Chapter One

1.语言学的主要分支是什么。每个分支的研究对象是什么？

Linguistics mainly involves the following branches:

  General linguistics, which is the study of language as a whole and which deals with the basic concepts, theories, descriptions, models and methods applicable in any linguistic study

  Phonetics, which studies the sounds that are used in linguistic communication

  Phonology, which studies how sounds are put together and used in communication

  Mor­phology, which studies the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words

  Syntax, which studies how morphemes and words are combined to form sentences

  Semantics, which is the study of meaning in lan­guage.

  Pragmatics, which is the study of meaning not in isolation, but in context of use

  Sociolinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to society

  Psycholinguistics, which is the study of language with reference to the workings of mind.

  Applied linguistics, which is concerned about the application of linguistic findings in linguistic studies; 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.

   Other related branches are anthropological linguistics, neurological linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and computational linguistics.

2. 现代语言学与传统语法有什么区别？

   Traditional gram­mar is prescriptive; it is based on "high "(religious, literary) written lan­guage . It sets models for language users to follow. But Modern linguistics is descriptive; its investigations are based on authentic, and mainly spoken language data. It is supposed to be scientific and objective and the task of linguists is supposed to describe the language people actually use, whether it is "correct" or not.

3. 什么叫共时研究？什么叫历时研究？

    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 rime, while a diachronic study of language is a his­torical study; it studies the historical development of language over a period of time.

4. 人类语言的甄别性特征是什么？

1) Arbitrariness

   It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For instance, there is no nec­essary relationship between the word dog and the animal it refers to. The fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages and that the same sound may be used to refer to different objects is another good example. Although language is arbitrary by nature, it is not entirely arbitrary. Some words, such as the words created in the imitation of sounds by sounds are motivated in a certain degree. 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 con­struction and interpretation of an infinitely large number of sentences, including those that they have never said or heard before.

3) Duality

    It means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds at the lower level and the other of meanings at the higher level. At the lower or the basic level, there is the structure of individual and meaningless sounds, which can be grouped into meaningful units at the higher level. This duality of structure or dou­ble articulation of language enables its users to talk about anything within their knowledge.

4) Displacement

It means that language can be used to talk about what happened in the past, what is happening now, or what will happen in the future. Language can also be used to talk about our real word experiences or the experiences in our imaginary world. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker.

5) Cultural transmission

    While we are born with the ability to acquire language, the details of any language are not genetically transmitted, but instead have to be taught and learned anew.

5. Chomsky的语言能力和语言使用各指什么？

    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.

6.Saussure 是如何区分语言和言语的？

    The distinction between langue, and parole was made by the famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure early this century. Langue and parole are French words. 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.

Chapter Two

7. 语言交际的两大媒介是什么？哪一个是基本的交际媒介？为什么？

   Modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary, but not the written form, because the spoken form is prior to the writ­ten form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of lan­guage.

8. 语音学的三个分支是什么。它们研究的对象各是什么？

    Articulatory phonetics: It studies the human speech organs and the way in which thee speech sounds are produced.

    Acoustic phonetics: It studies the physical properties of the speech sounds; it deals with the sound waves through the use of such machines as a spectrograph.

Auditory phonetics is the study of the perception of sounds by the human ear.

9.什么叫浊音化？它是如何形成的？

Voicing is the result of the vibration of the vocal cords. When the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration, the sounds produced in such a way are voiceless. When vocal cords are held together tautly so that the air stream vibrates them, the sounds produced in this way are voiced.

10.宽式标音和严式标音有什么区别？

The broad transcription is the transcription of sounds by using one letter to represent one sound. The narrow transcription is the transcription with diacritics to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.

11.英语的辅音是如何分类的？

1) by place of articulation :

a.bilabial such as [p],[b],[m],[w]

b.labiodental such as [f],[v]

c.dental such as [θ],[T ]

d.alveolar such as [t],[d],[s],[z],[n],[l],[r]

e.palatal such as [∫], [V ],[ t∫ ], [dV ], [j]

f.velar such as [k], [g], [ N ]

g.glottal such as [h]

2) by manner of articulation.

a.Stops such as [p],[b],[t],[d],[k],[g]

b.Fricatives such as [f],[v],[s],[z],[ θ],[ T ], [∫ ], [ V], [h]

c.Afficates such as [t∫], [dV ]

d.Liquids such as [l], [r]

e.Nasals such as [n],[m],[N]

f.Glides such as [w], [j]

12.英语的元音是如何分类的？

1) Vowels may be distinguished as front vowels such as [i:] [i] [e] [A] [a], central vowels such as [\:], [[],[Q]and back vowels such as[u:] [J] [ C:] and [B:] 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 such as [i:],[ i],[u:],[J], semi-close vowels such as[e], [з: ] , semi-open vowels such as [ [ ], [ C: ] , and open vowels such as [æ], [a], [Λ] and [ɑ:].

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. The long vowels include [i:] [\:] [ C: ] [u:] [ɑ:]，while the rest are short vowels.

13.语音学和音系学有什么区别？

    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.

14.音素、音位和音位变体有什么区别？

Phones are the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.; some do, some don’t.  A phoneme is a basic unit in phonology; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit.  It is not a sound, but a collection of distinctive phonetic features. In actual speech, a phoneme is realized phonetically as a certain phone. The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.

15.什么是超音位特征？它是如何影响语义的？

1)The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compund noun a 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.

16. 什么叫音位对立？什么叫互补分布？什么是最小对立对？

If two phonetically similar sounds can occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.  If two phonetically similar sounds are two allophones of the same phoneme and they occur in different environments, they are said to be in complementary distribution.

17.复合词有什么特点？

  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.

Chapter Three

18.  词素可以划分成哪些类别？

  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 Four

19.  什么是X-标杆理论?

    X-bar theory is a general and highly abstract schema that collapses all phrasal structure rules into a single format: X″→ (Spec) X (Compl). In this format, Spec stands for specifier while Compl stands for complement. This theory is capable of reducing the redundancies of individual phrasal structure rules and may well capture certain basic properties shared by all phrasal categories, i.e. NP, VP, AP, PP, across the languages of the world.

20.  英语的句子中的三种基本类型是什么？

    Traditionally, three major types of sentences are distinguished. They are simple sentence, coordinate or compound sentence and complex sentence. (1) A simple sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone as its own sentence. For example, ① John reads extensively. ② Mary decided to take a linguistic class the next semester. Each of the two sentences contains a single clause and can stand structurally independent. (2) A coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”, “but”, “or”. The two clauses in a coordinate sentence are structurally equal parts of the sentence; neither is subordinate to the other. For example, ③ John is reading a linguistic book, and Mary is preparing for her history exam. ④ John likes linguistics, but Mary is interested in history. (3) A complex sentence contains two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated into the other. The two clauses in a complex sentence have unequal status, one subordinating the other. The incorporated, or subordinate, clause is normally called an embedded clause, and the clause into which it is embedded is called a matrix sentence. For example, ⑤ Mary told Jane [that John liked linguistics]. ⑥ [That John likes linguistics] puzzles everyone. ⑦ Mary showed interest in linguistics [after John gave her a lecture]. In the above three examples, the clauses in the square brackets are embedded clauses. They are subordinate to the clauses outside the brackets which are called matrix clauses.

21.  画出 “Flying planes can be dangerous.” 的树型图。”

    This sentence is ambiguous because it has two readings:

a.   Planes which are flying can be dangerous.

b.   To fly planes can be dangerous.

The tree diagrams are as follows:

a.

           NP                         VP

   Flying planes                 can be dangerous.

b.

                        S

            S’                             VP

     NP          VP

  (Someone)  fly planes             can be dangerous.

Chapter Five

22.  语义研究的主要流派有哪些？

1)    The naming theory:  It was proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato. According to this theory, the linguistic forms or symbols used in a language are taken to be la­bels of the objects they stand for. So words are just names or labels for things.

2)    The conceptualist view:  It holds that there is no direct link between a lin­guistic form and what it refers to. In the interpretation of meaning, they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind.

