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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Compound

【答案】 Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as the compound words “blackboard” and “well-known”.

3． Morpheme

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content , a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning , whether it is lexical or grammatical. For example , in boys , there are two morphemes : “boy” and “-s”； in international, there are three morphemes: “inter-” “nation” and “-al”.

4． 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.

5． Denotation

【答案】 The core sense of a word or a phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world. In the case of linguistic signs, the denotative meaning is what the dictionary attempts to provide. It is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning, opposite to connotation.

6． Linguistic relativity

【答案】 This is one of two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It states that similarity between languages is relative , the greater their structural differentiation is , the more diverse their conceptualization of the world is. For example, not every language has the same set of words for the colors ; in Spanish there is no word that corresponds to the English meaning of “blue”.

7． CALL

【答案】 It is the abbreviation of computer-assisted language learning, which refers to the use of a computer in the teaching or learning of a second or foreign language. In this kind of CALL programs, the computer leads the student through a learning task step-by-step , asking question to check

comprehension. Depending on the student^ response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material.

8． Bound morpheme

【答案】 Bound morphemes refer to those morphemes that can not occur alone and must appear with at least another morpheme. For example , in the word “careless”，“-less” is a bound morpheme since it could not occur by itself as a word.

二、Essay-question

9． What are phonemes, phones and allophones? Explain their relationship with examples from English or Chinese.

【答案】 A phoneme is a minimally distinctive set of sounds in a language that can signal a difference in meaning. It is an abstract phonological unit represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context.

A phone is an individual phonetic unit or segment that occurs in speech. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. Each of the set of phones which correspond to a single phoneme of a language is called an allophone.

Phonemes are placed between slant

lines and phones are placed between square

brackets Allophones of the same phoneme generally occur in different contexts and never distinguish one word from another.

For example, when we pronounce the two words peak and speak, we are aware that the soundis pronounced differently, in the word peak, the soundis pronounced with a strong puff of air stream; but the same stop sound is pronounced slightly differently in the word speak, the puff of air is withheld

a little. Thesound in peak is called an aspiratedand thesound in speak is an unaspirated

There is a slight difference in the way they are pronounced, but such a difference dose not give rise to difference in meaning.

So a phoneme in the English sound system , and it can be realized differently as aspirated or unaspirated in different contexts. The phoneme /p/ in English can be realized as aspiratedand unaspirated which are allophones of the phoneme

stressed than the other. The more stressed syllable is the primary stress while the less stressed syllable is known as the secondary stress.

Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. Different rates of vibration produce what is known as different frequencies , and in auditory terms as different pitches. Pitch variations may be distinctive like phoneme, that is, when they may contribute to distinguish between different words.

When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. When we speak, we change the pitch of our voice to express ideas. The same sentence uttered with different intonation may express different attitude of the speaker. In English , there are four intonation patterns: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone, and the rise-fall tone.

10．How do you compare the traffic light system with a human linguistic system?

【答案】 Both the traffic light system and human linguistic system can symbolize some information in communication whereas the linguistic system is more complicated. However , the linguistic system has several distinctive features no other systems have , including the traffic light system.

（1）Language is arbitrary which means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. But in traffic light system , there are direct logical connections between the light signals and their meanings.

（2）Language is hierarchical, thafs to say linguistic system has 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. However, the traffic light system has no hierarchical system and the structure is composed by a single level.

（3）Language is productive. By creativity we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its excursiveness. Because of duality, speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never before produced or heard. But there is no recursive nature in traffic light system which means that it can not produce new meaning.

11．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.

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 dominating role in Europe, it has little influence in America. While many European languages have their own historical traditions and cultures, English is the dominating language in America, where there is no such a tradition as in Europe. In addition, the pioneer scholars in America were faced with the urgent task of recording the rapidly perishing native American Indian languages because there was no written record of them. However , these languages were characterised by features of vast diversity and differences which are rarely found in other parts of the world. To record and describe these exotic languages , it is probably better not to have any presuppositions about the nature of language in general. This explains why there was not much development in linguistic theory during this period but a lot of discussion on descriptive procedures.

Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution , and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense , mood and parts of speech , Firstly , structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules. However , its aim is confined to the description of languages, without explaining why language operates