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1. What are the categories of
lexical meaning?
Lexical
meaning
includes:
a)
referential
meaning
(also
denotative
meaning).
b)
Associative
meanings.
Referential
meaning
is
the
central
meaning
and
it
is
more
stable
and
universal.
Associative
meanings
are
meanings
that
hinge
on
referential
meaning, which
are less stable and more culture-specific.
Types
of
associative
meanings:
connotative
meaning,
social
meaning,
affective
meaning, reflected
meaning, collocative meaning
2. What
are the components of metaphor?
Target
domain and source domain are the components of
metaphors. That is to say all
metaphors
are
composed
of
two
components.
This
allows
us
to
understand
one
domain of experience in terms of
another. The domain to be conceptualized is called
target
domain,
while
the
conceptualizing
domain
is
termed
the
source
domain.
The
transference of
properties of the source domain to the target
domain is referred to by
some cognitive
linguistics as
mapping.
The
source domain is
concrete and
familiar.
The target domain
is abstract and novel.
3. How does
transformational grammar account for sentence-
relatedness?
1)
Sentence-
relatedness:
sentences
may
be
structurally
variant
but
semantically
related.
2) According to
Chomsky, a grammar as the tacit shared knowledge
of all speakers is
a system of finite
rules by which an infinite number of sentences can
be generated. He
attempts to account
for this aspect of syntax by postulating that deep
structures and
surface structures.
3) Deep structures are the basic
structures generated by phrase structure rules.
4)
Surface
structures
are
derived
structures,
the
structures
of
sentences
that
we
actually
speak.
Surface
structures
are
derived
from
deep
structures
through
transformational
rules which include replacement, insertion,
deletion and coping, etc.
5)
There
are
five
transformations:
particle
movement
transformation,
replacement,
insertion,
deletion and copying.
4. On what basis
do linguists regard human language as species-
specific (unique
to humans)?
Language
is
a
system
of
arbitrary
vocal
symbols
used
for
human
communication.
Many philosophers and linguists believe
that language is unique to man. Language is
a human trait that sets us apart from
other living creatures. They spell out a number of
features
of
language
which
are
not
found
in
animal
communication
systems.
These
features:
creativity,
duality,
arbitrariness,
displacement,
cultural
transmission,
interchangeability and reflexivity.
These are universal features possessed by all
human
languages. Although some animal
communication systems possess, to a very limited
degree, one or another of these
features except creativity and duality, none is
found to
have all the features. On this
basis linguists tend to conclude that human
languages
are qualitatively different
from animal communication systems.
5.
What
part
of
syntax
can
phrase
structure
rules
account
for
and
what
they
cannot?
Phrase
structure
rules
are
rules
that
specify
the
constituents
of
syntactic
categories.
These rules are part of speakers’
syntactic knowledge, which
govern the
construction
1
of sentences.
There are a
lot of part of syntactic knowledge, including
structural ambiguity (which
strings of
words have more than one meaning), words order
(different arrangements
of
the
same
words
have
different
meanings),
grammatical
relations
(what
element
relates to what
other element directly or indirectly), recursion
(the repeated use of the
same
rules
to
create
infinite
sentences),
sentence
relatedness
(sentences
may
be
structurally
variant
but
semantically
related),
and
syntactic
categories
(a
class
of
words or phrases that can substitute
for one another without loss of grammaticality)
etc.
Phrase
structure
rules
can
account
for
structural
ambiguity,
word
order,
grammatical relations, recursion, and
syntactic categories; but they cannot account for
sentence relatedness.
6. How
do sociolinguists classify the varieties of
English?
The term variety is the label
given to the form of a language used by
any group of
speakers or used in a
particular field. A variety is characterized by
the basic lexicon,
phonology, syntax
shared by members of the group. Varieties of a
language are of four
types:
the
standard
variety,
regional
dialects,
sociolects
and
registers.
The
standard
variety is the form of a language used
by the government and communication media,
taught
in
schools
and
universities
and
is
the
main
or
only
written
form.
A
regional
dialect is a
variety of a language spoken by people living in
an area.
Sociolects are
forms of a language that characterize
the speech of different social classes. Register
is
a term widely used in
sociolinguistics to refer to
“
varieties according to
use
”
.
7. What are
the functions of supra-segmental features?
The
phonetic
features,
distinctive
or
non-distinctive,
that
we
have
discussed
so
far
may be properties of single segments.
