雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Mechanisms of linguistic change

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Mechanisms of linguistic change

A

The changes that have caused the most disagreement are those in pronunciation.We have various sources of evidence for the pronunciations of earlier times, such as the spellings, the treatment of words borrowed from other languages or borrowed by them, the descriptions of contemporary grammarians and spelling-reformers, and the modern pronunciations in all the languages and dialects concerned. From the middle of the sixteenth century, there are in England writers who attempt to describe the position of the speech-organs for the production of English phonemes, and who invent what are in effect systems of phonetic symbols. These various kinds of evidence, combined with a knowledge of the mechanisms of speech-production, can often give us a very good idea of the pronunciation of an earlier age, though absolute certainty is never possible.

B

When we study the pronunciation of a language over any period of a few generations or more, we find there are always large-scale regularities in the changes: for example, over a certain period of time, just about all the long [a:] vowels in a language may change into long [e:] vowels, or all the [b] consonants in a certain position (for example at the end of a word) may change into [p] consonants. Such regular changes are often called sound laws. There are no universal sound laws (even though sound laws often reflect universal tendencies), but simply particular sound laws for one given language (or dialect) at one given period.

C

One cause which has been suggested for changes in pronunciation is geographic and climatic, for example that people living in mountain country are subject to certain changes in pronunciation compared to plainsmen, but the evidence for this is unconvincing. Other people have suggested biological and racial factors: it has been said, for example, that races with thick lips have difficulty in producing certain speech-sounds. Once again, no really convincing evidence has been produced.But in these circumstances the theory is unnecessary: the influence of one language on another is quite enough to explain such changes, without racial characteristics being invoked.

D

It is also possible that fashion plays a part in the process of change. It certainly plays a part in the spread of change: one person imitates another,and people with the most prestige are most likely to be imitated, so that a change that takes place in one social group may be imitated (more or less accurately) by speakers in another group. When a social group goes up or down in the world, its pronunciation may gain or lose prestige. It is said that, after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the upper-class pronunciation of Russian, which had formerly been considered desirable, became on the contrary an undesirable kind of accent to have, so that people tried to disguise it. Some of the changes in accepted English pronunciation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been shown to consist in the replacement of one style of pronunciation by another style already existing, and it is likely that such substitutions were a result of the great social changes of the period: the increased power and wealth of the middle classes, and their steady infiltration upwards into the ranks of the landed gentry, probably carried elements of middle-class pronunciation into upper-class speech.

E

A less specific variant of the argument is that the imitation of children is imperfect: they copy their parents’ speech, but never reproduce it exactly. This is true, but it is also true that such deviations from adult speech are usually corrected in later childhood. Perhaps it is more significant that even adults show a certain amount of random variation in their pronunciation of a given phoneme, even if the phonetic context is kept unchanged. This, however, cannot explain changes in pronunciation unless it can be shown that there is some systematic trend in the failures of imitation: if they are merely random deviations they will cancel one another out and there will be no net change in the language. For some of these random variations to be selected at the expense of others, there must be further forces at work

F

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雅思阅读真题题目：

Questions 27-29

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer

Write your answers in boxes 27-29 on your answer sheet.

The pronunciation of living language undergo changes throughout thousands of years. Changes from [b] consonants to [p] consonants are usually called 27 ……………………. There are three reasons for these changes:Firstly，the influence of one language on another is an adequate explanation since no disagreement being put forward. Secondly, 28.......... ……………………. involving imitation is associated with the spread of this linguistic phenomenon. The incomplete imitations of children, moreover, may also contribute to this change if they are only deviations. However, for those random variations in pronunciation, the deeper evidence lies in the 29 ……………………. or minimization of effort.

Questions 30-37

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 30-37 on your answer sheet,write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

30 The most controversial aspect of linguistic changes is the use of word.

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