3)    Contextualism:  It 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 ac­cording 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)

4)    Behaviorism

    The contextualist view was further strengthened by Bloomfield . He 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". (Bloomfield,

  This behaviorist theory is somewhat close to contextualism. It is linked with psychological interest.

23.  所指与意义有什么关系？

  Sense and reference are two terms in the study of meaning. (1) 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-contextualized. It is the aspect of meaning that dictionary compilers are interested in. 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. (2) Obviously, linguistic forms having the same sense may have different references in different situations. On the other hand, there are less frequent occasions when linguistic forms with the same reference might differ in sense, e.g. “morning star” and “evening star”.

24.  同义词可以分为哪些类别？

    Dialectal synonyms : Dialectal synonyms are words which have more or less the same mean­ing and are used in different regional dialects such as petroleum in British English and gasoline in American English.  Dialectal synonyms can also be found within British, or American English itself. For example, "girl" is called "lass" or "lassie" in Scottish dialect.

    Stylistic synonyms: Stylistic synonyms are words which have the same meaning but 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.

    Synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning :They are 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, such as thrifty and miser.

    Collocational synonyms : Some synonyms differ in their collocation. That is, they go together with different words, for example: accuse. . . of, charge. . . with,  rebuke. .-for.

    Semantically different synonyms: They 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" imples difficulty in believing. "

25.  在语义上，反义关系可以分为哪几个类别？各有什么特征？

1)      gradable antonys: Some antonyms are gradable because there are often intermediate forms between the two members of a pair such as old/young, hot/cold.

2)      Complementary antonyms: a pair of complementary antonyms is characterized by the feature that the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the other.

3)      Relational opposites: pairs of words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items.

26.  什么是述谓结构？它有那些类型？

The predica­tion is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. This applies to all forms of sentence, including statements, imperative and interrogative forms. A predication consists of argument(s) and predicate. An ar­gument is a logical participant in a predication. It is generally identical with the nominal element (s) in a sentence. A predicate is something that is said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.

    According to the number of arguments contained in a predi­cation, the predications may be classified into two-place predication (con­taining two arguments), one-place argument (containing one argument), and no-place predication ( containing no argument). For example:

         His car is next to my car. (Two-place predication)

         He is singing. (One-place predication)

         It is raining. (No-place predication)

27.  句子的意义是构成句子的每个单词意义的总和吗？

   The meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components. It cannot be worked out by adding up all the meanings of its constituent words. For example;

           The dog bit the man.

           The man bit the dog.

The two sentences consist of exactly the same words, but they arc widely different in their meanings.

28.  语义变化的主要类型有哪些？

    Semantic change refers to the change of meaning of a word. The major types of semantic change are as follows: (1) Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. For example, the word “holiday” was originally used to mean a day of religious significance because it was a “holy day”. Today everyone enjoys a holiday, whether he or she is religious or not. (2) Semantic narrowing is the reverse process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For example, the word “liquor” in contemporary English is an alcoholic drink, but it was once synonymous with “liquid”, be it alcoholic or not. (3) Semantic shift refers to the process in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related meaning, e.g. the word “silly”. Quite surprisingly, a “silly” person was a happy person in Old English, and a naive person in Middle English, but a foolish person in Modern English.

Chapter Six

29.  语用学和传统语义学有什么区别？

    Pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context of use, while traditional semantics treats meaning as something intrinsic, abstract and de-contextualized.

30.  句子和话语有什么区别？

   A sentence is a grammatical unit. Its meaning is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of a predication. Utterance is what people actually utter in the course of communication. It should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered or used. Most utterances take the form of sentences, i.e. most utterances are complete sentences in terms of syntax; however, some utterances are not, and some cannot even be restored to complete sentences.

31.  句子的语义与话语语义有什么区别？

The meaning of a sentence is abstract and de-contextualized, while the meaning of an utterance is concrete and context-dependent. Utterance meaning is based on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context.

32.  言内行为、言外行为和言后行为有什么区别，举例说明。

    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. 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 .

