Chapter 1
I. Define the following terms.
1. design features 2. diachronic 3. arbitrariness
4. competence 5. parole 6. prescriptive
7. duality 8. performance 9. synchronic
10. descriptive 11. displacement 12. langue
II. Does the traffic light system have duality? Can you explain by drawing a simple graph?
Answer:
Traffic light does not have duality. Obviously, it is not a double-level
千金市骨翻译
system. There is only one-to-one relationship between signs and meaning but the meaning units cannot be divided into smaller meaningless elements further. So the traffic light only h
as the primary level and lacks the condary level like animals’ calls.
ug是什么Red stop |
Green go |
Yellow get ready to go or stop |
|
III. Communication can take many forms, such as sign, speech, body language and facial expression. Do body language and facial expression share or lack the distinctive properties of human language?
Answer:
On the whole, body language and facial expression lack most of the
distinctive properties of human language such as duality, displacement,
creativity and so on. Body language exhibits arbitrariness a little bit. For
instance, nod means “OK/YES” for us but in Arabian world it is equal to
saying “职业生涯管理NO”. Some facial expressions have non-arbitrariness becau
they are instinctive such as the cry and laugh of a newborn infant.
IV. Why is the distinction between competence and performance important in linguistics? Do you think the line can be neatly drawn between them? How do you like the concept communicative competence?
Answer:
This is propod by Chomsky in his formalist linguistic theories. It is sometimes hard to draw a strict line. Some rearchers in applied linguistics think communicative competence may be a more revealing concept in language teaching than the purely theoretical pair---competence and performance.
Chapter 2
I. Define the following terms.
1. phonetics 2. consonant 3. allophone 4. vowel
5. assimilation 6. syllable 7. intonation
8. phonology 9. phoneme 10. tone
II. Give the description of the following sound gments in English.
1. [ð] 2. [ʃ] 3. [ŋ] 4. [dearthcam] 海上钢琴师经典台词 5. [p]
6. [k] 7. [l] 8. 纳思书院[i] 9. [u:]好听的英文名 女>jaywalk 10. [ɔ]solon
Answers:
1. [ð]大规模: voiced dental fricative 2. [ʃ]: voiceless postalveolar fricative
3. [ŋ]: velar nasal 4. [d]: voiced alveolar stop
5. [p]: voiceless bilabial stop 6. [k]: voiceless velar stop
7. [l]: (alveolar) lateral 8. [i]: high front unrounded lax vowel
9. [u:]: high back rounded ten vowel
10. [ɔ]: low back rounded lax vowel
III. Give the IPA symbols for the sounds that correspond to the descriptions below.
1. voiceless labiodental fricative 2. voiced postalveolar fricative
3. palatal approximant 4. voiceless glottal fricative
5. voiceless alveolar stop 6. high-mid front unrounded vowel
7. high central rounded vowel 8. low front rounded vowel
9. low-mid back rounded vowel
10. high back rounded ten vowel
Answers:
1. [f] 2. [Ʒ] 3. [j] 4. [h] 5. [t]
6. [e] 7. [ʉ] 8. [ɶ] 9. [ɔ] 10. [u:]
IV. To what extent is phonology related to phonetics and how do they differ?
Answer:
Phonetics is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. Phonology is the study of sound systems that occur in a language and the patterns where they fall in. Minimal pairs, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonologist.
Both are concerned with the same aspect of language----the speech sounds. But they differ in their approach and focus.
Phonetics is of general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds ud in all human languages; it focus on chaos. Phonology aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how the sounds are ud to convey meaning in linguis
tic communication. A phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their mantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind. Phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic gments to form plurals and past tens, to know what is and what is not a sound in one’s language. It focus on order.
