语言学答疑

〈语言学〉答疑库

1. Explain the following definition of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of

language.

Key: Linguistics investigates not any particular language, but languages in general.

Linguistic study is scientific because it is based on the systematic investigation of

authentic language data. No serious linguistic conclusion is reached until after the

linguist has done the following three things: observing the way language is actually

used, formulating some hypotheses, and testing these hypotheses against linguistic

facts to prove their validity.

2. Is modern linguistics mainly synchronic or diachronic? Why?

Key: Modern linguistics is mainly synchronic, focusing on the present-day language.

Unless the various states of a language are successfully studied, it will not be possible

to describe language from a diachronic point of view.

3. How is Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole similar to Chomsky’s

distinction between competence and performance?

Key: Both Saussure and Chomsky make the distinction between the abstract language

system and the actual use of language. Their purpose is to single out the language

system for serious study.

4. What features of human language have been specified by C. Hockett to show that it

is essentially different from any animal communication system?

Key: Arbitrariness--- a sign of sophistication only humans are capable of

Creativity--- animals are quite limited in the messages they are able to send

Duality--- a feature totally lacking in any animal communication

Displacement--- No animal can “talk” about things removed from the immediate

situation

Cultural transmisson--- Details of human language system are taught and learned

while animals are born with capacity to send out certain signals as a means of limited

communication

5 What are the two major media of communication? Of the two, which one is primary

and why?

Key: Speech and writing. Speech is considered primary over writing. The reason are:

speech is prior to writing in language evolution, speech plays a greater role in daily

communication, and speech is the way in which people acquire their native language.

6 What are the three branches of phonetics? How do they contribute to the study of

speech sounds?

Key: Articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.

Articulatory phonetics describes the way our speech sounds and how they differ.

Auditory phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, and reaches the

important conclusion that phonetic identity is only a theoretical ideal.

Acoustic phonetics studies the physical properties of speech sounds, the way sounds

travel from the speaker to the hear.

7 What is voicing and how is it caused?

Key: An articulatory dimension of speech sound production. It distinguishes meaning

in many languages such as English; therefore it is a phonological feature. It is caused

by the vibration of the vocal cords.

8 Explain with examples how broad transcription and narrow transcription differ?

Key: Broad transcription---one letter symbol for one sound

Narrow transcription---diacritics are added to the one-letter symbols to show the

finer differences between sounds.

9 How do phonetics and phonology differ in their focus of study?

Key: Phonetics: description of all speech sounds and their fine differences.

Phonology: description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds

function to distinguish meaning.

10What is a phone? How is it different from a phoneme? How are allophones related

to a phoneme?

Key: Phone--- a speech sound, a phonetic unit.

Phonology---a collection of abstract sound features, a phonological unit.

Allophones---actual realizations of a phoneme in different phonetic contexts.

11 What is a minimal pair and what is a minimal set? Why is it important to identify

the minimal set in a language?

Key: Minimal pair---Two sound combination identical in every way except in one

sound element that occurs in the same position.

Minimal set---A group of sound combinations with the above feature.

By identifying the minimal pairs or the minimal set of a language, a phonologist

can identify its phonemes.

12 What are suprasegmental feature? How do the major suprasegmental features of

English function in conveying meaning?

Key: Suprasengmental features---phonological features above the sound segment

level.

The major suprasegmental features in English---word stress, sentence stress,

intonation.

13 What are the main features of the English compounds?

Key: Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words

with or without a hyphen in between.

Syntactically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calculable from the

meanings of all its components.

Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.

14 Morpheme is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between

expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one?

What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic

whole?

Key: Since morpheme is defined as the smallest unit interms of relationship between

expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and the semantic

aspect of linguistic unit. A morpheme may overlap with a phoneme, such as I , but

usually not, as in pig, in which the morpheme is the whole word, i.e. an independent,

free morpheme, but the phonemes are/p/, /I /, and /g/.

15 Why is it important to know the relationships a sign has with others, such as

syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?

Key: As the relation between a signifier and its signified is arbitrary, the value of a

sign cannot be determined by itself. To know the identity of a sign, the linguist will

have to know the signs it is used together with and those it is substitutable for. The

former relation is known as syntagmatic and the latter paradigmatic.

16 How can the surface structure become the sole responsible structure for semantic

interpretation?

Key: This is mainly achieved by the introduction of trace theory. That is, after the

movement of any element, there will be a trace left in the original position, which is

represented by the better in the tree diagram. And the deep structure information

concerning the underlying syntactic relations between words, such as the subject in

the passive is the logical object, will be captured by the trace in the surface structure.

