Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. 2. Linguistics studies particular language, not languages in general. 3. A scientific study of language is based on what the linguist thinks.
4. In the study of linguistics, hypotheses formed should be based on language facts and checked against the observed facts.
5. General linguistics is generally the study of language as a whole.
6. General linguistics, which relates itself to the research of other areas, studies the basic concepts, theories, descriptions,
models and methods applicable in any linguistic study.
7. Phonetics is different from phonology in that the latter studies the combinations of the sounds to convey meaning in
communication.
8. Morphology studies how words can be formed to produce meaningful sentences.
9. The study of the ways in which morphemes can be combined to form words is called morphology.
10. Syntax is different from morphology in that the former not only studies the morphemes, but also the combination of
morphemes into words and words into sentences. 11. The study of meaning in language is known as semantics.
12. Both semantics and pragmatics study meanings.
13. Pragmatics is different from semantics in that pragmatics studies meaning not in isolation, but in context.
14. Social changes can often bring about language changes. 15. Sociolinguistics is the study of language in relation to society. 16. Modern linguistics is mostly prescriptive, but sometimes descriptive.
17. Modern linguistics is different from traditional grammar.
18. A diachronic study of language is the description of language at some point in time. 19. Modern linguistics regards the written language as primary, not the written language. 20. The distinction between competence and performance was proposed by F. de Saussure. Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given: 21. Chomsky defines “competence” as the ideal user’s k__________ of the rules of his language.
22. Langue refers to the a__________ linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community while the parole
is the concrete use of the conventions and application of the rules.
23. D_________ is one of the design features of human language which refers to the phenomenon that language consists
of two levels: a lower level of meaningless individual sounds and a higher level of meaningful units.
24. Language is a system of a_________ vocal symbols used for human communication.
25. The discipline that studies the rules governing the formation of words into permissible sentences in languages is called
s________.
26. Human capacity for language has a g_______ basis, but the details of language have to be taught and learned.
27. P _______ refers to the realization of langue in actual use.
28. Findings in linguistic studies can often be applied to the settlement of some practical problems. The study of such
applications is generally known as a________ linguistics.
29. Language is p___________ in that it makes possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by its users. In other words, they can produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences which they have never heard before.
30. Linguistics is generally defined as the s _______ study of language.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
31. If a linguistic study describes and analyzes the language people actually use, it is said to be _______. A. prescriptive A. Arbitrariness A. primary
B. analytic B. Displacement B. correct
C. descriptive C. Duality C. secondary
D. linguistic D. Meaningfulness
D. stable
32. Which of the following is not a design feature of human language? 33. Modern linguistics regards the written language as _______.
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34. In modern linguistics, speech is regarded as more basic than writing, because _______.
A. in linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing
B. speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed C. speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue
D. All of the above
35. A historical study of language is a _______ study of language.
A. synchronic
B. diachronic
C. prescriptive
D. comparative
36. Saussure took a(n) _______ view of language, while Chomsky looks at language from a ________ point of view.
A. sociological…psychological
C. applied…pragmatic
community.
A. parole A. sense
B. performance B. sounds
_______,
A. displacement C. flexibility
instinct.
A. learning 41. Linguistics 44. Pragmatics 47. Phonetics 50. Sociolinguistics 53. Productivity 56. Design Features
59. Langue
B. teaching
42. Phonology 45. Psycholinguistics 48. Morphology 51. Applied Linguistics 54. Displacement 57. Competence 60. Parole
C. books
D. both A and B 43. Syntax 46. Language 49. Semantics 52. Arbitrariness 55. Duality 58. Performance
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
B. duality D. cultural transmission
C. langue C. objects
D. Language D. ideas
38. Language is said to be arbitrary because there is no logical connection between _______ and meanings. 39. Language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. This feature is called
B. psychological…sociological
D.semantic…linguistic
37. According to F. de Saussure, _______ refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the mem- bers of a speech
40. The details of any language system is passed on from one generation to the next through _______, rather than by
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary: 61. Language is generally defined as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human commu- nication. Explain it in
detail.
62. What are the design features of human language? Illustrate them with examples.
63. How is modern linguistics different from traditional grammar?
64. How do you understand the distinction between a synchronic study and a diachronic study? 65. Why does modern linguistics regard the spoken form of language as primary, not the written?
66. What are the major distinctions between langue and parole? 67. How do you understand competence and performance?
68. Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole seems similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and
performance. What do you think are their major differences? 69. Do you think human language is entirely arbitrary? Why?
Chapter 2 Phonology
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Voicing is a phonological feature that distinguishes meaning in both Chinese and English.
2. If two phonetically similar sounds occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are said to be in
complementary distribution.
3. A phone is a phonetic unit that distinguishes meaning. 4. English is a tone language while Chinese is not.
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5. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.
6. In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. 7. Articulatory phonetics tries to describe the physical properties of the stream of sounds which a speaker issues with the
help of a machine called spectrograph.
8. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important areas: the throat, the mouth and the chest.
9. Vibration of the vocal cords results in a quality of speech sounds called voicing.
10. English consonants can be classified in terms of place of articulation and the part of the tongue that is raised the
highest.
11. According to the manner of articulation, some of the types into which the consonants can be classified are stops,
fricatives, bilabial and alveolar.
12. Vowel sounds can be differentiated by a number of factors: the position of tongue in the mouth, the openness of the
mouth, the shape of the lips, and the length of the vowels.
13. According to the shape of the lips, vowels can be classified into close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels
and open vowels.
14. Any sound produced by a human being is a phoneme. 15. Phones are the sounds that can distinguish meaning.
16. Phonology is concerned with how the sounds can be classified into different categories.
17. A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change
of meaning.
18. When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in
the strings, the two words are said to form a phonemic contrast. 19. The rules governing the phonological patterning are language specific.
20. Distinctive features of sound segments can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments.
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. A_______ refers to a strong puff of air stream in the production of speech sounds.
22. A_______ phonetics describes the way our speech organs work to produce the speech sounds and how they differ.
23. The four sounds /p/, /b/, /m/ and /w/ have one feature in common, i.e., they are all b_______ sounds. 24. Of all the speech organs, the t_______ is the most flexible, and is responsible for varieties of articulation than any
other.
25. English consonants can be classified in terms of manner of articulation or in terms of p_______ of articulation. 26. When the obstruction created by the speech organs is total or complete, the speech sound produced with the
obstruction audibly released and the air passing out again is called a s________.
27. S_________ features are the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments. They include stress, tone,
intonation, etc.
28. The rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language are called s_______ rules. 29. The transcription of speech sounds with letter-symbols only is called broad transcription while the transcription with
letter-symbols together with the diacritics is called n_________ transcription.
30. When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively
known as i_________.
31. P___________ is a discipline which studies the system of sounds of a particular language and how sounds are
combined into meaningful units to effect linguistic communication.
32. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important cavities: the pharyngeal cavity, the
o_______ cavity and the nasal cavity.
33. T_______ are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords and which can
distinguish meaning just like phonemes.
34. Depending on the context in which stress is considered, there are two kinds of stress: word stress and s_________
stress.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
35 Of all the speech organs, the _______ is/are the most flexible.
A. mouth
B. lips
C. tongue
D. vocal cords
36. The sounds produced without the vocal cords vibrating are ____ sounds.
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A. voiceless A. /z/
B. voiced B. /d/
C. vowel C. /k/
D. consonantal
D. /b/
37. __________ is a voiced alveolar stop.
38. The assimilation rule assimilates one sound to another by “copying”a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making
the two phones ____________.
A. identical
B. same
C. exactly alike
D. similar
39. Since /p/ and /b/ are phonetically similar, occur in the same environments and they can distinguish meaning, they are
said to be ___________.
A. in phonemic contrast C. the allophones
40. The sound /f/ is _________________.
A. voiced palatal affricate C. voiceless velar fricative A. back
B. central
B. voiced alveolar stop D. voiceless labiodental fricative C. front
D. middle
B. in complementary distribution
D. minimal pair
41. A ____ vowel is one that is produced with the front part of the tongue maintaining the highest position. 42. Distinctive features can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments. The phonemic features
that occur above the level of the segments are called _______.
A. phonetic components C. suprasegmental features
features.
A. phone
B. sound
phoneme.
A. phones 45. phonology 51. auditory phonetics 54. phonemic contrast
B. sounds
46. phoneme 52. acoustic phonetics
55. tone
C. phonemes
D. allophones 47. allophone 53. phone 56. minimal pair
Ⅳ. Define the terms below:
48. international phonetic alphabet 49. intonation 50. phonetics
C. allophone
D. phoneme
44．The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the ____ of that
B. immediate constituents D. semantic features
43. A(n) ___________ is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit, a collection of distinctive phonetic
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?
58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels? 59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics? 60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning. 61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?
Chapter 3 Morphology
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Morphology studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
2. Words are the smallest meaningful units of language.
3. Just as a phoneme is the basic unit in the study of phonology, so is a morpheme the basic unit in the study of
morphology.
4. The smallest meaningful units that can be used freely all by themselves are free morphemes.
5. Bound morphemes include two types: roots and affixes.
6. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as number, tense, degree,
and case.
7. The existing form to which a derivational affix can be added is called a stem, which can be a bound root, a free
morpheme, or a derived form itself.
8. Prefixes usually modify the part of speech of the original word, not the meaning of it.
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9. There are rules that govern which affix can be added to what type of stem to form a new word. Therefore, words formed
according to the morphological rules are acceptable words.
10. Phonetically, the stress of a compound always falls on the first element, while the second element receives secondary
stress.
Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. M _______ is the smallest meaningful unit of language. 12. The affix “-ish” in the word boyish conveys a g_______ meaning.
13. B___________ morphemes are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other
morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.
14. Affixes are of two types: inflectional affixes and d__________ affixes. 15. D________ affixes are added to an existing form to create words.
16. A s______ is added to the end of stems to modify the meaning of the original word and it may case change its part of
speech.
17. C__________ is the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words.
18. The rules that govern which affix can be added to what type of stem to form a new word are called m___________
rules.
19. In terms of morphemic analysis, d_______________ can be viewed as the addition of affixes to stems to form new
words.
20. A s______ can be a bound root, a free morpheme, or a derived form itself to which a derivational affix can be added. Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. The morpheme “vision” in the common word “television” is a(n) ______. A. bound morpheme C. inflectional morpheme
__________.
A. is the sum total of the meaning of its components
B. can always be worked out by looking at the meanings of morphemes
C. is the same as the meaning of a free phrase.
D. None of the above.
23. The part of speech of the compounds is generally determined by the part of speech of __________.
A. the first element
C. either the first or the second element
B. the second element
D. both the first and the second elements
bound, to form a word.
A. Free morphemes C. Bound words
formed.
A. Syntax A. lexical
B. Grammar B. morphemic
C. Morphology C. grammatical
D. Morpheme D. semantic
26. The meaning carried by the inflectional morpheme is _______.
27. Bound morphemes are those that ___________.
A. have to be used independently C. can either be free or bound A. Prefixes A. Words
B. Suffixes B. Morphemes
A. a derivative affix C. an inflectional affix
B. can not be combined with other morphemes D. have to be combined with other morphemes C. Roots C. Phonemes
B. a stem D. a root
D. Affixes D. Sentences
B. Bound morphemes
D. Words B. bound form D. free morpheme
22. The compound word “bookstore” is the place where books are sold. This indicates that the meaning of a compound
24. _______ are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or
25. _________ is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are
28. _______ modify the meaning of the stem, but usually do not change the part of speech of the original word.
29. _________ are often thought to be the smallest meaningful units of language by the linguists.
30. “-s” in the word “books” is _______.
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Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
31. morphology 34. morpheme 37. root 40. suffix
32. inflectional morphology
35. free morpheme
38. affix 41. derivation
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
43. What are the main features of the English compounds? 44. Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.
Chapter 4 Syntax
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Syntax is a subfied of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language, including the combination of
morphemes into words.
2. Grammatical sentences are formed following a set of syntactic rules.
3. Sentences are composed of sequence of words arranged in a simple linear order, with one adding onto another following
a simple arithmetic logic.
4. Universally found in the grammars of all human languages, syntactic rules that comprise the system of internalized
linguistic knowledge of a language speaker are known as linguistic competence.
5. The syntactic rules of any language are finite in number, but there is no limit to the number of sentences native speakers
of that language are able to produce and comprehend.
6. In a complex sentence, the two clauses hold unequal status, one subordinating the other.
7. Constituents that can be substituted for one another without loss of grammaticality belong to the same syntactic
category.
8. Minor lexical categories are open because these categories are not fixed and new members are allowed for. 9. In English syntactic analysis, four phrasal categories are commonly recognized and discussed, namely, noun phrase,
verb phrase, infinitive phrase, and auxiliary phrase.
10. In English the subject usually precedes the verb and the direct object usually follows the verb. 11. What is actually internalized in the mind of a native speaker is a complete list of words and phrases rather than
grammatical knowledge.
12. A noun phrase must contain a noun, but other elements are optional.
13. It is believed that phrase structure rules, with the insertion of the lexicon, generate sentences at the level of D-structure.