33.  Searle是如何对言外行为进行分类的？它们各自的言外之的是什么？

1)    Representatives: stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true.

2)    Directives: trying to get the hearer to do something.

3)    Commissives: committing the speaker himself to some future course of action.

4)    Expressives: expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state.

5)    Declarations: bringing about immediate changes by saying something.

34.  合作原则的四个准则是什么？违反合作原则的四个准则是如何产生会话含义的？

1)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.

2) 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.

3)The maxim of relation

Be relevant.

4)The maxim of manner

(1) Avoid obscurity of expression.

(2) Avoid ambiguity.

(3) Be brief ( avoid unnecessary prolixity) .

(4) Be orderly.

         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?

    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 "ice-cream." 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 Seven

35.  英语语言的发展可分为哪几个主要阶段？各个阶段的转变是以什么历史事件为标志的？

   English has undergone dramatic changes throughout the three major periods, i.e. Old English (roughly from 449 to 1100), Middle English (roughly from 1100 to 1500), and Modern English (roughly from 1500 to the present). (2) Historical Events: The Old English period began with the invasion of the British Isles by English-speaking Anglo-Saxons from Europe, and ended with the arrival of Norman French invaders historically known as the Norman Conquest. The Middle English period is distinguished from the Old English period by the Norman Conquest, and from the Modern English period as the result of the cultural influence of the European renaissance movement.

36.  语言变化的本质有什么特征？

  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.

37.  语言变化的主要原因是什么？

  (1) Sound assimilation is the physiological effect of one sound on another. It may cause loss of vowels or consonants, vowel nasalization and morphological and lexical changes. (2) Rule simplification and regularization are a type of spontaneous morphological rule change involving exceptional plural forms of nouns. For example, many English speakers tend to ignore the exceptional plural rules, just producing plural nouns such as “hoofs” instead of “hooves”. () Internal borrowing caused by the need to lessen the burden on memory. For example, by analogy to the pairs “reap/reaped” and “seem/seemed”, English speakers are heard saying “He sweeped the floor.” (4) Elaboration is motivated by the need to reduce ambiguity and increase communicative clarity or expressiveness. For example, Modern English has a stricter word order than Old English did. (5) Sociological triggers refer to those radical socio-political changes that lead to vigorous language changes. A typical example in the history of English is the Norman Conquest, a military event that marked the dawning of the Middle English period. (6) The continual process of cultural transmission across generations is another cause of language change. For example, while old people tend to call a refrigerator “icebox”, the younger generation is more often heard speaking of a “fridge” as they have the desire to sound different from the older generation. (7) Children’s approximation toward the adult grammar constitutes another basic cause for language change. Children tend to acquire the simplified and regularized expressions, thus giving rise to language change in the long run.

38.  为什么古英语的词序比现代英语灵活？

Old English has an elaborate case marking system to show if a constituent is the subject, object, and so on, of a sentence, while Modern English has a much weaker system for case marking and therefore has to rely heavily on more rigid word order to indicate grammatical relations.

39.  历史语言学重新构建语言历史的目和方法各是什么？

    Historical linguists aim at establishing, through the method of comparative reconstruction, the genetic relationship between and among various languages based on the evidence of systematic form-meaning resemblance in cognate items, and thereby to re­construct the protolanguage of a language family.

40.  什么是Grimm法则？

   Jacob Grimm, A German scholar, found a series of consonant shifts that occurred in the history of the Germanic languages including English, Dutch, German, Swedish and Danish. The following are the three sets of consonant shifts that Grimm discovered: a. Voiced stops become voiceless. b → p  d → t  g → k  b. Voiceless stops become fricatives. p → f  t → θ  k → x  c. Voiced aspirates become deaspirated. bh → b  dh →d  gh →g Because these sound changes were so strikingly regular and law-like, they became known as Grimm’s Law. According to this law, the Germanic languages were subject to a rule that changed all voiceless stops into fricatives after they split off from other Indo-European languages.

