Questions for the Passages
Passage 1 Language Defined
Questions:
1. What is the difference between speech and other forms of functions of man like walking?
2. Has language evolved out of the interjection? Bottom of p5
What about onomatopoeia? P6
3. What is Sapir‟s definition of language? P6
4. What is the relationship between language and thought? P10
5. Are some languages better than some other languages according to the author? What is
your opinion?
Passage 2 Language: An Introduction
Questions:
1. Do animals have language according to the author? Do you agree? In what way?
2. What are the properties of language? How do you understand them?
3. How do you understand the faminine and masculine in English and French words? p27
4. Is there any language that is to difficult or specially simple to it native speakers? p28
5. What is the relationship between the vocabulary of a language and culture? p28
Passage 3 The Origin of Language
Questions:
1. What is the origin of language according to the author? p31
2. What are the important barriers that must be surmounted in animal language?
3. How did the humans physically evolved to the stage of spoken communication? p35
4. Comment on the statement that originally human language was gestural rather than spoken. p 36
5. What is the difference between language and the use of tools according to the author? How is that related with brain lateralization? Bottom of p37
6. If we look ahead, what will be the trend of language development? Do you think it possible for all the people to speak one and same language, one existing now like English or
Chinese, or a newly invented one like Esperanto?
Passage 4 The Indo-European Language Family
Questions:
1. What is the relationship between English, French and German?
French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are modern evolution of ancient Latin. p46
2. How did people come to the conclusion that there is the proto-Indo-European?
Bottom of p 48
Passage 5 A Brief History of English
Questions:
1. Why are the following times important in the history of English?
1) AD 600 p53 top p55
2) 4th century p54
3) AD 43 p54
4) AD 550 bottom p54
2. Why didn‟t Latin become the language of the whole Britain? p54
3. What are the right date for the following three periods of English?
Old English
Middle English
Modern English
4. When was the first English Dictionary published? What is the importance of Dictionary? p62
5. What happened to English in the 8th century? p62
Passage 6 What is Linguistics?
Questions:
1. what is the implication of the sentences 1—4 ?
2. What is the significance of linguistic findings? p67
3. What are some of the interdisciplinary subjects involving linguistics? p68
Passage 9 Some basic Concepts in Linguistics
Questions:
1. What is the concern of linguistics according to the author? pp87-88
2. What are the major canons that guide linguistic analysis? What is your understanding?
p88
3. Which two aspects does linguistic study generally distinguish? p89
4. What are the characteristics of humanlanguage according to the author? pp89--92
5. What distinction should be made as a principle of linguistics? p92
6. How do you understand syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations? p94
7. How does the relational term “subject ” mean different things to different people? p96
8. What is the influence of linguistic study on foreign language teaching？ p96
Passage 10 Comparative and Historical Linguistics
Questions:
1. What contribution to linguistics did William Jones make? p99
2. What theory grew out of the comparative studies? p100
3. What information did you get about Sanskrit? p102
4. What were the major conclusions of historical linguistics concerning the relationships
among the many Indo-European languages? p103
Passage 11 Phonology
Questions:
1. What is phonology concerned with? p107
2. There are two essential components of a sound system according to the author. What are
they? p108
3. What is meant by “suprasegmental ” ? p108
4. There is often no straightforward correspondence between underlying phoneme
sequences and their phonetic realization. How did the author explain this? p109
5. What is the new trend of phonological research? p110
Paasage 13 Lexicon
Q uestions:
1. What is the research shift of the study of lexicons? pp141-142
2. Which two subtheories must the theory of lexicon include? P142
3. How important is the functional lexicons? p145
Passage 16 Grammars of English
Questions:
1. What are the different meanings of “grammar ” and its sense according to the author? p165
2. Which grammatical theories are popular in the field of linguistic analysis? p166
3. What do you know about Traditional grammar?
4. There were many people who insist that grammarians ‟ job is to describe the language
people use and not to prescribe. Do you agree? p168
5. What are the significant points in the favor of Traditional grammar as an analytical
system? p168
6. In what way is Structural grammar different from Traditional grammar? p171
7. What do you know about Transformational-Generative grammar?
8. What is the difference between performance and competence? p176
Passage 21 Semantics and Semantic Theory
Questions:
2. What is the central concerns of semantic theory? p226
3. What is word and what is lexeme ? p228
4. What is the relation between the meaning of sentence and the meaning of words? p228
5. What is the Principle of Compositionality? pp229-230
6. What types of meaning relations are there ? pp231-233
Passage 23 Pragmatics
Questions:
1) What are the definition and purpose of pragmatics? pp257-258
1. What is semantics in its broad sense and narrow sense? p225
2) What are the speech act principles? p258
3) What is illocutionary force? And what is implicit and explicit illocutionary force?
4) What are the conversational principles?
5) What decides the appropriateness of speech? p261
The context of speech
6) Why are implicit illocutionary force, conversation principles, and presuppositions are
important? p262
They are pragmatic context of language use and they shape our performance.
Passage 25 The Role of Context in Interpretation
Questions:
1. What is traditional concept of reference and what is the pragmatic concept of reference
according to the author?
2. What is the difference between logical presupposition and pragmatic presupposition?
3. What do the examples on page 276 reveal?
4. What is the difference between conventional implicature and conversational implicature?
5. How do you understand inference from specific premises and the loose form of inferencing?
6. What do you understand “co-text ”?
Passage 26 Cohesion
Questions ：
1. What is cohesion? p294
2. What types of parrallelism are there that are frequently found in literary discourse
according to the author? p295
3. Why do we say that verb form sequences produce lnks between clauses and sentences? And how? p295
4. What does the author want to say with the example from St. John‟s Gospel? p296
5. What is important to the interpretation of referring expressions? p296
6. What is the relationship between cohesion and coherence? pp298-300
7. What about cohesion and coherence in literature? p299
8. Questions for discussion and review 1. p301
Passage 30 The Input Hypothesis
Questions:
1. What is the Acquisition-learning hypothesis? What is the difference between acquisition
and learning according to the author?
2. What does the Natural order hypothesis say?
3. What is Monitor hypothesis?
4. What is the Input hypothesis?
5. What is the Filter hypothesis?
6. What is the feature of caretaker talk? p339
7. What is the difference between adults and children in acquiring L2 according to the
author? p346
8. What is the author‟s finding about the effect of instruction and exposure in L2 learning?
P347
9. When several methods are compared, what is the result? p348
10. What is the feature of immersion and sheltered class? pp350-351
11. What is the importance of “knowing subject matter ”? Are all day English programs
always better according to the author? p351
Passage 31 Three Functions of Output in L2 Learning
Questions:
1. Why is learning output important? p356
2. What are the three functions of output according to the author?
1) Noticing
How do they know output leads to noticing?
In about 40% of these episodes, students paid attention to grammatical forms.
They notice gap in their linguistic knowledge. Output led to noticing. p359
2) Hypothesis-testing
What is meant by „hypothesis-testing ‟?
3) Conscious reflection
What is meant by „conscious reflection‟?
3. What are the author‟s comments about the three functions of output? p368