68. Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole seems similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance. What do you think are their major differences?
   Although Saussure’s distinction and Chomsky’s are very similar, they differ at least in that Saussure took a sociological view of language and his notion of langue is a mater of social conventions, and Chomsky looks at language from a psychological point of vies and to him, competence is a property of the mind of each individual.
69.  Do you think human language is entirely arbitrary? Why?
    Language is arbitrary in nature, it is not entirely arbitrary, because there are a limited number of words whose connections between forms and meanings can be logically explained to a certain extent, for example, the onomatopoeia, words which are coined on the basis of imitation of sounds by sounds such as bang, crash,etc.. Take compounds for another example. The two elements  “photo” and “copy” in “photocopy” are non-motivated, but the compound is not arbitrary.

Chapter 2：Phonology                     
I. Decide whether each of the following statements is True or False:
1. Voicing is a phonological feature that distinguishes meaning in both Chinese and English.  
2. If two phonetically similar sounds occur in the same environments and they distinguish meaning, they are said to be in complementary distribution.  
3. A phone is a phonetic unit that distinguishes meaning.  
4. English is a tone language while Chinese is not.  
5. In linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing.  
6. In everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed.  
7. Articulatory phonetics tries to describe the physical properties of the stream of sounds which a speaker issues with the help of a machine called spectrograph.  
8. The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important areas: the throat, the mouth and the chest.  
9. Vibration of the vocal cords results in a quality of speech sounds called voicing.  
10. English consonants can be classified in terms of place of articulation and the part of the tongue that is raised the highest.  
11. According to the manner of articulation, some of the types into which the consonants can be classified are stops, fricatives, bilabial and alveolar.  
12. Vowel sounds can be differentiated by a number of factors: the position of tongue in the mouth, the openness of the mouth, the shape of the lips, and the length of the vowels.  
13. According to the shape of the lips, vowels can be classified into close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels and open vowels.  
14. Any sound produced by a human being is a phoneme.  
15. Phones are the sounds that can distinguish meaning.  
16. Phonology is concerned with how the sounds can be classified into different categories.  
17.  A basic way to determine the phonemes of a language is to see if substituting one sound for another results in a change of meaning.  
18.  When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a phonemic contrast.  
19. The rules governing the phonological patterning are language specific.  
20.  Distinctive features of sound segments can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments.
II. Fill in each of the following blanks with one word which begins with the letter given:
21. A ____ refers to a strong puff of air stream in the production of speech sounds.  
22．A ____ phonetics describes the way our speech organs work to produce the speech sounds and how they differ.  
23. The four sounds /p/,/b/,/m/ and /w/ have one feature in common, i.e, they are all b_______ sounds.  
24． Of all the speech organs, the t ____ is the most flexible, and is responsible for varieties of articulation than any other.  
25．English consonants can be classified in terms of manner of articulation or in terms of p____ of articulation.  
26．When the obstruction created by the speech organs is total or complete, the speech sound produced with the obstruction audibly released and the air passing out again is called a s________.  <![endif]>
27．S_________ features are the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments. They include stress, tone, intonation, etc.  
28．The rules that govern the combination of sounds in a particular language are called s ____ rules.  
29．The transcription of speech sounds with letter-symbols only is called broad transcription while the transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics is called n_________ transcription.  
30．When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as i_________.  
31．P______ is a discipline which studies the system of sounds of a particular language and how sounds are combined into meaningful units to effect linguistic communication.  
32．The articulatory apparatus of a human being are contained in three important cavities: the pharyngeal cavity, the o_______ cavity and the nasal cavity.  
33． T____ are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords and which can distinguish meaning just like phonemes.  <![endif]>
34．Depending on the context in which stress is considered, there are two kinds of stress: word stress and s_________ stress.
III. There are four choices following each of the statements below. Mark the choice that can best complete the statement:
35． Of all the speech organs, the _______ is/ are the most flexible.
A. mouth   B. lips   C. tongue   D. vocal cords  
36．The sounds produced without the vocal cords vibrating are ____ sounds.
A. voiceless    B. voiced    C. vowel     D. consonantal
37．__________ is a voiced alveolar stop.
 A. /z/        B. /d/      C. /k/    D./b/  
38． The assimilation rule assimilates one sound to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones ____________.
 A. identical    B. same    C. exactly alike     D. similar  
39．Since /p/ and /b/ are phonetically similar, occur in the same environments and they can distinguish meaning, they are said to be ___________.
A. in phonemic contrast        B. in complementary distribution
C. the allophones             D. minimal pair  
40．The sound /f/ is _________________.
 A. voiced palatal affricate             B. voiced alveolar stop
 C. voiceless velar fricative            D. voiceless labiodental fricative   
41.  A ____ vowel is one that is produced with the front part of the tongue maintaining the highest position.  
A. back         B. central    C. front     D. middle  
42. Distinctive features can be found running over a sequence of two or more phonemic segments. The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called ____________.
A. phonetic components    B. immediate constituents
C. suprasegmental features            D. semantic features  
43. A(n) ___________ is a unit that is of distinctive value.  It is an abstract unit, a collection of distinctive phonetic features.
A. phone         B. sound    C. allophone     D. phoneme  
44．The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the ____ of that phoneme.
A. phones       B. sounds    C. phonemes     D. allophones  <![endif]>
IV. Define the terms below:
45. phonology       46. phoneme           47.allophone 
48. international phonetic alphabet     
49. intonation        50. phonetics       51. auditory phonetics
52. acoustic phonetics    53. phone     54. phonemic contrast 
55. tone             56. minimal pair
V. Answer the following questions as comprehensively as possible. Give ex-amples for illustration if necessary: