现代语言学2011年10月真题试题与答案解析（00830）

fossilization

Define with examples phonemic contrast, allophone and complementary distribution. What is the basic way to determine the phonemes of a language?

Describe with examples the lexical loss which occurred in Old English and Middle English. Do you think the loss of words inevitable? What do you think of the process of lexical loss?

interpersonal communication

internal borrowing

social dialects

embedded clause

predication

directives

compounding

liquids

( ) Empirical studies show that interference from the mother tongue is the major source of errors in learning a second language.

synchronic linguistics

( ) The fact that successful translation between languages can be made is one of the major arguments against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

( ) If a speaker is saying something for which he or she lacks adequate evidence, he or she is violating the maxim of quantity.

( ) Cognates may be defined as words that have developed from a common ancestor or common source. Work on the systematic form-meaning resemblance in cognates lies at the core of comparative reconstruction.

( ) In medieval times, an agree-upon “common tongue” came into use in the eastern Mediterranean ports, which was called Lingua Franca. The term lingua franca cannot be generalized to other languages similarly used. Thus, not any language can be a lingua franca.

( )In a tree diagram of sentence structures, S is the root of the tree, occupying the topmost position, from where it branches into phrasal categories, which further branch into smaller syntactic units. The points at which the tree branches are located at various levels are known as branching nodes. A branching node is connected directly only to one lower node.

( ) Pairs of words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items are called complementary opposites.

( ) Modern linguistics is mostly descriptive, and prescriptive grammar is no longer used in current language teaching.

( ) The nasal cavity is formed by the passage through the nose when the soft palate, the velum at the back of the mouth is lowered. The sounds thus produced are called nasals. In English there are three nasals: [m], [n] in man, and [ ] in cling.

( ) From the orthographical point of view, a compound can be written as one word with or without a hyphen in between, or as two separate words, the choice of which is determined by conventions.

In second language acquisition, the process of adapting to the new culture of the L2 community is called a  .

Empirical studies of language use and conversation analysis indicate that in normal situations women tend to use more p   forms than men.

P   is considered as the intersection of psychology and linguistics, drawing equally upon the language and the mind or brain.

In the study of meaning, two kinds of context are recognized: the s   context and the linguistic context.

H   refers to a process of sound assimilation in which one of two phonetically similar syllables within a word is lost. For example, the Old English word “Engla-land” (“the land of the Angles”) came to be pronounced “England”.

The utterance meaning of a sentence varies with the c  in which it is uttered.

WH-movement is the proposed movement of wh-forms to the beginning of a clause or sentence. In English, WH-preposing is o   when a sentence changes from affirmative to interrogative.

In terms of word endings, English is simpler than some other languages such as Russian and German, as in its historical development it has dropped quite a few of its i     affixes.

A set of symbols called d      can be added to the letter-symbols such as those needed to indicate long vowels, nasalization to make finer distinctions than the letters alone make possible.

Apart from the biological predisposition for language acquisition, language ________ is required for successful language acquisition.( )

Language system is culturally transmitted, i.e.by teaching and learning, as opposed to g________ inheritance.

_________is characterized by the innovative, vivid and expressive use of nonstandard vocabulary as well as newly coined words, but it has traditionally carried a negative connotation.( )

Which of the following cases supports the idea that the language faculty of an average human degenerates after the critical period? ( )

Grimm’s Law can be expressed in terms of natural classes of speech sounds: voiced aspirates become unaspirated; voiced stops become voiceless; voiceless stops become ________.( )

According to John Austin’s speech act theory, a(n)________ act is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.( )

Synonyms are classified into several kinds. The words such as start, begin, and commence can be called ________ synonyms.( )

________ is of critical importance because it allows the grammar to generate an infinite number of sentences and sentences with infinite length.( )

________ phoneticians study speech sounds from the speaker’s point of view. They study the process of how a speaker uses his/her speech organs to produce sounds.( )

Morphemes such as -er, -en, in-are all called ________.( )

Often referred to as a design feature of language, ________ enables speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences that they have neither spoken nor heard before. ( )