2004 年广东中山大学语言学概论考研真题 I. 1. elite 2. chimney 3. sacrifice 4.hierachry 5. agenda 6. chaotic 7.wrestle 8. pamphlet 9.Greenwich 10. amour II. 1.sociolinguistics 2.complementary distribution 3. assimilation 4.case 5. contrastive 6.behaviourism 7. Relevance 8. The Meaning of Meaning 9. Noam Chomsky 

10. potential 11.referential 12. Firth 13. proficiency 14.compositionality 15. J.R. Firth III. 1. Prescriptive grammar is a grammar which states rules for what is considered the best or most correct usage. It is often based not on descriptions of actual usage but rather on the grammarian’s views of what is best. 2. Back formation refers to an abnormal type of words-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix form a longer form already in the language. in processing and 3. Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind, It also studies language producing utterances and in language acquisition for example. development in the child, such as the theories of language acquisition; biological foundations of language; and the relationship between language and cognition. 4. According to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language determines our thinking patterns; similarity between languages is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world is. This is referred to as linguistic relativity. 5. The term phatic communion originates from Malinowski’s study of the functions of language. It refers to the social interaction of language. We all use small, seemlingly meaningless expressions to maintain a comfortable relationship between people without involving any factual content. Ritual exchanges about health or weather often state the obvious phatic communion. 6. Traditional grammar is a grammar that is usually based on earlier grammars of Latin or Greek. It is often notional and prescriptive in their approach. 7. Those words that express grammatical meanings, such as, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns, are grammatical words. 8. In systemic-functional grammar, theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that with which the clause is concerned. 

9. The cooperative principle proposed by Paul Grice follows as such: make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. 10. Hyponymy refers to the sense relationship between a more general, more inclusive and a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordiante, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. IV. 1. The widely accepted designing feature of arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance, we cannot explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/. The arbitrary nature of language is a sign of sophistication and it makes it possible for language to have an unlimited source of expressions. The link between a linguistic sign and its meaning is a matter of convention. Here we have to look at the other side of the coin of arbitrariness, namely, conventionality. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes learning a language laboring. For learners of a foreign language, it is the conventionality of a language that is more worth noticing than its arbitrariness. 2. Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis is based on his observations that some important facts can never be otherwise explained adequately. First, children learn their native language fast and with little effort. It is said that children become fluent speakers of their native language by the age of five. Considering the fact that small children are not yet intellectually mature for any other sciences, this is surprising fast. Second, there are other facts that are puzzling if language is not innate. Children learn their mother tongue in very different environments. But they follow more or less the same stages in acquisition: the babbling stage, nonsense word stage, holophrastic stage, two –word utterance, developing grammar, near-adult grammar, and full competence. Despite the great difference in linguistic environment, they reach uniform levels of competence. Children may be good at different things. But in their first language acquisition, their difference is amazingly small. Third, the child learns the total grammar of the language during a limited period of time, from limited exposure to speech (which is often degenerate data). He can not only produce and understand sentences he has heard, but also sentences he has never heard before. What he learns seems to be set of rules rather than individual sentences. All these suggest that although babies are not born knowing a language, they are born with a predisposition to develop a language in much the same way as they are born with a predisposition to leaner to walk. Like the ability to walk, the ability to speak and understand spoken langue seems to be a natural human activity. 3. The interpersonal function embodies all uses of language to express social and personal relations. This includes the various ways the speaker enters a speech situation and performs a speech act. Because the clause is not confined to the expression of transitivity, there are non-ideational elements in the adult language system. These elements are grouped together as 

this metafunction in the grammar covering a whole range of particular uses of language. Interpersonal function is realized by MOOD and MODALITY. MOOD shows what role the speaker selects in the speech situation and what role he assigns to the addressee. If the speaker selects the imperative mood, for example, he assumes the role of one giving commands and puts the addressee in the role of one expected to obey orders. MODALITY specifies if the speaker is expressing his judgment or making a prediction. For example, Give me that teapot. V. The study of speech sounds is partitioned between two distinct but related disciplines, 1. phonetics and phonology. Phonetics studies how speech sounds are made, transmitted and received. Phonology is the study of the sound systems of language. There is a fair degree of overlap in what concerns the two subjects. Phonology is concerned with the linguistics patterning of sounds in human language, with its primary aim being to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in language, and to explain the variations teat occur. The human vocal apparatus can produce a very wide range of sounds but only a small number of these are used in a language to construct all of is words and sentences. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds while phonology studies the way in which speakers of a language systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning. Phonology is not specifically concerned with aspects of speech production or perception as these are purely the result of the physical properties of the system. In the study of coarticualtion in English, for example, it is often said that the articulation of the [t] sounds in the words tea and too differ from each other slightly. Phoneticians are concerned with how these two [t]’s differ in the way they are pronounced while phonologists are interested in the patterning of such sounds and the rules that underlies such variations. 2. With the development of transformational-generative grammar and other linguistic theories, some changes of attitudes have taken place. First of all, the nature of language is views differently—learning a language involves making constant hypotheses about the structure of the target language. The learner tests his now hypothesis against what the native speaker says. The errors he makes are actually his incorrect hypotheses about the new language. Another linguistic system based on the observation output which results from a learner’s attempted production of a target language form. Interlanguage is formed when the learner attempts to learn a new language, and it has features of both the first and the second language but it neither, The post-structuralists, therefore, regard errors as evidence of the learning process by making hypothesis about target language; the learner arrives at a particular interlanguage. Then he modifies his hypothesis and goes on towards the target language. Obviously, errors can be found at the stage of interlanguage. As stated by Corder, errors are significant in three different ways: a. They tell the teacher, if he undertakes a systematic analysis, how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and consequently when remains for him to learn. 

b. They provide the researchers with evidence of how language is learned or acquired, what strategies or procedures the learner is employing in his discovery of the language. c. They are indispensable to the learner himself, because we can regard the making of errors as a device the learner uses in order to learn. It is a way the learner has of testing his hypothesis about the nature of the language he is learning. The making of errors then is a strategy employed both by children acquiring their mother tongue and adults learning a second language. 3. Chomsky believes that langue is somewhat innate, and that children are born with what he calls a langue acquisition device (LAD), which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning. He argues the child comes into the world with specific innate endowment, not only with general tendencies or potentialities, but also with knowledge of the nature of the world, and specifically with knowledge of the nature of language. According to his view, children are born with knowledge of the basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal. The categories and relationship exist in al human languages and all human infants are born with knowledge of them. According to him, the study of langue, or the structure of langue, can throw some light on the nature of the human mind. This approach to language is a reaction against behaviorisms in psychology and empiricism in philosophy, making linguistics a branch of psychology. Halliday has inherited the idea that langue is a social phenomenon, and emphasizes the study of language in relation to the functions it performs. In his opinion, “ Language, in its primitive functions, [is] to be regarded as a mode of action, rather than as a countersign of thought ”. Language originally“was never used as a mere mirror of reflected thought.”In its primitive use, language functions as a link in concerted human activity, as a piece of human behavior,. It is a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection. Halliday regards meaning as primary above the grammar, thus seeing language as “meaning potential”. Halliday also has classified three metafunctions of language “ ideational, interpersonal, and textual”, and related the functions of language to its structures, which are transitivity, mood and theme respectively.