语言学课后练习附参考答案.docx

1、语言学课后练习附参考答案Chapter 1I. Define the following terms.1. design features 2. diachronic 3. arbitrariness 4. competence 5. parole 6. prescriptive 7. duality 8. performance 9. synchronic 10. descriptive 11. displacement 12. langueII. Does the traffic light system have duality? Can you explain by drawing a

2、 simple graph?Answer: Traffic light does not have duality. Obviously, it is not a double-levelsystem. There is only one-to-one relationship between signs and meaning but the meaning units cannot be divided into smaller meaningless elements further. So the traffic light only has the primary level and

3、 lacks the secondary level like animals calls.Red stopGreen goYellow get ready to go or stopIII. Communication can take many forms, such as sign, speech, body language and facial expression. Do body language and facial expression share or lack the distinctive properties of human language?Answer: On

4、the whole, body language and facial expression lack most of thedistinctive properties of human language such as duality, displacement,creativity and so on. Body language exhibits arbitrariness a little bit. Forinstance, nod means “OK/YES” for us but in Arabian world it is equal tosaying “NO”. Some f

5、acial expressions have non-arbitrariness becausethey are instinctive such as the cry and laugh of a newborn infant. IV. Why is the distinction between competence and performance important in linguistics? Do you think the line can be neatly drawn between them? How do you like the concept communicativ

6、e competence?Answer:This is proposed by Chomsky in his formalist linguistic theories. It is sometimes hard to draw a strict line. Some researchers in applied linguistics think communicative competence may be a more revealing concept in language teaching than the purely theoretical pair-competence an

7、d performance.Chapter 2I. Define the following terms.1. phonetics 2. consonant 3. allophone 4. vowel 5. assimilation 6. syllable 7. intonation 8. phonology 9. phoneme 10. toneII. Give the description of the following sound segments in English.1. 2. 3. 4. d 5. p 6. k 7. l 8. i 9. u: 10. Answers: 1. :

8、 voiced dental fricative 2. : voiceless postalveolar fricative 3. : velar nasal 4. d: voiced alveolar stop 5. p: voiceless bilabial stop 6. k: voiceless velar stop 7. l: (alveolar) lateral 8. i: high front unrounded lax vowel 9. u: high back rounded tense vowel10. : low back rounded lax vowelIII. Gi

9、ve the IPA symbols for the sounds that correspond to the descriptions below.1. voiceless labiodental fricative 2. voiced postalveolar fricative3. palatal approximant 4. voiceless glottal fricative5. voiceless alveolar stop 6. high-mid front unrounded vowel7. high central rounded vowel 8. low front r

10、ounded vowel9. low-mid back rounded vowel 10. high back rounded tense vowelAnswers:1. f 2. 3. j 4. h 5. t6. e 7. 8. 9. 10. u:IV. To what extent is phonology related to phonetics and how do they differ?Answer:Phonetics is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and pro

11、vides methods for their description, classification and transcription. Phonology is the study of sound systems that occur in a language and the patterns where they fall in. Minimal pairs, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonolog

12、ist. Both are concerned with the same aspect of language-the speech sounds. But they differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages; it focuses on chaos. Phonology aims to discover how speech sounds in a langu

13、age form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication. A phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their semantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind. Phonological

14、knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to form plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in ones language. It focuses on order. V. The pronu

15、nciation of tell is te, but that of teller is tel. Discuss why the phoneme /l/ is realized as and l respectively in this situation.Answer: The word teller is formed by adding a suffix er to the base wordtell to form a new word. We are all familiar with the rule that governs theallophones of the phoneme /l/: when preceding a vowel, it is l and whenfollowing a vowel it is . However, in teller it has a vowel both beforeand after it, so how do we decide that it should be pronounced as l, not? We notice that tell is a monosyllabic word while teller is