Download 國立屏東師範學院九十三學年度研究所碩士班入學考試

國立屏東師範學院九十四學年度研究所碩士班入學考試
英語語言學概論試題
1. There are three airstream mechanisms used for speech initiation in natural
language, but not all the egressive and ingressive possibilities are utilized.
Please summarize the principal airstream processes by listing the airstream, the
direction of the airstream and a brief description of the airstream. （10%）
2. What is VOT? How can we distinguish the different categories of stops in
English by voice onset time? （10%）
3. What are Fast Fourier transform (FFT) and Linear predictive coding (LPC)?
How are they used in acoustic phonetics ? （10%）
4. The semantic relations between verbs and noun phrases. (10%)
a. How do you describe the grammatical activity of spreading information
from the verb to its noun phrase and prepositional satellites, as seen in the
following two sentences? Did this happen at deep structure or surface
structure? Why?
The woman opened the door with the key.
The door was opened with the key by the woman.
b. Identify the thematic role of each NP in each sentence by filling in the blank right
below. (Note: Copy the sentence when providing your answer)
(1) With a telescope, Peter saw his father.
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(2) The worker loaded the dirt onto the truck.
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(3) John found a book in the room.
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(4) The dog ran from the kennel to the open field.
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(5) The thief unlocked all the doors with a paper clip.
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5. Tone and Intonation (10%)
a. If given Mandarin Chinese as the example, how are the concepts of “contour tone”
and register tone” fit into the language? And how does the role of “tone” play in
English as contrasted with that in Mandarin Chinese?
b. If the tonic accent was put on the word “mammal” rather than on the other word
“lion” in the sentence below when speaking English, how do you ascribe the
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linguistic properties such as “topic and comment” and “old information and new
information” to the two words being discussed? Why?
A lion is a mammal.
6. Ukrainian is a slavic language spoken in Ukraine, a country that was part of the
former Soviet Union. Compare the masculine nominative singular forms of
nouns with the vocative forms (nominative is used for the subject of a
sentence and vocative is used when calling to or addressing someone, as in
“Hey, Robin.”). There is a phonological change between the nominative and
the vocative, which adds the ending [-e] to the nominative form. Three pairs of
sounds are in allophonic variation. What are these pairs of sounds? What sort
of phonological process is at work here ? What do you think is conditioning
this alternation ? (The symbols [h] and [x] stand for a voiced glottal fricative
and a voiceless velar fricative).（20%）
7. The pro-forms and the structures that reflect them. (10%)
Take the sentences below as the examples:
(1) Mary saw the man with the telescope.
Jane also saw him.
The word “him” in the second sentence is traditionally called a “pronoun;” yet,
technically, as one of the pro-forms, the term “pronoun” is not adequate to
reflect the “proness” in the structure. There are more examples exhibiting the
same phenomenon:
(2) Cathy hugged Peter and Jane did too.
(3) I feel sick, which depresses me
a. What do you think are the better terms or ways to address the pro-forms (i.e.
the words underlined) in all the examples (example 1, 2, and 3) in the above?
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State your reasons in detail.
b. Draw a tree diagram for the following sentence to demonstrate that the tree
that you drew has faithfully reflected the structure of the pro-forms (i.e. the
words underlined) in the sentence:
This is the tiny old brick house that Dan built that we bought.
8. The phrases or sentences below are structurally ambiguous. Draw tree diagrams (at
least two) for every one of them. (20%)
a. more modern services
b. weeping woman’s child
c. The invisible man’s hair tonic is on sale.
d. The sheepdog was too hairy to eat.
e. Flying kite could be very dangerous.
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