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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Speech and thought presentation

【答案】 Speech and thought presentation: These two terms are used for the language in fiction, referring to the presenting forms for indicating the narrator‟s speech or thought. The speech presentation may have the following four possibilities : direct speech , indirect speech , narrator‟s representation of speech acts, and narrator‟s representation of speech. The Thought presentation can also be categorized into : narrator‟s representation of thought , narrator‟s representation of thought acts , indirect thought , free indirect thought, and direct thought.

2． Slang :

【答案】 It refers to casual , very informal speech , using expressive but informal words and expressions.

For some people , slang is equivalent to colloquial speech but for others , it means “undesirable speech”. Usually , “colloquial speech” refers to a speech variety used in informal situations with colleagues , friends or relatives ，and “slang” is used for a very informal speech variety which often serves as an “in-group” language for a particular set of people such as teenagers , army recruits , pop-groups etc. Most slang is rather unstable as its words and expressions can change quite rapidly, for example , “Beat it!” “Scram!”，and “Rack off!” for “leave”.

3． Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

4． Componential analysis

【答案】 It refers to a semantic approach which defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components , or semantic features. For example , the meaning of the word boy may be analyzed into three components: HUMAN, YOUNG and MALE.

5． Inflection

【答案】 Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes , such as number , person , finiteness , aspect and case , which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. For example, the past form of the verb work is realized by the addition of the inflectional suffix: „„-ed‟‟； the plural form of the noun child is realized

by the inflectional suffix: „„-ren‟‟.

6． Speech Act Theory

【答案】 Speech act theory was proposed by J. L. Austin and has been developed by J. R. Searle. Basically , they believe that language is not only used to inform or to describe things, it is often used to “do things”，and to perform acts.

7． Innateness hypothesis

【答案】 The “Innateness Hypothesis” of child lan guage acquisition was proposed by Noam Chomsky , who states that language are somewhat innate and that children are bom with what he calls a language acquisition device, which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning.

8． Concatenation

【答案】 What makes a word separate from other words is that all the letters are lined up together with no intervening spaces. That is, in a word, all letters are concatenated. Sometimes new words can be made by concatenating two existing words—for example, “airline” is a concatenation of the words “air” and “line” into a new word.

9． Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

10．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”.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Please disambiguate the following 5 sentences, using the tree-diagram, or any other means that you think is appropriate.

（1）Jane showed her baby pictures.

（2）The old man is drinking in the air.

（3）We need more realistic officials to handle the economy.

（4）We are sweeping the ground cigarettes on the street.

（5）Tom exchanged the money and fell around the corner.

【答案】（1）

12．What makes language unique to human beings?

The design features of language which refer to the defining properties of human language 【答案】

tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.Arbitrariness is a core feature of language, which means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. Duality , which means the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization. Creativity means language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Because of duality the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic unites to form an infinite set of sentences , most of which are never heard before. Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters, in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. So all these features make language unique to human beings.

13．Why is Saussure hailed as the father of modem linguistics?

【答案】 Saussure occupies such an important place in the history of linguistics that he is often described as ''father of modem linguistics”：

A. The book Course in General Linguistics （1916），which is the most important source of Saussure‟s ideas, marked the beginning of modem linguistics.

B.Saussure was the first to notice the complexities of language. He believed that language is a system of signs, called conventions. He held that the sign is the union of the signifier and the signified.