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陈新仁《英语语言学实用教程》配套题库【课后习题＋章节题库（含名校考研真题）＋模拟试题】试读：
第一部分 课后习题
第1章 导 言
课后习题详解
Check your understanding.
State whether each of the following statements is True or False.
(1) There is universal agreement about the origin of language.【答案】F
(2) Pet dogs can speak human language.【答案】F
(3) All human infants can speak some language.【答案】F
(4) By creativity we mean the creative use of language as often practiced by poets.【答案】F
(5) With different cultures there will be different languages.【答案】F
(6) Not all uses of language are meant to convey new information.【答案】T
In-Class Activities
1．“Language”, like “yuyan” in Chinese, is used for different meanings in different contexts, as shown below:
a. Chinese is a language.
b. Linguistics is the systematic study of language.
e. Both Jane and John like Shakespeare’s language.
d. the language of bees
Ask
(1) What does “language” mean in each of the contexts?
Key: a. a natural language; language in particular.
b. a human-specific tool for communication; language in general.
c. individual style of language use.
d. a metaphorical way of referring to bees’ system of communication.
(2) Is there any other context in which the use of the word means something else?+
Key: Yes. Example: language for the computer like C.
2．There is a well-known story in the Bible that reflects the importance of language in human society. According to the Old Testament, mankind spoke only one language until Nimrod began to build a tower that was to reach heaven. The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand each other’s speech.”
Ask
(1) What if there were no language?
Key: If there were no language, human beings could not communicate with each other, the experience of great persons and the process of history could not be documented. All in all, without language, the society can not move forward.
(2) What if there were only one language the world over?
Key: It would be much more convenient for human beings to communicate with each other; however, on the other hand, there could not be such a prosperous development of different cultures.
(3) What can we learn from this Bible story?
Key: Language is powerful as a tool of human communication.
3．The course of linguistics is aimed at bringing our conscious attention to language, something with which we are very familiar and which, paradoxically, we find strange. For instance, language is said to be creative. Consider the following two statements:
a. I learned a new word yesterday.
b. I learned a new sentence yesterday.
Ask
(1) Do you think the two statements are equally probable, and if not, why not?
Key: (a) is more likely than (b), since as the basic unit of meaning, the word can occur independently in language is finite in number, whereas as composed of words ,the sentence, though is almost infinite in number, is made possible by our knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. We can always produce and understand sentences that we never come across before. In that sense, no sentence is absolutely new.
(2) In what context do we make the second statement?
Key: When we focus our attention on the meaning of a sentence or when we are concerned with the form of a sentence as found in a language class.
4．The following English words are what we call onomatopoeic words, words that are characterized by a natural correspondence between their physical property (like sound or form) and their content or meaning:
bang; bark; crash; hiss
Ask
(1) Are there onomatopoeic words in Chinese?
Key: Yes. e.g.“哗啦”、“扑通”、“喀嚓”.
(2) Does the existence of onomatopoeic words overthrow the claim that language is arbitrary?
Key: No. Onomatopoeic words account for a very limited percentage in the vocabulary of a language
5．The arbitrary nature of language does not suggest that individuals can use a language arbitrarily. In fact, once the members of a community agree on the meaning of words, they are supposed to abide by the convention. Look at the following cartoon:
Ask
(1) Can one really invent a language of one’s own?
Key: No.
(2) If not, why?
Key: A language comes into being and is used by convention or agreement among its speakers.
6．Before the middle of the eighteenth century, theories of the beginning of language were widely discussed. According to these early theories, man was created almost instantaneously and speech was provided to him as a divine gift at the moment of creation. So goes the story of the Garden of Eden. God created Adam and speech simultaneously. God spoke with Adam and Adam answered him. The language they used was Hebrew.
Andreas Kemke, a Swedish philologist, asserted that in the garden of Eden, God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French. Goropius Becanus, a Dutch theorist, asserted that the language of the Garden was Dutch. The Egyptians considered themselves the oldest civilization, and therefore the original language was Egyptian.