17 What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Key: Sense refers to the inherent meaning of a linguistic form, which is a collection of

semantic meanings, abstract and decontextualized. Reference is what a linguistic form

refers to in the real world; it is a matter of the relationship between the form and the

reality.

18 Explain with examples “homonymy,”, “polysemy”, and “hyponymy”.

Key: Homonymy---identical in form (either in sound or in spellin, or in both) but

different in meaning, e.g. night-knight, lead v.-lead n., bank (a financial

institution)-bank (side of a river)

Polysemy---one form having more than one meaning, e.g. earth our planet, the

soil on its surface

Hyponymy---relation of semantic inclusion between a word which is more

general and a word which is more specific, e.g. furniture- table.

19 In what way is componential analysis similar to the analysis of phonemes into

distinctive features?

Key: In the light of componential analysis, the meaning of a word consists of a

number distinctive meaning features; the analysis breaks down the meaning of the

word into these features; it is these different features that distinguish word meaning.

Similarly, a phoneme is considered as a collection of distinctive sound features; a

phoneme can be broken down into these distinctive sound features and it is these

sound features that distinguish different sounds.

20What is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence

semantically meaningless?

Key: Grammaticality---the grammatical well-formedness of a sentence. A sentence

may be well-formed grammatically, i.e. it conforms to the grammatical rules of the

language, but it is not necessarily semantically well-formed, i.e., it may not make

sense at all.

21What does pragmatics study? How does it differ from traditional semantics?

Key: Pragmatics studies how meaning is conveyed in the process of communication.

The basic difference between pragmatics and traditional semantics is that pragmatics

considers meaning in context and traditionally semantics studies meaning in isolation

from the context of use.

22 How is the notion of context interpreted?

Key: Context is regarded as constituted by all kinds of knowledge assumed to be

shared by the speaker and the hearer.

23How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?

Key: Utterance-meaning is based on sentence-meaning; the former is concrete and

context-dependent and the latter is abstract and decontextualized.

24 According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly performing while

making an utterance. Give an example.

Key: Locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.

Example omitted.

25 What are the five types of illocutionary speech acts Searle has specified? What is

the illocutionary point of each type?

Key: Representative---stating what the speaker believes to be true

Directive---trying to get the hearer to do something

Commissive—committing the speaker himself to some future action

Expressive---expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state

Declaration---bringing about immediate changes by saying something

26 What are the four maxims of the CP? How does the violation of these maxims give

rise to conversational implicatures?

Key: Maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation, maxim of manner.

Examples omitted.

27. Why do we say tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear

structure in analyzing the constituent relationship among linguistic elements? Support

your statement with examples.

Key: In addition to revealing a linear order, a constituent structure tree has a

hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the

syntactic category of each structural constituent, and consequently is believed to most

truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements. For

example, the phrase " the old men and women" may have two interpretations, i.e. the

adjective "old” may modify the noun "men", or the following two nouns "men and

women". Linear order analysis cannot tell this difference, so it is ambiguous. Whereas,

the constituent or tree diagrams analysis can make this difference clear. So, we say

tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure analysis.

NP NP

NP NP NP NP

The old men and the women the old men and the old

women

28 Characterize the nature of language change.

Key: All living languages change with time. Language change is not only universal

and inevitable, but also systematic, extensive, ongoing, and gradual. Language change

is a rule-governed behavior, involving all components of the grammar.

29 Explain the purpose o reconstruction in historical linguistics and the method

employed by historical linguists.

Key: Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of somparative

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.

30What distinction, if any, can you draw between bilingualism and diglossia?

Key: Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are

used in a speech community; whereas in a diglossic community, two varieties of

language are used for different situations, one being more standard and higher, and

used for more formal matters, and the other less prestigious, and used for colloquial

situations.

31Describe three features of Black English, including at least one phonological and

one syntactic characteristics.

Key: 1) One of the phonological features of Black English is the simplification of a

consonant cluster at the end of a word by dropping the word-final phoneme. As a

result, for example, “pass”, “past” and “passed”, are all pronounced the way as “pass”

is.

2) One of the syntactic features of Black English is the constant absence of the

copula, such in “ That mine” and “The coffee cold.”

3) Another syntactic feature that characterizes Black English is the double

negation construction with sentences like “ I don’t know nobody” and “ He don’t go

nowhere.”