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科目代码：621科目名称：语言学基础知识
语言学基础知识试题（满分150分）
一、 英语语言学基础知识部分（占70%，共计105分；此部分要求考生用英文答卷，中文答卷不给分）
1. Define the following 5 terms. (25 points in all, 5 points for each
1) The “pooh-pooh” theory of the origin of language
2) Bound morphemes
3) Informative function of language
4) Cognitive linguistics
5) Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory
2. Explain the following topics in about 600 words. (40 points in all, 10 for each)
1) What are the suprasegmental features? What functions they perform in language use?
2) What are Jakobson’s (1960) views of the functions of language?
3) What is endocentric construction?
4) What is componential analysis? Please point out its weaknesses.
3. Make comments on the following topics in at least 1,500 words. (40 points in all, 20 for each)
1) Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)
2) Firth’s Theories of Language
1. Define the following 5 terms. (25 points in all, 5 points for each
1) The “pooh-pooh” theory of the origin of language
In the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they utter instinctive sounds of pain, anger and joy. As for evidence, we can only cite the universal use of sounds as interjections. What makes the theory problematic is that there is only a limited number of interjections in almost all languages. Besides,interjections such as Oh, Ah, Aiyo bear little relationship with the sound system of a language and therefore are not good evidence.
2) Bound morphemes
Some morphemes cannot normally stand alone, but function only as parts of words. Such morphemes are called bound morphemes. Bound morphemes can be classified into two categories.One category is derivational morphemes, which are used to make new words in the languages and are often used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem. For example, the derivational morpheme -ness can change the adjective kind to the noun kindness. The other category is inflectional morphemes, which are not used to produce new words, but rather to show aspects of the grammatical function of a word, such as -’s, -s, -ing, -ed, -en, -est, -er.
3) Informative function of language
Language is used to tell something, to give information, or to reason things out. Declarative sentences serve this function. For instance, the symbol “road closed” on a road has such an informative function. Language is the instrument of thought and people often feel the need to speak their thoughts aloud. For example, when people are working on a math problem. The use of language to record the facts is a prerequisite of social development. This is indeed a crucial function of language.
4) Cognitive linguistics
As experiments have shown, people will usually state that a car has a box-like shape, that it has wheels, doors, and windows, that it is driven by an engine and equipped with a steering wheel, an accelerator and brakes and that it has seats for the driver and the passengers. Besides, it will also be mentioned that a car is comfortable and fast, that it offers mobility, independence and perhaps social status. Some people may connect the notion of “car” with their first love affair, or with injury if they were once involved in an accident. This example tells us that the description of a car goes beyond objective descriptions, but provides a richer, more natural view of its meaning, and includes the use of metaphors. This approach that language and language use are based on our bodily experience and the way we conceptualize it is called cognitive linguistics.
5) Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory
Sperber and Wilson formally proposed relevance theory in their book Relevance:Communication and Cognition in 1086. They argue that all Gricean maxims, including the CP itself,should be reduced to a single principle of relevance, which is defined as: every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optional relevance.
To understand this definition, we need to be clear about the key notions in it: “ostensive communication” and “presumption of optimal relevance”. They agree with Grice that communication is not simply a matter of encoding and decoding, it also involves inference. But they maintain that inference has only to do with the hearer. From the speaker’s side, communication should be seen as an ostensive act. In other words, a complete characterization of communication is that it is ostensiveinferential. And “ostensive communication”, or “inferential communication”, is a shorthand.
By presumption of optimal relevant is meant:
(a) The set of assumptions of{I} which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee’s while to process the ostensive stimulus.
(b) The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could have used to communicate {I}.
2. Explain the following topics in about 600 words. (40 points in all, 10 for each)
1) What are the suprasegmental features? What functions they perform in language use?
Suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmentals are stress, tone, and intonation.
Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. A basic distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables, the former being more prominent than the latter, which means that stress is a relative notion. At the word level, it only applies to words with at least two syllables.At the sentence level, a monosyllabic word may be said to be stressed relative to other words in the sentence.
Intonation involves the occurrence of recurring fall-rise patterns, each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or on groups of words of varying length.For example, the rising tone at the end of an utterance is often used for asking yes-no questions and showing politeness or surprise, whereas the falling tone sometimes lead to rudeness and abruptness.
Languages like Chinese are known as tone languages. In Chinese tone changes are used in a different way, affecting the meanings of individual words. In Chinese Putonghua, a syllable such as[pa] can have at least four meanings depending on the tone on which it is spoken. More meanings are found if we consider the different characters with the same pronunciation and tone form.