14. WH-movement is obligatory in English which changes a sentence from affirmative to interrogative.
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
15. A s________ sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone as its own
sentence.
16. A s______ is a structurally independent unit that usually comprises a number of words to form a complete statement,
question or command.
17. A s______ may be a noun or a noun phrase in a sentence that usually precedes the predicate.
18. The part of a sentence which comprises a finite verb or a verb phrase and which says something about the subject is
grammatically called p_________.
19. A c_________ sentence contains two, or more, clauses, one of which is incorporated into the other. 20. In the complex sentence, the incorporated or subordinate clause is normally called an e_______ clause. 21. Major lexical categories are o_______ categories in the sense that new words are constantly added. 22. A _____ Condition on case assignment states that a case assignor and a case recipient should stay adjacent to each
other.
23. P_______ are syntactic options of UG that allow general principles to operate in one way or another and contribute to
significant linguistic variations between and among natural languages.
24. The theory of C_______ condition explains the fact that noun phrases appear only in subject and object positions. Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement: 25. A sentence is considered ____ when it does not conform to the grammati-cal knowledge in the mind of native speakers.
33. derivational morphology 36. bound morpheme
39. prefix 42. Compounding
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A. right A. coordinator A. recursive
B. wrong B. particle B. grammatical
C. grammatical C. preposition C. social
D. ungrammatical D. subordinator D. functional
26. A __________ in the embedded clause refers to the introductory word that introduces the embedded clause.
27. Phrase structure rules have ____ properties.
28. Phrase structure rules allow us to better understand _____________.
A. how words and phrases form sentences. B. what constitutes the grammaticality of strings of words C. how people produce and recognize possible sentences
D. All of the above.
29. Syntactic movement is dictated by rules traditionally called ________.
A. transformational rules C. phrase structure rules
B. generative rules D. x-bar theory
30. The theory of case condition accounts for the fact that __________.
A. noun phrases appear only in subject and object positions. B. noun phrases can be used to modify another noun phrase
C. noun phrase can be used in adverbial positions D. noun phrase can be moved to any place if necessary.
31. The sentence structure is ________.
A. only linear C. complex
A. large A. lexical
A. Generative C. X-bar
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
35. syntax 38. syntactic categories 41. transformational rules
36. Sentence 39. grammatical relations
42. D-structure
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions: 43. What are the basic components of a sentence?
44. What are the major types of sentences? Illustrate them with examples.
45. Are the elements in a sentence linearly structured? Why?
46. What are the advantages of using tree diagrams in the analysis of sentence structures?
47. What is NP movement. Illustrate it with examples.
Chapter 5 Semantics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Dialectal synonyms can often be found in different regional dialects such as British English and American English but
cannot be found within the variety itself, for example, within British English or American English.
2. Sense is concerned with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience,
while the reference deals with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form.
3. Linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations. 4. In semantics, meaning of language is considered as the intrinsic and inherent relation to the physical world of
experience.
5. Contextualism is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. 6. Behaviourists attempted to define the meaning of a language form as the situation in which the speaker utters it and the
37. coordinate sentence 40. linguistic competence
B. small B. morphological
B. Only hierarchical D. both linear and hierarchical C. finite C. linguistic
D. infinite D. combinational
32. The syntactic rules of any language are ____ in number.
33. The ________ rules are the rules that group words and phrases to form grammatical sen-tences.
34._______ rules may change the syntactic representation of a sentence.
B. Transformational D. Phrase structure
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response it calls forth in the hearer.
7. The meaning of a sentence is the sum total of the meanings of all its components.
8. Most languages have sets of lexical items similar in meaning but ranked differently according to their degree of
formality.
9. “It is hot.” is a no-place predication because it contains no argument.
10. In grammatical analysis, the sentence is taken to be the basic unit, but in semantic analysis of a sentence, the basic unit
is predication, which is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. S________ can be defined as the study of meaning.
12. The conceptualist view holds that there is no d_______ link between a linguistic form and what it refers to. 13. R______ 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. 14. Words that are close in meaning are called s________.
15. When two words are identical in sound, but different in spelling and meaning, they are called h__________. 16. R_________ opposites are pairs of words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items. 17. C ____ analysis is based upon the belief that the meaning of a word can be divided into meaning components. 18. Whether a sentence is semantically meaningful is governed by rules called s________ restrictions, which are
constraints on what lexical items can go with what others.
19. An a______ is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal element(s) in a sentence. 20. According to the n______ theory of meaning, the words in a lan-guage are taken to be labels of the objects they stand
for.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. The naming theory is advanced by ________.
A. Plato
B. Bloomfield
C. Geoffrey Leech
B. contexutalism D. behaviourism
23. Which of the following is not true?
A. Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. B. Sense is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form.
C. Sense is abstract and decontextualized.
D. Sense is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are not interested in.
24. “Can I borrow your bike?”_______ “You have a bike.”
A. is synonymous with
C. entails
features.
A. Predication analysis C. Phonemic analysis A. gradable antonyms C. complementary antonyms
A. Reference A. Polysemy A. homonyms
B. Concept B. Synonymy B. polysemy
B. Componential analysis D. Grammatical analysis B. relational opposites D. None of the above
C. Semantics C. Homonymy C. hyponyms
D. Sense D. Hyponymy D. synonyms
B. is inconsistent with D. presupposes
D. Firth
22. “We shall know a word by the company it keeps.” This statement represents _______. A. the conceptualist view C. the naming theory
25. ___________ is a way in which the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic
26. “Alive” and “dead” are ______________.
27. _________ deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.
28. ___________ refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form.
29. Words that are close in meaning are called ______________. 30. The grammaticality of a sentence is governed by _______.
A. grammatical rules C. semantic rules
B. selectional restrictions D. semantic features
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Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
31. semantics 34. synonymy 37. homophones 40. hyponymy 43. grammatical meaning
46. predicate
32. sense 35. polysemy 38. Homographs 41. antonymy 44. predication 47. two-place predication Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
48. Why do we say that a meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components?
49. What is componential analysis? Illustrate it with examples.
50. How do you distinguish between entailment and presupposition in terms of truth values?
51. How do you account for such sense relations between sentences as synonymous relation, inconsistent relation in terms
of truth values?
52. According to the way synonyms differ, how many groups can we classify synonyms into? Illustrate them with
examples.
53. What are the major views concerning the study of meaning? How they differ?
Chapter 6 Pragmatics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Both semantics and pragmatics study how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication
2. Pragmatics treats the meaning of language as something intrinsic and inherent.
3. It would be impossible to give an adequate description of meaning if the context of language use was left unconsidered. 4. What essentially distinguishes semantics and pragmatics is whether in the study of meaning the context of use is
considered.
5. The major difference between a sentence and an utterance is that a sentence is not uttered while an utterance is.
6. The meaning of a sentence is abstract, but context-dependent. 7. The meaning of an utterance is decontexualized, therefore stable.
8. Utterances always take the form of complete sentences
9. Speech act theory was originated with the British philosopher John Searle.
10. Speech act theory started in the late 50’s of the 20th century. 11. Austin made the distinction between a constative and a performative. 12. Perlocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention. Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given:
13. P_________ is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. 14. What essentially distinguishes s_______ and pragmatics is whether in the study of meaning the context of use is
considered.
15. The notion of c_________ is essential to the pragmatic study of language.
16. If we think of a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes an u___________.
17. The meaning of a sentence is a_______, and decontexualized.
18. C________ were statements that either state or describe, and were thus verifiable. 19. P________ were sentences that did not state a fact or describe a state, and were not verifiable.
20. A l_________ act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of
syntax, lexicon and phonology.
21. An i__________ act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; it is the act performed in saying something.
22. A c_________ is commit the speaker himself to some future course of action. 23. An e________ is to express feelings or attitude towards an existing state.
24. There are four maxims under the cooperative principle: the maxim of q_______, the maxim of quality, the maxim of
relation and the maxim of manner.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
25. _________ does not study meaning in isolation, but in context.
33. reference 36. homonymy 39. complete homonyms 42 componential analysis
45. Argument
9
A. Pragmatics A. contextual A. reference A. pragmatic A. constative
B. Semantics B. behaviouristic B. speech act B. grammatical B. directive
C. Sense relation C. intrinsic C. practical usage
C. mental C. utterance
D. Concept D. logical D. context D. conceptual D. expressive
26. The meaning of language was considered as something _______ in traditional semantics.
27. What essentially distinguishes semantics and pragmatics is whether in the study of meaning _________ is considered.
28. A sentence is a _________ concept, and the meaning of a sentence is often studied in isolation.
29. If we think of a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes a(n) _________.
30. Which of the following is true?
A. Utterances usually do not take the form of sentences. B. Some utterances cannot be restored to complete sentences.
C. No utterances can take the form of sentences. D. All utterances can be restored to complete sentences. 31. Speech act theory did not come into being until __________.
A. in the late 50’s of the 20the century
C. in the late 1960’s
brought about by the utterance.
A. A locutionary act C. A perlocutionary act
A. to get the hearer to do something
B. to commit the speaker to something’s being the case C. to commit the speaker to some future course of action D. to express the feelings or attitude towards an existing state of affairs
34. All the acts that belong to the same category share the same purpose, but they differ __________. A. in their illocutionary acts. C. in their strength or force
A. Cooperative Principle B. Politeness Principle
C. The General Principle of Universal Grammar
D. Adjacency Principle
36. When any of the maxims under the cooperative principle is flouted, _______ might arise.
A. impoliteness C. mutual understanding
Ⅳ. Define the terms below:
37. pragmatics 40. sentence meaning 43. locutionary act
38. context 41. constative 44. illocutionary act 46. Cooperative Principle
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
47. How are semantics and pragmatics different from each other?
48. How does a sentence differ from an utterance?
49. How does a sentence meaning differ from an utterance meaning? 50. Discuss in detail the locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act.
51. Searle classified illocutionary act into five categories. Discuss each of them in detail with examples.
52. What are the four maxims under the cooperative principle?
53. How does the flouting of the maxims give rise to conversational implicatures?
39. utterance meaning 42. performative 45. perlocutionary act
B. contradictions D. conversational implicatures B. in their intentions expressed D. in their effect brought about
B. An illocutionary act D. A performative act B. in the early 1950’s D. in the early 21st century
32. __________ is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change
33. According to Searle, the illocutionary point of the representative is ______.
35. __________ is advanced by Paul Grice
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Chapter 7 Historical Linguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. One of the tasks of the historical linguists is to explore methods to reconstruct linguistic history and establish the
relationship between languages.
2. Language change is a gradual and constant process, therefore often indiscernible to speakers of the same generation. 3. The history of the English language is divided into the periods of Old English, Middle English and Modern English. 4. Middle English began with the arrival of Anglo-Saxons, who invaded the British Isles from northern Europe. 5. In Old English, all the nouns are inflected to mark nominative, genitive, dative and accusative cases.
6. In Old English, the verb of a sentence often precedes the subject rather than follows it. 7. A direct consequence of the Renaissance Movement was the revival of French as a literary language. 8. In general, linguistic change in grammar is more noticeable than that in the sound system and the vocabulary of a
language.
9. The sound changes include changes in vowel sounds, and in the loss, gain and movement of sounds. 10. The least widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English are the loss and addition of
affixes.
11. In Old English, the morphosyntactic rule of adjective agreement stipulated that the endings of adjective must agree
with the head noun in case, number and gender.
12. The word order of Modern English is more variable than that of Old English.
13. Derivation refers to the process by which new words are formed by the addition of affixes to the roots, stems, or words.
14. “Smog” is a word formed by the word-forming process called acronymy.
15. “Fridge” is a word formed by abbreviation.
16. Modern linguists are able to provide a consistent account for the exact causes of all types of language change. 17. Sound assimilation may bring about the loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence, as in the case of
change of “Engla-land” to “England”.
18. Rule elaboration occurs when there is a need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or
expressiveness.
19. Language change is always a change towards the simplification of language rules 20. The way children acquire the language is one of the causes for language change. Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. H________ linguistics is the subfield of linguistics that studies language change.
22. The historical study of language is a d________ study of language rather than a synchronic study. 23. European R________ Movement separates the period of Middle English from that of modern English.
24. An important set of extensive sound changes, which affected 7 long or tense vowels and which led to one of the major discrepancies between phonemic representations of words and morphemes at the end of the Middle English Period, is
known as the Great V_______ Shift.
25. A_______ involves the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.
26. A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel sound to the middle of a word is known as e__________.
27. The three sets of consonant shifts that Grimm discovered became known collectively as Grimm s L _______. 28. Sound change as a result of sound movement, known as m_______, involves a reversal in position of two adjoining
sound segments.
29. B________ is a process by which new words are formed by taking away the supposed suffixes of exiting words. 30. Semantic b________ refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its
historically earlier denotation.
31. The original form of a language family that has ceased to exist is called the p_________.
32. Sound a________ refers to the physiological effect of one sound on another. In this process, successive sounds are
made identical or similar to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation.
33. In order to reduce the exceptional or irregular morphemes, speakers of a particular language may borrow a rule from
one part of the grammar and apply it generally. This phenomenon is called i_________ borrowing.
