语言学教程各章节练习及答案
Exercises to Linguistics
外语系
黄永亮
Chapter 1 Invitation to Linguistics
1.Define the following terms:
Langue: Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community.
Parole:parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use.
Prescriptive: Prescriptive and descriptive represent two different types of linguistic study. if the linguistic study aims to lay down rules for “correct and standard”behaviour in
using language, i.e. to tell people what they should day and what they should not
say, it is said to be prescriptive.
Descriptive: Prescriptive and descriptive represent two different types of linguistic study. If a linguistic study aims to describe and analyze the language people actually use, it is
said to be descriptive;
competence: Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language.
Performance: Chomsky defines performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.
Synchronic: The description of a language at some point of time in history is a synchronic study;
Diachronic: The description of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study.
Linguistics：Linguistics may be defined as the systematic (or scientific) study of language.
language：Language is a form of human communication by means of a system of symbols principally transmitted by vocal sounds.”
2.Does the traffic light system have duality, why?
No. No discrete units on the first level that can be combined freely in the second level to form meaning. There is only simple one to one relationship between signs and meaning, namely, re-stop, green-go and yellow-get ready to go or stop.
https://www.wendangku.net/doc/db10876018.html,munication can take many forms, such as sign, speech, body language and facial expression.
Do body language and facial expression share or lack the distinctive properties of human language?
Less arbitrary, lack duality, less creative, limited repertoire, emotional-oriented.
4.Why is competence and performance an important distinction in linguistics?
According to Chomsky, a language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence. And performance refers to the actual enables a speaker to produce and understand an indefinite numbers of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. A speaker’s competence is stable but his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. Thus, Chomsky proposed that linguists should focus on the study of competence, not performance. The distinction of the two terms “ competence and performance” represents the orientation of linguistic study. So we can say competence and performance is an important distinction in linguistics.
5.In what basic ways does modern linguistics differ from traditional grammar?
Modern linguistics differs from traditional grammar in the following basic ways:
Firstly, priority is given, as mentioned earlier, to spoken language. Secondly, focus is on synchronic study of language, rather than on diachronic study of language. Thirdly, modern linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive in nature. Linguists endeavor to state objectively the regularities of a language. They aim at finding out how a language is spoken: they do not attempt to tell people how it should be spoken. Fourthly, modern linguistics is theoretically rather than pedagogically oriented. Modern linguists strive to construct theories of language that can account for language in general. These features distinguished modern linguistics from traditional grammar. The two are complementary. Not contradictory. Knowledge of both is necessary for a language teacher: knowledge of the latter is necessary for a language learner.
Chapter 2 Phonetics
1. Give the description of the following sound segments in English
1)[?] voiced dental fricative
2)[?] voiceless alveolar fricative
3)[?] velar nasal
4)[?] voiced alveolar stop
5)[?] voiceless bilabial stop
6)[ ] voiceless velar stop
7)[●] (alveolar) lateral
8)[?] high front lax unrounded vowel
9)[◆:] high back tense rounded vowel
10)[ ] low back lax rounded vowel
2. How is the description of consonants different from that of vowels?
Consonants are described according to manner and place of articulation while vowels are described with four criteria: part of the tongue that is raised; extent to which the tongue rises in the direction of the palate; kind of opening made at the lips; position of soft palate.
3. Which sound may be described as
a voiced bilabial plosive [?]
a voiced labio-dental fricative [?]
a voiceless velar plosive [ ]
4. Why might a photographer ask the person she is photographing to say cheese?
The vowel of the word cheese [?:] is produced with the lips spread, this resembling a smile.
5.Account for the difference in articulation in each of the following pairs of words:
coast ghost; ghost boast
boast most; ghost mist;
The words coast and ghost are distinguished by the fact that the initial segment is voiceless in the case of the former and voiced in the case of the latter.
The word ghost and boast are distinguished by the place of articulation of the initial segment, [?] being velar while [?] is bilabial.
Boast and most are distinguished by the manner of articulation of the initial segment, [?] being nasal.
Most and mist are distinguished by the fact that the former has a rounded back vowel shile the latter has a spread front vowel.
Chapter 3 Phonology
1.Define the following terms
Phonology: Phonology is concerned with the sound system of languages. It is concerned with which sounds a language uses and how the contribution of sounds to the task of
communication.
Phone: A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones
Phoneme: Phoneme is the abstract element of sound, identified as being distinctive in a particular language.
Allophone: Allophone refers any of the different forms of a phoneme is an allophone of it in English. Compare the words peak and speak, for instance. The /?/ in peak is aspirated;
phonetically transcribed as [??] while the /?/ in speak is unaspirated, phonetically [?＝].
[?,??] are two different phones and are variants of the phoneme /?/. Such variants of a phoneme are called Allophone of the same phoneme.
Suprasegmental features:. The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segment are called Suprasegmental features. Suprasegmental features include: stress, tone and intonation.