2) What are Jakobson’s (1960) views of the functions of language?
For Jakobson, language is above all, as any semiotic system, for communication. While for many people, the purpose of communication is referential, for Jakobson (and the Prague school structuralists), reference is not the only, not even the primary goal of communication. In his famous article, Linguistics and Poetics, Jakobson defined the six primry factors of any speech event, namely:addresser, addressee, context, message, code, contact. In conjunction with these, Jakobson established a well-known framework of language functions based on the six key elements of communication,namely: referential (to convey message and information), poetic (to indulge in language for its own language), emotive (to express attitudes, feelings and emotions), conative (to persuade and influence others through commands and respects), phatic (to establish communion with others) and metalingual function (to clear up intentions and meanings). They correspond to such communication elements as context, message, addresser, addressee, contact and code respectively.
3) What is endocentric construction?
The syntactic constructions analyzed are of two main types: endocentric and exocentric constructions, depending on their distribution and the relation between their constituents. Endocentric
construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable centre or head. Usually
noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases belong to endocentric types because the constituent items are subordinate to the head.
4) What is componential analysis? Please point out its weaknesses.
On the analogy of distinctive features in phonology, some linguists suggest that there are semantic features, or semantic components. That is, the meaning of a word is not an unanalysable whole. It may be seen as a meaning of a word. For example, the meaning of the word boy may be analyzed into three components: HUMAN,YOUNG and MALE.
There are also weaknesses in the approach to analyze the meaning of a word in terms of semantic components. One weakness is that many words are polysemous. They have more than one meaning, consequently they will have different sets of semantic components. A case in point is the word “man”, which is usually said to have a component MALE, but it may also be used in a generic sense as in MAN is mortal, which applies to both sexes.
Secondly, some semantic components are seen as binary taxonomies. MALE and FEMALE in one, and ADULT and YOUNG is another. But as we have learned in the discussion of antonymy above, the opposition between MALE and FEMALE is different from that between ADULT and YOUNG. The former is absolute while the latter is relative.
Thirdly, the examples we have seen are only concerned with the neatly organized parts of the vocabulary. There may be words whose semantic components are difficult to ascertain. Besides,semantic components like HUMAN, ADULT, MALE belong to a meta-language, a language used for talking about another language. The attempt to explain the meaning of man in terms of these components is simply a translation from English to the meta-language. To someone who does not know the meta-language, this translation explains nothing.
3. Make comments on the following topics in at least 1500 words. (40 points in all, 20 for each)
1) Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)
Functional sentence perspective is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to an analysis of utterances or texts in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.
Some Czech linguists devoted considerable attention to problems of analyzing sentences from a functional point of view. They believe that a sentence contains a point of departure and a goal of discourse. The point of departure is equally present to the speaker and to the hearer — it is the ground on which they meet and is called the theme. The goal of discourse presents the very information that is to be imparted to the hearer, and is called the rheme. It is believed that the movement from the theme to the rheme reveals the movement of the mind itself. Language may use different syntactic structures, but the order of ideas remains basically the same. Based on these observations,they created the notion of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) to describe how information is distributed in sentences. FSP deals particularly with the effect of the distribution of known or given information and new information in discourse. The known information refers to information that is not new to the reader or hearer. The new information is what is to be transmitted to the reader or hearer. As we can see, the subject-predicate distinction is not always the same with the theme-rheme contrast. For example,
(a) Sally stands on the table .
Subject Predicate
Theme Rheme
(b) On the table stands Sally .
Predicate Subject
Theme Rheme
Sally is the grammatical subject in both sentences, but the theme in (a) and the rheme in (b).
2) Firth’s Theories of Language
While Firth inherited the tradition by taking up some of Saussure’s and Malinowski’s views, he developed their theories and put forward his own original points of view. Influenced by Malinowski,Firth regarded language as a social process, as a means of social life, rather than simply as a set of agreed-upon semiotics and signs. He held that in order to live, human beings have to learn, and learning language is a means of participation in social activities. Language is a means of doing things and of making others do things. It is a means of acting and living.
Firth did not see language as something wholly inborn or utterly acquired. He seemed to adopt a riding-on-the-wall attitude, seeing language as something both inborn and acquired. Thus he insisted that the object of linguistic study is language in actual use. And the goal of linguistic inquiry is to analyze meaningful elements of language in order to establish corresponding relations between linguistic and non-linguistic elements. The method of linguistic study is to decide on the composite elements of language, explain their relations on various levels, and ultimately explicate the internal relations between these elements and human activities in the environment of language use. That is to say, Firth attempted to integrate linguistic studies with sociological studies: because human beings are inseparable from cultural values, and language is an important part of them. Linguistics can help reveal the social nature of human beings.
