Language and Linguistics Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The order is prescriptive approach, descriptive approach, the concept of the language faculty and computational linguistics (I, II, III, IV). The traditional grammar tradition prescribed correct usage, structural linguistics in the twentieth century set out to describe languages as they are, Chomsky's generative work in the late 1950s and 1960s brought the notion of a language faculty, and computational linguistics grew after that with the use of computers.

The other orders put the language faculty ahead of the prescriptive and descriptive approaches, which reverses the history of the subject.

Answer: A

The correct match is a-ii, b-i, c-iv, d-iii. Displacement means that speech can refer to things that are away in time and place. Arbitrariness is the conventional relation between an object and the word for it. Interchangeability means that a speaker can also be a listener and the other way round. Denotation is the referential function of language, in which words refer to things.

The other options pair these features with the wrong descriptions, such as arbitrariness with the role of speaker and listener.

Answer: D

Assertion (I) is true and (II) is false. The key takes prescriptivism as the approach that deals with the written form, setting up rules of correct writing and usage from the standard written language.

Assertion (II), that only the written form is the true representation of a language, is false: modern linguistics treats speech as primary and writing as a secondary representation of it, and many languages have no writing at all.

Answer: B

Pinyin is the system of writing Mandarin with a modified Roman alphabet. It was introduced in China in the 1950s and is used to teach the pronunciation of Chinese characters.

Hangul is the Korean alphabet, and Kanji and Katakana are Japanese scripts, so none of them is a Roman-based system for Mandarin. The Roman letters in pinyin stand for the sounds of Mandarin, and tone marks over the vowels show the four tones of the language, so the system serves as an aid for learners and for computer input.

Answer: A

The Indian traditional theory of Rasa is set out in the Natyashastra, attributed to Bharata, which treats the aesthetic experience produced in the audience by a dramatic performance and lists the eight rasas.

Vyaktiviveka (Mahimabhatta) is a work on poetics that criticises the theory of dhvani, Kavyadarsha (Dandin) deals with figures and qualities of poetry, and Dasharupaka (Dhananjaya) is a manual of the ten types of drama which follows the Natyashastra. The theory itself is credited to the Natyashastra.

Answer: D

The correct matching is a-ii, b-iii, c-i, d-iv, option (D).

A postposition is a word class and belongs to morphology and syntax. A formant is a band of energy in the spectrum of a vowel and is a notion of acoustic phonetics. The lower lip is an articulator in articulatory phonetics, and 'distributed' is a distinctive feature of phonology.

Each of the other codes places at least one of these four in the wrong branch of the subject.

Answer: C

(I) is true and (II) is false.

The words 'this', 'that', 'the' and 'a' can each fill the same slot before 'girl', so they stand in a choice relation, that is a paradigmatic relation. A syntagmatic relation is the relation of items that occur together in a sequence, as 'this' and 'girl', and not of items that replace one another.

So the first assertion holds and the second does not.

A paradigmatic relation is one of substitution and choice, while a syntagmatic relation is one of combination in a chain, and the example in the stem shows the first.

Answer: B

The correct order is Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics.

The levels of grammar are arranged from the smallest units to the largest: sounds, then the structure of words, then sentence structure and finally meaning, the order of a typical course in linguistics.

The other options place semantics first or between phonology and morphology, which is not the usual order of levels.

The same order is followed in the layout of most textbooks, which begin with the sound system and end with the study of meaning.

Answer: C

The concept of 'langue' and 'parole' is associated with Ferdinand de Saussure.

In his Course in General Linguistics Saussure distinguished langue, the system of a language shared by a community, from parole, the actual speech acts of individuals.

Chomsky later made the parallel distinction of competence and performance, Sapir and Hymes worked on other topics.

The distinction is basic to structural linguistics, and it set the programme of treating language as a system of signs in which each element is defined by its relations.

Answer: A

When a message describes a situation, an object or a mental state, it has the referential function.

In Jakobson's scheme the referential function is oriented to the context, to what is talked about. It conveys information about a state of affairs.

The conative function is directed at the hearer, the emotive at the speaker's feelings, and the phatic at keeping contact open.

The referential function is also called the denotative or cognitive function, and it is the main one in ordinary statements of fact.