Chapter Eight

41.  双语和双言现象有什么区别？

  Bilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in which two standard languages are used in a speech community; whereas in a diglossic community, two varieties of language are used for different situa­tions , one being more standard and higher, and used for more for­mal matters, and the other less prestigious, and used for colloquial situations.

42.  标准英语优于非标准英语吗？

    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, including school settings where the language is taught as a foreign or second language. Nonstandard, or vernacular, languages are language varieties other than the standard language. (2) Standard language is not superior to nonstandard language at all. The designation of the standard language variety is motivated by historical and socio-political reasons and has nothing to do with any supposed linguistic superiority intrinsic to the grammatical components of that particular language variety. In view of language as an effective means of communication, no single dialect of a language, be it standard or nonstandard, is any more correct, any more logical, or any purer than any other dialect of the language. All dialects of a language are equally effective in expressing ideas.

43.  洋泾浜语与克里奥耳语有什么区别？

   A pidgin is a variety of language that is generally used by native speak­ers of other languages as a medium of communication. A pidgin is used for some practical pur­poses, such as trading, by groups of people who do not know each other' s languages. It is not a native lan­guage of a particular region, but only a marginal language used by people whose cultures are sharply separated and whose business contact is very spe­cialized .As a simplified language, a pid­gin involves reductions in sounds, vocabulary and syntax. Although pidgins are simplified languages, they are rule-governed.

A Creole language is originally a pidgin that has become established as a native language in some speech community. When a pidgin comes to be adopted by a population as its primary language, and children learn it as their first language, then the pidgin language is called a creole. A creole involves expansion in sounds, vocabulary and syntax. Creoles are fully developed languages.

44.  什么是地域变体、社会变体、文体变体和个人言语？

     Regional variation is speech variation according to the particular area where a speaker comes from. Regional variation of language is the most dis­cernible and definable. When all social groups in a single geographical area speak one particular dialectal variety of a language that shares the same lin­guistic features and is distinguishable from any other linguistic system of a different geographical location, that speech variety is an instance of regional variation.

   Social variation is the speech variation according the social factors. Consciously or unconsciously, our social backgrounds exert a shap­ing influence on our choice of linguistic features that are appropriate to our social identities. Social variation gives rise to sociolects which are subdivisible into smaller speech categories. These categories reflect our socioeconomic, edu­cational , occupational and ethnic background, as well as our sex and age.

   Stylistic variations are intra-speaker differences associated with the speech situation: who is speaking to whom about what under what circumstances for what purpose. Stylistic 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. Style can also refer to a particular person' s use of speech or writing at all times, or to a way of speaking or writing at a par­ticular period of time.A particular register may be used by a particular group of people, usu­ally sharing the same occupation like doctors, teachers, and lawyers, or the same interests, such as stamp collectors, football fans. A particular register often distinguishes itself from other registers by having a number of distinctive words, by using words or phrases in a partic­ular way, and sometimes by special grammatical constructions, such as sci­entific language, or legal language.

    Idiolectal variation: When an individual speaks, what is actually produced is a unique language system of the speaker, expressed within the overall system of a particular language. This variation is idiolectal variation. Such a personal dialect is referred to as idiolect .

45.  过度使用委婉语有什么消极影响？

  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 Nine

46.  什么是Sapir-Whorf 假设？

    The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a theory put forward by the American anthropological linguists Sapir and Whorf (and also a belief held by some scholars). It states that the way people view the world is determined wholly or partly by the structure of their native language. (2) The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts, i.e. linguistic determinism and relativism. Whorf proposed first that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language. Or put it more bluntly, language determines thought, i.e. the notion of linguistic determinism. Because languages differ in many ways, Whorf also believed that speakers of different languages perceive and experience the world differently, i.e. relative to their linguistic background, hence the notion of linguistic relativism.

47.  为什么说语言不能决定思维？

1) Words and meaning

The relationship between the name and the meaning of a word is quite arbitrary. Labeling a natural phenomenon or an object is not fundamental to a conceptual system. The fact that English has only one name for snow does not mean that English speakers cannot perceive differences in varieties of snow. Similarly, it does not follow that, because a language lacks a word, its speakers therefore cannot grasp its concept.

2) Grammatical structure

   The syntactic system of a language and the perceptual system of the speakers of that language do not have the kind of interdependent relationship. Many grammatical features of a language are purely superficial aspects of lin­guistic structure.

3) Translation

   Successful translation between languages can be made. If two languages have radically differ­ent conceptual systems, then translation from one language to another is im­possible

5. 3. 4 Second language acquisition

  If languages have different conceptual systems, then a speaker of one language will be unable to learn the other language because he lacks the right conceptual system. However, since people can learn radi­cally different languages, those languages couldn' t have different conceptual systems.

   Bilingualism is another good case in point. There are numerous cases of successful bilingual speakers across the globe. Although these people are proficient in two languages that are not genetically related, they do not have "double minds" equipped with two different systems of thought. Like monolinguals, bilingual or multilin­gual speakers have a consistent conceptual-perceptual system of the physical world.

5. 3. 5 Language and world views

   The language system does not necessarily provide specifics of one' s world views. On the one hand, people speaking the same language may have different world views, including political, social, religious, scientific and philosophical views. On the other hand, people speaking different languages may share similar political, social, religious, scientific or philosophical views. Moreover, one language can describe many different world views, as is evident in the case of successful translation.

48.  什么是大脑的单侧化？

 The localization of cognitive and perceptual functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain is called lateralization. The process of lateralization is believed to be maturational. That is, brain lateralization is genetically programmed, but takes time to develop. During development, the two sides of the brain become specialized for differ­ent functions and lateralization takes place. It is a commonly held view that lateralization is an evolutionary precondition of the development of superior intelligence as well as a precondition of language acquisition .

49.  大脑的语言中枢有哪几个区？各自的功能可能是什么？

   Research findings have shown that language processing centers are not situated in a single area of the left hemisphere, but several such as Broca' s area, Wernicke' s area and the angular gyros.

   Broca's area is the frontal lobe in the left cerebral hemisphere. This part is crucial for word finding and syntax processing. The damage to this part results in a speech production deficit such as word-finding difficulties and problems with syntax.

  Wernicke's area is another responsible for processing language. This area is crucial for language understanding. The damage to this part may result in the speech deficits such as a severe loss of under­standing even though their hearing is normal.  The patients produce fast and fluent speech with good intonation and pronunciation, but their content ranges from mildly inappropriate to complete nonsense, often unintelligible. They use very general terms, even in response to specific requests for information.

 The angular gyrus: 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 connections between visual and speech regions.

50.  两耳分听研究证明了什么？

  Dichotic listening tests involve simultaneously presenting, through ear-phones, two different auditory signals, one to the right ear and the other to the left ear. The test shows that stimuli heard in the left ear are reported less accurately than those heard in the right ear. This proves the hypothesis 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.

The test also proves 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.

51.  语言对思维的影响可能是什么？

   Language does not so much determine the way we think as it influ­ences the way we perceive the world and recall things, and affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks. That is, language may be used to pro­vide new ideas, bring about a change in beliefs and values, solve problems, and keep track of things in memory.

   It is evident that to the degree of success that language functions as an indispensable medium of information storage and retrieval, it can lead lan­guage users to be predisposed to act and perceive in certain ways rather than in others. In conclusion, language by no means determines the ways we per­ceive the objective world, but by its convenience, availability, and habitual use, does influence the perceptions, memory tasks, and other verbal and nonverbal behavior of human beings.

Chapter Ten

52.  Krashen是如何区分习得和学习的？

According to Stephen Krashen, language acquisition is contrasted with language learning on the assumption that these are different processes.

   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 a conscious process of accumulating knowledge of a second language usu­ally obtained in school settings. It is recognized that children acquire their native language without explicit learning. 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.

53.  为什么说母语习得是语法规则的习得？

   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.

54.  在母语习得中，语言输入起什么样的作用？

   For language to be eventually acquired, children must be provided with an appropriate linguistic environment in which they have access to language data and opportunities to interact with the input.

55.  刻意的教学对母语习得有什么作用？

    For the vast majority of children, language de­velopment occurs spontaneously and requires little conscious instruction on the part of adults. In natural settings, parents rarely correct young children s utterances that violate the rules of the grammar, still less do they go about teaching explicitly the correct forms of the language, al­though some parents believe that they constantly instruct their children to speak grammatical sentences. Even if they do, there is no convincing evi­dence that children need such instruction. In fact, parents often fail in their attempt to teach children grammatical rules.

   Of course, this is not to say that instruction is altogether useless in child language development from the stage of a babbler to that of a fluent speaker. A certain amount of conscious instruction on the part of parents and peers may have some effect on the language of a child. But the available ev­idence to date indicates that an explicit teaching of correct forms to young children plays a minor role at best.

56.  模仿在母语习得中的作用是什么？

   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.

57.  在儿童母语习得过程中，纠错起什么样的作用？

   It was once assumed that children received constant correction for using a "bad" grammar and rewards when using a "good" grammar. It was also assumed that children learned to produce correct sentences because they were positively reinforced when they said something right and negatively re­inforced when they said something wrong. 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 is not a key factor 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.

58.  第一语言习得经过哪些主要阶段？

(1) The prelinguistic stage: at this babbling stage, the sounds and syllables that children utter are as yet meaningless. (2) The one-word stage: at this stage, children learn that sounds related to meanings. They use one-word utterances, or holophrastic sentences to express a concept or predication that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. () The two-word stage: at this stage, children are heard uttering two-word expressions in a variety of combinations. (4) The multiword stage: at this stage, the salient feature of the utterances is the variation in strings of lexical morphemes. It is normally assumed that, 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.

59.  什么是比较分析法？

   Contrastive Analysis was developed in order to identify the areas of learning difficulty. The Contrastive Analysis approach was founded on the belief that, by establishing the linguistic differences between the native and target language systems, it was possible to predict what problems learners of a particular second language would face and the types of errors they would make. 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.

60.  什么叫中继语？

   SLA is viewed as a process of creative construction, in which a learner constructs a series of internal representations that comprises the learner's interim knowledge of the target language, known as interlanguage. This is the language that a learner constructs at a given stage of SLA. Specifically, interlanguage consists of a series of interlocking and ap­proximate 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. If learners were provided sufficient and the right kind of language expo­sure and opportunities to interact with language input, their interlanguage would develop gradually in the direction of the target language competence.

61.  刻意教学对第二语言学习有什么作用？

  Although formal instruction hardly affects the natural route of SLA, it does provide op­portunities to receive comprehensible input, and enables the classroom learner to perform a wider range of linguistic tasks than the natu­ralistic learner and thereby accelerates the rate of acquisition. There is con­siderable evidence to indicate that L2 learners, particularly adult beginners, benefit from the classroom setting, for they are much more likely to obtain the adjusted qualitative input needed for acquisition. In addition, grammar instruction, course materials and the "teacher talk" are all prepared to meet various stages of development, providing the kind of language features that learners are ready to acquire.

   Students with more formal instruction are found to have scored higher on proficiency tests than those with less. On the other hand, one should note that formal instruction has a powerful de­layed effect.

62.  有哪些个人因素影响第二语言的习得？

  There are a number of factors relating to the learner that potentially influence the way in which a second language is acquired. (1) The optimum age for second language acquisition occurs during the early years of one’s life before puberty. (2) Motivation is the learner’s overall goal or orientation. Instrumental motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is functional, i.e. to use it as an instrument for the purpose of, for instance, securing a desirable job. Integrative motivation occurs when the learner’s goal is social, i.e. to integrate oneself with the second language community. (3) Acculturation is a process of adapting to the culture and value system of the second language community. According to this view, the acquisition of a second language involves and is dependent on the acquisition of the culture of the target language community. It has been hypothesized that successful language learning is more likely when learners succeed in acculturating to the second language society. (4) Learner’s personality also influences the SLA. They are extroverted and introverted learners. It is recognized that extroverted learners are likely to achieve better oral fluency. To sum up, learner factors contribute to the success of SLA.