北京航空航天大学 2012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 or complete the related tasks. (30 points, 5×6)
1. What is an affix? Please exemplify any affixes that attach (relatively) productively to verbs and do not change the category.
2. State the Referential Theory (or meaning triangle) put forward by Ogden and Richards, and illustrate the theory with an example.
3. Figure out the conceptual metonymies in the following sentences and provide at least one more example.
a.He drank the whole bottle.
b.Arthur married money.
c.Einstein was one of the most creative minds of the last century.
d.Where are you parked?
4. Explain the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
5.What does Saussure mean when he writes,“Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative positions”?Please illustrate your point with an example.
Ⅱ. Complete the following tasks. (40 points, 4 ×10)
1.The sentence“The boy saw the man with the telescope”is structurally ambiguous.Please explain the ambiguity and illustrate the different meanings with phrase structure trees.
2. Figure out the structure of the following sentences and give a description of this phenomenon.
The horse raced past the barn fell.
The florist sent the flowers was pleased.
The cotton clothing is made from grows in Mississippi.
They told the boy that the girl met the story.
3. State the various stages of Chomsky's Transformational Grammar, and describe the theory's philosophical/methodological features.
4. Explain the (communicative) Principle of Relevance, and use it to explain why in a normal circumstance the sentence John went to the bank means that John went to a money-institution rather than that John went to the bank of a river.
参考答案
Ⅰ.
1．考点提示：本题考查对词缀的理解。根据与词根和词干的相对位置，词缀可分为前缀、后缀和中缀。词缀又可分为屈折词缀和派生词缀，屈折词缀不改变原词的词类，而派生词缀有可能改变也有可能不改变原词的词类。
解题思路：首先解释词缀的定义，然后再举屈折词缀的例子来说明不改变原词的类型。
参考答案：
Affix is a collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme, so affix is naturally bound. Affixes can be classified into three sub-types, namely, prefix, suffix,and infix,depending on their position around the root or stem of a word,e.g.prefix:para-,mini-;suffix:-ise,-tion.
The-ed of simple past tense:He walked home.
The-s of simple present tense: He walks home.
The-ing of progressive aspect:He is walking home.
2．考点提示：本题考查语义学中的指称理论。
解题思路：首先解释指称理论的概念，然后再举例加以说明。
参考答案：
It is a theory of meaning which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for. It is especially true in the case of proper nouns and definite noun phrases. But it can not refer to the abstract concepts. According to the “semantic triangle” theory, the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is not direct. It is mediated by concept.
E.g.,by saying desk is a piece of furniture with a flat top and four legs,at which one reads and writes, we think of the concept of desk, or summarizing the main features, the defining properties of a desk, instead of referring to a real desk.
3．考点提示：本题考查认知语言学中转喻概念在句子中的应用。
解题思路：分别列举每个句子中所包含的转喻类型。
参考答案：
In sentence a, it is a kind of Containment ICM (Idealized Cognitive Models), using the container for contents, and “bottle” may refer to “a bottle of milk” or “ a bottle of wine.”
In sentence b, it is a kind of Possession ICM, using possessed for the possessor, in which “money”refers to “the person with money.”
In sentence c, it is a kind of Category-and-Property ICM, in which “minds” refers to “people with great minds.”
In sentence d, it is a kind of Possession ICM, using possessor for possessed: “me” refers to “my car.”
Another example is “to author a new book”, using agent for action. It is Action ICM.
4．考点提示：本题考查对社会语言学中萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的认识。
解题思路：首先解释萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的初始理论，然后再说明逐渐衍变的“强式”和“弱式”两种理论模式。
参考答案：
What this hypothesis suggests is like this: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speaker's unique ways of understanding the world. It was proposed by the best remembered of American Anthropological linguistics. It has three aspects:
(1) Linguistic determinism which means language determines our way of thinking.
(2) Linguistic relativity which means the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. Different languages offer people different ways of expressing the world around.
(3) There are two versions of this hypothesis, the strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis suggests, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version of this hypothesis, however, is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical.
5．考点提示：本题考查索绪尔关于语言符号的理论。索绪尔认为语言是一个符号，这个符号是形式和意义的结合，索绪尔称之为“能指”和“所指”，它们只有相互结合作为符号的组成部分才能够得以存在。
解题思路：首先阐述理论，然后再举例加以说明。
参考答案：
Saussure believes that language is a system of signs. By saying the sentence, he means that the meaning or value of a sign depends on its context: what precedes it, what succeeds it, and the situation in which it is read or decoded—who reads it, how they read it, and why they read it.