34. By identifying and comparing similar linguistic forms with similar meanings across related languages, historical linguists reconstruct the proto form in the common ancestral language. This process is called c________ reconstruction.
11
35. The m ____ rule of adjective agreement has been lost from English.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
36. Historical linguistics explores ________________.
A. the nature of language change C. the relationship between languages
37. Language change is ______________.
A. universal, continuous and, to a large extent, regular and systematic
B. continuous, regular, systematic, but not universal C. universal, continuous, but not regular and systematic D. always regular and systematic, but not universal and continuous
38. Modern English period starts roughly _____________.
A. from 449 to 1100 C. from 1100 to the present
B. from 1500 to the present D. from 1700 to the present B. the causes that lead to language change
D. all of the above
39. Old English dates back to the mid-fifth century when _________. A. the Norman French invaders under William the Conqueror arrived in England
B. the printing technology was invented
C. Anglo-Saxons invaded the British Isles from northern Europe
D. the Celtic people began to inhabit England 40. Middle English was deeply influenced by ___________.
A. Norman French in vocabulary and grammar
B. Greek and Latin because of the European renaissance movement C. Danish languages because Denmark placed a king on the throne of England
D. the Celtic people who were the first inhabitants of England 41. Language change is essentially a matter of change ________.
A. in collocations
B. in meaning
C. in grammar
D. in usages
42. In Old and Middle English, both /k/ and /n/ in the word “knight” were pronounced, but in modern English, /k/ in the
sound /kn-/ clusters was not pronounced. This phenomenon is known as ________. A. sound addition C. sound shift
A. apocope
B. epenthesis
B. sound loss D. sound movement
C. parenthesis
D. antithesis
43. A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel sound to the middle of a word is known as _____. 44. Segment switch of sound positions can be seen in the example of the modern word “bird” which comes from the old
English word “bridd”. The change of the word from “bridd” to “bird” is a case of _________.
A. metathesis A. Derivation
B. sound loss B. Blending
C. sound addition C. Compounding
D. apocope D. Abbreviation
45. _________ is a process of combining two or more words into one lexical unit.
46. “Wife”, which used to refer to any woman, stands for “a married woman” in modern English. This phenomenon is
known as ________.
A. semantic shift C. semantic elevation A. Indo-European Family C. Austronesian Family
B. semantic broadening D. semantic narrowing B. Sino-Tibetan Family D. Afroasiatic Family
47. English language belongs to _________.
48. By analogy to the plural formation of the word “dog-s”, speakers started saying “cows” as the plural of “cow” instead
of the earlier plural “kine”. This is the case of _________.
A. elaboration C. sound assimilation A. the loss of morphological rules C. the alteration of morphological rules
B. external borrowing D. internal borrowing
B. the addition of morphological rules
D. all of the above
49. Morphologcial changes can involve __________.
50. The most dramatic morphological loss concerns the loss of ________.
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A. comparative markers C. gender and case markers
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
51. Apocope 54. back-formation 57. haplology 60. Blending 63. Great Vowel Shift
52. Metathesis 55. semantic narrowing
58. epenthesis 61. semantic broadening
64. acronym
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
B. tense markers D. none of the above
53. Derivation 56. protolanguage 59. Compounding 62. semantic shift 65. sound assimilation
66. What is the purpose or significance of the historical study of language?
67. What are the characteristics of the nature of language change?
68. What are the major periods in the history of English?
69. As language changes over time, the meaning of a word may deviate from its original denotation. Discuss the major
types of semantic changes.
70. Over the years from Old English period to the Modern English period, English has undergone some major sound
changes. Illustrate these changes with some examples.
71. What are the most widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English?
72. What are the causes of language change? Discuss them in detail.
Chapter 8 Sociolinguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. Sociolinguistics is the sub-discipline of linguistics that studies social contexts.
2. Language as a means of social communication is a homogeneous system with a homogeneous group of speakers. 3. Language use varies from one speech community to another, from one regional group to another, from one social group
to another, and even from one individual to another.
4. The goal of sociolinguistics is to explore the nature of language variation and language use among a variety of speech
communities and in different social situations.
5. The linguistic markers that characterize individual social groups may serve as social markers of group membership. 6. From the sociolinguistic perspective, the term “speech variety” can not be used to refer to standard language, vernacular
language, dialect or pidgin.
7. Functional speech varieties are known as regional dialects.
8. The most distinguishable linguistic feature of a regional dialect is its grammar and uses of vocabulary.
9. Geographical barriers are the only source of regional variation of language.
10. A person’s social backgrounds do not exert a shaping influence on his choice of linguistic features. 11. Two speakers of the same language or dialect use their language or dialect in the same way.
12. Every speaker of a language is, in a stricter sense, a speaker of a distinct idiolect.
13. The standard language is a better language than nonstandard languages.
14. A lingua franca can only be used within a particular country for communication among groups of people with different
linguistic backgrounds.
15. Pidgins are linguistically inferior to standard languages.
16. A pidgin usually reflects the influence of the higher, or dominant, language in its lexicon and that of the lower language
in their phonology and occasionally syntax.
17. The major difference between a pidgin and a creole is that the former usually has its native speakers while the latter
doesn’t.
18. Bilingualism and diglossia mean the same thing.
19. The kind of name or term speakers use to call or refer to someone may indicate something of their social relationship
to or personal feelings about that individual.
20. The use of euphemisms has the effect of removing derogatory overtones and the disassociative effect as such is usually
long-lasting.
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the blanks below with one word which begins with the letter given:
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21. The social group isolated for any given study is called the speech c________.
22. Speech v_________ refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or group of speakers. 23. From the sociolinguistic perspective, a speech variety is no more than a d__________ variety of a language.
24. Language standardization is also called language p_______.
25. Social variation gives rise to s_________ which are subdivisible into smaller speech categories that reflect their
socioeconomic, educational, occupational background, etc.
26. S_______ variation in a person’s speech or writing usually ranges on a continuum from casual or colloquial to formal
or polite according to the type of communicative situation.
27. A regional dialect may gain status and become standardized as the national or o________ language of a country.
28. The standard language is a s_________, socially prestigious dialect of language. 29. Language varieties other than the standard are called nonstandard, or v_______ languages.
30. A pidgin typically lacks in i_______ morphemes. 31. Linguistic taboo reflects s_________ taboo.
32. The avoidance of using taboo language mirrors social attitudes, emotions and value judgments and has no l_________
basis.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement: 33. _______ is concerned with the social significance of language variation and language use in different speech
communities.
A. Psycholinguistics C. Historical linguistics
A. use of words C. accent A. Regional variation C. Social variation
A. Geographical barriers
B. Loyalty to and confidence in one’s native speech C. Physical discomfort and psychological resistance to change
D. Social barriers
37. _________ means that certain authorities, such as the government choose, a particular speech variety, standardize it
and spread the use of it across regional boundaries.
A. Language interference C. Language planning
B. Language changes D. Language transfer B. Sociolinguistics D. General linguistics B. use of structures D. morphemes B. Language variation D. Register variation
34. The most distinguishable linguistic feature of a regional dialect is its _____.
35. ____ is speech variation according to the particular area where a speaker comes from.
36. _______ are the major source of regional variation of language.
38. _________ in a person’s speech or writing usually ranges on a continuum from casual or colloquial to formal or polite
according to the type of communicative situation.
A. Regional variation C. Variation in connotations
linguistic backgrounds.
A. lingua franca C. Creole
human language.
A. vernacular languages
C. pidgins
social background.
A. female; male
B. male; female
C. old; young
D. young; old
42. A linguistic _______ refers to a word or expression that is prohibited by the “polite” society from general use.
B. creoles D. sociolects B. register D. national language B. Changes in emotions D. Stylistic variation
39. A ____ is a variety of language that serves as a medium of communication among groups of people for diverse
40. Although _______ are simplified languages with reduced grammatical features, they are rule-governed, like any
41. In normal situations, ____ speakers tend to use more prestigious forms than their ____ counterparts with the same
14
A. slang
43. sociolinguistics 46. language planning 49. nonstandard language
50. lingua franca 53. diglossia 56. Sociolect
B. euphemism C. jargon D. taboo
45. speech variety48. standard language 60. euphemism
52. Creole 55. ethnic dialect
58. slang
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
44. speech community
47. idiolect 59. taboo 51. pidgin 54. Bilingualism 57. register
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
61. Discuss with examples that the speech of women may differ from the speech of men.
62. Discuss with examples some of the linguistic differences between Standard English and Black English.
63. What is a linguistic taboo? What effect does it have on our use of language?
Chapter 9 Psycholinguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. The linguistic ability of human beings depends primarily on the structure of the vocal cords.
2. Human beings are the only organisms in which one particular part of the left half of the brain is larger than the
corresponding part of the right half.
3. The case of Phineas Gage suggests that if our language ability is located in the brain, it is clear that it is not situated
right at the front.
4. In general, the right side of the brain controls voluntary movements of, and responds to signals from, the left side of the body, whereas the left side controls voluntary movements of, and responds to signals from, the right side of the body.
5. Language functions are believed to be lateralized primarily in the left hemisphere of the brain. 6. The language we speak determines the way we perceive the world and therefore the nature of thought.
7. Human beings can not think without language, just as they can not speak without thinking.
8. If a language lacks a word, its speakers will not be able to grasp its concept.
9. Generally speaking, left hemisphere is responsible for language and speech, analytic reasoning, associative thought, etc., while the right hemisphere is responsible for perception of nonlinguistic sounds, holistic reasoning, recognition of musical
melodies, etc.
10. Language by no means determines the ways we perceive the objective world, but by its convenience, availability, and
habitual use, does influence the perceptions of human being.
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the blanks below with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. P_________ is the study of language in relation to the mind.
12. The most important part of the brain is the outside surface of the brain, called the cerebral c_________, which is the
decision-making organ of the body.
13. The brain is divided into two roughly symmetrical halves, called h_________, one on the right and one on the left. 14. The localization of cognitive and perceptual functions in a particular side of the brain is called l__________.
15. Brain lateralization is g__________ programmed, but takes time to develop.
16. In addition to the m________ area which is responsible for physical articulation of utterances, three areas of the left
hemisphere are vital to language, namely, Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and the angular gyrus. 17. The relationship between the name and the meaning of a word is quite a______________.
18. When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard thought as s________ speech
and speech as o__________ thought.
19. Because languages differ in many ways, Whorf believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience
the world differently, relative to their linguistic background. This notion is called linguistic r__________.
20. The basic essentials of the first language are acquired in the short period from about age two to puberty, which is called
the c____ period for first language acquisition.
21. The strong version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has two aspects: linguistic d_______ and linguistic relativism. Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
22. Human linguistic ability largely depends on the structure and dynamics of _________.
15
A. human brain C. human memory
B. human vocal cords
D. human
23. Psychologists, neurologists and linguists have concluded that, in addition to the motor area which is responsible for
physical articulation of utterances, three areas of the left brain are vital to language, namely, _______.
A. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and the angular gyrus B. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and cerebral cortex C. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and neurons D. Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area and Exner’s area
24. The ____ age for the acquisition of the first language coincides with the period of brain lateralization. A. youngest A. fossilization A. chemical
B. flexible B. performance B. physical
the brain.
A. The case of Genie C. The componential analysis
A. the neurons
B. nerve pathways
brain?
A. analytic reasoning C. associative thought
B. temporal ordering D. visual and spatial skills
precondition of language acquisition.
A. Lateralization C. Brain separation
those that are ________ in nature.
A. non-linguistic
A. The motor area C. Wernicke’s area
with syntax.
A. the motor area C. Wernicke’s area
hypothesis that __________.
A. there was only one language area in the left brain B. there was no language area in the left brain C. there was one language area in the right brain D. there was more than one language area in the left brain
35. __________ is the language center primarily responsible for converting a visual stimulus into an auditory form and
vice versa.
A. The motor area C. Wernicke’s area
B. Broca’s area D. The angular gyrus B. Broca’s area D. the angular gyrus
B. musical
C. linguistic
B. Broca’s area D. The angular gyrus
D. natural
32. _______ is responsible for physical articulation of utterances.
B. Maturation D. Memory capacity B. The case of Phineas Gage D. The contrastive analysis
C. cerebral cortex
D. sensory organs
C. optimum C. competence C. scientific
D. relevant D. lateralization D. biological
25. Linguistic ____ is the brain’s neurological specialization for language. 26. Our linguistic ability is a ________ gift of the species’ gene program.
