语言学chapter2课后练习答案.pdfVIP

A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English (2nd edition) Chapter 2 Revision exercises reference 1. What are the two major media of communication? Of the two, which one is primary and why? Refer to section 2.1 The two major media of communication are speech and writing. Of the two, speech is considered primary for the following reasons: 1) from the point of view of linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system of any language is always a later invention. 2) In everyday communication, speech conveys a greater amount of information than writing. 3) Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, and writing is learned and taught later as part of formal education. 2. What is voicing and how is it caused? Refer to section 2.2.2 (1) Voicing is a phonetic feature of some speech sounds. It is caused by the vibration of the speakers vocal cords when he produces a certain sound. If a sound bears this feature, it is voiced. If such a feature is absent in the pronunciation of a sound, it is voiceless. All vowels in English are voiced; and some consonants in English are voiced such as [d] and [v] while others are voiceless such as [p] and [s]. 3. Explain with examples how broad transcription and narrow transcription differ. Both broad and narrow transcriptions are ways to transcribe speech sounds, i.e. ways of using written symbols to represent speech sounds. In broad transcription, only the letter symbols are used, and the principle is to use one letter for one sound, such as [P] and [I]. In narrow transcription, a set of symbols called diacritics are added to the let