45. phonology: Phonology studies the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.
46. phoneme: The basic unit in phonology is called phoneme; it is a unit of distinctive value. But it is an abstract unit. To be exact, a phoneme is not a sound; it is a collection of distinctive phonetic features.
47. allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.
48. international phonetic alphabet: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription.
49. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation.
50. phonetics: Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world' s languages
51. auditory phonetics: It studies the speech sounds from the hearer's point of view. It studies how the sounds are perceived by the hear-er.
52. acoustic phonetics: It studies the speech sounds by looking at the sound waves. It studies the physical means by which speech sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.
53. phone: Phones can be simply defined as the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.
54. phonemic contrast: Phonemic contrast refers to the relation between two phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.
55. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.
56. minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair.
Ⅴ. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give examples for illustration if necessary:
57. Of the two media of language, why do you think speech is more basic than writing?
1) In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.
2) In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed.
3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later at school.
58. What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?
1) Vowels may be distinguished as front, central and back in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.
2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels, semiclose vowels, semi-open vowels, and open vowels.
3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.
4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound.
59. What are the major differences between phonology and phonetics?
They differ in their approach and focus. Phonetics is of a general nature; it is interested in all the speech sounds used in all human languages: how they are produced, how they differ from each other, what phonetic features they possess, how they can be classified. Phonology, on the other hand, is interested in the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.
60. Illustrate with examples how suprasegmental features can affect meaning.
1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds, is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black.
2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives, adverbs, etc. are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word
in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.” for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine, the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.
3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said.
61. In what way can we determine whether a phone is a phoneme or not?
A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of meaning. If it does, the two sounds then represent different phonemes.
Chapter 3 Morphology
Ⅰ. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. T 2. F 3. T 4. T 5. T 6. T 7. T 8. F 9. F 10. T
Ⅱ. Fill in each blank below with one word which begins with the letter given:
11. Morpheme 12. grammatical 13. Bound 14.derivative 15. Derivative
16. suffix 17. Compounding 18.morphological 19. derivation 20. stem
Ⅲ. There are four choices following each statement. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
21. D 22. D 23.B 24.B 25.C 26.C 27.D 28.A 29.B 30. C
Ⅳ. Define the following terms:
31. Morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.
32. inflectional morphology: The inflectional morphology studies the inflections
33. derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word-formation.
34. Morpheme: It is the smallest meaningful unit of language.
35. free morpheme: Free morphemes are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves or in combination with oth-er morphemes.
36. bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used indepen-dently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a
word.
37. Root: A root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning; it must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word.
38. Affix: Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories, while derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word.
39. Prefix: Prefixes occur at the begin-ning of a word. Prefixes modify the meaning of the stem,
but they usually do not change the part of speech of the original word.
40. Suffix: Suffixes are added to the end of the stems; they modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech.
41. Derivation: Derivation is a process of word formation by which derivative affixes are added to an existing form to create a word.
42. Compounding: Compounding can be viewed as the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words.
Ⅴ. Anwser the following questions:
43. What are the main features of the English compounds?
Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calculable from the meanings of all its components. Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.
44. Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.
Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, for example, “book-” in the word “bookish”.
Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound
