1、 共 2页 第 1 页 电子科技大学 2014年攻读硕士学位研究生入学考试试题 考试科目:846英语语言学基础知识及运用 注:无机读卡,所有答案必须写在答题纸上,写在试卷或草稿纸上均无效。 I. Define the following terms with examples if necessary (30 points, 5 points each): 1. duality 2. metalanguage 3. minimal pairs 4. lexeme 5. connotation 6. immediate constituent analysis II. Make a judgme
2、nt and an evaluation of the following with your own reasons (20 points, 4 points each): 1. Endocentric construction differs from exocentric construction in that the distribution of the former is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words serv
3、es as a definable center or head. 2. “The contexts of an utterance determine its meaningSince no two contexts are ever exactly the same, to insist dogmatically that we know what a word means in advance of its utterance is nonsense.” 3. When analyzing the meanings of a polysemantic word, diachronical
4、ly we try to find the central meaning among all its meanings by frequency value, whereas synchronically the original meaning will be detected. 4. Linguistic communications are usually presented to us in the form of written text or speech. While the process of comprhension appears to be similar in bo
5、th cases, some of the initial stages of processing differ. 5. Since communication is a social activity, it could be said that speech is also social, not individual. III. Briefly answer the following questions (45 points; 9 points each): 1. Please analyze Nidas idea “words are sometimes culturally-sp
6、ecific” with examples. 2. In speech communications, we may conclude that generally the male style is report-speaking while the female style is rapport-speaking. Please explain this with examples. 3. Halliday once stated that the subject, in its traditional sense, is a complex of four distinct functi
7、ons, three in the structure of the clause and one in the information structure. Would you please try to explain these four functions of the subject in the following clause? The lion caught the tourist. 共 2页 第 2 页 4. Please cite some examples to analyze the difference between a phoneme and its alloph
8、ones. 5. What do you know about Chomskys formalist linguistic theory (i.e., Transformational-Generative Grammar)? IV. Discuss the following questions in detail (55 points, 10 points for the first, 15 points for 24 each): 1. Please briefly describe a picture of the different branches of linguistic st
9、udies. 2. Can you tell the exact meaning of the sentence “Im free at last!”? If not, why? 3. How would you analyze and explain the syntactic structure and meaning of the following sentence? Please translate it into Chinese and tell the difference between the original English sentence and your transl
10、ated Chinese version. The boy the girl the dog chased kissed cried. 4. Please analyze the following poem by the American poet William Carlos Williams from the perspective of Functional Linguistics: This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold