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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． Paradigmatic relations

【答案】 Paradigmatic relation , Saussure originally called associative , is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure , or between one element present and the others absent.

二、Short-answer-questions

3． What is your opinion on “true synonymy is non-existent”？

【答案】 Generally speaking , synonyms are the words which have different forms but similar meaning. There are several types of synonyms: dialectal synonyms, such as lift/elevator, flat/apartment; synonyms of different styles , as shown in gentleman/guy; synonyms of different registers , such as salt/sodium chloride ; synonyms differing in affective meaning , such as attract/seduce; synonyms differing in collocation, such as beautiful/handsome, able/capable.

4． What are deep and surface structures?

【答案】 Deep structure is a central theoretical term in generative grammar opposed to surface structure. It is the abstract syntactic representation of a sentence —an underlying level of structural organization which specific all the factors governing the way the sentence should be interpreted.

Surface structure is a central theoretical term in generative grammar, opposed to deep structure. It is 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.

三、Synthesis

5． Basing yourself on the model of componential analysis, analyze the following words teacher, typewriter , chopsticks

【答案】 Teacher : human , knowledgeable , instructive , respectable Typewriter : machine , typewriting Chopsticks: pair, eat, tool

6． The following are some well-known ambiguous sentences in syntactic studies of language. Can you disambiguate them?

（1） The chicken is too hot to eat.

（2） Flying planes can be dangerous.

【答案】 There are two meanings to ex. （1）: （a ） The chicken meat is too hot, so it cannot be eaten at the moment （b ） The chicken feels so hot （maybe after some intense aerobic exercises） that it cannot start eating and needs to calm down first.

The ambiguity of ex. （2） comes from “flying planes”. It can be deciphered as “the planes that is flying” or “to fly planes”.

一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Pidgins and Creoles

【答案】 A pidgin refers to a variety of a language that is not native language of anyone, but is learned on contact situations such as trading. When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade language and becomes the first language of a social community , it becomes a creole. The process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called creolization.

二、Short-answer-questions

3． How are the vowels described usually?

【答案】 Usually , the description of the vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements:

（1）The height of tongue raising （high , mid, low）;

（2）The position of the highest part of the tongue （front , central, back）;

（3）The length or tenseness of the vowel （tense vs. lax or long vs. short） , and

（4）lip-rounding （rounded vs. unrounded）.

4． For the following words, state the conditions under which the different forms of the past tense appear. What determines

whether

or is used? What distinctive features define conditioning environment?

【答案】

三、Synthesis

5． What is INTERLANGUAGE? Can you give some examples of interlanguage?

【答案】 The type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in