大连外国语大学英语学院《661语言学》历年考研真题汇编（含部分答案）.pdf

目录2010年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2008年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2007年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2006年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2005年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2004年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2003年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2002年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2001年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题1992年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含答案）2010年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2008年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2007年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2006年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2005年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含部分答案）2004年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2003年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2002年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题2001年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题1992年大连外国语大学英语学院661语言学考研真题（含答案）1.List the six important characteristics of human language.2.What are the types of morphemes?3.Illustrate the deep and surface structures.4.What do you know about the semantic features?5.How does language change?Key1.Linguists are in broad agreement about some of the importantcharacteristics of human language,and most of them would accept a tentativedefinition like the following:Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbolsused for human communication.(1)Arbitrariness-When we say“language is arbitrary”,we mean thatthere is no logical connection between meanings and sounds.There is noreason why we should use the sounds dag to denote the animal“dog”.(2)Duality-Language is a system.The system has two sets ofstructures,one of sounds and the other of meaning.This is important for theworkings of language.A small number of sounds can be grouped andregrouped into a large number of units of meaning(words),and the units ofmeaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences.The nature of this relationship constitutes a most interesting problem.Forinstance,we make dictionaries of a language,but we cannot make adictionary of sentences of that language.For the number of words isrelatively finitebut the number of sentences is absolutely infinite.Thisfeature of language offers its users the possibility to talk about anythingwithin their knowledge.No animal communication system has duality,orever comes near to possessing it.(3)Productivity-Language is productive in the sense that users canunderstand and producesentences they have never heard before.Every day we send messagesthat have never before been sent and understand novel messages.Much ofwhat we say and hear we say and hear for the first time;yet there seems noproblem of understanding.For example,the sentence A red-eyed elephant isdancing on the hotel bed must be new to all readers of this book and it doesnot describe a common happening in the world.Nevertheless,nobody hasany difficulty in understanding it.Productivity seems peculiar to humanlanguage.(4)Displacement-Language can be used to refer to things which are notpresent:real or imagined matters in the past,present,or future or in far awayplaces.In other words,language can refer to contexts removed from theimmediate situations of the speaker.This is what we mean by“displacement”.This property of language provides speakers with anopportunity to talk about a wide range of things,free from the warrierscaused by remoteness in time and place.(5)Cultural transmission-Animal call systems are geneticallytransmitted.That is,animals are born with the capacity to produce the set ofcalls peculiar to their species.All cats,gibbons and bees,for example,havesystems which are almost identical to those of all other cats,gibbons andbees.With human beings,things are different:a Chinese speaker and anEnglish speaker are not mutually intelligible.This shows that language isculturally transmitted.That is,it is passed on from one generation to the nextby teaching and learning,rather than by instinct.This is not to deny thathuman capacity for language has a genetic basis;in fact only human beingscan learn a human language at birth and he has to be exposed to a language inorder to acquire it.(6)Interchangeability-Interchangeability means that any human beingcan be both a producerand a receiver of messages.The communication systems of gibbons andbees have this feature,but those of certain other animals do not.For instancesome male birds possess calls which females do no have,and certain kinds offish have similar sex-restricted types of communication.Their calls andpatterns are not interchangeable between the sexes.(Form Linguistics:ACourse Book by Hu Zhuanglin,Liu Runqing and Li Yanfu.)2.Morphemes are commonly classified into free forms(morphemeswhich can occur as separate words)and bound forms(morphemes whichcannot so occur-mainly affixes):thus unselfish consists of the threemorphemes un,self and ish,of which self is a free form,un-and-ish boundforms.3.Deep structure-A central theoretical term in generative grammars;opposed to surface structure.Deep structure is the abstract syntacticrepresentation of a sentence-an underlying level of structural organizationwhich specifies all the factors governing the way the sentence should beinterpreted.This level provides information which enables us to distinguishbetween the alternative interpretations of sentences which have the samesurface form,e.g.Flying planes can be dangerous,where flying planes can berelated to two underlying sentences,Planes which fly.,and To fly planes.Itis also a way of relating sentences which have different surface forms but thesame underlying meaning,as in the relationship between surface forms butthe same underlying meaning,as in the relationship between active andpassive structures,e.g.“The panda chased the man”as opposed to“The manwas chased by the panda”.Transformational grammars would derive one ofthese alternatives from the other,or perhaps both from an even more abstract(“deeper”)underlying structure.The various grammatical relations in suchsentences can then be referred to as the“deep subject”,“deep object”,etc.(contrasted with“surface subject”,etc.).It is also possible to compute the“deep”at which a transformation operates,by referring to the number ofstages in a derivation before it applies,and some attempt has been made tocorrelate this notion with the complexity of a sentence.Surface structure A central theoretical term in generative grammar,opposed to deep structure.The“surface structure”of a sentence is the finalstage in the syntactic representation of a sentence,which provides the input tothe phonological component of the grammar,and which thus most closelycorresponds to the structure of the sentence we articulate and hear.Analysinga surface string of morphemes through constituent analysis is universalprocedure which indicates many important facts about linguistic structure;but it by no means indicates,or how we intuitively.For such reasons,linguists in the late 1950s postulated a deep or“underlying”structure forsentences a level of structural organization in which all the factorsdetermining structual interpretation are defined and interrelated.The standardview is that a grammar operates by generating a set of abstract deepstructures,subsequently converting these underlying representations intosurface structures by applying a set of transformational rules.This two-levelconception of grammatical structure is still widely held,though it has beenmuch criticised in recent generative studies.An alternative conception is torelate surface structure directly to a semantic level of representation,bypassing deep structure altogether.More recently,a modified conceptionknown as S-structure bas been introduced.4.Semantic features are similar to the category of trope in traditionalrhetoric,in which an expression is used in a sense other than its proper ofliteral one.Semantic features can be categorized into four kinds.(1)Redundancy.In ordinary communication,semantic redundancy isregarded as a fault of style and has been disapproved by generations ofrhetoricians and language teachers.However,it has various stylistic effects inliterary work.(2)Absurdity.Semantic absurdity results from a combination ofcontradictory or incongruouswords but is nothing unobservable in reality.(3)Figurative meaning.Figurative meaning is the transference ofmeaning through sense association.(4)Honest deception.Honest deception refers to the deliberate use ofoverstatement and understatement so as to achieve emphasis.(From Linguistics:A Course Book by Hu Zhuanglin,Liu Runqing andLi Yanfu)5.It has been observed that language is something which behaves likeanimate beings.The fact that people talk about the growth and death of acertain language is no longer a wonder.The dying out of many Indianlanguages on the American continent,which once challenged the efforts of awhole generation of American structuralists,has long been known to the restof the world.Sometimes we could even find the rebirth of a language,Hebrew in Israel for example.This at least shows that language has beenconstantly changing.Changes can take place at different levels of language:lexical change,phonological change,grammatical change,semantic change,orthographicchange.(Form Linguistics:A Course Book by Hu Zhuanglin,Liu Runqing andLi Yanfu)