Firth held that meaning is use, thus defining meaning as the relationship between an element at any level and its context on that level. According to his theorizing, the meaning of any sentence consists of five parts: (1) the relationship of each phoneme to its phonological context; (2) the relationship of each lexical item to the others in the sentence; (3) the morphological relations of each word; (4) the sentence type of which the given sentence is an example; and (5) the relationship of the sentence to its context of situation.
Accordingly, there are five levels of analysis: (1) phonological; (2) lexical and semantic;(3) morphological: (4) syntactic; and (5) context of situation. By analyzing the positions of sounds in relation to other sounds on the first level, one can find out the phonological function. Analyses o the lexical and semantic level aim not only to explain the referential meaning but also the collocative meaning. For example, one of the meanings of night comes from its collocation with dark, and one of the meanings of dark comes from its collocation with night. On the morphological level, inflections are studied, and on the syntactic level, the syntagmatic relationship of grammatical categories,or colligation, is studied. Such a relationship is realized by combining elements of language, for example, we study linguistics. On the level of the context of situation, non-linguistic elements such as objects, behaviour, and events, together with the effects of linguistic behaviour are studied. Firth said that this kind of study makes no distinction between words and ideas. And by doing this, we can explain why certain utterances are used in certain contexts of situation, and we can therefore equate“use” and “meaning”. By context of situation, Firth meant a series of contexts of situation, each smaller one being embedded into a larger, to the extent that all the contexts of situation play essential parts in the whole of the context of culture.
Firth’s own study focused on the context of situation as Malinowski did. He defined the context of situation as including the entire cultural setting of speech and the personal history of the participants rather than as simply the context of human activity going on at the moment. Recognizing that sentences are infinitely various, he used the notion of “typical context of situation” so that some generalizations can be made about it. By a typical context of situation, he meant that social situations determine the social roles participants are obliged to play; since the total number of social roles is also finite. For this reason, he said “conversation is much more of a roughly prescribed ritual than most people think. Once someone speaks to you, you are in a relatively determined context and you are not free just to say what you please.” Semantics is then defined as the classification of utterance of a language into the typical contexts of situation for which they might be appropriate.
Firth made more specific and more detailed contextual analyses. He put forward the idea that in analyzing a typical context of situation, one has to take into consideration both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text:
(1) The internal relations of the text itself
(a) The syntagmatic relations between the elements in the structure
(b) The paradigmatic relations between units in the system
(2) The internal relations of the context of situation
(a) The relations between text and non-linguistic elements, and the general effects
(b) The analytical relations between words, parts of words, phrases and the special elements of the context of situation.
Firth also listed a model in his papers in linguistics that covers both the situational context and the linguistic context of a text:
(1) The relevant features of the participants: persons, personalities
(a) The verbal action of the participants
(b) The non-verbal action of the participants
(2) The relevant topics, including objects, events, and non-linguistic, non-human events
(3) The effects of the verbal action
Firth’s second important contribution to linguistics is his method of prosodic analysis, called prosodic phonology, put forward in a paper presented at London Philological Society in 1948. The term “prosody” has a special meaning. Since any human utterance is a continuous speech flow made up of at least one syllable, it cannot be cut into independent units. In order to analyze the functions on various levels, mere phonetic and phonological descriptions are insufficient. Phonological description only deals with paradigmatic relations, leaving syntagmatic relations out of consideration. Firth pointed out that in actual speech, it is not phonemes that make up the paradigmatic relations, but phonematic units. There are fewer features in phonematic units than in phonemes, because some features are common to phonemes of a syllable or a phrase (even a sentence). When these features are considered in syntagmatic relations, they are all called prosodic units.
Firth did not define prosodic units. However, his discussion indicates that prosodic units include such features as stress, length, nasalization, palatalization, and aspiration. In any case, these features cannot be found in one phonematic unit alone.
An emphasis on polysystemic analysis does not mean a neglect of structural analysis. Firth actually attached great importance to syntagmatic relations. He held that the basic unit in analyzing speech is nor word, but text, text in particular contexts of situation. Dissecting text into levels is only for the sake of analysis. It does not matter much which level should be analyzed first, since levels are abstracted from text. However, whichever level we analyse, we should analyse the prosodic units of the text.
Prosodic analysis and phonemic analysis both consider basically the same phonological facts. However, prosodic analysis is advantageous in categorizing data and revealing the relations between linguistic data. It can discover more units on various levels and attempts to explicate the interrelationship between units on these levels.