Zagadnienia do egzaminu na stopień licencjata z językoznawstwa
(wersja 2010)
Branches of linguistics in the macrolinguistic perspective
Dichotomies in the divisions of linguistics (theoretical-applied, general-descriptive, synchronic-diachronic)
Levels of linguistic investigation according to the unit of description
Unique features of language as contrasted with animal communication
The components and nature of native speaker's linguistic knowledge
Linguistic competence versus linguistic performance
Prescriptive versus descriptive approach to language
Grammatical categories and grammaticalization
Theories about the origin of language
Why do languages change?
Sources of similarities between languages
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determinism
Indo-European languages - groups and location
The place of Polish and English in the Indo-European family
Language, dialect, idiolect and diglossia
Style and register
Define pidgins and creoles
Differences between British and American English
Synthetic, analytic and agglutinative languages
Types of languages
Grimm's Law and Verner's Law
The diachronic perspective of the English language: Old English, Middle English and Modern English
Functions of language according to Jakobson
Major assumptions of Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of language
The concept of linguistic sign according to De Saussure
Major assumptions of Noam Chomsky's theory of language
Deep and Surface Structures, Phrase Structure Rules and Transformations
Major assumptions of the cognitive theory of language
Phonetics versus phonology
Articulatory, acoustic and auditory phonetics
The reasons for differences between spelling and pronunciation in the English language
Homophones, homographs and homonyms
International phonetic alphabet, diacritics and types of transcription
The notions of phoneme, phone and allophone
Articulatory features of English consonants
Articulatory features of English vowels
Places of articulation of English consonants
Manners of articulation of English consonants
The voiced-voiceless, oral-nasal and central-lateral oppositions
Cardinal vowels
What are allophonic rules?
Types of coarticulation in English
Assimilation and neutralisation as phonological processes
Phases in the articulation of plosives, the fortis - lenis distinction
Major allophonic variants of English plosives
Major allophonic variants of English nasals and approximants
Articulatory differences between plosives, fricatives and approximants
The notions of aspiration, syllabic consonants, nasal and lateral release
Allophonic processes affecting vowels in English
Segmental and suprasegmental phonology
The concept of distinctive features in phonology, the notion of natural class of sounds
Stress-timed versus syllable-timed languages
The structure of a syllable and phonotactic constraints in English
Types and functions of intonation in English
Linking and intrusive /r/ in English
Coalescence and elision in English
Lexicology, lexicography and the dictionaries of English
The problems with the definition of the term “word”
The notions of lexeme, word-form, phonological word, orthographic word and grammatical word
The notions of morpheme, morph and allomorph
Types of conditioning of allomorphy
Inflection versus derivation
Concatenative morphological processes
Non-concatenative morphological processes
Word-manufacturing processes
The notions of suppletion, zero morph and empty morph
Types of affixes
Types of compounds
The notions of stem, base and root
Content words and function words
Obligatorily bound and potentially free morphs
Bound bases and portmanteau morphs
The category of aspect and tense in English
The category of number, gender and case in English
The category of mood, person and voice in English
The scope of syntactic analysis
Tests for constituency
Modification and complementation in syntax
Functions in a sentence
Subject and predicate as the immediate constituents of a sentence
Types of nouns and the functions of NP's
Major properties of English nouns
Major properties of English verbs
Subcategories of verbs in English
How to distinguish ditransitive and complex transitive verbs?
How to distinguish monotransitive and intensive verbs?
Major properties of English adjectives
Major properties of English adverbs
Major properties of English prepositions and prepositional phrases
Coordination in syntax
Major classes of English function words
Types of adverbials
What is ellipsis?
Finite and non finite clauses, simple and complex sentences
Grammaticality versus acceptability
What are phrase markers? What can they show?
The notions of node and dominance in a tree diagram
The scope of study of semantics
Semantic componential analysis
Semantic features
Ambiguity and its sources
Types of antonymy
Synonyms, hyponyms and superordinates
Polysemy and homonymy
Truth conditions and sentential semantics
Thematic roles
Theta assignment and theta criterion
Semantic anomaly, metaphors and idioms
Reference and sense in semantics
Proper names as referring expressions
What is the scope of study for pragmatics?
Exemplify the potential difference between speaker meaning and sentence meaning
What is entailment? Which type of entailment can be named a true paraphrase?
What are analytic and synthetic sentences? What are contradictions?
Presupposition and its major properties
Types of presupposition
Proximal and distal deictic items
Person, place and time deixis
The notion of the deictic centre, possible shifts of the deictic perspective
Social and discourse deixis
Reflections of indexicality in grammar
The major assumptions of the speech act theory
Performatives versus constatives
Three component acts of a speech act
Typology of speech acts
Felicity conditions
Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices, direct and indirect speech acts
Indirectness and implicature
Types of implicature
Grice's Co-operative Principle and the Maxims of Conversation
Hedges and intensifiers
The notion of politeness in pragmatics
Maxims of politeness according to Leech (1983)
The concept of “face” in Politeness theory
Face Threatening Acts - which acts threaten particular aspects of face?
The global strategies of face saving