Exercises
Exercises 1
I Discussion questions.
1.Would you say that language is arbitrary? What would language be like if it was not arbitrary?
2. “Language is human-specific.” How would you interpret this statement?
3.What are the differences between human language and animal communication systems in terms of displacement and cultural transmission?
4.What are the basic functions of language and what are their aims? Can the sentence form always be a reliable guide to its use of a function?
5.How is language defined? Do you agree with this definition?
6.Why is it that language is still a mystery? What are the ideas and stories concerning the origin of language?
II Complete the following passage with proper words or expressions.
There are five major design features of human language.(1) is a system built on(2) relationships . It is structured into two(3) with each having complex structural arrangements. Language is creative or (4) .
It is not (5) an immediate present context. Language is(6) transmitted.
These features show that language is human-(7) .Only human beings are capable of possessing this(8) system. They also indicate that human language is(9) animal communication systems or other(10) of communication like(11) .
Now with these features in the mind we can say that language is a system of(12) (13) symbols used for(14) (15) .This definition is well-made, for it captures all important aspects of(16) .
Exercises 2
I. Discussion questions.
1. Why is it that a linguist is expected to have wide experience of different types of languages?
2.What are the main branches of modern linguistics? And what are the interdisciplinary studies of language?
3.Which one do you prefer, descriptive linguistics or prescriptive linguistics? Why?
4.What is the difference between diachronic and synchronic linguistics?
5.What are the features of American structuralism?
6. How has the TG grammar developed?
II Complete the following passage with proper words or expressions.
It is not difficult to sense the complexity of language structure, but it is not so easy to say how many levels should be set up in order to explain the way this
(1) is organized. Some simple models of language recognize only two basic levels: the set of physical(2) (sounds, letters, sings, words) contained in a language ,and the range of abstract meanings conveyed by these forms. More commonly, the notion of forms is sub-divided, to distinguish different kinds of abstractness. In speech, for example, the physical facts of pronunciation, as defined by the processes of articulation, acoustic transmission and audition, are considered to be the subject matter of(3) .The way different languages organize sounds to convey differences of meaning is the province of(4) . And the study of the way meaningful units are brought into sequence to convey wider and more varied patterns of meaning is the province of (5) .The term(6) is then used for the study of the patterns of meaning themselves.
Four-level models of language (phonetics/phonology/grammar/semantics) are among the most widely used, but further divisions within and between these levels are often made. For example, within the level of grammar, it is common to recognize a distinction between(7) , the study of word structure and (8) , the study of word sequence within sentences. Within(9) , the study of vowels ,consonants , and syllables (segmental phonology) is usually distinguished from the study of prosody and other tones of voice(suprasegmental phonology).Within semantics ,the study of vocabulary (or lexicon) is sometimes taken separately from the study of larger patterns of meaning (under such headings as text or discourse). All of these are regularly referred to as(10) “ ” of structure.
Exercises 3
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is phonetics? And what is articulatory phonetics?
2. What are the places and manners of articulation?
3. In what ways do vowels differ from each other?
4.What is the difference between narrow transcription and broad transcription?
II. Write the sound which corresponds to each of the following phonetic descriptions.
1. voiceless alveolar plosive
2. voiceless dental fricative
3. voiced bilabial plosive
4. voiced velar plosive
5. tense front mid vowel
6. lax high back vowel
7. high front tense unrounded vowel
8. high back tense vowel
Exercises 4
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is the difference between phonetics and phonology?
2. What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?
3. Why do we say that /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes?
4. What does complementary distribution mean?
5. What is the importance of stress in English? Is “a ΄toy factory” different from “a toy ΄factory”? And what is the difference?
II. Account for sound changes in the following sentence and formulate rules for these changes.
Betty laughed as she sat in the red plane.[΄bedi: ΄læft əЗ ∫i ΄sæt in ðə ΄red ΄plein]
Exercises 5
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is the concern of morphology?
2. What is the difference between free morphemes and bound morphemes?
3. What is the difference between derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes?
4. Is it true that the meaning of a compound is always predictable from the parts it contains? Illustrate with examples.
II. Complete the following passage with proper words or expressions.
(1) words, as we have already noted, differ from (2) in that they are made up of free forms only: home-land, home-stead, and home-work. These are primary compounds: each consists of two simple (3) forms. Both components are substantives, the first determining and qualifying the second. This type of compound occurs in all lndo-European languages. In (4) it is certainly prolific: airman, beehive, bookcase, daybreak, flowerpot, landmark, lifeline, network, notebook, pathway, rainbow, seashore, snowflake, thunderbolt, vineyard, waterfall, and countless others. You will observe that the precise (5) between the two component substantives may vary considerably. An (6) is a man who flies in an aircraft, but a beehive is a hive in which bees are housed, and so on. The signification of a particular compound is arbitrary, determined by custom and use. Having once become settled in its use by the speech community, a newly-formed (7) henceforth functions as one morphological unit and it then acquires lexical status. Because in English the determinant (air) always (8) the determinatum (man), we may create reversible compounds in our language like boathouse “shed at the water’s edge for storing (9) ” and houseboat “boat adequately equipped for living in”; bookcase “case containing shelves for books” and case-book “book in which legal or medical cases are recorded”. In using such compounds the speaker runs no risk of ambiguity because it is characteristic of the inherited structure of English that the (10) comes first.
Exercises 6
I. Discussion questions.
1. What are syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?
2. What is the IC analysis? Can you describe the sentence “The tall men and women left “in terms of the analysis? What are the problems there?
3. For each of the following sentences state as precisely as you can in what ways it is ambiguous:
(1) She drew the boy with the chalk.
(2) She hates Peter’s painting.
(3) Mary talked with students there.
II. Draw tree diagrams to show the deep structure and the surface structure for each of the following sentences.
- What can the man eat?
- Why should Jane always cry?
- How did the student report the incident?
III. Provide a derivation for the sentence “David loves Mary” within the minimalist framework.
Exercises 7
I. Discussion questions.
1. Why is it that meaning is difficult to study?
2. What is the semiotic triangle?
3. How many kinds of meaning are there according to Leech?
4. What are linguistic contexts?
5. How do we usually discriminate synonyms?
6. What is polysemy? And what is hyponymy?
7. What is entailment? And what is presupposition?
II. Analyze the following words in terms of componential analysis.
father,
mother,
son,
daughter,
baker
illiterate
get
III. Circle the two-place predicate in the following.
forget, put, between, dog, learn, below
IV. Identify the presuppositions that lie behind each of the following utterances.
- Mary stopped drinking coffee.
- David regretted having told her the secret.
- Susan’s dog isn’t barking.
Exercises 8
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is the difference between semantics and pragmatics?
2. What is an illocutionary act? Illustrate.
3. What is a conversational implicative?
4. What is negative politeness? And positive politeness? Illustrate.
II. Explain the following in terms of the CP or the PP.
- The lady is made of iron.
- A. What do you think of his lecture?
B. Well, he looks smart in his suit.
III. Read the following passage and fill in the blanks.
The term implicature was proposed by the philosopher H.P.Grice. He suggests that when people converse with one another they acknowledge a kind of tacit agreement to cooperate conversationally towards mutual ends. This(1) he calls the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE. When one abides by the(2) principle one agrees to act according to various rules, or rather(3) , as Grice calls them. One must tell the truth, and make remarks which are relevant to the(4) , for example. Grice has suggested four conversational(5) .
(i) The maxim of quantity.
Give the required amount of(6) not too much or too little.
(ii) The maxim of (7) .
Do not say that for which you lack evidence or which you believe to be false.
(iii) The maxim of relation
Make your contributions relevant to the purpose in hand.
(iv) The maxim of manner
Avoid obscurity, ambiguity and unnecessary prolixity, and be orderly.
The important point about these(8) maxims is that unlike rules (e.g. grammatical rules) they are often violated. In this sense they are rhetorical principles. Sometimes the(9) may be clandestine, as when someone tells a lie and is not detected by the hearer; but more important, the maxims are also broken(10) , so that it is obvious to all of the participants in the(11) . When this happens the listener perceives the difference between what the speaker says and what he(12) by what he says, the particular meaning deduced for the latter being the implicature.
Exercises 9
I. Discussion questions.
1. How is language and society related?
2. How does language act upon society?
3. How does society act upon language?
4. What is a regional dialect?
5. What are the major features of the English language used by women native speakers?
6. What is an idiolect? And a standard dialect?
7. What is a lingua franca? And a pidgin?
8. What is bilingualism? And diglossia?
II. Below are some words used in British English for which different words are usually used in American English. See if you can find the American equivalents.
(1) sweets (8) torch (15) label
(2) pram (9) cellar (16) fireman
(3) lorry (10)trousers (17) paraffin
(4) maize (11) pail (18) time table
(5) tin (12) biscuit (19) gym shoes
(6) flat (13) underground (20)spirits
(7) pavement (14) lift (21)waistcoat
III. Read the following passage and fill in the blanks.
(1) there are differences between the sexes is hardly a matter of dispute. On the average, females have more fat and less muscle than(2) , are not as strong, and weigh less. They also mature more rapidly and(3)
longer. The(4) voice usually has different characteristics from the male
voice and often females and males exhibit different ranges of verbal skills. However, we also know that many of the(5) may result from different socialization practices. For example, women may live longer than men because of the different (6) they play in society and the different jobs they tend to fill. Differences in(7) quality may be accentuated by beliefs about what men and women should sound like when they talk, and any differences in verbal skills may be explained in great part through differences in upbringing. (It has often been noted that there is far more reading failure in schools among boys than girls, but it does not follow from this fact that (8) are inherently less well equipped to learn to read, for their poor performance in comparison to girls may be socio-cultural in origin rather than genetic.)
Numerous observers have described women’s speech as being(9) from that of men. I should also observe that there is a bias here: men’s speech usually provides the norm against which women’s(10) is judged. We could just as well ask how men’s speech differs from(11) of women, but investigators have not usually gone about the task of looking at differences in that way. Any view too that (12) speech is trivial, gossip-laden, corrupt, illogical, idle, euphemistic, or deficient is highly suspect; nor is it necessarily more precise, cultivated, or stylish- or even less profane than(13) speech. Such judgments lack solid evidentiary support.
Exercises 10
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is brain lateralization? And linguistic lateralization?
2. What is Broca’s area? And Wernicke’s area?
3. What is the critical period hypothesis?
4. How is acquisition different from learning?
5. What is negative transfer? And positive transfer?
6. What is interlanguage? And fossilization?
II. Read the following passage and fill in the blanks.
Four major findings emerge from these studies on infants’ responsiveness to affective vocal expressions. First, at the age of five months, when(1) are not yet showing consistent selective responsiveness to positive and negative facial expressions, infants do respond differentially to(2) and negative vocal expressions, suggesting that the(3) is more powerful than the face as a social signal in early infancy. Second, infants(4) with appropriate affect to positive and negative(5) expressions, smiling more to Approvals than to Prohibitions. Third, infants are more responsive to affective vocalizations in ID [infant-directed] speech than in AD [adult-directed] speech, suggesting that the exaggerated prosodic characteristics of(6) vocalizations to infants increase their salience as vocal signals. And finally, young infants are responsive to affective(7) spoken with infant-directed prosody even in
(8) that they have never heard before, providing evidence for the functional equivalence of such ID vocalizations across cultures. These findings indicate that the melodies of mothers’ speech are compelling auditory stimuli, which are particularly effective in eliciting emotion in preverbal(9) .
The finding that American infants differentiate maternal vocalizations in some but not all languages suggests that cultural(10) in the nature and extent of emotional expressiveness may also have an early influence on infants’ responsiveness to(11) signals. A process of early cultural “calibration” might account for these(12) differences. According to this explanation, infants in all cultures are initially(13) to the same(14) cues, that they find smooth, wide-ranging pitch contours of moderate loudness to be more pleasing, while they find low, narrow pitch contours that are short, staccato, and loud to be more aversive. However, cultural differences in display rules governing emotional expression may determine the levels and range of emotional intensity to which the (15) is routinely exposed and which the infant comes to expect in social interaction with adults.
Exercises 11
I. Discussion questions.
1. What family does English belong to? Can you say anything more about this family?
2. When did Old English begin and how did it start?
3. What are the features of Middle English?
4.What is the Great Vowel Shift?
