今天，上海新航道雅思頻道小編給大家帶來劍4Test3雅思閱讀passage3原文譯文，希望可以幫助廣大雅思考生輕松備考雅思。

  劍4Test3雅思閱讀passage3原文譯文——獲得語言資料

  Obtaining Linguistic Data

  獲得語言資料

  A Many procedures are available for obtaining data about a language. They range from a carefully planned, intensive field investigation in a foreign country to a casual introspection about one’s mother tongue carried out in an armchair at home.

  A我們有很多種可以用來獲得語言資料的方式。這些方法既可以是精心準備，深入細致的國外實地調査，也可以是在自家搖椅上進行的，對母語的一次不經意的反思。

  B In all cases, someone has to act as a source of language data — an informant. Informants are (ideally) native speakers of a language, who provide utterances for analysis and other kinds of information about the language (e.g. translations, comments about correctness, or judgements on usage). Often, when studying their mother tongue, linguists act as their own informants, judging the ambiguity, acceptability, or other properties of utterances against their own intuitions. The convenience of this approach makes it widely used, and it is considered the norm in the generative approach to linguistics. But a linguist’s personal judgements are often uncertain, or disagree with the judgements of other linguists, at which point recourse is needed to more objective methods of enquiry, using non-linguists as informants. The latter procedure is unavoidable when working on foreign languages, or child speech.

  B無論用何種方式，總有人要充當語言資料的來源——這個人就叫做資料提供者。資料提供者(理想狀態下)應該是以該語言為母語的人，他可以提供做分析之用的語句，還可以給出有關該語言的其他信息(如翻譯，正誤評判，用法判斷等)。在研究本國語言時，語言學家本人往往充當資料提供者一角，比照他們的直覺，來對語句的歧義現象、可接受度及其他特性加以評判。這種方法因其便利性而被廣泛使用，而且還被看作是生成式語言研究方式的規范。然而，一名語言學家的個人判斷通常要么是不確定的，要么就與其他語言學家的意見相左，此時就需要求助于更為客觀的提問方式，讓語言學家本人以外的人來充當資料提供者。

  C Many factors must be considered when selecting informants — whether one is working with single speakers (a common situation when languages have not been described before), two people interacting, small groups or large-scale samples. Age, sex, social background and other aspects of identity are important, as these factors are known to influence the kind of language used. The topic of conversation and the characteristics of the social setting (e.g. the level of formality) are also highly relevant, as are the personal qualities of the informants (e.g. their fluency and consistency). For larger studies, scrupulous attention has been paid to the sampling theory employed, and in all cases, decisions have to be made about the best investigative techniques to use.

  C在研究外語及兒童語言的時候，第二種方式是不可避免的在選擇資料提供人的時候要考慮多種因素——你面對的是單個說話人(當語言從未被描述過的時候出現的通常狀況)，還是兩個人互動;是小組還是大規模的樣本。年齡、性別、社會背景以及身份的其他方面都很重要，因為據信這些因素會影響使用語言的類別。對話的話題和社交場合的特征(比如正式程度)也極其相關;同樣，資料提供者的個人資質(比如語言流暢度和連貫性)也十分重要。對于較大規模的研究來說，要對所采用的抽樣方式一絲不茍，而且無論在什么情況下，都要決定采用最好的調查技術。

  D Today, researchers often tape-record informants. This enables the linguist’s claims about the language to be checked, and provides a way of making those claims more accurate (‘difficult’ pieces of speech can be listened to repeatedly). But obtaining naturalistic, good-quality data is never easy. People talk abnormally when they know they are being recorded, and sound quality can be poor. A variety of tape-recording procedures have thus been devised to minimise the ‘observer’s paradox’ (how to observe the way people behave when they are not being observed). Some recordings are made without the speakers being aware of the fact — a procedure that obtains very natural data, though ethical objections must be anticipated. Alternatively, attempts can be made to make the speaker forget about the recording, such as keeping the tape recorder out of sight, or using radio microphones. A useful technique is to introduce a topic that quickly involves the speaker, and stimulates a natural language style (e.g. asking older informants about how times have changed in their locality).