2.Transcribe the realization of the past tense morpheme for each of the following words:
Waited waved wiped waded. account for the differences.
[id] in “waited”and “waded”follows another alveolar plosive. [d] in “waved”
follows voiced consonants.
[t] in “wiped” follows voiceless consonants, there being voicing assimilation.
3. which of the following would be phonologically acceptable as English words?
Thlite grawl dlesher shlink tritch sruck stwondle
“grawl” and “tritch”
4.Why can we not use the sequence [?kl] in twinkle as an example of a consonant cluster?
The sequence [?kl] bridges two syllables.
5.For each of the following pairs compare the position of the stress. Comment.
Economy/economic wonder/wonderful
Beauty/beautiful acid/acidic
In adjectives ending in –ic the stress moves to the following syllable, in adjectives ending in –ful it does not.
6.Explain why somebody might choose to stress the following utterances as indicated by the bold
type:
a) John want ed to do this today. b) John wanted to do this today. c) John wanted to
do this to day.
The first utterance implies that John was unable to do what he wanted.
The second implies that he was only able to do something else.
The third implies that he was only able to do it some other day.
Chapter 4 Morphology
1.Define the following terms:
Morpheme:the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit that can not be divided into further small units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Compound: Polymorphemic words which consist wholly of free morphemes, such as classroom, blackboard, snowwhite, etc.
Allomorph:any of the different form of a morpheme. For example, in English the plural morpheme -‘s but it is pronounced differently in different environments as /s/ in cats, as /z/ in dogs and as /iz/ in classes. So /s/, /z/, and /iz/ are all allomorphs of the plural morpheme.
Bound morpheme:an element of meaning which is structurally dependent on the word it is added to, e.g. the plural morpheme in “dogs”.
Free morpheme: an element of meaning which takes the form of an independent word.
https://www.wendangku.net/doc/db10876018.html,plete the words with suitable negative prefixes
a. ir removable g. in human
b. in formal h. ir relevant
c. im practicable i. un evitable
d. in sensible j. im mobile
e. in tangible k. il legal
f. il logical l. in discreet
3. “Morpheme” is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between
expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a
semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme?
Since morpheme is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and semantic aspect of
linguistic unit. A morpheme may overlap with a phoneme, such as I, but usually not, as in pig, in which the morpheme is the whole word, i.e. and independent, free morpheme, but the phonemes are /p/, /i/ and /g/.
4. Identify in the following sentence four bound morphemes. State the function of
each and say whether each is derivational or inflectional.
The teacher’s brother considered the project impossible.
The –er and the –‘s of teacher’s are bound morphemes, the former being derivational, as it produces a lexeme that denotes the person who does an action, the latter being an inflectional morpheme, as it indicates possession.
The –ed of considered is inflectional, indicating that the action took place in the past. The im- of impossible is derivational, producing a new lexeme that denotes the opposite of possible.
Chapter 5 Syntax
1.Define the following terms:
Category: parts of speech and functions, such as the classification of words in terms of parts of speech, the identification of functions of words in term of subject, predicate, etc. Concord: also known as agreement, is the requirement that the forms of two or more words in
a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories
Syntagmatic relation:. Syntagmatic relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present.
Paradigmatic relation: a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the
others absent.
Deep structure: is defined as the abstract representation of the syntactic properties of a construction, i. e. the underlying level of structural relations between its
different constituents
Surface structure: is the final stage in the syntactic derivation of a construction, which closely corresponds to the structural organization of a construction people actually
produce and receive.
Theme: The Theme is the first constituent of the clause.
Rheme: All the rest of the clause is simply labeled the Rheme.
2.Why is it important to know the relations a sign has with others, such as syntaxgmatic and
paradigmatic relations?
As the relation between a signifier and signified is arbitrary, the value of a sign can not be determined by itself. To know the identity of a sign, the linguist will have to know the signs it is used together with and those it is substitutable for. The former relation is known as syntagmatic and the latter paradigmatic.
3.In what ways is IC analysis better than traditional parsing?
In traditional parsing, a sentence is mainly seen as a sequence of individual words, as if it has only a linear structure. IC analysis, however, emphasizes the hierarchical structure of a sentence, seeing it as consisting of word groups first. In this way the internal of structure of a sentence is shown more clearly, hence the reason of some ambiguities may be revealed.
4.What are the problems in IC analysis?
There are some technical problems caused by the binary division and discontinuous constituents. But the main problem is that there are structures whose ambiguities cannot be revealed by IC analysis, e.g. the love of God. In terms of both the tree diagram and the label, there is only one structure, but the word God is in two different relations with love,
i.e. either as subject or object.
5.Clarify the ambiguity in the following sentence by tree diagrams:
Old teachers and priests fear blackbirds.
S
NP VP
NP V
Old fear blackbirds.
N Conj. N
teachers and priests