语言学问答题及答案

1.Why does modern linguistics regard the spoken form of language as primary, not the written?

First, the spoken form is prior to the writ-ten form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of language. Second, the spoken form plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed and it serves a wider range of purposes

Finally, the spoken form is the medium through which we acquire our mother tongue.

66. What are the major distinctions between langue and parole?

The distinction between langue, and parole was made by the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure early this century. 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.

2．What are the major views concerning the study of meaning? How do

they differ?

One of the oldest was the naming theory, proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato, who believed that the words used in a language are taken to be la-bels of the objects they stand for. The conceptualist view holds that there is no direct link between a lin-guistic form and what it refers to. The form and the meaning are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind. Contextualism is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. Two kinds of context are recognized; the situational context and the linguistic context.

For example, the meaning of the word "seal" in the sentence "The seal could not be found" can only be determined ac-cording to the context in which the sentence occurs:

The seal could not be found. The zoo keeper became worried.

(seal meaning an aquatic mammal)

The seal could not be found. The king became worried.

(seal meaning the king's stamp)

Behaviorism drew on behaviorist psychology when he tried to define the meaning of linguistic forms. Behaviorists attempted to de-fine the meaning of a language form as " the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer".

3.Discuss with examples some of the linguistic differences between Standard English and Black English.

One of the most prominent phonological characteristics of Black English is the frequent simplification of consonant clusters at the end of words when one of the two consonants is an alveolar /t/, /d/, /s/, or /z/. The application of this simplification rule may delete the past - tense morpheme, so "past "and "passed "are both pronounced like "pass."

Another salient characteristic of Black English phonological system con-cerns the deletion of some word-final stop consonants in words like "side" and "borrowed." Speakers of Black English frequently delete these word-fi-nal stops, pronouncing “side” like “sigh” and “borrowed” like “borrow.”

One prominent syntactic feature is the frequent absence of various forms of the copula "be" in Black English, which are required of Standard Eng-lish. Compare the following expressions in Black English and Standard Eng-lish:

(1) Black English Standard English

They mine. They' re mine.

You crazy. You re crazy.

Another distinctive syntactic feature of Black English is the systematic use of die expression "it is" where Standard English uses "there is " in the sense of “there exists” :

Is it a Mr. Johnson in this office?

Another aspect of Black English is the use of double negation constructions. Whenever the verb is negated, the indefinite pronouns "something", "some-body", and "some" become the negative indefinites "nothing", "nobody", and "none", for example:

He don't know nothing. (He doesn't know anything.)

4.How does a sentence meaning differ from an utterance meaning?

A sentence meaning is of-ten considered as the intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of a predication. It is abstract and independent of context. The meaning of an utterance is concrete, and context-dependent. The utterance meaning is based on sentence meaning; it is realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context. For example, “There is a dog at the door”. The speaker could utter it as a matter- of- fact state-ment, telling the hearer that the dog is at the door. The speaker could use it as a warning, asking the hearer not to approach the door. There are other

possibilities, too. So, the understanding of the utterance meaning of “There is a dog at the door” de-pends on the context in which it is uttered and the purpose for which the speaker utters it.