What is the phonetic feature of the sound [u]

A. close back short

B. semi-close front short

C. semi-open central short

D. open front short

7. Which of the following sentences contain a derivational affix

A. The cows escaped.

B. It was raining.

C. Those socks are inexpensive.

D. She closed the book.

8. The morpheme “ed” in the word “worked” is known as a(n) ______.

A. derivational morpheme

B. lexical morpheme

C. inflectional morpheme

D. functional morpheme

9. “en-” in “enlarge” is a(n) ______.

A. derivational affix

B. inflectional affix

C. free root

D. bound root

10. ______ is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.

A. Syntax

B. Grammar

C. Morphology

D. Morpheme

11. Which of the following forms is possible word of English

A. sproke

B. bsarn

C. mbood

D. coofp

12. Which pair of words below shows the relation of antonymy. ______

A. flourish—thrive

B. intelligent—stupid

C. casual—informal

D. flog—whip

13. We call the relation between “furniture” and “wardrobe” as ______.

A. hyponymy

B. meronymy

C. homophony

D. homonymy

14. Most of the violations of the maxims of the CP give rise to ______.

A. breakdown of conversation

B. confusion of one’s intention

C. hostility between speakers and the listeners

D. conversational implicatures

15. In t he phrase structure rule “S——>NP VP”, the arrow can be read as______.

A.is equal to

B.consists of

C.has

D.generates

16. The meaning carried by the inflectional morpheme is ______.

A. lexical

B. morpheme

C. grammatical

D. semantic

17. The pair of words “hot” and “cold” are ______.

A. gradable antonyms

B. relational antonyms

C. complementary antonyms

D. co-hyponyms

18. Which pair of the following are complementary antonyms

A. alive / dead

B. above / below

C. poor / rich

D. doctor / patient

19. What is the relation between the pair of sentences:

He likes seafood.

He likes crabs

A. synonymy

B. inconsistency

C. entailment

D. presupposition

20. Which pair of the following are homographs

A. piece n. / peace n.

B. tear v. / tear n.

C. fast adj. / fast v.

D. flower n. / rose n.

21. Which pair of the following are dialectal synonyms

A. lorry, truck

B. kid, child

C. collaborator, accomplice

D. amaze, astound

22. “Lift” and “elevator” form a pair of ______ synonyms.

A. stylistic

B. dialectical

C. collocational

D. connotative

15. All syllables must have a ______.

A. onset

B. coda

C. nucleus

D. consonant

23. ______ studies language and speech as they are used at a given moment and not in terms of how they have evolved over time.

A. Diachronic linguistics

B. Synchronic linguistics

C. Prescriptive linguistics

D. Comparative linguistics

24. ______ deals with language application to other fields, particularly education.

A. Psycholinguistics

B. Sociolinguistics

C. Applied linguistics

D. Comparative linguistics

25. Of the following sound combination, only ______ is permissible in English.

A. iblk

B. ilbk

C. ilkb

D. blik

26. Which pair of words below shows the relation of synonymy. ______

A. drunk—sober

B. uncle—aunt

C. young—old

D. casual—informal

27. The sense relationship between “He has been to France” and “He has been to Europe” is ______.

A. hyponymy

B. antonymy

C. presupposition

D. entailment

28. In the phrase structure rule “NP—>(Det) N (PP)…”, the arrow can be read

as______.

A. is equal to

B. branches into

C. transforms

D. generates

29. In terms of the place of articulation, the following sounds [t][r][s][l][z][n] share the feature of ______.

A. palatal

B. alveolar

C. bilabial

D. dental

30. Y’s utterance in the following conversation violates the maxim of ______.

X: When is Susan’s f arewell party

Y: Sometime next month.

A.quality

B.quantity

C.relation

D.manner

31. Of the three speech acts, linguists are most interested in the ______because this kind of speech act is identical with the speaker’s intention.

A. locutionary act

B. constative act

C. perlocutionary act

D. illocutionary act

32. We call the relation between “vehicle” and “car” as ______.

A. hyponymy

B. synonymy

C. polysemy

D. homonymy

33. Which of the following pairs differs from the others in the sense relation ______

A. good, bad

B. long, short

C. big, small

D. innocent, guilty

34. As far as manners of articulation are concerned, which of the following

differs from the others ______

A.[p]

B. [b]

C. [t]

D. [f]

35. Which pair of the following belong to meronymy

A. animal, tiger

B. hand, finger

C. livestock, dog

D. furniture, dresser

36. “-En” in “blacken” is a(n) ______.

A. derivational affix

B. inflectional affix

C. free root

D. bound root

37. Transformational rules do not change the basic ______ of sentences.

A. form

B. structure

C. meaning

D. sound pattern

38. According to Searle, those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of action are called____.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/d014528124.html,missives

B. directives

B.expressives

D. declaratives

39. The illocutionary point of the____ is to express the psychological state specified in the utterance.

A. declarations

B. expressives

https://www.360docs.net/doc/d014528124.html,missives

D. directives

40. Y’s utterance in the following conversation exchange violates the maxim of ______.

X: Who was that you were with last night？

Y: Did you know that you were wearing odd socks？

A. quality

B. quantity

C. relation

D. manner

II. Blank filling

1.Productivityor___ refers to man’s linguistic ability which enables him to produce

and understand an infinitely large number of sentences in our native language, including the sentences which were never heard before.

2.Some antonyms are g radable_ because there are often intermediate forms

between the two members of a pair.

3.Duality is the way meaningless elements of language at one level (sounds and

letters) combine to form meaningful units (words) at another level.

4.According to its position in the new word, affixes are divided into two kinds:

prefixes and suffixes.

5.Phonological rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular

language are called sequential rules.

6.Root_ constitutes the core of the word and carries the major component of its

meaning.

7.A suffix is added to the end of stems to modify the meaning of the original word

and it may change its part of speech.

8.In terms of morphemic analysis, derivation can be viewed as the addition of

affixes to stems to form new words.

9.Some morphemes cannot normally stand alone, but function only as parts of

words, . –s, -er, -ed and –ing, which are called bound______ morphemes.

10.When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the

word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/d014528124.html,nuguge _is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human

communication.

12.Saussure put forward two important concepts. Langue_ refers to the abstract

linguistic system shared by all members of a speech community.

13.Broad transcription is normally used in dictionary and teaching

textbooks for general purposes.

14.The root _ constitutes the core of the word and carries the major

component of its meaning.

15.Prefixes modify the meaning of the stem, but usually do not change the

part of speech of the original word.

16. Displacement is a design feature of human language that enables speakers

to talk about a wide range of things, free from barriers caused by separation

in time and space.

17. An independent unit of meaning that can be used freely by itself is called

a free _ morpheme.

18.Clear [l] and dark [l] are allophones of the same one phoneme /l/. They never

take the same position in sound combinations; thus they are said to be in

complementary distribution.

19.Stem is the base to which one or more affixes are attached to create a

more complex form that may be another stem or a word.

20.Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

two sounds [p] and [p h] are in complementary distribution, and they are known as allophones of the phoneme /p/.

22. _Syntax_______ is a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined

to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.

23. Cooperative Principle (CP) is proposed by Paul Grice .

24. “Words are names or labels for things.” This view is called naming theory in

semantic studies.

25. The sentence “My unmarried sister is married to a bachelor” is a contradition.

III. True or false questions.

( T ) 1. “Where did he buy the beer” presupposes “He bought the beer”.

( F) 2. Sense and reference are the same aspects of meaning.

( F ) 3. A word’s category can be told straightforward from its meaning.

( T ) 4. The smallest meaningful units that can be used freely all by themselves are free morphemes.

(T ) 5. The meaning carried by the inflectional morpheme is grammatical.

( T ) 6. “The student’’ in the sentence ‘The student liked the linguistic lecture” and “The linguistic lecture” in the sentence “The linguistic lecture liked the

student” belong to the same syntactic category.

( F ) 7. Compounds with a preposition are in the category of the prepositional part of the compound.

(T ) 8. Like other phrases, Infl takes an NP as its specifier and a VP category as its complement.

( T ) 9. Linguistic context is concerned with the probability of words or expressions co-occurring or collocating with each other.

( T ) 10. When the two words are in the same grammatical category, the compound will be in this category.

( F ) 11. Linguistics is the course of language.

( F ) the history of any language the writing system always came into being before the spoken form.

( T ) 13. Articulatory phonetics is concerned about how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds.

( F ) 14. Language system is genetically transmitted.

( T) 15. Phonology is the study of the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables.

(T) 16. Sentences are not formed by randomly combining lexical items, but by following a set of syntactic rules that arrange linguistic elements in a

particular order.

( T) 17. Stress has two main semantic functions: distinguish between two words and emphasize the syllable or word.

( T) 18. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are closed class words.

( T) 19. Linguistic forms with the same reference might differ in sense.

(T) 20. The more commonly used a word is, the more likely it has acquired more than one meaning.

( T ) 21. Utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the Abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication or simply in

context.

( F ) , suggesting, warning, ordering are instances of commissives.

( T ) 23. When performing an illocutionary act of representative, the speaker is making a statement or giving a description which he himself believes to be

true.

(T) 24. Coordination refers top the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other.

(T ) 25. Traditionally,sentence is the minimum part of language that express meaning.