Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication
Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication

1 Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

1.Linguistics is the scientific study of language.

2.general linguistics is the study of language as a whole

3.prescriptive linguistic is to lay down rules for language user. Descriptive is to describe the language

phonemen a as they are .and is object and more scientific .

4.synchronic linguistic deal with the description of a language at some point of time in history .modern

linguistic is synchronic .diachronic deal with de description of a language as it change through time or study of it’s historical development over a period of time.

5.F.de Saussure define langue is the abstract linguistic system share by all the members of a speech

community .parole refers to realization of langue in actual use .

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,petence is the idea user’s knowledge of the rules of his language ,while performance is actual

realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.

7.the different between traditional grammar and modern grammar is that traditional grammar is

prescriptive, while modern grammar is descriptive that traditional grammar tend to emphasize the important of writing while modern grammar force language into a latin-base framework.

8.Charles Hockett design feature of language :①arbitrariness means language is arbitray by

nature ,ie,there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds . ②productivity refers to the fact that language makes possible construction and interpretation of new signals by it’s users.which is why they can produce and understand large number sentences including sentences they have never hear.③double articulation refers to the duality of structure .the fact that language is a system which consist of two set of structure or two levels .As lower or the base level there is a structure of sounds ,which meaningless by themselves ,but sounds of language can be regrouped and regrouped into a large number unit of meaning which are found at higher level of the system.

④displacement is the property that language can be used to refer to things which are present or

not present ,real or image matters ,in past ,present ,or future or in far- way place.This feature provides speakers with an opportunity to talk about a wide range of things.⑤cultural transmission refers to a fact that language is culturally trasmissed .in other words ,language is passed on from one generation to next through teaching and learning.

9.phonetics is the study of the phonic medium of language ;it is concerned with all the sounds that

occur in the world’s language.

10.语言学的三个分支:phonetics look at speech from three distinct but related perspective: the speaker,

the hearer and the way of sound travels ,this give rise to three branches of phonetics : articulatory phonetic ,auditory phonetic and acoustic phonetics .Articulatory phonetics is a study of sounds from speakers points of view .ie.How a speaker use his speech or gans to articulate the sounds.

A uditory phonetic is a study of sounds from the hearer’s point of view .ie. how the sounds are

perceive by the hearer . acoustic phonetic is a study of how sounds tavel by looking at the sound waves .the physical mean by which sounds are transimitted through the air from one person to another.

11.diacritics (语言符号)as some speech sounds produced differ only in some detailed aspect ,the IPA

provides its users with another set of symbols.

12.b road transcription is the transcription with letter symbols only .while narrow transcription is

the transcription with diacritic .for example ;the sound /l/ intranscription as dark or clear sound in different context .broad transcription is widely use in today’s text book and dictionary .

13.phonology and phonetics both study human sounds ,but they differ in their approach and

focus .phonology deal with how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are

uses to convey meaning in linguistic communication .phonetics ,however is interested in all human speech sounds and deal with how they are produced ,how they differ from each other .what phonetic feature they possess , how they can be classified and so on.

14.phone is a phonetic unit or segment .the speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic

communication .

15.phoneme is a phononlogical unit ;it is a unit that is of distinctive value;it is an abstract unit.it

is not any particular sound ,but rather it is represented pr realize by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context.

16.allophone is that the different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic

environment .

17.phonemic contras t(音位对立);it can be easy to observe that phonetically similar sounds might be

relatedin two ways .if they are two distinctive phones ,.eg /p/and /b/ in /pit/and /bit/.

18.minimal pair is such a pair of different forms as identical in every way except for one sound segment

which occurs in the same place in the strings(as pill and till)

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,plementary distribution (互补分布) arises when allophone of phone are related to each other

in that they do not distinguish meaning but complement each other in distribution.