In Saussure's opinion, in order to communicate, sounds must be part of a system of conventions and part of a system of signs, which are the union of a form and an idea, which Saussure called the Signifier and the Signified. The value of a sound can only be determined by its context.
For example, the sound and the sign “pen” only refer to something you write in the English language. In other language, it has different meanings. That explains why signs function through their relative positions.
Ⅱ.
1．考点提示：本题考查句子的歧义。
解题思路：该句子有两层意思，一种为“男孩看见了那个带着望远镜的人”，另一种为“男孩用望远镜看见了那个人。
参考答案：
This sentence can be understood with two meanings:
(1) The boy saw the man who was holding the telescope. ( 2 points)
(2) With the help of the telescope, the boy saw the man. (2 points)
2．考点提示：本题考查心理语言学和认知语言学中的花园路径理论。花园路径是一个语言学和心理语言学现象，是语言处理过程中的一种特殊的暂时歧义，是故意违反人们已经习惯的语法、语义和逻辑知识，省掉句中某些实时加工过程中的某些部分而产生的局部歧义。而整个句子其实是没有歧义的。人们偏向于对歧义句进行最容易接受的解读。然而那种人们不愿意接受的解释才是句子的正确解读。这类歧义现象会对语言的处理过程造成较大的困难。
解题思路：首先指出四个句子真正的句子结构，然后再阐述花园路径理论。
参考答案：
The structure of the following sentences could be:
The horse (that was raced past the barn) fell.
The florist (who was sent the flowers ) was pleased.
The cotton (from which clothing is made) grows in Mississippi.
They told the boy(that the girl met)the story.(4 points)
This phenomenon is called “garden path” which is a kind of “temporary ambiguity” or “sentence containing temporary structural ambiguities.” The reader usually starts to parse this as an ordinary active intransitive sentence, but stumbles when reaching the word “fell.” At this point, the reader is forced to backtrack and look for other possible structures. It may take some rereading to realize that “raced past the barn” is in fact a reduced relative clause with a passive participle, implying that “fell” is the main verb. The correct reading is this: “The horse (that was raced past the barn) fell.” This sentence can be parsed in other ways as well, but that is irrelevant to its status as a garden path sentence. The example hinges on the ambiguity of the lexical category of the word “raced”: it can be either a past-tense verb or a passive participle. (6 points)
3．考点提示：本题考查乔姆斯基转化生成语法的发展阶段以及其理论特点。
解题思路：首先阐述五个阶段，然后再概述其特征。
参考答案：
TG Grammar has seen five stages of development: the classical theory, the standard theory, the extended standard theory, the revised extended standard theory and the minimalist program. (4 points)
Chomsky's TG Grammar has the following features. First, Chomsky defines language as a set of rules or principles. Second, Chomsky believes that the aim of linguistics is to produce a generative grammar which captures the tacit knowledge of the native speaker of his language. This concerns the question of learning theory and the question of linguistic universals. Third, Chomsky and his followers are interested in any data that can reveal the native speaker's tacit knowledge. They seldom use what native speakers actually say; they rely on their own intuition. Fourth, Chomsky's methodology is hypothesis-deductive, which operates at two levels: (a) the linguist formulates a hypothesis about language structure—a general linguistic theory; this is tested by grammars for particular languages, and (b) each such grammar is a hypothesis on the general linguistic theory. Finally, Chomsky follows rationalism in philosophy and mentalism in psychology. (6 points)
4．考点提示：本题考查语用学中的关联理论。
解题思路：首先阐述关联理论的内容，然后再利用理论解释说明该例句。
参考答案：
Relevance theory is a proposal by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson which is defined as: Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of his own optional relevance. It seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit inferences. It argues that the hearer / reader / audience will search for meaning in any given communication situation and having found meaning that fits their expectation of relevance, will stop processing.
By presumption of optimal relevance (slightly revised later) is meant:
1. The set of assumption {I} which the communicator intends to make manifest to the addressee is relevant enough to make it worth the addressee's while to process the ostensive stimulus.
2. The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one the communicator could have used to communicate {I}. (4 points)
That is, every utterance comes with a presumption of the best balance of effort against effect. On the one hand, the effects achievable will never be less than is needed to make it worth processing. On the other hand, the effort required will never be more than is needed to achieve these effects. In comparison to the effects achieved, the effort needed is always the smallest. This amounts to saying “of all the interpretations of the stimulus which confirm the presumption, it is the first interpretation to occur to the addressee that is the one the communicator intended to convey.”
Both of the two sentence are correct, but the second one is more relevant in terms of the increased processing effort involved. Usually, John went to the bank means he went to the bank in order to withdraw money or something else.If the other explanation is the intended interpretation,the speaker may say like:John went to the bank for a walk.(6 points)