语言学概论期末复习题(2)

语言学概论期末复习题（2）

Ⅰ. Read each of the following statements carefully. Decide which one of the four choices best completes the statement and choose the letter A, B, C or D.

(20%)

“I can refer to Confucius even though was dead 2000 years ago.” This shows that language has the design feature of ___________.

A. arbitrariness

B. creativity

C. Duality

D. displacement

2. “ Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”. This is an example of __________

grammar.

A. prescriptive

B. descriptive

C. transformational

D. functional

3. Using language for sheer joy of using it shows that language has a ____________

function.

A. metalingual

B. recreational

C. informative

D. performative

4. ___________ is the smallest meaning unit in the lexical system of language

A. word

B. lexeme

C. morpheme

D. Stem

5. The “semantic triangle” was first proposed by _______.

A. Plato and Aristotle

B. Ogden and Richards

C. Chomsky and Halle

D. Leech and Palmer

6. Saussure believed that language is a system of signs. This sign is the union of a

form and an idea, which Saussure called _______.

A. langue and parole

B. signifier and signified

C. speech and writing

D. system and function

7. Many modern linguists have criticized traditional grammarians for adopting a

_____ approach to language study.

A. synchronic

B. diachronic

C. prescriptive

D. descriptive

8. The fact that different languages have different words for the same object is good

proof that human language is .

A. arbitrary

B. rational

C. logical

D. cultural

9. Morphemes that represent “tense”, “number”, “gender”, “case” and so forth are

called morphemes.

A. inflectional

B. bound

C. free

D. derivational

10. The English word “modernizers” is composed of morphemes.

A. four

B. three

C. two

D. five

11. “Unless I hear from her, I won’t leave this town” is a sentence.

A. simple

B. coordinate

C. complex

D. compound

12. In the following pairs of words, are a pair of complementary antonyms.

A. old and young

B. male and female

C. hot and cold

D. buy and sell

13. The stimulus-response theory was proposed by .

A. Firth

B. Halliday

C. Bloomfield

D. Chomsky

14. As far as the sentence “My bag is heavy” is concerned, linguists of pragmatics are

more interested in its ______ meaning.

A. literal

B. logical

C. contextual

D. grammatical

15. A speaker’s knowledge of the total set of rules, conventions, etc., governing the

skilled use of language in a society is termed ______.

A. competence

B. performance

C. communicative competence

D. communicative strategy

16. Language is said to be arbitrary because there is no logical connection between

_____ and meanings.

A. sense

B. sounds

C. objects

D. ideas

17. Modern linguistics regards the written language as _____.

A. primary

B. better

C. secondary

D. unchangeable

18. Which of the following is not a design feature of human language?

A. Arbitrariness

B. Displacement

C. Duality

D. Meaningfulness

19. If a linguistic study describes and analyzes the language people actually use, it is

said to be ______.

A. prescriptive

B. analytic

C. descriptive

D. linguistic

20.The branch of linguistic study called _____ is concerned with how speakers use

the sentences of a language to achieve effective and successful communication.

A. sociolinguistics

B. pragmatics

C. syntax

D. computational linguistics

Ⅱ. Decide whether the following statements are true or false. Write T for true and F for false. (20%)

1.Bound morphemes cannot occur “unattached”.( )

2.“He is easy to please” has the same deep structure as “he is eager to please”.( )

3.According to Palmer, there are no real synonyms in a language.( )

4.English is a tone language while Chinese is an intonation language. ( )

5.Linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different

situations. ( )

6.The word “unacceptability” has four morphemes. ( )

7.The word ‘lead’ (领导) and the ‘lead’ (铅) homographs. ( )

8.The word ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’ are dialectal synonyms. ( )

9. The limited range of sounds that are meaningful in human communication

constitute the phonic medium of language. ( )

10. The task of a linguist is to discover the nature and rules of the underlying language system.

( )

11. Phonetics studies human sound patterning and the meaning of sounds in communication. ( )

12. General linguistics deals with the general aspects of language application. ( )

13. Modern linguistics aims at prescribing models for language users to follow. ( )

14. Synchronic linguistics deals with a series of language phenomena at the same time. ( )