20.sequential rulers(序列规则);theletter :k b I l .if you are asked to arrange these cards to form

all the “possible”words in English ,you might order them as:blik kilb bilk, kilb. your knowledge tells you that these are the only arrangements of these phonemes permissible in English ,and that lbki,likb, bkil ilkb,are not possible words in English .this indicates that there are rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language.

21.Assimilation rules is the rules that assimilates one sound to another by “copying” a feature

of sequential phoneme thus making the two phones similar (as in “impossible”)

22.superasegmental features(超切分特征the phonemic features that occurs above the level of the

segments

23.intonation is the collective expresstion of meaning when pitch ,stress ,and sound ,length are tied

to the sentences rather than the word in isolation .

chapter3

24.open class words is are the content words of a language to whose classes new words can be regular

added as nouns verbs adjective and adverbs in English .

25.close class words include grammatical or functional words,to whose classes new words are not usually

added as conjunctions preposition articles and pronoun in English .

26.Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words ,and the rules by which words are

formed.

27.morphemes refers the most basic element of meaning is traditionally .

28.derivational morphemes are morphemes (such as –ic and ism) that can be conjoined to other morphemes

or words to derive a new words .

29.inflectional morphemes are morphemes (such as “-s”‘-es’‘-ed’and ‘-ing’)that are bound to

other morphemes or words without changing their synatatic category .

chapter 4 syntax

30.syntax is a branch of linguistic that studies how words are combined too form sentences and rules

that govern the formation of sentences.

31.syntactic categories 句法范畴 a fundamental fact about words in all human language is that they can

be grouped together into a relatively small number of class

32.phrases that formed more than one word usually contain the following element ;head ,specifier and

complement.

33.phrase structure rule ;as we seen .a certain words can only concur with certain other words .there

must be certain grammatical mechanism that ensures the appropriate position that specifiers ,heads ,and complement occupy in phrase structure .such type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of element that make up of phrase .

34.the xp rule ;xp –(specifier )x (complement)

35.coordination rule 并列规则 English contains others type of structure as well ,for example ;some

structure of the same type with help of a conjunction such as ‘and’’or ’

36.specifiers标识语 have both special semantic and syntactic roles,they help make more precise the

meaning of the head .they typically mark a phrase boundary.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,plemen t补语短语;the sentence introduced by complementizer is called a complement clause ,thus

the whole italicized part in the above sentence .

38.modifier修饰语the most common modifier of ns are adjective phrase and those of verbs are adverb

phrase and prepositional prase which describe manner and time .modifiers in English vary in terms of their position with respect to the head .

39.auxiliary movement 助动词移位according to xp rule,the auxiliary is the head of a sentence which takes

a vp category as its complement on the right and NP ,the subject ,as its specifier on the left.

40.inversion 倒装moves the auxiliary from the infl position to a position to the left of the subject.

41.Do insertion do的插入;insert interrogative do into an empty infl position .

42.deep structure 深层结构 formed by the xp rule in according with the head’s subcategorization

properties.

43.surfacestructure表层结构corresponding to the final syntactic form of the sentence which result

from appropriate.

44.WH movement ;move the wh phrase to beginning of the sentence. For example ;what can you see in the

picture.

Chapter5 semantics

45.semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning.

46.The naming theory, proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato, is one of the oldest notions conc erning meaning, according to

which, the linguistic forms or symbols, in other words, the words used in a language are simply labels of the objects they st and for, and words are just names or labels for things.

47.Conceptualism holds the view that relates words and things through the mediation of concepts of the mind

48.Contextualis m holds the view that meaning should be studied in terms of situation, use, context–elements closely linked with

language behaviour.

49.Behaviorism holds the view that the meaning of a la nguage form is the ‘situation in which the speaker utters it and the response

it calls forth in the hearer.

50. Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguist ic

form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in, like the definition of ‘dog’ as ‘a domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form’.

51.Reference means 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. For instance, if we say ‘The dog is barking’, we must be talking about

a certain dog in the situation; here, ‘dog’refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference

of the word ‘dog’ in this particular situation.

52.synonymy同义关系refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning .synonyms同义词words are

close in

meaning .

53.dialectal synonyms use in the different regional dialect. For example ,british English and American

English are two major geographical varieties of the English languge.

54.collocational synonyms ;some synonyms differ in their collocation .i.e in the words they go together

with .

55.polysemy 多义现象while different words may have the same or similar meaning,the same one word may

have more than one meaning .

56.homonymy同音异议refers to the phenomenon that words having different meaning have the same form.

57.homophones同音异议词 ;when the two words identical in sound.

58.homographs同形异议词when the two words identical in spelling .

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,plete homonyms 完全同音异义词;when the two words are identical in both sound and spelling .

60.Predication refers to the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence; it consists of ‘argument(s)’and ‘p redicate’. An argument

is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal element(s) in a sentence. A predicate is someth ing said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.

61.Selectional restrictions refer to the constraints on what lexical items can go with what others

62.Grammaticality refers to the grammatical meaning of a linguistic unit (such as ‘a sentence’), which is governed by the grammatical

rules of the language.

63.hyponymy下义关系refers to the sense relation between a more general more inclusive word and more

specific word .the word which is more general in meaning is called spuperodinate,上座标词。And the word more specific words are called its hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are called co-hyponyms.

64.X entails Y (Y is an entailment X) for example;X: he has been to France. Y: he has been to Europe.

65.X presupposes Y(X is a prerequisite of Y) for example; X: Mike’s bike needs repairing. Y; Mike’s

has a bike.

66.Semantic feature refers to that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components.

Chapter 6 pragmatics 语用学

67.Pragmatics can be defined in various ways ;a general definition is that is the study of how speakers

of a language use sentences to effect successful communication.

68.Constatives are statements that either state or describe, and thus verifiable (‘The dress is red’).

69.Expressives are the speaker’s attempts to express his feelings or attitude towards an existing state, e.g. ‘I’m sorry for

being late.’, ‘It’s very kind of you to give me advice.’

70.Performatives are sentences that do not state a fact or describ e a state, and are not verifiable (‘I name this ship Elizabeth’).

71.Directives are the speaker’s attempts to get the hearer to do something, e.g. ‘Turn on the light!’, ‘You’d better read the

book.’, ‘Your money or your life!

72.Illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention, the act performed in saying something.

73.Declarations are the speaker’s attempts to bring about immediate changes by saying (declaring) something, e.g. ‘I now declare

the meeting open.’, ‘I fire you!’

74.Utterance meaning is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or in a context.

75.Locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses, the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon

and phonology.

76.Sentence meaning is the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,missives are the speaker’s attempts to commit the speaker himself to some future course of action, e.g. ‘I promise to come.’,

‘I will call you tomorrow mor ning without fail.

78.’Representatives are the speaker’s attempts to state or describe, say what the speaker believes to be true, e.g. ‘I have never

been to England before.’, ‘The man is a rich man.’perlocutionary act

79.Perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something, the consequence of, or the change brought about

by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something.

80.Conversational implicature is a nonconventional implicature based on an addressee’s assumption that the sp eaker is following

the conversational maxims or at least the cooperative principle. It occurs when any of the four maxims is violated.

81.The relation between pragmatics and semantics is that both are linguistic studies of meaning. But they differ in that sem antics

traditionally studies meanings of words, meanings of sentences in isolation from language use, whereas pragmatics studies mea nings in the context of language use.

82.Context is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer (e.g. knowledge of the language

they use, knowledge of what has been said before, knowledge about the world in general, knowledge about the specific situation in which linguistic communication is taking place, and knowledge about each other).

Chapter 7 language change

83.Change in negation rule refers the fact that as late 15t h and 16t h centuries ,one could merely add not at the end of an affirmative

sentence to negate it . in modern English ,not must precede the main verb ,and do ,marked for the proper tense ,must be inserted .

84.vocabulary change can be include: 1,addition of new words .2,loss of words.3, changes in the meaning of words.

85.Borrowing refers to the use of words in a language from another language of a different culture, e.g. i n English, bonus—Latin;

dinner—French.

86.Functional shift refers to the phenomenon of words shifting from one part of speech to another without the addition of affixes,

e.g. shoulder (n.)—shoulder (v.).

87.An acronym is a word derived from the initials of several words, e.g. IT—information technology; WTO—World Trade Organization.

88.Blending refers to the formation of a word by combining parts of other words, e.g. smog—smoke + fog; motel—motor + hotel.

89.Back-formation refers to the formation of a word by ‘subtracting’an affix thought to be part of the old word, e.g. edit—editor;

beg—beggar.

90.Clipping refers to the abbreviation of longer words or phrases, e.g. gym—gymnasium, mike—microphone.

91.widening of lexical meaning: The meaning of a word may change through time. The widening of lexical meaning is one kind of change

in the meaning of a word. This refers to the case when the meaning of a word becomes broader, that word means everything it u sed to mean, and then more. Take the word ‘tail’for instance. It once referred to ‘the tail of a horse’. But now it is used to mean ‘the tail of any animal’.

92.narrowing of lexical meaning:Th is refers to the case that in the course of several generations, semantic change has narrowed the meaning of a word to what it is in Modern English. Take the word ‘girl’for instance. It once meant ‘young person of either sex’but now means ‘young people of female se x

Chapter 8 language and society

92.Sociolinguistic is the sub-field of linguistics that studies the relation between language and society ,between the uses of language

the social structures in which the users of language live .

93.Macro-sociolinguistics refers to the study of society as a whole, and of how language functions in it and how it reflects the

social differentiations, i.e., a bird’s-eye view of the languages used in society.

94.Bilingualism refers to the case in which two languages are used side by side with each having a different role to play, and language

switching occurs when the situation changes.

95.Speech variety refers to a ny distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or a group of speakers. It is also termed ‘language

variety’.

96.Dialect is a personal dialect of an individual speaker that combines elements regarding regional, social, gender, and age

variations.

97.According to M.A. K. Halliday,register refers to the type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation.

98.Ethnic dialect is a social dialect of a language that cuts across regional differences; it is mainly spoken by a less privile ged

population that has experienced some form of social isolation such as racial discrimination or segregation

99.Speech community refers to the social group that is singled out for any special study. For general linguistics, it is a group

of people who form a community and share the same language or a particular variety of a language.

100.Regional dialect is a linguistic variety used by people living in the same geographical region.

101.Diglossia refers to a sociolinguistic situation where two varieties of a language exist s ide by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play.

102.A pidgin is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it is used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading.

103.Linguistic repertoire refers to the totality of linguistic varieties possessed by an individual.

104.A Creole is a pidgin which has become the primary language of a speech community and which is acquired by the children of that speech community as their native language.

105.Sociolec t refers to the linguistic variety characteristic of a particular social class.

106.Standard dialect is a superimposed, socially prestigious dialect of a language. It is the language employed by the government and the judiciary system, used by the mas s media, and taught in educational institutions. It is a particular variety of a language in that it is not related to any particular group of language users, but it is the variety which any member of a speech commu nity can possibly use regardless of his social and geographical backgrounds, his gender and age.

107.In a broad sense, culture means the total way of life of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. In a narrow sense, it may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture, etc.

108.The three social variables of register are field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. Field of discourse refers to what is going on: the area of operation of the language activity. It answers the questions of ‘why’and ‘about what’communication takes place. Tenor of discourse refers to the role of relationship in the situation in question: who the participants in the communication groups are and in what relationship they stand to each other. It answers the question of ‘to whom’the speaker is communicating. Mode of discourse mainly refers to the means of communi cation. It is concerned with ‘how’communication is carried out.

Chapter 9 language and Culture

109.Linguistic relativity refers to the fact that different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around, and they think and speak differently.

