当代语言学导论--练习.doc

第一章练习 0402班集体答题 I．译文（已批改）：语言贯穿我们的全部的生活, 予我们的思维以言辞, 予我们理念以话音, 予我们的感受以表述。它是一种人类所拥有的丰富而多样的能力 – 想用就用，无须思索，天下儿童，自能习得。语言学家知其固然复杂，却可描述。 语言学是研究语言的本质、结构和变化的科学, 分为语音学,音位学,形态学,句法学,语义学和语用学. II．1)Plato 2)Aristotle 3)Xunzi 4) Chomsky 5) Saussure III．A Summary of Language and Human Beings (未经批改) Language had the systematic internal structure of a sentence and the relationship between sounds meaning and the complex actual hierarchy. In order to understand a single sentence, a newborn human baby needs to break the string of sounds which he hears into syntactic constituents and associate a sound combination with a definite meaning. There are three stages during which he perceives the existence of language around him spontaneously. a.????? producing single—word sentence (12—18 months) b.???? forming elementary phrases and two—word sentences c.???? making adult—like sentences (by the age of two and a half) In a word, as to human being, the knowledge of language just grow naturally from the mind during a certain period in childhood and not need to be deliberately taught. IV．(未经批改) 1．Human language. Human beings have an inborn knowledge of language which must be universally correct and acceptable. The location of such innate knowledge is in our genes. There is a biological, physical entity inside our brain which decides what we speak. This entity is UG – universal grammar. According to UG theory, every speaker is endowed with a set of principles. Animals don’t have an area in their brain that controls language. Nor do they have genes that carry the knowledge of language. 2 It is hard to say. Nothing is impossible. The first prerequisite that they should have is a biological organ, like genes or certain areas of the brain that can develop into language skills or control the language we use. The second is that they should have UG, which helps them both to produce and understand meaningful utterance and so forth. 3 Communication is one of the most basic functions of human language. How