II. Read the passage and fill in the blanks.
“Indo-European” is the name scholars have given to the(1) of languages that first spread throughout Europe and many parts of southern Asia, and which are now found, as a result of colonialism, in every part of the(2) . The parent(3) generally known as “Proto-Indo-European”, is thought to have been spoken before 3000 BC, and to have split up into different(4)
during the subsequent millennium. The differences were well established between 2000 and 1000 BC, when the Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian languages are first attested.
Archaeological evidence shows the existence of a semi-nomadic population living in the steppe region of southern Russia around 4000 BC, who began to spread into the Danube area of Europe and beyond from around 3500 BC. The people are(5) as the Kurgans, because of their burial practices (kurgan being the Russian for “burial mound”). Kurgan culture seems to have arrived in the Adriatic region before 2000 BC, and this coincides well with the kind of time-scale needed to produce large amounts of linguistic change. The ancestors of the(6) are not known, though there are several similarities between Proto-Indo-European and the Uralic family of(7) ,spoken further east, and these may well have had a common(8) several thousand years before.
By comparing the similar vocabulary of the extant(9) languages, it is possible to draw some conclusions about the geographical origins and life-style of the people. For instance, many(10) words (such as “mother”, “husband”, “brother”) can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. These include several words for “inlaws”, which seem to have been used solely with reference to the bride. Evidence of this kind suggests that it was the(11)
who was given a position within the husband’s family, rather than the other way round, and that the society must therefore have been patriarchal in character.
The reconstructed (12) has words for horses, dogs, sheep, pigs, and other animals; there is a word for some kind of vehicle, and this (13) definitely had wheels; there are many words for parts of the body; there are several words relating to farming, and a few words (14) to tools and weapons; many abstract notions are attested, relating to such fields as law, religious belief and social status; numerals went to at least 100. Words relating to fauna and flora are of particular interest; for they can provide (15) as to the place of origin of the people. There are no words for ‘palm tree’ or ‘vine’, for example, which suggests, independently(16) any archaeological evidence, that the migrations did not begin in the Mediterranean area. But other clues often seem contradictory. The word for ‘beech tree’ is widely attested, and, as this tree does not(17) in Asia, it has been suggested that the Indo-Europeans must have(18) in north-central Europe. On the other hand, there is little evidence of a common word for ‘oak’, which is also a European tree, and if this word was not known to the (19) , the view is supported that their migration must have begun in Asia after all. Indo-European philology raises many fascinating (20) of this kind.
Exercises 12
I. Discussion questions.
1. What is stylistics?
2. How is the word style often used? Why does Buffoon say that the style is the man?
3. What is sound symbolism?
4. How is sight manipulated in poetry?
5. How is formality differentiated according to Martin Joos? Do you think it can always work?
II. Read the following article written by H.G. Widdowson. What do you think of this kind of stylistic analysis of a poem? Can you appreciate his way of stylistic interpretation?
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Perhaps the first thing that one notices, if one is looking at the language of the poem without troubling about what it is attempting to convey, is the preponderance of pronominal forms in the first verse. I occurs twice in the first line, and his occurs twice as well: once in line 2 and once in line 4. In addition, we have he and me occurring in line 3. There may, of course, be nothing in the least significant about these elementary observations, but we may take them as a beginning and see where they lead us.
Let us now speculate that the third person is associated with the notion of possession, basing our speculation on the slender evidence of the double occurrence of his. With this in mind, the next thing we might notice is that the idea of possession is given prominence at the very beginning of the poem, in that the phrase Whose woods is placed in thematic position. That is to say, it has been moved from its normal place in the word-order of the sentence and put in initial position where it acquires the status of the theme of the sentence. This observation might lead us to surmise that the theme of the poem as a whole has something to do with possession as well as something to do with woods.
We may now turn to consider the two occurrences of his. Its first occurrence is in the phrase his house, and its second in the phrase his woods. We notice that in each of their two appearances in the first verse, the wood, are represented as being possessed. Furthermore, since house and woods are both associated with his in the parallel phrases in which they occur, we might look into the possibility of their being represented as having some kind of semantic equivalence. Since his only occurs in the two phrases his house and his woods, there does seem to be an implication that houses and woods are conceived of as being the same kind of thing, and that the woods are possessed in the same way as the house is possessed.
Let us explore this possibility further. The lexical item house may be distinguished from the lexical item wood in that its semantic specification in the code of the language would include the feature/+ artifact/, whereas the specification for wood would not. The two items are not therefore semantically equivalent in the language code. If they are to be taken as semantically equivalent in the context of this poem, either house must lose its feature/+ artifact or wood must acquire it. At this point, we might turn our attention to the rather striking verb fill up in line 4.
Fill up would be specified in the code as being associated with artifacts rather than with natural objects. That is to say, we would normally think of glasses, bottles, petrol tanks as filling up, rather than woods. The oddity of the phrase: To watch his woods fill up with snow arises because wood does not have the features/+ artifact/ and / + receptacle/ as items like bottle and petrol tank do. It acquires these features in this context. Thus, of the two possibilities mentioned above, the evidence would seem to suggest that the woods are being represented as artifacts, and possessed in the same way as houses are possessed.
Possession bestows right of ownership. We are perhaps now in a position to suggest why it is that the first thing which is expressed in the poem is a sense of trespass. The first verse expresses the poet’s feeling that he has no right to stop because somebody else has already acquired total rights over the woods by virtue of possession. They have thereby become part of the human would of rights and obligations which the poet as a member of society is bound by, so that even to stop and look at the woods is to infringe some social law of private ownership.
We may now turn to the second and third verse. Here, we notice, the woods are no longer represented as pieces of real estate: his woods and artifacts and items of rightful property become aspects of nature. But the theme of possession as being associated with human values and institutions is continued. The possessive, this time related to the first person, recurs in my little horse. The horse is shown to be very much a part of the world of human values. Not only is he possessed but he also possesses: his harness bells. Furthermore, whereas the item horse has in the code the feature /-human/, in the context of the poem it acquires the feature of humanness. The horse is represented as reacting like a human being; he does not understand why he should be made to stop where there is no human habitation, and where, therefore, there can be no justification for stopping in terms of any normal social requirement.
The sound of the harness bells, which might be said to suggest the world of human affairs, is contrasted with the sound of the wind in verse 3. Whereas the sound of the bells is caused by a sense of human values, that of the wind represents a freedom from the constraints which such values impose; the wind is easy in the sense that term has in the expression “free and easy”. Furthermore, the fact that the two phrases easy wind and downy flake occur in combination and are structurally and rhythmically alike suggests that the adjectives are intended to be understood as referring to the same kind of quality. That is to say, the implication seems to be that it is of the nature of wind to be easy in the same way as it is of the nature of snowflakes to be downy: these are intrinsic properties in each case. We might say, then, that in the second and third verses, the woods, the wind and the falling snow are seen as symbolizing a natural freedom from constraint, a world apart from that which is circumscribed by a human system of rights and obligations.
At the beginning of the last verse, the word woods appears again as the theme of the sentence in which it occurs. This time, however, it is both theme and subject in a simple attributive sentence. The effect of this is to provide the woods with an independent reality, having values which are not attached to them by virtue of being possessed, but which are intrinsic properties: just as the wind is naturally easy, so the woods are naturally lovely, dark, and deep. These qualities are contrasted with human values as the theme of possession is restated. Whereas, however, possession in the first verse is associated with rights, in the last verse it is associated with obligations. The use of the verb have is interesting here. As a lexical verb, have carries the meaning of possession, but as modal auxiliary (in expressions like I have to go, for example) it carries the meaning of obligation. In the expression I have promises to keep, these two senses of have are compounded. This might be shown as follows:
 I have promises
I have promises to keep.
I have to keep promises
?One might say that what is being suggested here is that the first person in the poem has promises in the same sense as the third person has woods, but the possession of promises does not bestow rights, it imposes obligations.
Finally, we might notice that the connection between the first and second lines is elliptical and is open to two interpretations. The lines, are, I think, generally understood to mean something like the following:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep but (I cannot stay to enjoy them any longer because) I have promises to keep.
If, however, one takes it that the woods, together with the wind and the snow, represent a kind of elemental freedom from the kind of constraint which controls human lives, then one might think of these lines as having something like the following meaning:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep (and represent as such a reality of elemental freedom) but (my reality must be that of social constraints and this is represented by he fact that) I have promises to keep.
Only in sleep is there freedom from responsibility.
From Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature
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