110.Denotative meaning is the meaning that can be found in a dictionary.

111.Iconic meaning refers to the meaning when a word invokes images to people.

112.Connotative meaning refers to the meaning triggered by a word through association

113.Material culture is the concrete, substantial and observable aspect of the life of a people.

114.Spiritual culture is mostly the abstract, ambiguous, and hidden aspect of the life of a people, or the products of mind (such as ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space).

115.Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis;According to Sapir and Whorf, language filters people’s perception and the way they categorize experiences.

This is termed Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It comes in two versions, the strong and weak versions. The strong version holds tha t

the language patterns determine people’s thinking and behavior. The weak version holds that the language patterns influence people’s thinking and behavior.

Chapter 10 language acquisition

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,nguage acquisition refers to the child’s acquisition of his moth er tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community.

117.Atypical development refers to the abnormal language development in linguistics, which includes hearing impairment, mental retardation, autism, stuttering, aphasia, dyslexia, and dysgraphia.

118.Aphasia refers to the partial or total loss of language due to brain damage.

Dyslexia

119.Dyslexia refers to the disorders in reading which may be acquired or developmental.

120.Mental retardation refers to the language impairment of mental ability that may cause a delayed language acquisition. 121.Universal Grammar refers to the innate endowment to discover language’s structure by matching the innate knowledge of basic grammatical system to that particular language.

122.Dysgraphia refers to the disorders in writing which may be acquired or developmental.

123.The innatist view of language acquisition is that human beings are biologically programmed for language and that the language develops in the child just as other biological functions such as walki ng. This innate ability is first referred to as Language Acquisition Device (LAD), and later as Universal Grammar (UG). Chomsky holds that if children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which their own language makes use of these principles and the variations on those principles which may exist in the particular language they are learning.

124.The interactionist view of language acquisition is that language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops.

125.The Critical Period Hypothesis ref ers to the specific and limited time period for language acquisition. It has two versions.

The strong version suggests that children must acquire thei r first language by puberty or they will never be able to learn from subsequent exposure. The weak version holds that language learning will be more difficult and incomplete after puberty. 126.The behaviourist view of language acquisition is that language is behavior and that language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation.

127.Motherese is a “special”speech adults use in talking to little children with slow rate of speech, high pitch, rich intonation, shorter and simpler sentence structures,frequent repetition, paraphrasing and limited vocabulary. It is also termed ‘caretaker talk’ or child directed speech.

128.Under-extension refers to the phenomenon of a child denying some fact due to his lack of adequate knowledge, e.g. a child may say that birds are not animals.

129.Telegraphic speech refers to content words which give us the information and which lack the function elements.

130.Over-extension refers to the phenomenon of a child taking a property of an object and generalizing it inappropriately, e.g.

‘apple’ for ‘all fruit’ or ‘anything round’

Chapter 11 second language acquisition

131.Interlingual errors refer to errors mainly resulting from cross-linguistic interference at different levels such as phonological, lexical, grammatical or discoursal, etc.

132.Affect strategies are strategies that deal with the ways learners interact or communicate with other speakers, native or non-native. 133.Cognitive strategies are strategies involved in analyzing, synthesis, and internalizing what has been learned.

134.Learning strategies are learners’conscious goal-oriented and problem-solving based efforts to achieve learning efficiency. 135.Resultative motivation refers to the drive that learners learn a second language for external purposes.

136.Contrastive analysis is a kind of analysis which compares features of the native language and target language (the forms and meanings) to spot the mismatches or differences so that people could predict learners’ difficulty.

137.Metacognitive strategies are the techniques in planning, monitoring and e valuating one’s learning.

138.Intrinsic motivation refers to the drive that learners learn a second language for enjoyment or pleasure from learning. 139.Error analysis refers to the analysis of learners’errors, which involves first independently or objectively, describing the learners’interlanguage, then a comparison of their version of the target language and the target language itself is followed to locate mismatches.

140.According to Selinker, interlanguage refers to an abstract system of learner’s target languag e system. It has now been widely used to refer to the linguistic expressions learners produce especially the wrong or not idiomatic ones.

141.Instrumental motivation occurs when people learn a foreign language for external goals such as passing exams, financial rewards or furthering a career, etc.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c6606589.html,nguage aptitude in second language acquisition refers to a natural ability for learning a second language.

143.Interference is the negative or distorting effect that new learning can have on previous learning or that pr evious learning can have on new learning.

144.Intralingual errors refer to errors mainly resulting from faulty or partial learning of the target language, independent of the native language, which include learning strategies-based errors, communication strategies-based errors, induced errors, and some compound and ambiguous errors.

145.Integrative motivation refers to the drive that people learn a foreign language because of the wish to identify with the target culture.

146.Fossilization refers to a process occurring from time to time in which incorrect linguistic features become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes a language.

Chapter 12 language and brain

147.Neurolinguistics is the study of the relationship between brain and language. It includes researc h into how the structure of the brain influences language learning, how and in which parts of the brain language is stored, and how damage to the brain affects the ability to use language.

148.Psycholinguistics is the study of language processing; it is concer ned with the processes of language comprehension and production. 149.Top-down processing refers to the spontaneous and automatic interpretation of a sentence on the basis of whatever information is available before the analysis of all the phonemes in the sente nce.

150.Bottom-up processing is such an inductive analysis as to perform phonetic analysis, when one hears a sentence, to isolate phonemes and word boundaries, and to relate these to representations in the mental lexicon.

151.A garden path sentence is an awkward sentence that misleads the syntactic parser and takes it down the garden path to the wrong analysis, e.g. “The horse raced past the barn fell.”

152.Minimal attachment strategy is that we prefer attaching new items into the phrase marker being constructed using the fewest syntactic nodes consistent with the rules of the language, e.g.

Ernie kissed Marcie and her sister …

It could be either

Ernie kissed [Marcie and her sister]… (minimal attachment)or

[Ernie kissed Marcie] and [her sister

158.Spoonerism is a kind of humorous slips of tongue, named after the Victorian cleric and teacher, W. A. Spooner, who was infamo us for blundering through many lectures or sermons with humorous speech errors such as below:

What he intended:

You have wasted the whole term.

What he said:

You have tasted the whole worm.

综合分析题:

1.Analyze the design features of following words (a)bang (b) book

Human language different from animal language in a number ways .for instance;human language has design features of arbitrainess,producitivity,double articulation ,displacement and culture transimission. In the case of the word “book”it is a symbol that fifts into design feature of arbitraries. It is created arbitrary or there is no logical relation between the symbol itself and thing or meaning it refers to .most word in a language have this feature .the word bang is on other hand ,is a case against the feature of arbitrariness that is a symbol has a logical relation to what it means .the words is an onomatopoeic word,but such words only occupy a very small protion ,is also not affect the feature of arbitrariness of language .

2. Analyze the morphemes of following words.

(a) disagreement (b)modernization

There are three morphemes in the word “disagreement”. ”dis”is prefix ,and a bound morpheme ,which can not occur alone .”argee” is the root and a free morpheme which can occur freely in language use. “ment”is a surffix and a bound morpheme ie.it can not be used alone either .and there are three morpheme in word “modernnization” where “moder”is the root morpheme .”-ize”is it’s the second and bound morpheme .and “-ation”its third and bound morpheme.

3.Analyze Speaker A's presupposition in the following dialogue and its possible effect on Speaker B:

A: (The first time to invite B to see a film) Hello, Mary. This is John speaking.

B: Hi, John.

A: Which film do you would like to see with me tonight, Titanic, or Love Me Again?

B: Well, ...

答案:Speaker A's presupposition in the dialogue is Mary has promised to see a film with John that evening. He made this suppositio n probably because he was afraid of Mary's refusal to go to see the movie with him. Therefore, he asked Mary to make a choice out of two films instead. The possible effect is that if Mary was careless, or she liked him very much, or she was in love with him,then she might accept his assumption and went with him to enjoy the film. If she was very careful, or she did not like him, then the presupposition might have little effect on her, and she might well decline his invitation.