27. ________shows that if our language ability is located in the brain, it is clear that it is not situated right at the front of
28. The most important part of the brain is the outside surface of the brain, called _________.
29. According to lateralization theory, which of the following is not the primary function of the left hemisphere of the
30. _______ is commonly held to be an evolutionary precondition of the development of superior intelligence as well as a
31. The dichotic listening research shows that the left hemisphere is not superior for processing all sounds, but only for
33. Language disorder resulting from a damage to _________ in the brain reveals word-finding difficulties and problems
34. In 1874, the young German physician Carl Wernicke published his discovery in a paper which contributed to the
36. The neurobiologist Eric Lenneberg is a major proponent of the idea that ________.
A. there is a distinction between acquisition and learning B. there is a critical period for language acquisition
16
C. language influences thinking
D. there is interrelationship between language and thinking
37. The case of Genie shows that ____________. A. language can not be acquired at all after the critical period
B. Cerebral plasticity after puberty is still high enough to for a successful mastery of a new language
C. the language faculty of an average human degenerates after the critical period
D. the language learning should be done as early as possible
Ⅳ. Explain the following terms:
38. psycholinguistics 41. Broca’s area 44. linguistic determinism 47. linguistic lateralization 50. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
39. brain lateralization 42. angular gyms 45. sub vocal speech 48. right ear advantage 51. linguistic relativism Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
55. What are the biological foundations of language?
56. What are the major mental functions under the control of each hemisphere?
57. What can we do by means of dichotic listening tests? 58. What is the safe conclusion from Genie’s case? 59. How are language and thought related to each other?
Chapter 10 Language Acquisition
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. L1 development and L2 development seem to involve the same processes.
2. The capacity to acquire one’s first language is a fundamental human trait that all human beings are equally well
possessed with.
3. All normal children have equal ability to acquire their first language.
4. Children follow a similar acquisition schedule of predictable stages along the route of language development across cultures, though there is an idiosyncratic variation in the amount of time that takes individuals to master different aspects
of the grammar.
5. Humans can be said to be predisposed and biologically programmed to acquire at least one language.
6. Some languages are inferior, or superior, to other languages.
7. Language acquisition is primarily the acquisition of the vocabulary and the meaning of language.
8. Human beings are genetically predetermined to acquire language; this genetic predisposition is a sufficient condition for
language development.
9. Children who grow up in culture where caretaker speech is absent acquire their native language more slowly than
children who are exposed to caretaker speech.
10. In mother tongue acquisition, normal children are not necessarily equally successful.
11. For the vast majority of children, language development occurs spontaneously and require little conscious instruction
on the part of adults.
12. The available evidence to date indicates that an explicit teaching of correct forms to young children plays a minor role
at best.
13. Correction and reinforcement are not key factors in child language development as they were claimed to be.
14. Imitation, plays at best a very minor role in the child’s mastery of language.
15. Observations of children in different language areas of the world reveal that the developmental stages are similar,
possibly universal, whatever the nature of the input.
16. A child’s babbling seems to depend on the presence of acoustic, auditory input. 17. In general, the two-word stage begins roughly in the second half of the child’s first year. 18. Children’s two-word expressions are absent of syntactic or morphological markers.
19. Children first acquire the sounds in all languages of the world, no matter what language they are exposed to, and in late
40. dichotic listening 43. cerebral plasticity 46. cerebral cortex 49. critical period hypothesis
52. overt thought
53. intrapersonal communication 54. interpersonal communication
17
stages acquire the more difficult sounds.
20. Language acquisition begins at about the same time as lateralization does and is normally complete, as far as the
essentials are concerned, by the time that the process of lateralization comes to an end. Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 21. The first language a____________ refers to the development of a first or native language.
22. According to a n__________ view of language acquisition, humans are quipped with the neural prerequisites for
language and language use, just as birds are biologically prewired to learn the songs of their species.
23. A caretaker speech, also called m______ or b______, is the type of modified speech typically addressed to young
children.
24. B_________ learning theory suggested that a child’s verbal behaviour was conditioned through association between a
stimulus and the following response.
25. Children’s one-word utterances are also called h__________ sentences, because they can be used to express a concept
or predication that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech.
26. The early multiword utterances of children lack inflectional morphemes and most minor lexical categories, they are
often referred to as t__________ speech.
27. A___________ refers to the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the first language by using it naturally
in daily communicative situations.
28. The C________ Analysis was founded on the belief that it was possible, by establishing the linguistic differences between the native and target language systems, to predict what problems learners of a particular second language would
face and the types of errors they would make.
29. The language that a learner constructs at a given stage of SLA is known as i_________.
30. Learners subconsciously use their first language knowledge in learning a second language. This is known as language
t___________.
31. Motivation in language learning can be defined in terms of the learner’s overall goal or orientation. I_________ motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is functional and i________ motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is social.
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the one that can best complete the statement:
32. In first language acquisition, imitation plays _________.
A. a minor role C. a basic role A. with much imitation
C. with much correction from their parents
and sentences.
A. cultural
B. grammatical
C. behaviour
D. pragmatic
35. ____ has been found to occur usually in children’s pronunciation or reporting of the truthfulness of utterances, rather
than in the grammaticality of sentences.
A. Punishment
B. Instruction
C. Reinforcement
D. Imitation
36. According to the _______, the acquisition of a second language involves, and is dependent on, the acquisition of the
culture of the target language community.
A. acculturation view C. behaviourist view
B. mentalist view D. conceptualist view B. a significant role
D. no rule
B. with little conscious instruction D. with little linguistic input
33. Linguists have found that for the vast majority of children, language development occurs _____________.
34. The development of linguistic skills involves the acquisition of ____ rules rather than the mere memorization of words
37. In general, a good second learner is an adolescent ________.
A. who has a strong and well-defined motivation to learn B. who seeks out all chances to interact with the input
C. who is willing to identify himself with the culture of the target language community
D. all the above
38. The optimum age for second language acquisition is ________________. A. early teenage C. at puberty
B. after puberty D. after the brain lateralization
39. The formal instruction in second language acquisition ___________.
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A. has no effect at all C. has very little effect
B. has a powerful delayed effect D. has unsatisfactory effect
40. ________ is believed to be a major source of incorrect forms resistant to further instruction.
A. The second language learners’unwillingness to learn
B. The Poor classroom teaching
C. The fossilization of the learner’s interlanguage D. The learner’s lack of instrumental motivation
41. Which of the following is not true?
A. Interlanguage is a product of communicative strategies of the learner.
B. Interlanguage is a product of mother tongue interference.
C. Interlanguage is a product of overgeneralization of the target language rules. D. Interlanguage is the representation of learners’unsystematic L2 rules.
42. _________, except those with mental or physical impairments, are better or worse first language acquirers. A. Some men
43. caretaker speech
49. transfer
52. instrumental motivation
B. Almost all men
C. No men
D. Few men
45. telegraphic speech 51. fossilization 54. acculturation
Ⅳ. Explain the following terms:
44. holophrastic sentences
50. interlanguage 53. integrative motivation
46. second language acquisition 47. acquisition 48. learning
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
55. What’s the difference between acquisition and learning, according to Krashen?
56. How do the learner factors potentially influence the way in which a second language is acquired?
57. What is the role of input for SLA? 58. How do you understand interlanguage? 59. Discuss the contrastive analysis in detail.
60. What are the major stages that a child has to follow in first language development? What are the features of the
linguistic forms at each stage?
61. What is the role of correction and reinforcement in first language acquisition?
62. Why do we say language acquisition is primarily the acquisition of the grammatical system of language?
63. Discuss the biological basis of language acquisition. 64. What is the role of imitation in first language acquisition?
19
Suggested answers to supplementary exercises:
Chapter 1 Introduction
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. T 2. F 3. F 4. T 5. T 6. F 7. T 8. F 9. T 10. F 11. T 12. T 13. T 14. T 15. T 16. F 17. T 18. F 19. F 20. F Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given: 21. knowledge 22. abstract 23. Duality 24. arbitrary 25. syntax 26. genetic 27. Parole 28. applied 29. productive 30. scientific (or systematic) Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement.
31. C 32. D 33. C 34. D 35. B 36. A 37. C 38. B 39. A 40. D
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
41. Linguistics: Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language.
42. Phonology: The study of how sounds are put together and used in communication is called phonology. 43. Syntax: The study of how morphemes and words are combined to form sentences is called syntax.
44. Pragmatics: The study of meaning in context of use is called pragmatics.
45. Psycholinguistics: The study of language with reference to the workings of mind is called psycholinguistics.
46. Language: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. 47. Phonetics: The study of sounds which are used in linguistic communication is called phonetics. 48. Morphology: The study of the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words is called morphology.
49. Semantics: The study of meaning in language is called semantics.
50. Sociolinguistics: The study of language with reference to society is called sociolinguistics.
51. Applied linguistics: In a narrow sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages. In a broad sense, it refers to
the application of linguistic findings to the solution of practical problems such as the recovery of speech ability. 52. arbitrariness: It is one of the design features of language. It means that there is no logical connection between
meanings and sounds
53. Productivity: Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the con-struction and interpretation of new
signals by its users.
54. Displacement: Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. In other words, language can be used to refer to
contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker
55. Duality: The duality nature of language means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two
levels, one of sounds and the other of meanings.
56. Design features: Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal
system of communication
57. Competence: Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, 58. Performance: performance is the actual realization of the knowledge of the rules in linguistic communication. 59. langue: Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community; Langue is the
set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow; Langue is relatively stable, it does not change
frequently
60. Parole: Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use; parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the
application of the rules; parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary: 61. Language is generally defined as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Explain it in
detail.
First of all, language is a system, because elements of language are com-bined according to rules. Secondly, language is arbitrary because there is no intrinsic connection between form and meaning, or between the sign and what it stands for. Different languages have different words for the same object in the world. This fact is a good illustration of the arbitrary nature of language. This also explains the symbolic nature of language: words are just symbols; they are associated with
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objects, actions, ideas, etc. by convention. Thirdly, language is vocal because the primary medium is sound for all
languages, no matter how well-developed their writing systems are.
The term “human” in the definition indicates that language is possessed by human beings only and is very different from the communication systems of other living creatures. The term “communication” means that language makes it possible
for its users to talk to each other and fulfil their commu-nicative needs.
62. What are the design features of human language? Illustrate them with examples.
(1) Arbitrariness
As mentioned earlier, the arbitrary property of language means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For instance, there is no necessary relationship between the word elephant and the animal it symbolizes. In addition, different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages, and even within the same language, the same sound does not refer to the same thing. However, language is not entirely arbitrary. There are words which are created in the imitation of sounds by sounds, such as crash, bang in English. Besides, some compound words are also not
entirely arbitrary. But the non-arbitrary words are quite limited in number.
The arbitrary nature of language makes it possible for language to have an unlimited source of expressions.
(2) Productivity
Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the con-struction and interpretation of new signals by its users. This is why they can produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences, including sentences that they
have never said or heard before. They can send messages which no one else has ever sent before.
Productivity is unique to human language. Most animal communication systems appear to be highly restricted with
respect to the number of different signals that their users can send and receive.
(3) Duality
The duality nature of language means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds and the other of meanings. At the lower or the basic level, there is the structure of sounds, which are meaningless, discrete, individual sounds. But the sounds of language can be combined according to rules into units of meaning such as morphemes and words, which, at the higher level, can be arranged into sentences. This duality of structure or double articulation of language enables its users to talk about anything within their knowledge. No animal
communication system has duality or even comes near to possessing it.
(4) Displacement
Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. Animal calls are mainly uttered in response to immediate changes
of situation.
(5) Cultural transmission
Human beings were born with the ability to acquire language, but the details of any language are not genetically transmitted or passed down by instinct. They have to be taught and learned, but animal call systems are genetically
transmitted.
63. How is modern linguistics different from traditional grammar?
Traditional grammar is prescriptive; it is based on “high” (religious, literary) written language. It sets grammatical rules and imposes the rules on language users. But Modern linguistics is descriptive; it collects authentic, and mainly spoken
language data and then it studies and describes the data in an objective and scientific way. 64. How do you understand the distinction between a synchronic study and a diachronic study?
The description of a language at some point in time is a Synchronic study; the description of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study. A synchronic study of language describes a language as it is at some particular point in time, while a diachronic study of language is the study of the historical development of language over a period of time.
65. 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?
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The distinction between langue, and parole was made by the famous Swiss 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.
67. How do you understand competence and performance?
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. 68. Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole seems similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and
performance. What do you think are their major differences?
Although Saussure’s distinction and Chomsky’s are very similar, they differ at least in that Saussure took a sociological view of language and his notion of langue is a mater of social conventions, and Chomsky looks at language from a
psychological point of vies and to him, competence is a property of the mind of each individual.
69. Do you think human language is entirely arbitrary? Why?
Language is arbitrary in nature, it is not entirely arbitrary, because there are a limited number of words whose connections between forms and meanings can be logically explained to a certain extent, for example, the onomatopoeia, words which are coined on the basis of imitation of sounds by sounds such as bang, crash, etc. Take compounds for another example.
The two elements “photo” and “copy” in “photocopy” are non-motivated, but the compound is not arbitrary.
Chapter 2 Phonology:
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. T 2. F 3. F 4. F 5. T 6. T 7. F 8. F 9. T 10. F 11. F 12. T 13. F 14. F 15. F 16. F 17. T 18. F 19. T 20. T Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. Aspiration 22. Articulatory 23. bilabial 24. tongue 25. place 26. stop 27. Suprasegmental 28. sequential 29. narrow 30. intonation
31. Phonology 32. oral 33. Tone 34. sentence
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each of the statements below. Mark the choice that can best complete the
statement:
35. C 36. A 37. B 38. D 39. A 40. D 41. C 42. C 43. D 44. D
Ⅳ. Define the terms below:
45. phonology: Phonology studies the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in
a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.
46. phoneme: The basic unit in phonology is called phoneme; it is a unit of distinctive value. But it is an abstract unit. To
be exact, a phoneme is not a sound; it is a collection of distinctive phonetic features.
47. allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the
allophones of that phoneme.
48. international phonetic alphabet: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription. 49. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are
collectively known as intonation.
50. phonetics: Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that
occur in the world' s languages
51. auditory phonetics: It studies the speech sounds from the hearer's point of view. It studies how the sounds are perceived
by the hear-er.
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52. acoustic phonetics: It studies the speech sounds by looking at the sound waves. It studies the physical means by which
speech sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.
53. phone: Phones can be simply defined as the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic
unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.
54. phonemic contrast: Phonemic contrast refers to the relation between two phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the
same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.
55. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. 56. minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the
same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?
1) In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.
2) In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. 3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught
later at school.
58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?
1) Vowels may be distinguished as front, central and back in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth. 2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels, semiclose vowels,
semi-open vowels, and open vowels.
3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels. 4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound.
59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?
They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic
communication.
60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning.
1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds, is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black. 2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives, adverbs, etc. are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal
circumstances is not stressed.
3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that
there is an implied message in what is said.
61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?
A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of
meaning. If it does, the two sounds then represent different phonemes.
Chapter 3 Morphology
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. T 2. F 3. T 4. T 5. T 6. T 7. T 8. F 9. F 10. T Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 11. Morpheme 12. grammatical 13. Bound 14. derivative 15. Derivative
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16. suffix 17. Compounding 18. morphological 19. derivation 20. stem
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. D 22. D 23. B 24. B 25. C 26. C 27. D 28. A 29. B 30. C
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
31. Morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which
words are formed.
32. inflectional morphology: The inflectional morphology studies the inflections 33. derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word-formation.
34. Morpheme: It is the smallest meaningful unit of language.
35. free morpheme: Free morphemes are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely
all by themselves or in combination with oth-er morphemes.
36. bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used indepen-dently but have to be
combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.
37. Root: A root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning; it
must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word.
38. Affix: Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories, while derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word. 39. Prefix: Prefixes occur at the begin-ning of a word. Prefixes modify the meaning of the stem, but they usually do not
change the part of speech of the original word.
40. Suffix: Suffixes are added to the end of the stems; they modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases
change its part of speech.
41. Derivation: Derivation is a process of word formation by which derivative affixes are added to an existing form to
create a word.
42. Compounding: Compounding can be viewed as the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create
new words.
Ⅴ. Anwser the following questions:
43. What are the main features of the English compounds?
Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, 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. 44. Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.
Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, for example,
“book-” in the word “bookish”.
Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound morphemes can be subdivided into roots and affixes. A root is seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it has a clear and definite meaning, such as “gene-” in the word “generate”. Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as “-s” in the word “books” to indicate plurality of nouns. Derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word such as “mis-” in the word “misinform”. Derivational affixes can also be divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word such as “dis-” in the word
“dislike”, while suffixes occur at the end of a word such as “-less” in the word “friendless”.
Chapter 4 Syntax
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. F 2. T 3. F 4. T 5. T 6. T 7. T 8. F 9. F 10. T
11. F 12. T 13. T 14. T
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
15. simple 16. sentence 17. subject 18. predicate 19. complex 20. embedded
21. open 22. adjacency 23. Parameters 24. Case
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Ⅲ. There are four given choices for each statement below. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
25. D 26. D 27. A 28. D 29. A 30. A 31. D 32. C 33. D 34. B
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
35. syntax: Syntax is a subfield of linguistics. It studies the sentence structure of language. It consists of a set of abstract
rules that allow words to be combined with other words to form grammatical sentences.
36. Sentence: A sentence is a structurally independent unit that usually comprises a number of words to form a complete statement, question or command. Normally, a sentence consists of at least a subject and a predicate which contains a finite
verb or a verb phrase.
37. coordinate sentence: A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating
conjunction, such as “and”, “but”, “or”.
38. syntactic categories: Apart from sentences and clauses, a syntactic category usually refers to a word (called a lexical
category) or a phrase (called a phrasal category) that performs a particular grammatical function.
39. grammatical relations: The structural and logical functional relations of constituents are called grammatical relations. The grammatical relations of a sentence concern the way each noun phrase in the sentence relates to the verb. In many
cases, grammatical relations in fact refer to who does what to whom.
40. linguistic competence: Universally found in the grammars of all human languages, syntactic rules comprise the system
of internalized linguistic knowledge of a language speaker known as linguistic competence.
41. Transformational rules: Transformational rules are the rules that transform one sentence type into another type. 42. D-structure: D-structure is the level of syntactic representation that exists before movement takes place. Phrase
structure rules, with the insertion of the lexicon, generate sentences at the level of D-structure.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions: 43. What are the basic components of a sentence?
Normally, a sentence consists of at least a subject and its predicate which contains a finite verb or a verb phrase.
44. What are the major types of sentences? Illustrate them with examples.
Traditionally, there are three major types of sentences. They are simple sentence, coordinate (compound) sentence, and complex sentence. A simple sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone
as its own sentence, for example:
John reads extensively.
A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word that is called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”,
“but”, “or”. For example:
John is reading a linguistic book, and Mary is preparing for her history exam.
A complex sentence contains two, or more, clauses, one of which is incorporated into the other. The two clauses in a
complex sentence do not have equal status, one is subordinate to the other. For example:
Before John gave her a lecture, Mary showed no interest in linguistics.
45. Are the elements in a sentence linearly structured? Why?
No. Language is both linearly and hierarchically structured. When a sentence is uttered or written down, the words of the sentence are produced one after another in a sequence. A closer examination of a sentence shows that a sentence is not composed of sequence of words arranged in a simple linear order with one adding onto another following a simple arithmetic logic. In fact, sentences are also hierarchically structured. They are organized by grouping together words of the same syntactic category, such as noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP), as can be seen from the following tree diagram:
S
NP VP Det N Vt NP
Det N
The boy likes the music.
46. What are the advantages of using tree diagrams in the analysis of sentence structures?
The tree diagram can not only reveal a linear order, but also a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents. It can, in addition, show the syntactic category of each structural constituent, thus it is believed to most
truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements.
47. What is NP movement. Illustrate it with examples.
NP movement in-volves the movement of a noun phrase. NP-movement occurs when, for example, a sentence changes
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from the active voice to the passive voice:
(A) The man beat the child. (B) The child was beaten by the man.
B is the result of the movement of the noun phrases “the man” and “the child” from their original positions in (A) to new
positions. That is, “the man” is postposed to the right and “the child” is preposed to the left.
Not all instances of NP-movement, however, are related to changing a sentence from the active voice to the passive voice.
For example:
(C) It seems they are quite fit for the job. (D) They seem quite fit for the job.
These sentences are identical in meaning, but different in their superfi-cial syntactic representations. It is believed that they
have the same underlying structure, but (27b) is the result of an NP movement.
Chapter 5 Semantics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. F 2. F 3. T 4. F 5. T 6. T 7. F 8. T 9. T 10. T
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. Semantics 12. direct 13. Reference 14. synonyms 15. homophones 16. Relational 17. Componential 18. selectional 19. argument 20. naming
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. A 22. B 23. D 24. D 25. B 26.C 27. A 28. C 29. D 30. A
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
31. Semantics: Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning in language.
32. Sense: 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 contextualised.
33. Reference: 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 34. Synonymy: Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning.
35. Polysemy: Polysemy refers to the fact that the same one word may have more than one meaning.
36. Homonymy: Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e.,
different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both.
37. homophones: When two words are identical in sound, they are called homophones 38. homographs: When two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs.
39. complete homonyms: When two words are identical in both sound and spelling, they are called complete homonyms. 40.Hyponymy: Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific
word.
41. Antonymy: Antonymy refers to the relation of oppositeness of meaning.
42. Componential analysis: Componential analysis is a way to analyze word meaning. It was pro-posed by structural semanticists. The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be divided into meaning components,
which are called semantic features.
43. The grammatical meaning: The grammatical meaning of a sentence refers to its grammaticality, i.e., its grammatical
well-formedness. The grammaticality of a sentence is governed by the grammatical rules of the language.
44. predication: The predication is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.
45. argument: An argument is a logical participant in a predication. It is generally identical with the nominal element(s) in
a sentence.
46. predicate: A predicate is something that is said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments
in a sentence.
47. two-place predication: A two-place predication is one which contains two arguments.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
48. Why do we say that a meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components? The meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components because it cannot be worked out by
26
adding up all the meanings of its constituent words. For example;
(A) The dog bit the man. (B) The man bit the dog.
If the meaning of a sentence were the sum total of the meanings of all its components, then the above two sentences would
have the same meaning. In fact they are different in meanings.
As we know, there are two aspects to sentence meaning: grammatical meaning and semantic meaning. The grammatical meanings of “the dog” and “the man” in (A) are different from the grammatical meanings of “the dog” and “the man” in (B). The meaning of a sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning. It is the product of the meaning of
the constituent words and of the grammatical constructions that relate one word syntagmatically to another.
49. What is componential analysis? Illustrate it with examples.
Componential analysis, proposed by structural semanticists, is a way to analyze word meaning. The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be divided into meaning components, which are called semantic features. Plus and minus signs are used to indicate whether a certain semantic feature is present or absent in the meaning of a word, and these feature symbols are usually written in capitalized letters. For example, the word “man” is analyzed as consisting of
the semantic features of [+ HUMAN, + ADULT, + ANIMATE, +MALE]
50. How do you distinguish between entailment and presupposition in terms of truth values?
Entailment is a relation of inclusion. Suppose there are two sentences X and Y:
X: He has been to France. Y: He has been to Europe.
In terms of truth values, if X is true, Y is necessarily true, e.g. If he has been to France, he must have been to Europe. If X is false, Y may be true or false, e. g. If he has not been to France, he may still have been to Europe or he has not been to Europe. If Y is true, X may be true or false, e.g. If he has been to Europe, he may or may not have been to France.
If Y is false, X is false, e.g. If he has not been to Europe, he cannot have been to France.
Therefore we conclude that X entails Y or Y is an entailment of X. The truth conditions that we use to judge presupposition is as follows:
Suppose there are two sentences X and Y
X: John’s bike needs repairing.
Y: John has a bike.
If X is true, Y must be true, e.g. If John’s bike needs repairing, John must have a bike.
If X is false, Y is still true, e. g. If John’s bike does not need repairing, John still has a bike. If Y is true, X is either true or false, e.g. If John has a bike, it may or may not need repairing. If Y is false, no truth value can be said about X, e.g. If John does not have a bike, nothing can be said about whether his bike needs repairing or not. Therefore, X presupposes Y, or Y
is a presupposition of X.
51. How do you account for such sense relations between sentences as synonymous relation, inconsistent relation in terms
of truth values?
In terms of truth condition, of the two sentences X and Y, if X is true, Y is true; if X is false, Y is false, therefore X is
synonymous with Y
e.g. X; He was a bachelor all his life. Y: He never married all his life.
Of the two sentences X and Y, if X is true, Y is false; if X is false, Y is true, then we can say A is inconsistent with Y
e.g. X: John is married. Y: John is a bachelor.
52. According to the ways synonyms differ, how many groups can we classify synonyms into? Illustrate them with
examples.
According to the ways synonyms differ, synonyms can be divided into the following groups.
i. Dialectal synonyms
They are synonyms which are used in different regional dialects. British English and American English are the two major
geographical varieties of the English language. For examples:
British English American English
autumn fall lift elevator
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Then dialectal synonyms can also be found within British, or American English itself. For example, “girl” is called “lass”
or “lassie” in Scottish dialect, and “liquor” is called “whisky” in Irish dialect.
ii. Stylistic synonyms
They are synonyms which differ in style or degree of formality. Some of the stylistic synonyms tend to be more formal,
others tend to be casual, and still others are neutral in style. For example:
old man, daddy, dad, father, male parent
chap, pal, friend, companion
iii. Synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning
They are the words that have the same meaning but express different emotions of the user. The emotions of the user indicate the attitude or bias of the user toward what he is talking about. For example, “collaborator” and “accomplice” are synonymous, sharing the meaning of “a person who helps another”, but they are different in their evaluative meaning. The former means that a person who helps another in doing something good, while the latter refers to a person who helps
another in a criminal act. iv. Collocational synonyms
They are synonyms which differ in their collocation. For example, we can use accuse, charge, rebuke to say that someone has done something wrong or even criminal, but they are used with different prepositions accuse...of, charge...with,
rebuke...for. v. V. Semantically different synonyms
Semantically different synonyms refer to the synonyms that differ slightly in what they mean. For example, “amaze” and “astound” are very close in meaning to the word “surprise”, but they have very subtle differences in meaning. While
amaze suggests confusion and bewilderment, “astound” implies difficulty in believing. 53. 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 labels 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 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”. Chapter 6 Pragmatics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. F 2. F 3. T 4. T 5. F 6. F 7. F 8. F 9. F 10. T 11. T 12. F
Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 13. Pragmatics 14. semantics 15. context 16. utterance 17. abstract
18. Constatives 19. Performatives 20. locutionary 21. illocutionary
22. commissive 23. expressive 24. quantity
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
25. A 26.C 27.D 28.B 29.C 30.B 31. A 32.C 33.B 34.C 35. A 36.D
Ⅳ. Define the terms below:
37. pragmatics: Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful
communication.
