大学英语语言学期末考试名词解释和论述答案

名词解释

https://www.360docs.net/doc/463619746.html,petence and Performance:

The distinction is discussed by the American linguist N. Chomsky in the late 1950’s. Competence----the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language.

Performance----the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.

(American linguist N. Chomsky in the late 1950’s proposed the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language. This internalized set of rules enables the language user to produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences and recognize sentences that are ungrammatical and ambiguous. According to Chomsky, performance is the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Although the speaker’s knowledge of his mother tongue is perfect, his performances may have mistakes because of social and psychological factors such as stress, embarrassment, etc.. Chomsky believes that what linguists should study is the competence, which is systematic, not the performance, which is too haphazard. )

2.Sociolinguistics: is the sub-field of linguistics that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live.( It is a field of study that assumes that human society is made up of many related patterns and behaviors, some of which are linguistic.)

https://www.360docs.net/doc/463619746.html,nguage Acquisition:

refers to the child’s acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community. (Language acquisition is concerned with language development in humans. In general, language acquisition refers to children’s development of their first language, that is, the native language of the community in which a child has been brought up.)

4.the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a theory put forward by the American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf (and also a belief held by some scholars). It states that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language. (2) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts, i.e. linguistic determinism and relativism. Whorf proposed first that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language. Or put it more bluntly, language determines thought, i.e. the notion of linguistic determinism. Because languages differ in many ways, Whorf also believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the

world differently, i.e. relative to their linguistic background, hence the notion of linguistic relativism.

5.Phrase structure rule: The grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up a phrase is called a phrase structure rule, such as:

NP →(Det) + N +(PP)……e.g. those people, the fish on the plate, pretty girls.

VP →(Qual) + V + (NP)……e.g. always play games, finish assignments.

AP →(Deg) + A + (PP)……very handsome, very pessimistic, familiar with,

very close to

PP →(Deg) + P + (NP)……on the shelf, in the boat, quite near the station.

The boy liked the dog.

(The combinational pattern in a linear formula may be called a phrase structural rule, or rewrite rule[重写规则]. )

6.Arbitrariness:

The form of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. The link between them is a matter of convention.( It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For instance, there is no necessary relationship between the word dog and the animal it refers to. The fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages and that the same sound may be used to refer to different objects is another good example. Although language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. Some words, such as the words created in the imitation of sounds by sounds are motivated in a certain degree. The arbitrary nature of language makes it possible for language to have an unlimited source of expressions. )

7.narrow transcription: transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics. This is the transcription required and used by the phoneticians in their study of speech sounds.

( The narrow transcription is the transcription with diacritics to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.)

8.Second Language Acquisition: Second Language Acquisition (SLA) refers to the systematic study of how one person acquires a second language subsequent to his native language.( SLA is viewed as a process of creative construction, in which a learner constructs a series of internal representations that comprises the learner's interim knowledge of the target language, known as interlingua. This is the language that a learner constructs at a given stage of SLA. Specifically, interlanguage consists of a series of interlocking and approximate linguistic systems in-between and yet distinct from the learner's native and target languages. It represents the learner’s transitional competence moving along a learning continuum stretching from one’s LI competence to the target language competence. As a type of linguistic system in its own right, interlanguage is a product of L2 training, mother tongue interference, overgeneralization of the target language rules, and communicative strategies of the learner. If learners were provided sufficient and the right kind of language exposure and opportunities to interact with language input, their interlanguage would develop gradually in the direction of the target language competence. )

9.sense and reference: Sense and reference are both concerned with the study of word meaning. They are two related but different aspects of meaning.

Sense — is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in.

Reference — what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.

10.Interlanguage: Learns put their first language back to the whole picture and studied its role from a cognitive perspective. In this sense, native language functions as a kind of “input from inside,” therefore transfer is not transfer, but a kind of mental process.( SLA is viewed as a process of creative construction, in which a learner constructs a series of internal representations that comprises

the learner’s interim knowledge of the target language, known as

interlanguage.)

https://www.360docs.net/doc/463619746.html,nguage Acquisition Device: The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a hypothetical brain mechanism that Noam Chomsky postulated to explain human acquisition of the syntactic structure of language. This mechanism endows children with the capacity to derive the syntactic structure and rules of their native language rapidly and accurately from the impoverished input provided by adult language users. The device is comprised of a finite set of dimensions along which languages vary, which are set at different levels for different languages on the basis of language exposure. The LAD reflects Chomsky's underlying assumption that many aspects of language are universal (common to all languages and cultures) and constrained by innate core knowledge about language called Universal Grammar. This theoretical account of syntax acquisition contrasts sharply with the views of B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and other cognitive and social-learning theorists who emphasize the role of experience and general knowledge and abilities in language acquisition.??????