On the assumption that babies, if left alone, will grow up speaking “the original” language, Psammetichus (6 B. C.) had two babies taken at random from an ordinary family and given to a servant to raise. He ordered the servant not to speak a word to the babies. When they were two years old, the children one day abruptly greeted the servant with “Bekos!” The servant immediately reported this to Psammetichus. The king checked with his counselors, who informed him that “bekos” meant “bread” in Phrygian. So in true “scientific” spirit, Psammetichus announced that Phrygian was the original language.
Ask
(1) Is there any basic flaw in this experiment?
Key: The process is not strictly controlled. There may have been some coincidence. The sample size is too small for the experiment to be valid.
(2) Do you think we really can answer the question about the beginning of language?
Key: No, at least in the present condition where/when we cannot perform experiments on the human brain, the key organ of speech.
7．Below are samples of speech from children at three different stages in their acquisition process.
Child A: You want to eat?
I can’t see my book.
Why you wake me up?
Child B: Where those dogs goed?
You didn’t eat supper.
Does lions walk?
Child C: No picture in there.
Where momma boot?
Have some?
Ask
(1) Can you identify the most likely order (from least to most advanced) of these samples?
Key: C→B→A
(2) What features in each child’s utterances can you use as evidence to support your ordering?
Key: Child A: Good syntax except for improper question form.
Child B: Visible development of syntax; overgeneralization
Child C: Not much syntax; two-word utterances; telegraphic sentences (sentences that contain only content words but lack function words)
8．The following data (from Fromkin and Rodman 1983) might give some hints about first language acquisition:
Episode 1
Adult: He’s going out.
Child: He go out.
Adult: That’s an old-time train.
Child: Old-time train.
Adult: Adam, say what I say: Where can I put them?
Child: Where I can put them?
Episode 2
Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits?
Child: Yes.
Adult: What did you say she did?
Child: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Adult: Did you say she held them tightly?
Child: No, she holded them loosely.
Ask:
(1) It is often assumed that children imitate adults in the course of language acquisition. Can imitation account for the above production on the part of the child?
Key: It can account for some, but can not account for all. There is counter evidence against the assumption, like the overgeneralization “go-ed” for “went”.
(2) What distinguishes the child’s production from that of the adult?
Key: Overgeneralization of “-ed” for the past tense as shown by “holded”.
9．Another theory of child language acquisition argues that children learn to produce “correct” sentences because they are positively reinforced when they say something right and negatively reinforced when they say something wrong. Observe the following data (ibid.) and answer the questions that follow:
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
Mother: No, say “Nobody likes me”.
Child: Nobody don’t like me.
(dialogue repeated eight times)
Mother: Now, listen carefully; say “Nobody likes me”.
Child: Oh, nobody don’t like me.
Ask
(1) How do adults reinforce the process of children’s acquisition as exemplified here?
Key: They use explicit correction.
(2) Do children know what they are doing wrongly?
Key: Not exactly.
(3) Do adults succeed in their reinforcement?
Key: Not always, at least.
(4) How should we treat the “mistakes” that children make while acquiring their mother tongue?
Key: We may ignore them sometimes, although some amount of reinforcement may turn out to be helpful.
10．Some scholars suggest that children are able to learn language because adults speak to them in a special “simplified” language sometimes called motherese, care-takerese, or child directed speech (CDS) (more informally, baby talk). In our culture adults do typically talk to young children in a special way. We tend to speak more slowly and more clearly, we exaggerate our intonation, and sentences are generally short and simple.
Ask
(1) Do children learn through structured or simplified input, as suggested?
Key: Not always. There is evidence for both sides.
(2) Can you offer some examples representing the way adults talk to infants?
Key: Motherese is characterized by shorter sentences, higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, higher proportion of content words to function words, simple syntax, more interrogatives and imperatives, more repetitions. Yet it is not syntactically simpler. Rather, it may include syntactically complex sentences such as questions: Do you want your juice now? Negatives with tag questions: We don’t want to hurt him, do we? Indeed, it is fortunate that motherese is not syntactically restricted. If it were, children might not have sufficient information to extract the rules of their language.
11．Not only are many languages dying today, many dialects are also disappearing from the planet. For example, according to a report once circulated on the Internet, many parents discourage their children from speaking their local dialect. They would rather their children took hold of every chance to learn English, because the latter will give them an edge in future competition.
Ask
(1) What measures do you suggest for protecting dialects as well as languages?
Key: I think the most important measure is that government should put forward some policies to improve the status of dialects; then the area should pay more attention to economic development, if the economy there is advanced, the dialect there is also popular, like Cantonese and so on.
(2) Do you think that someday people all over the world will speak only one language, or someday dialect will cease to exist?
Key: I don’t think so. Because language is a very important symbol of one nation, every country pay much attention to spread the influence of their language in the world, they are unwilling to give up their own language.
12．Natural languages have a lot in common. The common properties that all natural languages share are termed “universals”. Here are some of them:
(1) Wherever humans exist, language exists.
(2) The vocabulary of any language can be expanded to include new words for new concepts.
(3) All languages change through time.
(4) All grammars contain rules for the formation of words and sentences of a similar kind.
(5) Similar grammatical categories (for example, nouns, verbs) are found in all languages.
Ask:
Are there any universals that you think all languages share but are not mentioned here?
Key: E.g. All languages have internal structures. All languages have numerical.
Exercise
Task 1 Reference Search
Find in the library or online some information about the following themes:
(1) Esperanto
(2) phatic communion
(3) Ferdinand de Saussure
(4) language acquisition device (LAD)
(5) Innate Hypothesis
Key:
(1) Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto which tanslates as “one who hopes”.
(2) phatic communion is one only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.
(3) Ferdinand de Saussure was s Swiss linguist and semiotician whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developemnts both in linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the father of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major fathers of semiotics’semiology.
(4) language acquisition device (LAD)
(5) Innate Hypothesis is a linguistic theory of language acquisition which holds that at least some linguistic knowledge exists in humans at birth. Facts about the complexity of human language systems, the universality of language acquisition, and the facility that children demonstrate in acquiring these systems and the comparative performance of adults in attempting the same task are all commonly invoked in support. The idea that there may be an age by which this learning must be accomplished is known as the critical period hypothesis.
Task 2 Term Definition
Different linguists may offer different definitions, as cited below. How are the definitions different? Search for at least two more definitions.
Edward Sapir: Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.
Noam Chomsky: From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.
Key: The above different versions of definitions which are combined will help me to understand the terms more clearly, since the different versions of definitions give me a lot of information from different aspects, which make me to know even details of the terms
Task 3 Study Questions
1．What do you think is essential to the emergence of language?
Key: The existence of social activities; the need to express diverse ideas, emotions, etc.; the need to communicate ideas to distant places; etc.
2．Can our pets learn human languages? Why or why not?
Key: No. They are genetically not endowed with the capacity.
3．What role does body language play in language communication?
Key: It plays a very important role in language communication. Sometimes it is much easier and convenient to use body language than use spoken language. Sometimes it can express meanings that vocal language can not express. It can also express intimacy between close friends.
4．Naturally occurring “experiments” with so-called “wolf-children”, “Mowgli”, “bear-children” or “monkey-children” and other such feral youngsters have been widely reported for hundreds of years. None of these children could speak or understand speech and, indeed, most efforts to teach them language ended in failure. How would you account for the failure?
Key: The language acquisition device has to be triggered before a certain age (that of puberty). Sufficient expose to a language environment at the right time is essential to language acquisition.
5．The following are some instances of using English for communication. What specific function does each use of English serve in the following pictures?
Key: Informative (in the form of commanding). Directive (Advertising in the form of requesting). Directive (Persuading in the form of threatening). Directive (Recruiting).
6．Iconicity of language is an aspect of language where form echoes meaning. Onomatopoeia, also known as “sound symbolism”, is one type of iconicity. Some researchers have found other evidence of iconicity. For example, words beginning with the sound combination sl-in English often have an unpleasant sense, as in slithering, slimy, slugs. Here are some questions:
(1) Is the “unpleasant” sense actually true of all, or even most, words beginning with sl-in English?
Key: No, it isn’t true of all, maybe most of them are true.
(2) Are there any other sounds or sound combinations that you associate with particular meanings?
Key: Omit
(3) How about the vowel sounds in words that identify near-to-speaker concepts (this, near, here) versus far-from-speaker concepts (that, far, there)? What is the difference? Is it a general pattern distinguishing terms for things that are near versus far in English? What about the case in Chinese?
Key: Front vowels for near-speaker concepts; central or back vowels for far-from-speaker concepts. There seems to be a similar kind of pattern in Chinese. C.f. 近 jin /远 yuan；这 zhe /那 na
7．In many of the world’s languages there are so-called nursery names for parents. In English, for example, corresponding to the word mother is the nursery name mama, and for father one finds dada and papa. There is remarkable similarity across different languages in the form of these nursery names for parents. For example, in Chinese and Navajo ma corresponds to English mama. Why do you think that this is the case?
Key: Bilabials are learned and produced first because they are the easiest.
8．The following two transcriptions (taken from Bellugi, 1970) are fragments of conversations between the same mother and child. The first one took place when the child was 24 months, and the second three months later.
(1) What are some of the changes which appear to have taken place in the child’s ability to use English during that period?
Key: It observed that the changes of child’s ability to use English appear to have taken place from 2.5 to 3 years old.
(2) What do these changes suggest about the order of language acquisition?
Key: a. Like the basically proper use of interrogatives and the correct use of inflection.
b. Complete sentences are acquired later than elliptical ones. Inflection is acquired at a late stage.
Task 4 Comment Work
In this century it (the Whorfian Hypothesis) was given special attention through the work of Edward Sapir and, more importantly, Benijamin Lee Whorf. Working on American Indian languages, especially Hopi, the language of the Pueblo Indians of Arizona, Whorl became acutely aware of the inadequacies of traditional grammatical techniques built on Indo-European languages, especially Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, for dealing with non-Indo-European languages. Experience of American and Hopi culture suggested to Whorf that the cultures and thought processes were different because their languages were so different. This led him to establish:
... what I have called the “linguistic relativity principle”, which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.
A more succinct version of this claim: “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language, “came to be known as the “Whorfian hypothesis”. Language influences thought, it was claimed; mind is in the grip of language.
(Elizabeth Traugott and Marry Pratt, Linguistics for Students of Literature, p. 106)
Questions
(1) Do you agree with the contention that language determines the way we think?
Key: No, I don’t think so. Language is only a tool for people to communicate; it is not the key factor that determine the way we think.
(2) Germany is a country rich in great philosophers. Do you think that has to do with the language Germans speak?
Key: No, I don’t think so. Language is only a tool for people to communicate; even if there is some relation between the two, the relation is not the key one.
Language acquisition is a creative process. Children are not given explicit information about the rules, by either instruction or correction. They must somehow extract the rules of the grammar from the language they hear around them, and their linguistic environment does not need to be special in any way for them to do this. Observations of children acquiring different languages under different cultural and social circumstances reveal that the developmental stages are similar, possibly universal. Even deaf children of deaf signing parents go through stages in their signing development that parallel those of children acquiring spoken languages. These factors lead many linguists to believe that children are equipped with an innate template or blueprint for language - Universal Grammar (UG) - and this blueprint aids the child in the task of constructing a grammar for her language. This is referred to as the innateness hypothesis.
(Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman and Nia Hyams, An Introduction to Language, pp. 347 - 348)
Questions
(1) Do you think the inborn device can work independently of the environment?
Key: No, there are some children who grow up separate from human beings can not speak. It means that the inborn device can not work independently of the environment.
(2) Collect some examples from Chinese infants that prove the creative nature of language acquisition.
Key: Children acquire language without special instruction, as time going; they can create some words or sentences that they have not heard before.
Task 5 Mini-Project
Randomly select ten most commonly used words and ten infrequently used words from an English vocabulary list. Compare and find if there is a possible correspondence between the size of words and the frequency of usage (e. g. the more common the word, the
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