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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Semantic field

【答案】 It is the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation , sex , membership of the father's or mother's side of the family.

2． Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

【答案】 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts : linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism refers to the notion that a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Different languages offer people different ways of expressing around , they think and speak differently. Linguistic relativity refers to the claim that the cognitive processes that are determined are different for different languages. Thus, speakers of different languages are said to think in different ways. The hypothesis is now interpreted mainly in two different ways: a strong version and a weak one. The strong version believes that the language patterns determine peopled thinking and behavior ; the weak one holds that the former influence the later. So far , many researches and experiments conducted provide support to the weak version.

3． Surface structure

【答案】 It is a term used in generative grammar to refer to the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure we articulate and hear. For instance, “John is easy to please.” and “John is eager to please.” are two sentences with the same surface structure.

4． Hyponymy

Hyponymy. It refers to the sense relationship between a more general, more inclusive and 【答案】

a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordiante, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. For example , the hyponymy relationship could be established between “animal” and “rabbit”.

5． MT

【答案】 It refers to machine translation, the use of machine （usually computers） to translate texts from one natural language to another

6． Functional Sentence Perspective （FSP ）

【答案】 It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to art analysis of utterances （or texts） in

terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.

7． grammatical word

【答案】 It refers to those which mainly work for constructing group , phrase , clause , clause complex , or even text , such as , conjunctions , prepositions , articles , and pronouns. Grammatical words serve to link together different content parts. So they are also known as Function Words.

8． functional morpheme

【答案】 This is a subtype of free morphemes, which one consists largely of the functional words in language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns, for example, “and , about when on , near, the” an so on.

9． Lexical word

【答案】 Lexical word, lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives , and adverbs.

10．Register

【答案】 It is a speech variety used by a particular group of people , usually sharing the same occupation （e.g. doctors, lawyers） or the same interests. A particular register often distinguishes itself from others by having a number of distinctive words, by using words or phrases in a particular way, and sometimes by special grammatical constructions （e.g. legal language）.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Is American English superior to African English? Why or why not?

【答案】 American English is not superior to African English. As different branches of English, African English and American English are equal. Similar as they are , they are influenced by their respective cultural context and thus form respective systems of pronunciation, words and even grammar.

12．Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for different types of sand, and in Arabic one must choose from a whole range of words which are subsumed under the Western category CAMEL. Can you explain these phenomena with your linguistic knowledge?

【答案】 These phenomena can be explained from the following perspectives:

（1）These phenomena show a relationship between language and society. Language changes from region to region , from one social group to another and from individual to individual. The living environment makes great impact on the changes of language. As Eskimo are always living in an environment of a snow world, they have made a good cognition to snow and classified it in different types. Human use language to describe the world they have cognized.

（2）These phenomena can be explained from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that : our language helps mould our way of thinking and , consequently , different languages may probably express speaker‟s unique ways of understanding the world. So Eskimos^ different words

for different types of snow reflect their different ways to understand snow.

13．What is the cognitive interpretation of image schema?

【答案】 Image schema is a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience.

Image schema exists at a level of abstraction, operates at a level of mental organization between propositional structures and concrete image , and it can be subdivided into the following items : a center-periphery schema , a continent schema ，a cycle schema ，a force schema ，a link schema ，a part-whole schema，a path schema，a scale schema and a vertical schema.

14．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.

15．What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of 【答案】

all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. For example the sense of the word “dog” is “a domesticated canine mammal , occurring in many breeds that show a great domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form”. It does not refer to any particular dog that exists in the real world, but applies to any animal that meets the features described in the definition.

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world ; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic unit and the non-linguistic world of experience. If we say “The dog is barking”，we must be talking about a certain dog existent in the situation. The word ^dog^ refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference of the word “dog” in this particular situation.

It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

16．thrived 10. breathed 11. turned 12. hissed

【答案】

三、Essay-question

17．Think of the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle proposed by P. Grice, and explain the violation of maxims in the cases below.

1）A : Have you seen my watch?

B : Look in the drawer.