The features that are found over a segment or
sequence of two or more segments are
called supra-segmental features. These features
are also distinctive features. They are
found in such units of syllables, words, phrases
and sentences. The most widely found
supra-segmental features are stress, intonation
and tone.
Stress is defined
as the perceived prominence (comparative loudness)
of one or more
syllable elements over
others in a word. This definition implies that
stress is a relative
notion.
Intonation: when we speak, we change the pitch of
our voice to express ideas.
The same
sentence uttered with different intonation may
express different attitude of
the
speaker. In English, there are three basic
intonation patterns: fall, rise and fall-rise.
Tone
is
the
variation
of
pitch
at
the
word
level
to
distinguish
words.
The
same
sequence
of segments can be different words if uttered with
different tones. English is
not a tone
language. Chinese is a typical tone language.
Intonation
and
stress
generally
occur
simultaneously
in
utterance.
When
intonation
contour
falls
on
a
syllable,
the
nucleus
is
stressed
and
the
vowel
is
naturally
lengthened
a
bit.
In
the
meantime,
there
is
a
little
pause
after
the
syllable.
This
simultaneous functioning of the
features serves to highlight the information
focus, or
to eliminate ambiguity
(double interpretations of the same phrase or
sentence).
8. What are aspects of
syntactic knowledge?
Syntactic
knowledge is the knowing of which strings of words
are grammatical and
which
are
not.
In
addition,
it
includes:
1)
structural
ambiguity
2)
word
order
3)
2
grammatical relations 4) recursion 5)
sentence relatedness 6) syntactic categories.
9. The advantages and disadvantages of
componential analysis?
1st,
it
is
a
breakthrough
in
the
formal
representation
of
meaning.
Once
formally
represented,
meaning components can be seen. 2nd, it reveals
the impreciseness of the
terminology in
the traditional approach to meaning analysis.
Looking at the semantic
formula of man
and woman again you can see that it is not true
that the total meaning
of one word
contrasts with that of the other. It is merely in
one semantic feature that
the two words
contrast. When we look at the semantic formulae of
man and father, we
find
that
all
the
semantic
features
of
man
are
included
in
the
semantic
formula
of
father.
Then
we
reach
a
different
conclusion
from
common
sense
in
regard
to
the
relation between man and father. Is
this contradictory? The answer is No. The obvious
fact
that
man
includes
father
is
derived
from
the
perspective
of
reference.
Componential
analysis
examines
the
components
of
sense.
The
more
semantic
features a word
has, the narrower its reference it is.
The limitations of componential
analysis are also apparent. It cannot be applied
to the
analysis
of
all
lexicon,
merely
to
words
within
the
same
semantic
field.
It
is
controversial whether semantic features
are universal primes of word meanings in all
language.
Nevertheless,
CA
is
so
far
a
most
influential
approach
in
the
structural
analysis of lexical meaning.
10. Why is
linguistics a vast field of study?
Linguistics
is
a
broad
field
of
study,
because
language
is
a
complicated
entity
with
many layers and facets.
There are a number of divisions of linguistics,
which can be
put
into
two
categories.
1)
Intra-disciplinary
divisions:
the
study
of
language
in
general is often termed
general linguistics. It is based on the view that
language as a
system
is
composed
of
three
aspects:
sound,
structure
and
meaning.
2)
Inter-disciplinary
divisions.
a)
Sociolinguistics
deals
with
the
relation
between
language and
culture. b) Psycholinguistics deals
with the relation between language
and mind c) applied linguistics is
concerned with the application of linguistic
theories
and descriptions in other
fields.
11. How is
linguistics different from traditional grammar?
1)
Traditional grammar is
prescriptive and modern linguistics is
descriptive.
2)
Traditional
grammatical
categories
are
merely
based
on
European
language
but
linguistic studies all languages.
3)
Traditional
grammar
lacks
a
theoretical
framework,
while
modern
linguistics
is
theoretically rather than pedagogically
oriented.
12. How are speech sounds
described?
The
study
of
speech
sounds
is
phonetics
which
includes
3
parts:
1)
articulatory
phonetics
2)
acoustic
phonetics
3)
auditory
phonetics.
Articulatory
phonetics
is
the
primary
concern in linguistics, in which speech sound is
described within 3 sides:
The description of consonants: a) place
of articulation
b) manners of
articulation c)
voicing d) aspiration
The description of vowels: a)
monophthongs b) diphthongs c) lip rounding d)
tensity
In more detailed transcription
(sometimes referred to as narrow transcription), a
sound
may be transcribed with a symbol
to which a smaller symbol is added in order to
mark
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