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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Back-formation

【答案】 Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example , the word “television” appeared before “televise”，and so does “editor” to “edit”.

2． 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.

3． 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.

4． 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”.

5． Textual function

【答案】 Textual function : The textual function is one of the three meta-functions language is composed of. It refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living message different from a random list of sentences.

6． Prefix

【答案】 In linguistics, a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can attach. Prefixes are bound morphemes （they cannot occur as independent words ） . While most languages employ both prefixes and suffixes, prefixes are less common. Some languages employ mostly suffixes and almost no prefixes at all. The use of prefixes has been found to correlate statistically with other linguistic features, such as a verb-object word order and the use of prepositions.

7． 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）

8． inflectional morpheme

【答案】 Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

二、Essay-question

9． How many semantic relations are there among sentences? Give examples.

【答案】 There are basically six:

（1）Synonymy , e.g. X: “He was a bachelor all his life." Y: “He never married all his life."

X is synonymous with Y.

（2）Inconsistence , e.g. X: “Mark is married." Y: “Mark is a bachelor.”

X is inconsistent with Y.

（3）Entailment ，e.g. X: “Mark married a blonde heiress:”Y: “Mark married a blonde.”

X entails Y.

（4）Presupposition , e.g. X: ''John's bike needs repairing^ Y: '"John has a bike."

X presupposes Y.

（5）Contradiction , e. g. X: '"My unmarried aunt is married to a bachelor.”

X is a contradiction.

（6）Anomaly , e.g. X: "'The blackboard has a bad temper.”

X is semantically anomalous.

10．What do you think of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

【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）One5s 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 <4If Aristotle had spoken Chinese，his logic would have been different”.

11．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 language 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.

12．Which of the following sentences are ambiguous? If you know how, use tree diagrams to show how these sentences are ambiguous.

（1）The children put the toy in tile box.

（2）The professor‟s appointment was shocking.

（3）No smoking section is available.

（4）Jack refused to change his decision. 【答案】

Therefore ,

it could be clear that the sentence is ambiguous.

Thus ,

this sentence is ambiguous.

Thus , this sentence is unambiguous.

13．Some comments on the following statement based on your own experience:

There exists a close relationship between language and culture. In other words, a successful master