北京航空航天大学 2013年硕士研究生入学考试试题

考试科目：821综合英语

Part One　 Linguistics (70 points)

Ⅰ. Briefly answer the following questions. (30 points, 5×6)

1. What is a phoneme? How to discover phonemes?

2. What are endocentric compounds and exocentric compounds? Which compounds below are endocentric and which are exocentric?

Airplane; dog food; pickpocket; policeman; redhead; sky-blue; walkman

3. What are syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations? Explain each of them with an example.

4. What is Contrastive Analysis (in Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching) ?

5. What are image schemas? Give three examples of image schemas.

Ⅱ. Answer the following questions or complete the related tasks below, together with some appropriate superordinates and hyponyms, in a diagram to show the hyponymy. (40 points, 4×10)

1. What is hyponymy? Arrange the vehicles shown in the first column in the table.

2. Write some phrase-structure rules ( beginning with S → NP + VP) which can generate the sentence:The men love a red car.

3. What is Componential Analysis? Use this theory to explain why the following sentences do not make sense :

(a) John is a man but not a male.

(b) Peter killed Bob but Bob did not die.

4. Consider the dialogue between A and B:

A: Can I talk to you now?

B: I will have a meeting in a minute.

Explain B's implicature using Grice's theory of Conversational Implicature.

参考答案

Ⅰ.

1．考点提示：本题考查的是音位。

解题思路：首先解释音位的概念，再说明通过最小对立对来发现音位并加以举例说明。

参考答案：

A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning. Phonological analysis relies on the principle that certain sounds cause changes in the meaning of a word, whereas other sounds do not. A simple methodology to demonstrate this is to take a word, replace one sound by another,and see whether a different meaning results.For instance,the word tin in English consists of three separate sounds, each of which can be given a symbol in a phonetic transcription, [tin]. If we replace[t]by[d],a different word results:din.[t]and[d]are thus important sounds in English, because they enables us to distinguish tin from din,tie from die,and many more words pairs.Similarly,[i] can be shown to be important units, too.

This technique, called the minimal pairs test, can be used to find out which sound substitutions cause differences of meaning. For English, it leads to the identification of over 40 important units, called phonemes.

2．考点提示：本题考查的是向心复合词和离合复合词。

解题思路：首先解释向心复合词和离心复合词的概念，再选出符合相对应的复合词。

参考答案：

Compounds can be further divided into two kinds: the endocentric compound and exocentric compound. The head of a nominal or adjective endocentric compound is de-verbal. That is, it is derived from a verb. Consequently, it is also called a verbal compound or a synthetic compound. Usually, the first member is a participant of the process verb. The exocentric nominal compounds are formed by V+N, V+A, and V+P, whereas the exocentric adjectives come from V+N, V+A.

The endocentric compound are: airplane, dog food, policeman, redhead, sky-blue.

The exocentric compound are: pickpocket, walkman.

3．考点提示：本题考查的是结构主义语法中的组合关系和聚合关系。

解题思路：首先解释组合关系和聚合关系的概念，再举例加以说明。

参考答案：

Saussure proposed the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. Syntagmatic relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence or between elements which are present, such as the relation between“weather”and others in the following sentence:“If the weather is nice,I'll go out.”

Paradigmatic relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure or between one element present and the others absent. For example, the word man can be replaced by the phrase pretty girl in the sentence The man smiles.

4．考点提示：本题考查的是对比分析。

解题思路：首先解释对比分析的概念，再加以举例分析。

参考答案：

Contrastive analysis (known as CA) came into fashion in the 1960s. Starting with describing comparable features of the native language and target language (e.g. tense, words or expressions etc.), contrastive analysis compares the forms and meaning across these two languages to locate the mismatches or differences so that people can predict the possible learning difficulty learners may encounter.

For example, between Chinese and French, there are many “false friends”, words and phrases which are rather similar in spelling and sound yet different in meaning and function. This is usually out of a direct transfer from learners' native language French. Such native language transfer errors may also occur when Chinese English learners simply transfer Chinese collocation or expressions to English as “to touch the society, ” and so on.

5．考点提示：本题考查的是意向图式。

解题思路：首先解释意向图式的概念，再加以举例说明。

参考答案：

Mark Johnson proposes image schemas. He defines an image schema as a recurring dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience. Image schematic structures have two characteristics: they are pre-conceptual schematic structures emerging from our bodily experience and they are constantly operating in our perceptual interaction, bodily movement through space, and physical manipulation of objects. Image schemas exist at a level of abstraction, operate at a level of mental organization between propositional structures and concrete images, and serve repeatedly as identifying patterns in an indefinitely large number of experiences, perceptions and image formation for objects or events that are similarly structured in the relevant ways.

Ⅱ.

1．考点提示：本题考查的是词的上下义关系，以及上义词和下义词。

参考答案：

Hyponymy is a kind of sense relation. It is a matter of class membership. (2 points) The upper term or in other words the class, in this sense relation is named as superordinate, while the lower term, namely, the members, is the hyponym. (2 points) A superordinate is a general term that usually includes different words representing narrower categories. (2 points) In this particular case, vehicle serves as the superordinate, and the hyponyms are different vehicles featuring various characteristics, to be exact, van, bus, car motorcycle and bicycle. (4 points)

2．考点提示：本题考查的是转换生成语法中短语结构的组合原则。

解题思路：为了弥补直接成分分析法的不足，乔姆斯基建议在语言研究中区分两层结构即深层结构和表层结构。而转换规则负责把短语的深层结构转换为表层结构。

参考答案：

The phrase structure component has phrase structure rules, which can be listed as S→NP+VP,VP→V+NP, NP→N+Det, Det→a, the, etc. (4 points)

The structure of the sentence mentioned above is as follows: the whole sentence can be divided into a NP(noun phrase)and a VP(verb phrase).The men form a NP and love the red car serves as VP. The VP can be further divided into love as a verb,and a red car as a another NP.Any NP can be divided into Det+N.Inside the NP,the is a determiner,and men is the noun,as for the NP a red car,both a and red are served as determiners and car is the certain noun.(6 points)

3．考点提示：本题考查的是成分分析法。

解题思路：首先解释成分分析法的概念，再利用其解释句子的意义关系，分析其不合理性。

参考答案：

Componential analysis refers to a semantic approach which defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components, or semantic features. For example, the meaning of the word“boy” may be analyzed into three components: HUMAN, YOUNG and MALE. It is a way proposed by the structural semanticists to analyze word meaning. (4 points) The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. That is, the meaning of a word is not unanlysable whole. It may be seen as a complex of different semantic features. (3 points)

The semantic components will also explain sense relations between sentences. The sentences in the examples are all self-contradictory, as there are words, or expressions, which have contradictory semantic components in them. Thus the two sentences do not make sense. (3 points)

4．考点提示：本题考查的是会话含义理论。

解题思路：首先解释会话含义的概念，再根据题目要求阐述该对话违反了哪条合作原则，说明其产生的隐含义。

参考答案：

The theory of conversational implicature was proposed Grice. (2 points) According to Grice, in daily conversation people do not usually say things directly but tend to imply them. Grice coined the term implicature, which refers to the implied meaning. The conventional implicature is a type of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words, together with the context, under the guidance of the CP and its maxims. (5 points)

In the conversation above, what B said violates the maxim of Quality. Thus the conventional implicature occurred. Here what B implicates is that I don't want to talk with you now. (3 points)