北京林业大学英语专业2006语言学基础知识试题

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北京林业大学

2006年硕士研究生入学考试语言学基础知识试题

I. Below are some questions and statements with missing words, each followed by four possible answers or fillers marked A, B, C and D. In some cases, only one choice is correct while in others more than one or all should be chosen. Choose ALL the correct ones. (30 points, 2 points each)

1. ?A person can refer to Shakespeare even though he died many years ago.? This shows that language has the design feature of _____.

A. duality

B. creativity

C. arbitrariness

D. displacement

2. Which of the following words involve ?nasalization??

A. rap

B. read

C. running

D. want

3. Which of the following are instances of blending?

A. transistor

B. smog

C. boatel

D. brunch

4. In Halliday’s gram mar, the basic unit of structure is the _____.

A. sentence

B. clause

C. phrase

D. word

5. The phoneme /p/ is in a _____ relation with the phonemes /i/ and

/t/ in the word pit, and it is in a _____ relation with /b/, /s/, and /h/, as they are capable of replacing /p/ in the context /_it/ to form an English word.

A. syntagmatic, paradigmatic

B. paradigmatic, syntagmatic

C. syntagmatic, syntagmatic

D. paradigmatic, paradigmatic

6. The principal suprasegmental features are _____.

A. syllable

B. stress

C. tone

D. intonation

7. The structural approach to the analysis of language was started by

_____ in the beginning of the twentieth century.

A. Ferdinand de Saussure

B. Leonard Bloomfield

C. Edward Sapir

D. Noam Chomsky

8. The ?semantic triangle? was proposed by _____.

A. Plato and Aristotle

B. Ogden and Richards

C. Chomsky

D. Leech and Palmer

9. Which of the following are complementary antonyms?

A. buy, sell

B. alive, dead

C. old, young

D. present, absent

10. According to John Austin, typical performatives are characterized

by _____.

A. first person singular subject

B. simple present tense

C. active voice

D. indicative mood

11. Metaphors like He is made of iron are extreme examples in which

_____ is violated.

A. the Quantity maxim

B. the Quality maxim

C. the Relation maxim

D. the Manner maxim

12. The seven types of meaning recognized by Leech in his Semantics

include _____.

A. affective meaning

B. reflected meaning

C. social meaning

D. thematic meaning

13. According to Horn, _____ encourages the hearer to infer that

more is meant.

A. the Q-principle

B. the R-principle

C. the I-principle

D. the M-principle

14. Which of the following are features of women register, according

to Lakoff?

A. Women use more intensifiers such as terrible and awful.

B. Women use more tag questions.

C. Women’s linguistic behavior is more indirect and more polite.

D. Women use more fancy color terms.

15. The relation of presupposition between sentences is exemplified

by _____.

A. a. John married a blond heiress.

b. John married a blond.

B. a. I don’t regret leaving London.

b. I left London.

C. a. John’s bike needs repairing.

b. John has a bike.

D. a. The mayor of Liverpool is in town.

b. There is a mayor of Liverpool.

II. Decide whether the following statements are True (T) or False

(F). (20 points, 2 points each)

1. CALL refers to the use of a computer in the teaching or learning of

a second or foreign language.

2. In 1950s, machine translation research was done with assistance

from the language experts in the fields of syntax and semantics. 3. As an important factor that affects word recognition, frequency

effect describes the additional ease with which a word is accessed due to its repeated occurrence in the discourse or context.

4. Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to

facilitate interpretation of environmental stimuli.

5. ‘Linguistic determinism’ and ‘linguistic relativity’ have

alternatively been used to refer to ethnography of communication.

6. The con cept of ‘communicative competence’ was introduced by

Noam Chomsky.

7. Varieties related to the user are normally known as dialects and

varieties related to use as registers.

8. Metonymy is used in the following expression a long necessary

voyage from the house of marriage.

9. ‘Foregrounding’ refers to specific linguistic devices, i.e., deviation

and parallelism, which are used in literary texts.

10. Information structure is a hearer-oriented analysis of the

distribution of given information and new information in

discourse.

III. Briefly explain the following terms. (25 points, 5 points each)

1. competence and performance

2. ‘garden path’ sentences

3. simile

4. machine translation

5. interlanguage

IV. Answer the following questions. (75 points, 25 points each)

1. The pronunciation of tell is [ ], but that of telling is [ ]. Using your knowledge of phonology and morphology, discuss why the phoneme /l/ is realized as [ ] and [l] respectively.

2. Explain the following sentences:

1) To do research means to get your hands dirty.

2) I’ve had enough dumbbells in my office.

Discuss: why is it important to teach culture in the classroom?

3. What is the ‘innateness hypothesis’?