(LAD, that is Language Acquisition Device, is posited by Chomsky in the 1960s as a device effectively present in the minds of children by which a grammar of their native language is constructed.

)

12.Cooperative Principle: According to Grice, in making conversation, there is a general principle which all participants are expected to observe. It goes as follows:

Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

使你所说的话，在其所发生的阶段，符合你所参与的交谈的公认目标或方向。

论述

1 .Explain with examples the three notions of phone, phoneme and allophone, and also how they are related.

A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning. Some do, some don’t. A phoneme is a basic unit in phonology; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit. It is not a sound, but a collection of distinctive phonetic features. In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme. For example, the phoneme /p/ in English can be realized as [p] and [ph], which are allophones of the phoneme /p/.

2 What is deep structure and what is surface structure? Try to explain the relationships and differences between them.

A sentence may have two levels of syntactic representation. One exists before movement takes place, named D-structure (or the deep structure[深层结构])，the other occurs after movement takes place named S-structure (roughly meaning the surface structure[表层结构])

The XP rule

Deep structure Subcategorization restricts choice of complements

Transformations

Surface structure

3 What are the major views concerning the study of meaning?

Semantics----the study of language meaning.

Meaning is central to the study of communication

1.命名论The naming theory

The naming theory, one of the oldest notions concerning meaning, and also a very primitive one was proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato. According to this theory, the linguistic forms or symbols, in other words, the words used in a language are taken to be labels of the objects they stand for, so words are just names or labels for things.

2.意念论The conceptualist view

It holds that there is no direct link between a linguistic form and what it refers to; rather ,in the interpretation of meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind.

3.语境论Conceptualism

It’s based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. her are two kinds of context: the situational and the linguistic context.

4.行为主义论Behaviorism

It refers to the attempted to define the meaning of a language form as the” situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer”. this theory somewhat close to conceptualism emphasizes on the psychological response.

4 Based on your own experiences, please illustrate how important it is to learn its culture when learning a foreign language.

Learning a foreign language is inseparable from learning its culture. We need to learn enough about the language’s culture so that we can communicate in the target language properly to achieve not only the linguistic competence but also the pragmatic or communicative competence as well.otherwise,the ignorance of cultural differences as seen in the previous section can create barriers in learning the target language and in communication, or may lead to misunderstanding and confusion sometimes .

5 .How is Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance?

Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole: Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community, and parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use. Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow while parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules. Langue is abstract; it is not the language people actually use, but parole is concrete; it refers to the naturally occurring language events. Langue is relatively stable; it does not change frequently; while parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.

American linguist N. Chomsky in the late 1950’s proposed the distinction between competence and performance. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language. Performance is the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Saussure’s distinction and Chomsky’s are very similar in that they both think that language can be divided into two levels, one level is abstract (e.g. langue; competence) and the other concrete (e.g. parole; performance). And they also think that what linguists should deal with is the abstract level which can reveal the real nature of language. At the same time, they differ at least in that Saussure took a sociological view of language and his notion of language is a matter of social conventions, and Chomsky looks at language from a psychological point of view and to him competence is a property of the mind of each individual.

6 What are the four maxims of CP? Try to give your own examples to show how flouting these

maxims gives rise to particularized conversational implicature.

Cooperative Principle: According to Grice, in making conversation, there is a general principle which all participants are expected to observe. It goes as follows:

Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

Four maxims of CP

The maxim of quantity 量的准则：信息适量。

— Make your contribution as informative as required for the current purpose of the exchange.— Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The maxim of quality 质的准则：信息真实。

— Do not say what you believe to be false.

— Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The maxim of relation 相关准则：话题相关

— Be relevant ( make your contribution relevant).

The maxim of manner 方式准则：简明清楚

— Avoid obscurity of expression.

— Avoid ambiguity.

— Be brief.

— Be orderly.