语言学考研题

1. “He has already trunked two packs” is an example of ( ) error.

A. anticipation

B. morpheme-exchange

C. exchange

D. perception

2. How do you interpret the distinctions between language acquisition and language learning?

3. Explain the purpose and significance of reconstruction in historical linguistics and the method employed by historical linguists.

Historical Linguistics: It is a subfield of linguistics that deals with what happened to languages in the past and how that happened. Historical linguists are trying to trace the historical development of languages and to discover the links between languages and among language families.

历史语言学: 语言学的一个分支。它研究语言的过去和语言变化的原因。历史语言学家试图追溯语言发展的轨迹，以便发现各语言间甚至各语系间的联系。

历史语言学中的重新构建的目的及历史语言学家所用的方法是什么？

Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of comparative reconstruction, the genetic relationship between and among various languages based on the evidence of systematic form –meaning resemblance in cognate items, and thereby to reconstruct the protolanguage of a language family.

历史语言学（historical linguistics），亦称越时语言学（diachronic linguistics)或历时语言学、演化语言学，是由索绪尔创立的一门研究语言变化的学科，主要研究语言在一定的时间跨度内所经历的种种变化，采用正视法（以文献考证为基础按时间顺序来叙述一种语言的历史）和回顾法（通过比较来重建一种语言）来研究问题。它所关注的主要是如下四个课题：

?对被观察到的特定语言的变化进行描述和解释。

?对话语共同体(Speech communities)的历史进行描述。

?重构语言群的史前史，并确定她们之间的亲缘关系，将她们按亲疏远近归派到相应的语系、语族和语支中。（比较语言学）

?阐述有关语言变化的成因及方式的普遍原理。

现代历史语言学肇端于18世纪晚期，由文献学（philology)发展而来，而传统的文献学是专注于钻研古代文章典籍，以复古为终极理想的学问。

最初的历史语言学是比较语言学，中文习称为历史比较语言学，它所关心的主要是对语言谱系的梳理和对史前（指有文字以前）语言的测拟（或称构拟），所采用的是比照法和内部测拟。当时的焦点是对著名的印度-欧罗巴诸语——中文习称印欧语系

(Indo-European languages)——的研究，而该语系中的很多语言都有着相当悠久的文字史。以此为契机，对乌拉尔语系（Uralic languages)、南岛语系（Austronesian languages:南岛是对奥斯特罗尼西亚的义译）、美洲土著诸语群、汉藏语系

（Sino-Tibetan languages)、阿尔泰语系（Altaic languages)等语言群落的意义深远的研究工作也相继展开。

然而，如今的比较语言学已降格成为历史语言学学科业已开辟出来的广阔领域中一个分支。现在，对印欧语系的比较研究已经被高度专门化，对所属诸语后续演进的多项研究特别是对其中规范化现代变体的研究已经取得了成功。

初始，所有的现代语言学都是侧重于历史的，甚至连对现代方言的研究也包含了对语源考求。直到索绪尔将语言学一分为二，界定为共时（synchronic)和越时(diachronic)两大门类，该学科今天所呈现出的格局的基础才得以初步奠定。因越时语言现象被定义成了多个共时阶段的连续，于是语言学的重心倒向了共时方面。然而今天看来，索绪尔当初的界定方法是过于理想化了。在留声机发明之前纯粹的共时语言学对任何历史时期而言都是不可能存在的：书简上固化了的语言总是滞后于口头语言的发展，并且在现代出版系统通行之前，又总是很难精准地确定文献的著作年代。社会语言学学者的研究表明，共时的语言状态其内部也是不均匀的：年长者和年幼者话语习惯的差异暗示了语言变化的趋势。共时多样性理论的提出是语言学上的一大进步。

对语言生物学起源的探讨也是历史语言学范畴之内的一个课题，一个一直被搁置的课题，因为大多数的语言学家都认为那实在是太过遥远了，遥远到甚至虚无飘渺，很难想像单靠着比照法，能从连绠短汲深都不足以形容的那点实在有限的历史文献中找到什么有价值的线索。其他一些技术，比如大宗语汇比较（Mass lexical comparison）似乎有可能成为克服比较语言学极限的解决之道，不过多数语学家都对它的可靠性持怀疑态度。

有很多个对种族的（特别是史前时期的）群集和迁徙的猜想都建立在历史语言学发现的基础之上。不过，通过将语言史与考古的和遗传学的实证相互参照，人们发现，以语言作为种族确认的依据有时候并不可靠。

1，Work out the distinctive feature of the sounds given bellow.

[m]

[f]

[h]

[e]

[u]

Specify the difference between each pair of sounds using distinctive feature .

[l ] [r]

[t ] [d]

[i ] [u]

[ph] [ p]

2. Identify the meaning relation of the following pairs.

lion and cub

3, Work out a phrase structure grammar that can generate the structure of the following three sentences.

1) The little boy kicked the ball on the sports ground.