  D如今，語言研究者通常都會為資料提供人錄音。這就使語言學家針對這些語言的某些論斷變得可以接受檢查，并且還能提供一種使這些觀點更為精確的方式(反復聽“難”懂的語言)。但是想要獲得自然的，高質量的資料可沒那么容易。當得知被錄音的時候，人們說話的方式就不同了，而且音質可以很差。因此，一系列的錄音方式就被設計出來以便盡可能地解除研究者的矛盾(如何能夠觀察人們的行為方式又不讓他們知道正在被觀察)。有時候，說話人是在毫不知情的情況下被錄音的——這一方式可以獲得極自然的材料，但是道德方面的反對意見也是預料之中的事。另外，也可以嘗試讓說話人忘記錄音這回事，比如把錄音機藏起來，或是使用無線麥克風。還有一種管用的方式，就是提出一個說話人能夠迅速融入的話題，從而激發一種自然的語言風格(比如詢問年長的資料提供者：在他們的家鄉，時代是如何變遷的)。

  E An audio tape recording does not solve all the linguist’s problems, however. Speech is often unclear and ambiguous. Where possible, therefore, the recording has to be supplemented by the observer’s written comments on the non-verbal behaviour of the participants, and about the context in general. A facial expression, for example, can dramatically alter the meaning of what is said. Video recordings avoid these problems to a large extent, but even they have limitations (the camera cannot be everywhere), and transcriptions always benefit from any additional commentary provided by an observer.

  E然而，磁帶錄音的方式并不能夠解決語言學家面臨的所有問題。講話通常又不清楚，又有歧義。因此，如果可能的話，要對參與者的非語言行為以及整體語境做出書面評述，作為對錄音的補充。例如，一個面部表情就可以徹底改變一句話的意思。在很大情況下，可以用錄像方式避免這樣的問題，但是就算是這個方式也存在局限性(攝像機不可能安得到處都是)，而且文字謄本總是要得益于觀察者另外提供的注解。

  F Linguists also make great use of structured sessions, in which they systematically ask their informants for utterances that describe certain actions, objects or behaviours. With a bilingual informant, or through use of an interpreter, it is possible to use translation techniques (‘How do you say table in your language?’). A large number of points can be covered in a short time, using interview worksheets and questionnaires. Often, the researcher wishes to obtain information about just a single variable, in which case a restricted set of questions may be used: a particular feature of pronunciation, for example, can be elicited by asking the informant to say a restricted set of words. There are also several direct methods of elicitation, such as asking informants to fill in the blanks in a substitution frame (e.g. I___ see a car), or feeding them the wrong stimulus for correction (‘Is it possible to say I no can see?’).

  F語言學家還需要大量使用結構化會議，當中他們系統地要求資料提供者說出有關某種動作、物體及行為的語句。如果資料提供者是說雙語的，或者通過翻譯的幫助，我們就有可能用到翻譯技巧(比如你們怎么說桌子這個詞)。通過使用面試表格和調查問卷，我們能夠在很短的時間里覆蓋大量的知識點。通常，研究者只想獲得有關某個語言變項的信息，在這種情況下，就必須使用一套嚴格設置好的問題：比如說，發音上的某個特殊規則，可以用要求資料提供者讀出一組嚴格設定的單詞的方法引出來。我們還有幾種直接的誘導方式，比如讓資料提供人填寫替換表中的空格(比如：我__看到一輛汽車)，或者給他們做改錯練習(“能不能說我能不看到?”)。

  G A representative sample of language, compiled for the purpose of linguistic analysis, is known as a corpus. A corpus enables the linguist to make unbiased statements about frequency of usage, and it provides accessible data for the use of different researchers. Its range and size are variable. Some corpora attempt to cover the language as a whole, taking extracts from many kinds of text; others are extremely selective, providing a collection of material that deals only with a particular linguistic feature. The size of the corpus depends on practical factors, such as the time available to collect, process and store the data: it can take up to several hours to provide an accurate transcription of a few minutes of speech. Sometimes a small sample of data will be enough to decide a linguistic hypothesis; by contrast, corpora in major research projects can total millions of words. An important principle is that all corpora, whatever their size, are inevitably limited in their coverage, and always need to be supplemented by data derived from the intuitions of native speakers of the language, through either introspection or experimentation.

  G為了語言分析而被編纂起來的語言代表樣本被叫做語料庫。語料庫使得語言學家能夠對一種用法的頻率加以客觀陳述，而且還可以為其他的研究者所用。語料庫的范圍和規模是各不相同的。有些語料庫試圖將語言作為一個整體來研究，從不同類型的文章中節選材料;其他的則十分挑剔，只提供針對某個特殊語言現象的一組材料。語料庫的大小是由實踐因素決定的，比如說可以用來搜集、處理、存儲資料的時間：要想為幾分鐘的演講做一個精確的原文，可能要花上數小時的時間。有時候，個小資料樣本就足以證明一種語言學假說。相反地，重大研究項目的語料庫加起來足有上百萬字。一個重要的原則是，無論大小，所有的語料庫在覆蓋面上都不可避免地存在局限性，因此，它們總是需要通過內省或實驗的方式，被源自母語者直覺的資料補充。

  以上就是小編為大家帶來關于《劍橋雅思4真題》閱讀部分供大家閱讀參考，新航道雅思資料頻道將第一時間為考生發布最全、最新、最專業的雅思資訊及雅思考試資料及機經.