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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． 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.

3． 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.

4． 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.

5． Cross-cultural communication

【答案】 Cross-cultural communication is an exchange of ideas , information , etc , between persons from different cultural backgrounds. The cultural conventions of the participants may widely different , and misinterpretation and misunderstanding can easily arise , even leading to a total communication breakdown.

6． 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 in formal 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”.

7． Endocentric construction

【答案】 Endocentric construction : An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e. a word or a group of words , which serves as a definable center , or head. Hence an endocentric construction is also known as a headed construction. Noun phrases like “Lovely Lucy” are typical endocentric constructions.

8． constituent

【答案】 Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a construction: for example, in the sentence The boy ate the apple, S , the boy , ate the apple , each part is a constituent. （A ）（B ）（C ）

Constituents can be joined together with other constituents to form larger units. If two constituents, in the case of the example above , B （the boy ） and C （ ate the apple ） , are joined to form a hierarchically higher constituent A （“S”，here a sentence） , then B and C are said to be immediate constituents of A.

二、Essay-question

9． Research has found that two-year-old English children produce negative sentences such as a） tod ） , but note）:

a ）He doesn‟t like cabbage.

b ）Doesn‟t like cabbage.

c ）Him no like cabbage.

d ）No like cabbage.

e ）*Him doesn‟t like cabbage.

How can you account for this?

【答案】 This founding firstly demonstrates one point that the acquisition of auxiliary verbs comes later than that of comparatively “simpler” morphemes such as pronouns. Therefore, it is unUkely for children to make mistakes as shown in e） . The reason for this phenomenon could be explained by the fact that in the early stage of children^ language acquisition, the speech at first only contains content words and lacks the function elements.

This founding also shows that children have a certain process of learning the negative form. There are generally three stages.

1） At first, the negative element is not part of the structure of the sentences. It is simply attached to the beginning, as shown in d）.

2 ） The negative element is inserted into the sentence. The additional negative forms don't and can't are used, and with no and not, begin to be placed in front of the verb rather than at the beginning, as shown in c ）.

3） Children begin to produce the appropriate part of do, be or the model verbs, to suit the person or tense, as shown in b） and a）.

10．Use examples to illustrate different ways to extend syntactic constituents.

【答案】 In this chapter , several ways to extend syntactic constituents are brought under the category of recursiveness , including coordination and subordination , conjoining and embedding , hypotactic and paratactic and so on. Coordination and conjoining are the different names for the same linguistic phenomenon , that is , to use and , but or or to join together syntactic constituents with the same [unction. For instance, the sentence A man got into the car could be extended into a sentence like this “[NP A man , a woman , a boy , a cat and a dog] got into the car”. While subordination and embedding can be understood as the extension of any syntactic constituent by inserting one or more syntactic elements with different functions, into another. I saw the man who had visited you last year is an extended sentence by changing the independent clause The man had visited you last year into a dependent element （here a relative clause）.

However , hypotaxis and parataxis are the two traditional terms for the description of syntactic relations between sentences. In the examples below , the former is hypotactic , while the latter is paratactic :

We live near the sea. So we enjoy a healthy climate. He dictated the letter. She wrote it.

11．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 of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture.

【答案】 Language use is heavily tinted with its culture. A language does not only expresses facts, ideas , or events which represent similar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the peopled attitudes , beliefs, world outlook, and so on. In a word, language expresses cultural reality. To dig it further , a language, as a system of signs with their own cultural substances and values, may be viewed as a symbol of social identity. People are identified via their use of language. In this sense, language symbolizes cultural reality.

On the other hand , as people‟s language uses express the culture ，to be more specific , their community culture represented by its social conventions, norms and social appropriateness, the culture both emancipates and constrains people socially, historically and metaphorically.

Historically , each culture has its past and tradition. A culture consists both of its ways how a social group represents itself, its technological achievements, monuments and works of art and of its historical identity recorded and passed down by the pop culture. It is language that has played a major role in socializing the people and in perpetuating culture, especially in print form.

In addition , culture also affects its peopled imagination or common dreams which are mediated through the language and reflected in their life. Language is not only intrinsically related to what the culture is and what it was, but also related to the culture of imagination governing people‟s decisions as well as actions. The interplay between language and culture may result in various forms of socialization and people with different cultures may be socialized in different ways with different acculturation.

Although language and culture are inextricably intertwined , this relationship is not analogous to that of structures and processes. Rather, culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. Linguistic competence is one variety of cultural competence and speech behavior is one variety of social behavior. The relation of language to culture is that of part to whole.

12．What are the special features of American structuralism?

【答案】 American Structuralism is a branch of synchronic linguistics that developed in a very different style from that of Europe. While linguistics in Europe started more than two thousand years ago, linguistics in America started at the end of the nineteenth century. While traditional grammar plays a