By William B. McGregor
1) Linguistics is concerned with prescribing how people ought to speak their language.
True False
2) Most linguistic signs are symbolic.
3) Onomatopoeic words are iconic signs.
4) Language is a system of signs.
5) Paradigmatic relations are the relations between two items occurring together: for and example are in paradigmatic relation in for example.
6) Which of the following best describes the meaning of Charles Hockett's feature displacement?
The property of something (e.g. a word) being in the wrong place. Capability of communicating about the system of communication. Ability to communicate about things not actually present. Capability of being able to produce new meanings. Property of something being lost in the process of communication.
7) Only human languages have the property of arbitrariness.
8) Which of the following gives the best description of duality in Hockett's scheme?
The linguistic sign has two aspects: form and meaning. Both form and meaning components of the sign are patterned. Human languages can be both spoken and written. Users take on alternately the roles of producer and receiver of messages. Some languages (like Sanskrit) have a special dual form of nouns meaning 'two'.
9) The Chinese writing system is pictographic, that is, each character directly represents an idea.
10) Systems of signing used by deaf people such as ASL (American Sign Language) are genuine and full human languages.
11) All signs of Auslan (Australian Sign Language) are iconic.
12) All systems of writing represent sounds to some extent.
13) English has 5 vowels, a, e, i, o, and u.
14) British Sign Language is a system for representing English by means of hand-signs.
15) Sign languages like Danish Sign Language, American Sign Language, British Sign Language, and Nicaraguan Sign Language are as similar to one another as British English and American English.
16) People all around the world talk about speaking and language.
17) Which of the following was the earliest known tradition of linguistics?
Greek Arabic Chinese Babylonian Hindu
18) The main division of modern linguistic theories is into which of the following oppositions:
Historical vs. Structuralist Formal vs. Functional Formal vs. Informal Modernism vs. Postmodernism Structuralist vs. Poststructuralist
19) According to functional theories of linguistics only meaning is of interest, and the notion of the linguistic sign is rejected.
20) The founding father of modern linguistics is generally considered to be which of the following men:
Charles Darwin Leonard Bloomfield Ferdinand de Saussure Nicholai Trubetzkoy Daniel Jones Noam Chomsky
21) Which of the following is not an example of a sign?
The word and The letter g in the word give The word bird The H in H2O
22) Which of the following branches of linguistics is primarily concerned with changes in a language or several languages over time?
Historical linguistics Sociolinguistics Morphology Evolutionary linguistics Typology Semantics
23) Roughly how many languages are spoken in the world today?
500 2000 7000 100 100,000
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