38. Context: Generally speaking, it consists of the knowledge that is shared by the speaker and the hearer. The shared
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knowledge is of two types: the knowledge of the language they use, and the knowledge about the world, including the general knowledge about the world and the specific knowledge about the situ-ation in which linguistic communication is
taking place.
39. utterance meaning: the meaning of an utterance is concrete, and context-dependent. Utterance 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. 40. sentence meaning: The meaning of a sentence is often considered as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence
itself in terms of a predication.
41. Constative: Constatives were statements that either state or describe, and were verifiable.
42. Performative: performatives, on the other hand, were sentences that did not state a fact or describe a state, and were not
verifiable. Their function is to perform a particular speech act.
43. locutionary act: A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal
meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.
44. illocutionary act: An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker's intention; it is the act performed in saying
something.
45. perlocutionary act: A perlocutionary act is the act per-formed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. 46. Cooperative Principle: It is principle advanced by Paul Grice. It is a principle that guides our conversational behaviours. The content is: Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs by the
accepted purpose or the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
47. How are semantics and pragmatics different from each other?
Traditional semantics studied meaning, but the meaning of language was considered as something intrinsic, and inherent, i.e. a property attached to language itself. Therefore, meanings of words, meanings of sentences were all studied in an isolated manner, detached from the context in which they were used. Pragmatics studies meaning not in isolation, but in context. The essential distinction between semantics and pragmatics is whether the context of use is considered in the study of meaning. If it is not considered, the study is restricted to the area of traditional semantics; if it is considered, the
study is being carried out in the area of pragmatics. 48. How does a sentence differ from an utterance?
A sentence is a grammatical concept. It usually consists of a subject and predicate. An utterance is the unit of communication. It is the smallest linguistic unit that has a communicative value. If we regard a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes an utterance. Whether “Mary is beautiful.” is a sentence or an utterance depends on how we look at it. If we regard it as a grammatical unit or a self-contained unit in isolation, then it is a sentence. If we look at it as something uttered in a certain situation with a certain purpose, then it is an utterance. Most utterances take the form of complete sentences, but some utterances are not, and some cannot even be restored to complete
sentences.
49. 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 statement, 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” depends on the context in which it is uttered and the purpose for which the speaker utters it.
50. Discuss in detail the locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act.
A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; it is the act performed in saying something. A perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence
of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. For example:
You have left the door wide open.
The locutionary act performed by the speaker is that he has uttered all the words “you”, “have”, “door”, “left”, “open”, etc.
and expressed what the word literally mean.
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The illocutionary act performed by the speaker is that by making such an utterance, he has expressed his intention of
asking the hearer to close the door.
The perlocutionary act refers to the effect of the utterance. If the hearer understands that the speaker intends him to close the door and closes the door, the speaker has successfully brought about the change in the real world he has intended to;
then the perlocutiohary act is successfully performed.
51. Searle classified illocutionary act into five categories. Discuss each of them in detail with examples. 1) representatives: representatives are used to state, to describe, to report, etc.. The illocutionary point of the representatives is to commit the speaker to something's being the case, to the truth of what has been said. For example:
(I swear) I have never seen the man before.
(I state) the earth is a globe.
2) directives: Directives are attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something. Inviting, suggesting, requesting,
advising, warning, threatening, ordering are all specific instances of this class. For example:
Open the window!
3) commissives: Commissives are those illocutionary acts whose point is to commit the speaker to some future course of
action. When the speaker is speaking, he puts himself under obligation. For example:
I promise to come.
I will bring you the book tomorrow without fail.
4) expressives: The illocutionary point of expressives is to express the psychological state specified in the utterance. The speaker is expressing his feelings or attitude towards an existing state of affairs, e.g. apologizing, thanking, congratulating.
For example:
I’m sorry for the mess I have made.
5) declarations: Declarations have the characteristic that the successful performance of such an act brings about the
correspondence between what is said and reality. For example:
I now declare the meeting open.
52. What are the four maxims under the cooperative principle?
The maxim of quantity
(1) Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purpose of the exchange).
(2) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
The maxim of quality
(1) Do not say what you believe to be false. (2) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
The maxim of relation
Be relevant. The maxim of manner (1) Avoid obscurity of expression.
(2) Avoid ambiguity.
(3) Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
(4) Be orderly.
53. How does the flouting of the maxims give rise to conversational implicatures?
A: Do you know where Mr. Smith lives? B: Somewhere in the southern suburbs of the city.
This is said when both A and B know that B does know Mr. Smith’s address. Thus B does not give enough information that is required, and he has flouted the maxim of quantity. Therefore, such conversational implicature as “I do not wish to tell
you where Mr. Smith lives” is produced. A: Would you like to come to our party tonight? B: I’m afraid I’m not feeling so well today.
This is said when both A and B know that B is not having any health problem that will prevent him from going to a party. Thus B is saying something that he himself knows to be false and he is violating the maxim of quality. The conversational
implicature “I do not want to go to your party tonight” is then produced.
A: The hostess is an awful bore. Don’t you think? B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren’t they?
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This is said when both A and B know that it is entirely possible for B to make a comment on the hostess. Thus B is saying something irrelevant to what A has just said, and he has flouted the maxim of relation. The conversational implicature “I
don’t wish to talk about the hostess in such a rude manner” is produced.
A: Shall we get something for the kids? B: Yes. But I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.
This is said when both A and B know that B has no difficulty in pronouncing the word “icecream”. Thus B has flouted the maxim of manner. The conversational implicature “I don’t want the kids to know we are talking about ice-cream” is then
produced.
Chapter 7 Historical Linguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. T 2. T 3. T 4. F 5. F 6. T 7. F 8. F 9. T 10. F 11. T 12. F 13. T 14. F 15. F 16. F 17. T 18. T 19. F 20. T
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given: 21. Historical 22. diachronic 23. Renaissance 24. Vowel 25. Apocope 26. epenthesis 27. Law 28. Metathesis 29. Backformation 30. broadening 31. protolanguage 32. assimilation 33. internal 34. comparative 35. morphosyntactic Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
36. D 37. A 38. B 39. C 40. A 41. C 42. B 43. B 44. A 45. C
46. D 47. A 48. D 49. D 50. C Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
51. Apocope: Apocope is the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.
52. Metathesis: Sound change as a result of sound movement is known as metathesis. It involves a reversal in position of
two neighbouring sound segments.
53. Derivation: It is a process by which new words are formed by the addition of affixes to the roots, stems or words. 54. back-formation: It is a process by which new words are formed by taking away the supposed suffix of an existing
word.
55. semantic narrowing: Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or
inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
56. Protolanguage: It is the original form of a language family that has ceased to exist.
57. Haplology: It refers to the phenomenon of the loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence. 58. Epenthesis: A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel sound to the middle of a word is known as
epenthesis.
59. Compounding: It is a process of combining two or more than two words into one lexical unit.
60. Blending: It is a process of forming a new word by combining parts of other words.
61. semantic broadening: Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general
or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation.
62. semantic shift: Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a
new, sometimes related, meaning.
63. Great Vowel Shift: It is a series of systematic sound change at the end of the Middle English period approximately between 1400 and 1600 in the history of English that involved seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major
discrepancies between English pronunciation and its spelling system.
64. Acronym: An acronym is a word created by combining the initials of a number of words.
65. sound assimilation: Sound assimilation refers to the physiological effect of one sound on another. In an assimilative process, successive sounds are made identical, or more similar, to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation,
or of haplology.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
66. What is the purpose or significance of the historical study of language?
1) Researches in historical linguistics shed light on prehistoric developments in the evolution of language and the connections of earlier and later variants of the same language and provide valuable insights into the kinship patterns of
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different languages.
2) The identification of the changes that a particular language has undergone enables us to reconstruct the linguistic history
of that language, and thereby hypothesizes its earlier forms from which current speech and writing have evolved. 3) The historical study of language also enables them to determine how non-linguistic factors, such as social, cultural and
psychological factors, interact over time to cause linguistic change. 67. What are the characteristics of the nature of language change?
All living languages change with time and language change is inevitable. As a general rule, language change is universal, continuous and, to a considerable degree, regular and systematic. Language change is extensive, taking place in virtually
all aspects of the grammar.
Although language change is universal, inevitable, and in some cases, vigorous, it is never an overnight occurrence, but a
gradual and constant process, often indiscernible to speakers of the same generation.
68. What are the major periods in the history of English?
The major periods in the history of English are Old English period (roughly from 449 to 1100), Middle English period (roughly from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English period (roughly from 1500 to the present). Old English dates back to the
mid-fifth century when Anglo-Saxons invaded the British Isles from northern Europe.
The pronunciation of Old English is very different from its modem form. For example, the Old English word “ham” is pronounced as /ha:m/. In terms of morphology, nearly half of the nouns are inflected to mark nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases. In addition, suffixes are added to verbs to indicate tense. Syntactically, the verb of an Old English
sentence precedes, hut does not follow, the subject.
Middle English began when the Norman French invaders invaded England under William the Conqueror in 1066. Middle English had been deeply influenced by Norman French in vocabulary and grammar. For example, such terms as “army”,
“court”, “defense”, “faith”, “prison” and “tax” came from the language of the French rulers.
Modern English period starts with European renaissance movement. A direct consequence of the Renaissance movement
was the revival of Latin as a literary language. In the post-Renaissance period, the “British Empire” set up English-speaking colonies in many parts of the world. By the nineteenth century, English was recognized as the language of the government, the law, higher education, and business and commerce in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Today Modern English is widely used and has in fact become an important tool of international communication
among peoples of different countries.
69. As language changes over time, the meaning of a word may deviate from its original denotation. Discuss the major
types of semantic changes.
Major types of semantic changes are semantic broadening, semantic narrowing and semantic shift.
Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. Take the word “holiday” for example, the older meaning was a “holy day”. Today everyone
enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not.
Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically
earlier meaning. For example, “wife”, used to mean “any woman”, but now it means “married females” only. Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning. For example, the word silly meant “happy” in Old English, and naive in Middle English, but “foolish” in
Modern English.
70. Over the years from Old English period to the Modern English period, English has undergone some major sound
changes. Illustrate these changes with some examples.
The major sound changes include changes in vowel sounds, and in the loss, gain and movement of sounds.
The changes in vowel sounds can be seen in the Great Vowel Shift in the history of English, which led to one of the major disagreements between the pronunciation and the spelling system of Modern English. These changes involve seven long,
or tense vowels, for example Words Middle English Modem English Five fi:v faiv Mouse Mu:s maus Feet fe:t fi:t Mood Mo:d mu:d Break Brε:ken breik Sounds do not just change, they can be lost. Vowel sounds change, but some sounds simply disappeared from the general pronunciation of English. One example of sound loss is the /kn-/ clusters in the word-initial position. In Old and Middle
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English, both /k/ and /n/ were pronounced, as is shown in the spelling of such words as “knight” and “knee”. Although
Modern English spelling of these words still keeps the initial letter k, its sound is no longer pronounced. Sound changes can also take the form of sound addition. Sound addition includes the gain or insertion of a sound, for
example:
spinle spindle emty empty
Sound change can take the form of sound movement. It involves a reversal in position of two neighbouring sound segments. For example, the /r/ sound in the Old English words “bridd” (“bird”) and “hros” (“horse”) was moved to the
right of the vowel sounds in their Modem English counterparts “bird” and “horse”.
71. What are the most widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English? The most widely-spread morphological changes in the historical development of English are the loss and addition of affixes. A number of morphological rules in Old English are now lost in Modern English. Some of these rules are about derivational affixes, such as suffixes “-baere” and “-bora”. In Old English an adjective would derive if “-baere” was added
to a noun, such as:
lust (“pleasure”) + baere lustbaere (“agreeable”)
But this rule has been lost in modern English.
The most dramatic morphological loss concerns the loss of gender and case marking. In Old English, for example, “st?n” (“stone”) was marked masculine, while “gief” (“gift”) and “d…or” (“wild animal”) were marked respectively feminine
and neuter. In modern English, the gender markers of these words have been lost.
Some affixes have been added to the English morphological system. Take “-able” for example, it has been added to English since the Old English period. At first, words ending in “-able”, such as “favourable” and “conceivable”, were borrowed altogether from French. Then this suffix became a productive rule in English. It was used with other verbs to form adjectives. Contemporary English speakers apply this suffix rule to more stems, thus producing new adjectives such
as “payable”, and “washable”.
72. What are the causes of language change? Discuss them in detail.
Language changes are due to the following causes:
1) Sound assimilation: Sound assimilation refers to the physiological effect of one sound on another. In an assimilative process, successive sounds are made identical, or more similar, to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation, or of haplology, the loss of one of two phonetically similar syllables in sequence. For example, the Old English word “Engla-land” (“the land of the Angles”) came to be pronounced “England” through the assimilation of la-la sounds. 2) Rule simplification and regularization: Some changes are the result of simplification and regularization. The plural forms of borrowed words are usually irregular, thus complex. For example, the plural forms of “agendum”, “datum”, “curriculum” and “memorandum” are “agenda”, “data”, “curricula” and “memoranda”. The irregular plurals of these nouns have been replaced by regular plurals of “agendas”, “curriculums”, and “memorandums” among many speakers,
thus making them simplified and regularized.
