作者：圣才电子书
出版社：圣才电子书
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
中山大学外国语学院837外国语言学及应用语言学历年考研真题及详解试读：
2017年中山大学837外国语言学及应用语言学考研真题及详解
Ⅰ. Explain the following terms. (10 points for each term)
1. allomorph【答案】
Those morphs which represent the same morpheme are called the allomorphs of the same morpheme. For instance, the noun plural morpheme {plural} in English has [-s], [-z], [-iz], [-ai], [-n], [-i] and other morphs, such morphs are termed as the allomorphs of the morpheme {plural}. Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, some others may have considerable variations; some morphemic shapes represent different morphemes and thus have different meanings, for instance, the morphemic shapes {-s} can express plurality in desks, person/ finiteness in speaks and case in girl’s.
Words such as illogical, imbalance, irregular and inactive share a common morpheme in-. In other words, il-, im-, and ir- are exceptionally the variation forms of one morpheme in-. These variation forms are called ALLOMORPHs, i.e. allomorphs of the same morpheme owing to the influence of the sounds to which it attaches. Other instances are such as the variation of plural forms of nouns: -s, -es, -en, -ee-, ø, -ce and -ves.
2. diglossia【答案】
The term diglossia, first used by Ferguson in 1959, refers to a sociolinguistic situation similar to bilingualism. But instead of two different languages, in a diglossic situation two varieties of a language exist side by side throughout the community, with each having a definite role to play. The languages which Ferguson used as examples are Arabic, Modem Greek, Swiss German and Haitian Creole. Each of these languages has two varieties: the high variety (H) and the low variety (L). The two varieties have overt recognition in the community and have commonly known and used labels. H-variety is used in government, the media, education and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.
One of the most important features of diglossia is the specialization of function of the two varieties. Each variety is the appropriate language for certain situations with very slight overlapping.
3. embedding【答案】Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination which is also called center embedding in linguistics. Different languages accommodate this construction in various ways, but many of them allow for instances where a smaller, or more precise, unit of speech can be included in a fuller sentence. When this phrase is integrated whole into the larger one, it is often referred to as center embedding. One of the most common examples of center embedded phrases involves relative clauses that get injected into larger sentences. One basic example is a sentence like this one: “The man that the woman heard left.”—In this example of center embedding, if the relative clause was entirely taken out, a shorter sentence might read like this: “The man left.” The inclusion of the relative clause serves to show the reader that there was a woman who heard the man, and this leads to the appearance of the phenomenon of center embedding in the sentence. Thus the basic function of embedding is to demonstrate more details about the meaning of the original sentence.
4. idiom【答案】An idiom is a phrase or an expression that has a figurative, or sometimes literal, meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom’s figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms, occurring frequently in all languages. It is estimated that there are at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language.
5. pragmatics【答案】Pragmatics can be defined in various ways. A general definition is that it is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. As the process of communication is essentially a process of conveying and understanding meaning in a certain context, pragmatics can also be regarded as a kind of meaning study. Pragmatics is a comparatively new branch of study in the area of linguistics; its development and establishment in the 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study of linguistics, especially that of semantics. Pragmatics is the study of language in use, focusing on the study of speaker’s meaning, utterance meaning or contextual meaning. Pragmatics and semantics are both linguistic studies of meaning, so they are related to as well as different from each other. It differs from the kind of meaning we studied in semantics in that it takes context into consideration while semantics concentrates on the study of literal meaning without context.
6. loan translation【答案】Loan translation is a special type of borrowing, in which each morpheme or word is translated in the equivalent morpheme or word in another language. For instance, the English word almighty is a literal translation from the Latin omnipotens. This is also called CALQUE, which may be a word, a phrase, or even a short sentence. The English expression free verse was translated from Latin’s verse libre, and black humour is a loan translation from French humour noir, so is found object from French objet trouve.
7. interlanguage【答案】The type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language is often referred to as Interlanguage. Interlanguage is often understood as a language system between the target language and the learner’s native language. It is imperfect compared with the target language, but it is not mere translation from the learner’s native language either. However, interlanguage should not really be seen as a bridging language between or a mixture of the target language and native language. Interlanguage is a dynamic language system, which is constantly moving from the departure level to the native-like level. Therefore, “inter” actually means between the beginning stage and the final stage. Studies on interlanguage can be done in two ways: (1) investigating the psychological, biological or neurological mechanisms involved in the production of interlanguage; (2) investigating the linguistic features of interlanguage. The former type of research has been widely conducted, whereas the latter type has not received due attention.
8. communicative competence【答案】Communicative competence includes both the knowledge about the language and the knowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations. It includes five main components of communicative competence. Namely, linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence, and fluency. Linguistic competence is concerned with knowledge of the language itself, its form and meaning; Pragmatic competence is concerned with the appropriate use of the language in social context; Discourse competence refers to one’s ability to create coherent written text or conversation and the ability to understand them; Strategic competence is similar to communication strategies. It refers to strategies one employs when there is communication breakdown due to lack of resources; The last component is termed as fluency, which means one’s ability to link units of speech together with facility and without strain or inappropriate slowness or undue hesitation.
9. critical period【答案】The critical period hypothesis is a theory in the study of language acquisition which posits that there is a critical period of time in which the human mind can most easily acquire language. This idea is often considered with regard to primary language acquisition, and those who agree with this hypothesis argue that language must be learned in the first few years of life or else the ability to acquire language is greatly hindered. The critical period hypothesis is also used in secondary language acquisition, regarding the idea of a time period in which a secondary language can be most easily acquired.
10. forensic linguistics【答案】Forensic linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law, is the application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are principally three areas of application for linguists working in forensic contexts: understanding language of the written law, understanding language use in forensic and judicial processes, and the provision of linguistic evidence.
11. corpus linguistics【答案】Corpus linguistics deals with the principles and practice of using corpora in language study. A computer corpus is a large body of machine-readable texts. Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in corpora (samples) of “real world” text. The text-corpus method is a digestive approach for deriving a set of abstract rules, from a text, for governing a natural language, and how that language relates to and with another language; originally derived manually, corpora now are automatically derived from the source texts. Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference.
Ⅱ. Write what you consider to be a good definition of the term language. Justify the choice of the elements that you have incorporated in your definition. (10 points)【答案】
Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. This definition has revealed five essential factors of language: systematic, arbitrary, vocal, symbolic and most importantly human-specific.
(1) Short as it is, this definition has captured the main features of language. First of all, language is a system, i.e. elements of language are combined according to rules. This explains why “iblk” is not a possible sound combination in English, and also why “Been he wounded has” is not a grammatically acceptable sentence in English.
(2) Second, language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between a linguistic symbol and what the symbol stands for, for instance, between the word “pen” and the thing we write with. The fact that different languages have different words for the same object 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 objects, actions, ideas, etc. by
试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]