4. Analyze the following dialogue by applying the Cooperative Principle:

A: Where is John?

B: He must be somewhere in the city.

答案:The Cooperative Principle refers to the general principle that in making conversation, the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate, or it would be impossible for them to carry on the talk. 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. It comprises four maxims: of quantity, quality, relation, and manner. The violation of any of these maxims results in what Grice terms conversational implicature. In the dialogue given, Speaker B violates the maxim of quality. One possible interpretation is th at he does not want to let A know about John.

5. Analyze the following dialogue by applying the speech act theory:

Father said to Son: You got up late again today.

答案:According to Austins’new model of speech acts, a speaking might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locut ionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act.

In this example, Father’s words might mean his performing three acts at the same time:

Locutionary act: uttering of the sentence “You got up late again today ”.

Illocutionary act: asking Son to change his bad habit of getting up late.

Perlocutionary act: Son’s actual act of changing, or sticking to, his bad habit of getting up late in the coming days.

6. What are causes of language change?

答案:Language change can be attributed to a varie ty of factors. Some language changes may be easy to explain, but others may be difficult to account for.

For instance, it is clear to us that the rapid development of science and technology has led to the creation of many new word s (such as ‘telecom’, ‘fax’). In addition, social and political changes and political needs have supplied the English vocabulary with a great quantity of new words and expressions (such as ‘hot line’, ‘shuttle diplomacy’). What is more, as more and more women have taken up activities formerly reserved for men, more neutral job titles (such as ‘chairperson’, ‘police officer’) have been created. Furthermore, the way acquire the language also provides a basic cause of change. Still another source of change whic h can be regarded as ‘economy of memory’results in grammar simplification (such as ‘agendum—agenda/agendums’). It is true that there is no single cause of language change. When we account for language change, we may find it quite a complicated phenomenon.

7,What are the recent trends of the English language?

答案:The recent trends of the English language include moving towards greater informality, the influence of American English, and the influence of science and technology.

8. ,What is the Input Hypothesis?

答案:According to Krashen, the only way learners can acquire language is by receiving comprehensible input, which is defined as ‘i+1’, where ‘i’represents learners’current state of knowledge, and the next stage is an ‘i+1’. That is, learners have to receive input that is just beyond their competence but not beyond their understanding. This is termed the Input Hypothesis. However, this hypothesis was later modified so that comprehensible input was a necessary but not sufficient condition for acquisition. Lear ners have to also have the right environment and circumstances to allow comprehensible input to work. A learner's affective filter has to be low; they have to be free of stress and motivated.

9,What is minimal attachment strategy?

答案:Minimal attachment strategy is that we prefer attaching new items into the phrase marker being constructed using the fewest syntactic nodes consistent with the rules of the language, e.g.

Ernie kissed Marcie and her sister …

It could be either

Ernie kissed [Marcie and he r sister]… (minimal attachment)or

[Ernie kissed Marcie] and [her sister …]

10,What is Spoonerism?

答案:Spoonerism is a kind of humorous slips of tongue, named after the Victorian cleric and teacher, W. A. Spooner, who was infamo us for blundering through many lectures or sermons with humorous speech errors such as below:

What he intended:

You have wasted the whole term.

What he said:

You have tasted the whole worm.

11.What is overgeneralization?

答案:Overgeneralization is the use of previously available strategies in new situations, which results in mistakes, e.g.

The girl is in a blue ski jacket.

The girl is dressed in a blue ski jacket.

* The girl is worn in a blue ski jacket.

12,What is cross-association?

答案:Cross-association refers to the internal interference, or the close association of the two similar linguistic forms which leads to confusion, e.g.*The apricot is too sour to eat it. [I can’t eat it.]

相关主题
相关文档
最新文档