3) Internal borrowing: In order to reduce the number of exceptional or irregular morphemes, speakers of a particular language may borrow a rule from one part of the grammar and apply it generally. For example, by analogy to the plural formation of “foe-s” and “dog-s”, speakers started saying “cows” as the plural of “cow” instead of the earlier plural kine. 4) Elaboration: Rule elaboration occurs when there is a need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or expressiveness. If a particular grammatical feature is lost as a result of a change in the phonological system, some other
feature may be added in another component of the grammar.
5) Social triggers: Socio-political changes such as wars, invasions, occupation, colonization, and language planning and standardization policies lead to language changes. For example, in the history of English, the Norman Conquest marked the beginning of the Middle English period. And British colonial settlement, and the country’s political, cultural and economic advances in distant lands such as North America, Oceania, South Africa, and India lead to the change of English
into British, American, Australian, South African and Indian varieties.
6) Cultural transmission: Although a new generation has to find a way of using the language of the previous generation, it has to find expressions that can best communicate the views and concepts of the time and the changed and ever-changing social life, and recreate the language of the community. For example, while old people tend to call a refrigerator “icebox”, the younger generation is more often heard speaking of a “fridge”. This tenuous transmission process adds up to the
inevitable and ongoing language change and variation.
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7) Children’s approximation toward the adult grammar: The way children acquire the language is another basic cause for language change. Children usually construct their personal grammars by themselves and generalize rules from the linguistic information they hear. Children’s grammar never models exactly after that of the adult speech community,
because children are exposed to diverse linguistic information.
All the above factors contribute to language changes.
Chapter 8 Sociolinguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. F 2. F 3. T 4. T 5. T 6. F 7. F 8. F 9. F 10. F 11. F 12. T 13. F 14. F 15. F 16. T 17. F 18. F 19. T 20. F Ⅱ. Fill in each of the blanks below with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. community 22. variety 23. dialectal 24.planning 25. sociolects 26. Stylistic 27. official 28. superposed 29. vernacular 30. inflectional
31. social 32. linguistic
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
33. B 34. C 35. A. 36. A. 37. C 38. D 39. A 40. C 41. A 42. D
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
43. sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of language in social contexts.
44. speech community: The social group isolated for any given study is called the speech community or a speech community is a group of people who form a community and share the same language or a particular variety of language. The important characteristic of a speech community is that the members of the group must, in some reasonable way, interact linguistically with other members of the community. They may share closely related language varieties, as well as
attitudes toward linguistic norms.
45. speech variety: Speech variety, also known as language variety, refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a
speaker or group of speakers. The distinctive characteristics of a speech variety may be lexical, phonological,
morphological, syntactic, or a combination of linguistic features.
46. language planning: language standardization is known as language planning. This means that certain authorities, such
as the government or government agency of a country, choose a particular speech variety and spread the use of it,
including its pronunciation and spelling systems, across regional boundaries.
47. Idiolect: An idiolect is a personal dialect of an individual speaker that combines aspects of all the elements regarding regional, social, and stylistic variation, in one form or another. In a narrower sense, what makes up one’s idiolect includes
also such factors as voice quality, pitch and speech rhythm, which all contribute to the identifying features in an
individual’s speech.
48. standard language : The standard language is a superposed, socially prestigious dialect of language. It is the language employed by the government and the judiciary system, used by the mass media, and taught in educational institutions,
in-cluding school settings where the language is taught as a foreign or second language.
49. nonstandard language: Language varieties other than the standard are called nonstandard languages. 50. lingua franca: A lingua franca is a variety of language that serves as a medium of communication among groups of
people for diverse linguistic backgrounds.
51. pidgin: A pidgin is a variety of language that is generally used by native speakers of other languages as a medium of
communication.
52. Creole: A Creole language is originally a pidgin that has become established as a native language in some speech
community.
53. diglossia: Diglossia usually describes a situation in which two very different varieties of language co-exist in a speech
community, each with a distinct range of purely social function and appropriate for certain situations. 54. Bilingualism: Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used either by an
individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation.
55. ethnic dialect: Within a society, speech variation may come about because of different ethnic backgrounds . An ethnic language variety is a social dialect of a language, often cutting across regional differences. An ethnic dialect is spoken mainly by a less privileged population that has experienced some form of social isolation, such as racial discrimination or
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segregation.
56. Sociolect: Social dialects, or sociolects, are varieties of language used by people belonging to particular social classes. 57. register: Registers are language varieties which are appropriate for use in particular speech situations, in contrast to language varieties that are associated with the social or regional grouping of their customary users. Format reason,
registers are also known as situational dialects.
58. Slang: Slang is a casual use of language that consists of expressive but non-standard vocabulary, typically of arbitrary, flashy and often ephemeral coinages and figures of speech characterized by spontaneity and sometimes by raciness. 59. taboo: taboo, or rather linguistic taboo, denotes any prohibition by the polite society on the use of particular lexical
items to refer to objects or acts.
60. euphemism: A euphemism, then, is a mild, indirect or less offensive word or expression substituted when the speaker
or writer fears more direct wording might be harsh, unpleasantly direct, or offensive.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
61. Discuss with examples that the speech of women may differ from the speech of men.
In normal situations, female speakers tend to use more prestigious forms than their male counterparts with the same general social background. For example, standard English forms such as “I did it” and “he isn’t” can be found more often in the speech of females, while the more colloquial “I done it” and “he ain’t” occur more frequently in the speech of males. Another feature often associated with so-called women’s language is politeness. Usually, tough and rough speeches have connotations of masculinity and are not considered to be desirable feminine qualities. In general, men’s language is more straightforward, less polite, and more direct, and women’s language is more indirect, less blunt, and more circumlocutory. This phenomenon of sex-preferential differentiation is also reflected in the relative frequency with which males and females use the same lexical items. For example, certain words that are closely associated with women may sound typically feminine as a result of that association. For example, some English adjectives like “lovely”, “nice”, “darling” and “cute” occur more often in female speeches and therefore cause feminine association. Females have also been shown to possess a greater variety of specific color terms than males, in spite of the fact that men do not necessarily possess less acute color perception than women. On the other hand, males have the reputation of possessing a larger vocabulary in
traditionally male-dominated domains such as sports, hunting and the military.
A request in English such as “Close the door when you leave” can be phrased in a number of ways ranging from a harsh
command to a very polite request: a. Close the door when you leave. b. Please close the door when you leave. c. Would you please close the door when you leave? d. Could you close the door when you leave?
Although the above options are all available to both men and women, it is usually the more polite forms that are selected by female speakers. In general, females are found to use more questions than declarative statements in comparison with
males.
62. 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 concerns the deletion of some word-final stop consonants in words like “side” and “borrowed”. Speakers of Black English frequently delete these word-final 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 English. Compare the following expressions in Black English and Standard English:
(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
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pronouns “something”, “somebody”, and “some” become the negative indefinites “nothing”, “nobody”, and “none”, for
example:
He don’t know nothing. (He doesn’t know anything.)
63. What is a linguistic taboo? What effect does it have on our use of language?
A linguistic taboo refers to a word or expression that is prohibited by the “polite” society from general use. Obscene, profane, and swear words are all taboo words that are to be avoided entirely, or at least avoided in mixed company. In sociolinguistics, a linguistic taboo, denotes any prohibition on the use of particular lexical items to refer to objects or acts. As language use is contextualized in particular social settings, linguistic taboo originates from social taboo. When an act is taboo, reference to this act may also become taboo. Taboo words and expressions reflect the particular social
customs and views of a particular culture.
As linguistic taboo reflects social taboo, certain words are more likely to be avoided, for examples, the words related to sex, sex organs and excrement in many cultures. The avoidance of using taboo language mirrors social attitudes, emotions
and value judgments, and has no linguistic basis.
The avoidance of using taboo language has led to the creation of euphemisms. A euphemism is a mild, indirect or less offensive word or expression substituted when the speaker or writer fears more direct wording might be harsh,
unpleasantly direct, or offensive. For example, we say “portly” instead of “fat”.
In many cultures, people avoid using direct words that pertain to death or dying because it is the subject that everyone fears and is unpleasant to talk about. In the English-speaking world, for example, people do not “die”, but “pass away”. Euphemisms involve a wide range of fields. Although the use of euphemisms has the effect of removing derogatory overtones, the disassociative effect is never long-lasting. Often when the negative connotation of a word is recognized in its euphemistic form, a new euphemism will have to be sought for. However, an excessive use of euphemism may have negative effects. As a matter of fact, many euphemisms have become cliches that are to be avoided in formal speech and writing. They also tend to be wordy and to give writing a timid quality. In addition, euphemism can be evasive or even deceitful. Because they are often improperly used to obscure the intended meaning, many people find them offensive and
prefer plain language.
Chapter 9 Psycholinguistics
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. F 2. T 3. T 4. T 5. T 6. F 7. F 8. F 9. T 10. T
Ⅱ. Fill in each of the blanks below with one word which begins with the letter given: 11. Psycholinguistics 12. cortex 13. hemispheres 14. lateralization 15. genetically 16. Motor 17. arbitrary 18. sub-vocal, overt 19. relativism 20. critical 21. determinism Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
22. A 23. A 24. C 25. D 26. D 27. B 28. C 29. D 30. A
31. C 32. A 33. B 34. D 35. D 36. B 37. C
Ⅳ. Explain the following terms:
38. Psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics is the study of language in relation to the mind.
39. brain lateralization: The localization of cognitive and perceptual functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain is
called brain lateralization.
40.dichotic listening: a research technique which has been used to study how the brain controls hearing and language, with which subjects wear earphones and simultaneously receive different sounds in the right and left ear, and are then asked to repeat what they hear. Dichotic listening research makes use of the generally established fact that anything experienced on the right-hand side of the body is processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa. A basic assumption, thus, would be that a signal coming in the right ear will go to the left hemisphere and a signal coming in the left ear will go to
the right hemisphere.
41. Broca’s area: It refers to the frontal lobe in the left cerebral hemisphere, which is vital to language. This area is
discovered by Paul Broca, a French surgeon and anatomist.
42. angular gyms: The angular gyrus lies behind Wernicke’s area. The angular gyrus is the language center responsible for converting a visual stimulus into an auditory form and vice versa. This area is crucial for the matching of a spoken form with a perceived object, for the naming of objects, and for the comprehension of written language, all of which require
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connections between visual and speech regions.
43. cerebral plasticity: Ac-cording to Lenneberg, prior to the end of the critical period, both hemispheres are involved to some extent in language and one can take over if the other is damaged. This neurological flexibility is called cerebral
plasticity.
44. linguistic determinism: a theory put forward by the American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf, which states
that the way people view the world is determined by the structure of their native language.
45. subvocal speech: a term used to refer to thought when thought and language are identical or closely parallel to each
other.
46. cerebral cortex : the outside surface of the brain which receives messages from all the sensory organs and where
human cognitive abilities reside.
47. linguistic lateralization: It refers the brain’s neurological specialization for language.
48.right ear advantage: The speech signals presented in the right ear goes directly to the left brain, while the speech signals in the left ear must first go to the right hemisphere, from where it is transferred to the left side of the brain for processing. Since the speech signals in the left ear takes a non-direct route and a longer time before processing than a linguistic signal received through the right ear, linguistic stimuli heard in the left ear are reported less accurately than those heard in the
right ear. This phenomenon is called the right ear advantage.
49. critical period hypothesis: The critical period hypothesis refers to a period in one’s life extending from about age two to puberty, during which the human brain is most ready to acquire a particular language and language learning can proceed
easily, swiftly, and without explicit instruction.
50. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: a theory put forward by the American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf which states
that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language.
51. linguistic relativism: Whorf believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently,
relative to their linguistic background, hence the notion of linguistic relativism.
52. overt thought: When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard speech as
“overt thought”.
53. intrapersonal communication: It means that language users use language to facilitates thinking, speech behavior and
action for the individual.
54. interpersonal communication: It means language users use language to convey information, thoughts and feelings from
one person to another, or to control each other’s behavior.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions:
55. What are the biological foundations of language?
Of all organisms, human beings are the only spontaneous cre-ators and users of highly sophisticated languages that permit the communication of a wide range of knowledge and ideas. Evidently, our linguistic ability does not depend primarily on the structure of our vocal cords, for other mammals also have vocal cords. Human linguistic ability largely depends, instead, on the structure and dynamics of the human brain. As far as is currently known, human beings are the only organisms in which one particular part of the left half of the brain is larger than the corresponding part of the right half.
This has led to the belief that human language is biologically, or more exactly, neurologically, based.
56. What are the major mental functions under the control of each hemisphere?
Psychological research suggests that both hemispheres perform important mental functions and they differ only in the manner in which they treat incoming stimuli. For example, the right hemisphere processes stimuli more holistically and the
left hemisphere more analytically.
Brain lateralization for major mental functions under the control of each hemisphere is given as follows:
(1) Left hemisphere Right hemisphere language and speech perception of nonlinguistic sounds
analytic reasoning holistic reasoning temporal ordering visual and spatial skills reading and writing recognition of patterns calculation recognition of musical melodies
associative thought
Because each cerebral hemisphere has unique functional superiority, it is accurate to think of the hemispheres as
complementarily specialized.
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57. What can we do by means of dichotic listening tests?
Dichotic listening research makes use of the generally established fact that anything experienced on the right-hand side of the body is processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, and vice versa. A basic assumption, thus, would be that a signal coming in the right ear will go to the left hemisphere and a signal coming in the left ear will go to the right hemisphere. By means of dichotic listening tests, we can analyze the characteristics of incoming stimuli processed by the individual
hemispheres.
Dichotic listening test can show that the left hemisphere is not superior for processing all sounds, but only for those that are linguistic in nature, thus providing evidence in support of the view that the left side of the brain is specialized for
language and that it is where language centers reside. 58. What is the safe conclusion from Genie’s case?
A safe conclusion from Genie’s case is that the language faculty of an average human degenerates after the critical period
and consequently, most linguistic skills cannot develop. 59. How are language and thought related to each other?
Language and thought may be viewed as two independent circles overlapping in some parts, where language and thought are consistent with each other and one never occurs without the other. When language and thought are identical or closely parallel to each other, we may regard thought as “subvocal speech”, and speech as “overt thought”. In such a case,
speaking and thinking take place simultaneously. Chapter 10 Language Acquisition
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False: 1. F 2. T 3. T 4. T 5. T 6. F 7. F 8. F 9. F 10. F 11. T 12. T 13. T 14. T 15. T 16. F 17. F 18. T 19. T 20. T Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given: 21. acquisition 22. nativist 23. motherese, babytalk 24. Behaviorist 25. holophrastic 26. telegraphic 27. Acquisition 28. Contrastive 29. interlanguage 30. transfer
31. Instrumental, integrative
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the one that can best complete the statement:
32. A 33. B 34. B 35. C 36. A 37. D 38. A 39. B 40. C 41. D 42. C
Ⅳ. Explain the following terms:
43. caretaker speech: It is the modified speech typically addressed to young children. Such modified speech is called
babytalk, motherses, or parentese.
44. holophrastic sentences: They are children’s one-word utterances. They are called holophrastic sentences, because they
can be used to express a concept or predication that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. 45. telegraphic speech: They are the early multiword utterances of children which typically lack inflectional morphemes and most minor lexical categories. Some function words are altogether missing. What occur in these multiword utterances are usually the “substantive” or “content” words that carry the main message. Because of their resemblance to the style of
language found in telegrams, utterances at this acquisition stage are often called telegraphic speech.
46. second language acquisition: Second language acquisition (SLA) is a general term which refers to the acquisition of a second language (L2), in contrast with first language acquisition (FLA). SLA is also used as a general term to refer to the acquisition of a foreign or subsequent language (such as a third or fourth language). Thus, SLA is primarily the study of
how learners acquire or learn an additional language after they have acquired their first language (LI).
47. Acquisition: According to Krashen, acquisition refers to the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the
first language by using it naturally in daily communicative situations.
48. Learning: Learning, however, is defined by Krashen as a conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a second
language usually obtained in school settings.
49. Transfer: It refers to the phenomenon that learners subconsciously use their LI knowledge in learning a second
language.
50. Interlanguage: It is a series of internal representations that comprises the learner’s interim knowledge of the target language. This is the language that a learner constructs at a given stage of SLA. Interlanguage consists of a series of interlocking and approximate linguistic systems in-between and yet distinct from the learner’s native and target languages.
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It represents the learner’s transitional competence moving along a learning continuum stretching from one’s LI
competence to the target language competence.
51. Fossilization: it is a process that sometimes occurs in second language learning in which incorrect linguistic features
become a permanent part of the way a person speaks or writes in the target language.
52. instrumental motivation: Adults are motivated to learn a second language in order to use it functionally. In other words,
the learners desire to learn a second language because it is useful for some functional, “instrumental” goals. This
motivation is called instrumental motivation.
53. integrative motivation: Adults are motivated to learn a second language in order to use it socially. In other words, the
learners learn a second language in order to communicate with native speakers of the target language.
54. Acculturation: It is the process of adapting to the new culture of the L2 community.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
55. What’s the difference between acquisition and learning, according to Krashen?
According to Krashen, acquisition refers to the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the first language by using it naturally in daily communicative situations. Learning, however, is defined as a conscious process of accumulating
knowledge of a second language usually obtained in school settings. A second language, Krashen argues, is more commonly learned but to some degree may also be acquired, depending on the environmental setting and the input received by the L2 learner. A rule can be learned before it is internalized (i.e., acquired), but having learned a rule does not necessarily prevent having to acquire it later. For example, an English language learner may have learned a rule like the third person singular “-s”, but is unable to articulate the correct form in casual and spontaneous conversation because the rule has not yet been acquired. This shows that conscious knowledge of rules does not ensure an immediate guidance for
actual performance.
56. How do the learner factors potentially influence the way in which a second language is acquired?
1) The optimum age for second language acquisition: First language acquisition is most successful when it occurs during the early years of one’s life before puberty, but the optimum age for SLA does not always accord with the maxim of “the younger the better”. The optimum age for SLA is early teenage. This claim is justifiable because this is the age when the learner’s flexibility of the language acquisition faculty has not been completely lost while one’s cognitive skills have
developed considerably.
2) Motivation: Motivation in language learning can be defined in terms of the learner’s overall goal or orientation. Instrumental motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is functional, and integrative motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is social. If the target language functions as a foreign language (used in a limited environment such as in school), the learner is likely to benefit from an integrative motivation; but if the target language functions as a second language (used as a primary means of communication in the community of the learner), an instrumental motivation is more effective. 3) Acculturation: The acculturation hypothesis focuses on the social and psychological conditions under which L2 processing is most likely to take place successfully. It states simply that the more a person aspires to acculturate to the
community of the target language, the further he or she will progress along the developmental continuum.
4) Personality: Intuitively, an outgoing personality may contribute to language acquisition. Research results, however, only partially support this hypothesis. No significant relationship has been found between talkativeness on the one hand and overall proficiency in a second language on the other. But it is recognized that as a result of being frequently exposed to and interacting with the target language, learners with an extroverted personality are likely to achieve better oral fluency
than otherwise.
In sum, a good second language learner is, among other things, an adolescent who has a strong and well-defined motivation to learn. He is able to respond and adaptable to different learning situations. He seeks out all opportunities and makes maximum use of them to interact with the input. He employs appropriate learning strategies. And he is willing to
identify himself or herself with the culture of the target language community.
57. What is the role of input for SLA?
It is evident that SLA takes place only when the learner has access to L2 input and the opportunity to interact with the input. It appears that what learners need is not mere exposure to L2 data, but the kind of input data that are specially suited to their current stage of development. There is, however, no agreement as to precisely what constitutes optimum input. Some scholars advise that access to comprehensible input is a necessary condition for acquisition to take place. It is suggested that input can be made comprehensible by the use of learned structures and vocabulary, the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of the input data, and the learner’s general knowledge to interpret new language items. It is also
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suggested that interaction (i.e., taking part in communicative activities) and intake (i.e., the input that is assimilated and
fed into the interlanguage system) are more important for SLA than input.
58. How do you understand interlanguage?
Interlanguage consists of a series of interlocking and ap-proximate 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. 59. Discuss the contrastive analysis in detail.
Contrastive Analysis was developed in order to identify and predict the areas of learning difficulty. Given this approach, it was hypothesized that L2 errors were predominantly the result of negative transfer, or mother tongue interference and second language learning was believed to be a matter of overcoming the differences between LI and L2 systems. According to this view, the major task of second language teaching should predominantly be: first, contrast the native and the target language systems and make predictions about the language items that would cause difficulty and the errors that learners were likely to make; then use these predictions in deciding on the type of language items that needed special treatment in teaching and in material development and the type of intensive techniques that would be employed to
overcome learning difficulties created by the interference.
In practice, the Contrastive Analysis is not effective because a large proportion of grammatical errors could not be explained by mother tongue interference. Errors predicted by contrastive analysis have often not occurred, whereas many
actual errors, such as “goed” and “foots”, come from overgeneralization instead of negative transfer.
Errors, according to the contrastive analysis approach, are negative and had to be overcome or given up. In fact, errors produced in a learner’s second language utterance may very well be developmental errors and therefore, should not be looked upon simply as a failure to learn the correct form, but as an indication of the actual acquisition process in action.
Developmental errors often result from the effort on the part of the learner to construct and test general rules of
communication in the target language.
60. What are the major stages that a child has to follow in first language development? What are the features of the
linguistic forms at each stage?
1) The prelinguistic stage: At the babbling stage, the sounds and syllables that children utter are meaningless. Babbling, especially early babbling, is largely independent of the particular language to which children are exposed. The sounds produced in this period seem to include a large variety of sounds. Babbling does not seem to depend on the presence of
acoustic, auditory input.
When children are through the tenth and eleventh months, they are capable of using their vocalizations to express emotions
and emphasis, and of attempting at the grand task of language acquisition.
2) The one-word stage: This stage usually occurs in the late part of the first year or the early part of the second year. At this
stage children learn that sounds are related to meanings. They begin to use the same string of sounds of the native language to “mean” the same thing. Children’s one-word utterances are also called holophrastic sentences, because they can be used to express a concept or predication that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. One-word
utterances sometimes show an overextension or underextension of reference.
3) The two-word stage: During the second year of life, child’s utterances gradually become longer. Children are heard uttering two-word expressions in a variety of combinations. Children’s two-word utterances can express a certain variety
of grammatical relations indicated by word order, for example:
Daddy hat. Doggie bark. Shoe mine. Apple me.
Two-word expressions are absent of syntactic or morphological markers. Pronouns are rare.
4) The multiword stage: It occurs between two and three years old. The salient feature of the utterances at this stage ceases
to be the number of words, but the variation in strings of lexical morphemes, for example:
Daddy like this book. He play little tune. This shoe all wet.
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No sit there.
The early multiword utterances typically lack inflectional morphemes and most minor lexical categories, therefore they are often called telegraphic speech. Although they lack grammatical morphemes, telegraphic sentences are not simply words that are randomly strung together, but follow the principles of sentence formation. As this type of telegram-format speech increases, a number of grammatical morphemes begin to appear in children’s speech. Simple prepositions begin to turn up
in their speech.
By the age of five, with an operating vocabulary of more than 2,000 words, children have completed the greater part of the
language acquisition process.
61. What is the role of correction and reinforcement in first language acquisition?
According to Behaviorist learning theory, children are believed to gradually assume correct forms of the language of their
community when their “bad” speech gets corrected and when their good speech gets positively reinforced.
Researchers have found that correction and reinforcement are not key factors in child language development as they were claimed to be. When adults do attempt to correct children s grammatical errors and the correct form is repeated, their efforts seem to have little effect, or simply doom to failure because children often do not know what the problem is and continue to use a personally constructed form. Children Reinforcement has been found to occur usually in children’s
pronunciation or reporting of the truthfulness of utterances, rather than in the grammaticality of sentences. 62. Why do we say language acquisition is primarily the acquisition of the grammatical system of language? In principle, no human brain can store all the words and expressions of a language. What happens is that when processing the language they hear, children construct the grammar and make sense of the expressions according to the grammar. When producing utterances, they follow the internalized grammatical rules. Without the knowledge of the productive rules, it would be impossible for language users to produce and understand an unlimited number of sentences which they have
never heard before.
63. Discuss the biological basis of language acquisition.
Language acquisition is a genetically determined capacity that all humans possess. Although the development of a communicative system is not unique to human beings, the natural acquisition of language as a system of highly abstract rules and regulations for creative communication distinguishes humans from all other animal species. In this sense, humans can be said to be predisposed, that is, biologically programmed, to acquire at least one language. Language development can thus be regarded as analogous to other biological developments in human growth and maturation, such as the growth and maturation of one’s limbs and organs. Humans are equipped with the neural prerequisites for language and
language use, just as birds are biologically “prewired” to learn the songs of their species.
64. What is the role of imitation in first language acquisition?
At one time, it was widely believed that children learned language by simply imitating the speech of those around them. We now know that this cannot be true, since many utterance types produced by children do not closely resemble structures
found in adult speech. If children learn their native tongue by imitating their parents, how can we account for the utterances that are typical of children’s language, such as the plural form “my foots”, the past tense forms of “I eated”, and the negative construction of “No the sun shining”? It is impossible that children imitate these structures from adults because they are never heard in adult conversations. In addition, Children with speech impairment for neurological or physiological reasons learn the language spoken to them and understand what is said. A more reasonable explanation is
that children are attempting to construct and generalize their own grammatical rules.
Some young language learners do seem to make selective use of imitation, but they do not blindly mimic adult speech in a parrot fashion, but rather exploit it in very restricted ways to improve their linguistic skills. The point is that imitation
plays at best a very minor role in the child’s mastery of language.
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