PREVIOUS QUESTIONS

Introduction to Linguistics

2014

English

Subject Code: 1178

(Introduction to Linguistics)

Time: 4 Hours                                                                                                       Full Marks: 80

Part-A

1. Answer any ten of the following questions                                                           1 × 10 = 10

a) What is diphthong?

     Ans: Diphthong is a vowel sound formed by the combination of two monophthongs in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves towards another.

b) What is the smallest phonological unit?

     Ans: Phoneme is the smallest phonetic unit.

c) What is parole?

     Ans: According to Saussure, parole refers to the concrete instances of the use of langue. This is the individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject’.

d) What is IC?

     Ans: IC Analysis or Immediate Constituent Analysis a system of grammatical analysis that divides sentences into successive layers or constituents until, in the final layer, each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word.

e) What is tonic stress?

     Ans: Tonic stress refers to the syllable in a word which receives the most stress in an intonation unit. An intonation unit has one tonic stress.

f) What is phone?

     Ans: A phone is an unanalyzed sound of a language. It is the smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech that is able to be transcribed with an IPA symbol.

g) What is Bound Stem?

     Ans: A bound stem is a stem which cannot occur as a separate word apart from any other morpheme.

h) What is syntax?

     Ans: Syntax is the rules and principles of the sentence structure of a language.

i) What is schema?

     Ans: A schema is a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information.

j) What is isogloss?

     Ans: Isogloss is the line on the dialect atlas that shows the geographical boundaries of the distribution of a particular linguistic feature.

k) What is tone?

     Ans: Tone is use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning.

l) Who is Saussure?

     Ans: Ferdinand de Saussure is a renowned Swiss linguist and semiotician. He is the proponent of the terms Langue and Parole.

Part-B

Answer any five of the following questions:                                                               4 × 5 = 20

2. What is elision? Mention the rules of elision.

3. What are differences between competence and performance?

4. What is the difference between systematic and paradigmatic relationships?

5. Define Deep Structure and surface Structure.

6. What are Allomorphs?

7. Define Tripthongs. Show English Tripthongs with examples.

8. What is the difference between ‘tone’ and pitch’?

9. Transcribe the following words (any four)

August, Graduate, Adjective, Message, Measure, sound

Part-C

Answer any five questions:                                                                                        10 × 5 = 50

10. Classify English phonemes according to their places of articulation.

11. Discuss the major syntactic process in English.

12. What is morpheme? Mention the inflectional derivational morphemes of English.

13. What is Linguistics? To what extent can Linguistics be considered as a science?

14. What is IC analysis? Exemplify IC analysis through a tree diagram.

15. Discuss different stages of child language development.

16. Discuss the relationship between language and culture.

17. What is Assimilation? Describe different aspects of Assimilation.