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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）

【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.

2． Embedding

【答案】 It refers to the inclusion of a clause within a phrase or another clause, or of a phrase into another phrase. An example of embedded clauses is : What I do is none of your business. （Nominal clause embedded as subject of another clause）

3． Lexical relations

【答案】 There are several types of lexical relations concerning the sense of the words. Those are synonymy , antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, homonymy, and so on. （a ） Synonymy refers to the sameness relation ; “autum”, and “full ” are synonyms , for example , （b ） Antonymy refers to the oppositeness relation ; for example , “buy” and “sell ” are antonyms , （c ） Hyponymy refers to the inclusiveness relation; for example, “apple” is a hyponym of “fruit”, （d ） Polysemy means one word that has more than one related meaning ，and “bank”，as an example, is a polysemous word. （e ） Homonymy refers to the relation of two different words which are identical either in sound, or spelling, or both, such as “bow” （bau ） and “bow” （b əu ）.

4． Applied linguistics

【答案】 It is a branch of linguistics which studies the application of linguistics in reality. For example , there are studies on multilingualism, language acquisition, first and second language teaching and learning.

5． Conversational implicature

【答案】 Conversational implicature refers to a type of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words together with the context, under the guidance of the CP and its maxims. For example, the implicature of He is a tiger could probably be he has some characteristics of a tiger.

6． Linguistic determinism

【答案】 Linguistic determinism , is one of the two points of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , and has

developed into the strong version of this hypothesis. It could be summarized as follows: （1） One‟s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language. （2） The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems. Therefore , the following statement could represent this hypothesis 4tIf Aristotle had spoken Chinese , his logic would have been different”.

7． Diglossia

【答案】 When two languages or language varieties exist together in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, the more standard variety can be called the high variety or H-variety , which is used in government , the media , education , and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety or L-variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

8． figure-ground alignment

【答案】 Figure-ground alignment seems to apply to space with the ground as the prepositional object and the preposition expressing the spatial relational configuration. It also applies to human perception of moving objects. Since the moving object is typically the most prominent one, because it is moving , it is typically the figure, while the remaining stimuli constitute the ground.

二、Essay-question

9． What is the main difference between literal language and figurative language?

【答案】 The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually its literal meaning , while figurative language is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense.

Appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. It always makes use of a comparison between different things. Figurative language compares two things that are different in enough ways so that their similarities, when pointed out , are interesting, unique and/or surprising. Figurative langu age uses “figures of speech” to express something other than the literal meaning of the words, in other words, figurative language cannot be taken literally （or should not be taken literally only） . Simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, apostrophe, are all forms of figurative language.

For example, the literal meaning of the word “tree ” is “a large plant”. However, once we start talking about a tree in the context of “a family tree” for example, it is no longer a literal tree we are talking about, but a figurative 〇此^ literal use of the word “tree” refers to an organism which has bark, branches and leaves. A “family tree” shares some of these qualities—graphically , a plan of a family and a representation of a tree can look similar, and in a way they are both a process of organic growth, so we use the same term for both. But when we use the term for a plant it is a literal usage and when we use the term to describe our ancestry, it is a figurative usage.

10．In the history of modem linguistic study of language, various schools have been founded.What are they?

【答案】 （1） The traditional grammar school attempt to lay down universally valid rules to show how a language ought to be used. It is prescriptive rather than descriptive.

（1）An important outgrowth of descriptive linguistics was a theory known as structuralism developed by American Structuralist School. The influential figure in this school is American linguist Leonard Bloomfield （1887 〜 1949 ） , who was strongly influenced by behaviourism.

（2）The Transformational-Generative School is developed by Noam Chomsky in the middle of 1950s with the publication of his book Syntactic Structures. Chomsky was strongly against Bloomfield‟s behaviourist psychology and empiricism and adopted cognitive psychology and rationalism.

（3）The Prague School is well-known, for its contribution to phonology and its functional analysis to language. The approach that Prague School linguists use is based on a combined theory between structuralism and functionalism. The most influential scholar is Trubetzkoy , who distinguished the concepts between the phonetic and phonological analysis of sounds , the analysis of phonemes into distinctive features.

（4）The London School was founded by John Firth （1890 〜1960） . Central to his work is his contextual theory of meaning.

（5）Influenced by Firth‟s ideas, M.A.K. Halliday distinguished linguistic behavior potential from actual linguistic behavior. Halliday developed Systemic Linguistics or Functional Grammar which is concerned with language as an instrument of social interaction rather than as a system that is viewed in isolation.

11．Illustrate the ways of lexical change.

【答案】 Lexical change includes invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, back-formation, analogical creation, borrowing, compound and derivation.

a.Coinage : it is the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are invented trade names of one company‟s product that become general terms for any version of that product. Such as Kleenex ，Teflon and Xerox.

b.Borrowing : it is the taking over of words from other languages. The English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages，such as encore, which is borrowed from French.

c.Compounding : it is the process of a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. For example , “fingerprint” is composed of “finger” and “print”.

d.Blending : blending is typically accomplished by jointing part of one word to the other whole word or other part of the word. For example, the word smog is formed by combing parts of two words “smoke” and “fog”.

e.Clipping : it occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form. Common example is like ad （“advertisement”）.

f.Backformation : it is a specialized type of word formation in which new words are coined from already existing words by “subtracting‟‟ an affix thought to be part of the old word. For example, the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was created from it.

g.Analogical creation. It refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, „„marathon‟‟ appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modem English created such words as “telethon”，“talkthon”.

h.Acronyms : some new words, known as acronyms, are formed form the initial letters of a set of other words. These can remain essentially “alphabetisims” such as CD （“compact disk”）where the pronunciation consists of the set of letters. More typically, acronyms are pronounced as single words, as in NATO （“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”）.

i.Derivation : it is the process of forming new words by adding prefixes, infixes or suffixes to the