2) He runs fast.

3) We know the person who borrowed the book from the library.

短语结构语法（Phrase-structure grammar）

乔姆斯基用于阐明理解语言和语法的三种模式之一（另外两个是“有限状态语法”和“转换语法”）。它是与一种语言结构理论相关的语法形式，而这种理论是基于直接的结构分析或分解（源自拉丁文pars，即“部分”）。这种分析是把句子分解为各种组成的部分，然后赋予这些部分这样一些范畴，诸如名词、动词、副词等等。由此产生的语言就被称作短语结构语言。这种分析被明显地刻画为使用图表和引入把某些符号转换为其他符号的重写规则，譬如，把“句子”重写成“名词短语+动词短语”，又把“名词短语”重写成“冠词+名词”，等等。话语的不同部分在这种分析中不断地得到揭示。但这只能用在当我们知道我们想要推出什么样的句子的时候，它并没有展现不同句子之间直观到的内在关系。譬如，这种语法不能把“to be”

归为一种动词。因而，乔姆斯基认为这种语法不适合语言描述，并认为应该把它替换为转换生成语法。

Language production

More is known about language comprehension than about language production. This is perhaps because it is generally easier for an experimenter to exercise control over the comprehension material than to constrain a subject's language production. Furthermore, language production cannot be considered purely from the perspective of a theory of language. LANGUAGE PRODUCTION is very definitely a

goal-directed activity, in the sense that people speak and write in order to make friends, influence people, convey information, and so on.

The two forms of language production considered in this section are speech production and writing. Speech production has been investigated more thoroughly than writing, but the reasons for this are not clear.

7.3.1 Speech production

The usual approach in cognitive psychology is to set the subject a task, and then to assess how accurately or efficiently that task has been performed. This approach doesn't work, however, when we are investigating speech production. If we tell our subjects what we want them to say, then the spontaneity of normal speech is completely lost. If, on the other hand, we leave our subjects free to say whatever they like on a given topic, then we have very little experimental control over what is said. One approach is to ask people to speak on a particular topic, and to make a tape

recording of what they say. Another, more useful approach is to ask people to make a collection of the speech errors which they make in everyday speech.

At a theoretical level, a promising start has been made by Garrett(1976; 1984). He argued that producing speech is a much more complex matter than it might appear to be from our everyday experience. According to his model, there are altogether five different levels of representation involved in speaking a sentence, and they occur in the following sequence:

(1) The message-level representation: this is an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to communicate.

(2) The functional-level representation: this is an outline of the proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no actual words to fill the slots.

(3) The positional-level representation: this differs from the functional level representation in that it incorporates the words of the sentence that is to be produced.

(4) The phonetic-level representation: of the necessary information about the ways the intended sentence are pronounced.

(5) The articulatory-level representation: this is the final representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the words in the sentence in the correct order.

This complex theory of speech production has not as yet been tested thoroughly. However, there is support for some of its major assumptions. In essence, Garret ( 1984 ) claimed that the speaker engages in reasonably elaborate planning

before beginning to speak. One way of testing this notion is to consider the sorts of error that people make while talking. If, for example, sounds or words from the end of a sentence intrude into the early part of a sentence, then this provides evidence for the notion of forward planning. The classic error of this type is the SPOONERISM (or SLIP OF THE TONGUE), where the initial letter or letters of two words are transposed.

Other errors also demonstrate the existence of forward planning. An ANTICIPATION ERROR occurs when a word is spoken earlier in the sentence than it should be (e. g. The school is at school. ) A similar type of error is the EXCHANGE ERROR, in which two items within a sentence are swapped (e. g. This is the happiest life of my day. )

In general terms, the demands of speech production are so great that production of speech and planning for the next utterance are difficult to combine satisfactorily. Pauses are used in an attempt to ease these processing demands, but even with pauses, spontaneous speech is usually characterized by a variety of errors. The position is rather different when people have prepared the content (but not the wording) of what they intend to say (e.g. before a public lecture). Such prepared speech exhibits many fewer grammatical and stylistic errors than does spontaneous speech.

According to Garrett (1976; 1984 ), speakers decide on the grammatical structure of a proposed utterance in the functional-level representation, and then select the appropriate words to fit into that structure in the subsequent position-level representation. Given this sequence, it would be possible for the grammatical structure of a spoken sentence to be correct even though some of the words were incorrectly positioned. Precisely this is found with MORPHEME-EXCHANGE ERRORS, in which the roots or basic forms of two words are switched leaving the grammatical structure unchanged (e. g. He has already trunked two packs. )

Why is human speech production so prone to error? According to Dell (1986), it is the price we pay for having such a flexible speech- production system. Its flexibility has the great advantage of allowing us to produce novel sentences. Indeed, most speech errors involve novelty, but simply novelty of an unwanted kind. If we had a very rigid speech-production system, it might prevent errors from occurring, but we would suffer the disadvantage of very stereotyped utterances.