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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Design features

【答案】 Design features : It refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

2． Contrastive analysis

【答案】 Contrastive analysis is an approach to analysis of second language acquisition, based on a belief that a more effective teaching pedagogy would come out when the similarities and differences between native language and target language are taken into consideration. By such an analysis , it is supposed that some leaning difficulties could be predicted in terms of language transfer.

3． 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.

4． Innateness hypothesis

【答案】 The “Innateness Hypothesis” of child language acquisition was proposed by Noam Chomsky , who states that language are somewhat innate and that children are bom with what he calls a language acquisition device, which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning.

5． 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.

二、Short-answer-questions

6． How to distinguish root and stem?

【答案】 Root is that part of a word-form that remains when all the inflectional and derivational affixes have been removed. Thus in the word undesirables , the root is desire. Stem is the part of a word-form that remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed. So in the word undesirables, the stem is undesirable. The stem of a word may be: a） a simple stem consisting of only one morpheme or root , e.g. work ; b ） a root plus a derivational affix , e.g. worker ; c ） two or more roots , e.g. workshop.

7． What is the definition of cognitive linguistics?

【答案】 Cognitive linguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.

8． Why do people take duality as one of the important design features of human language? Can you tell us what language will be if it has no such design feature?

【答案】 Duality makes our language productive. A large number of different units can be formed out of a small number of elements——for instance, tens of thousands of words out of a small set of sounds. And out of the huge number of words, there can be astronomical number of possible sentences and phrases, which in turn can combine to form unlimited number of texts. Most animal communication systems do not have this design feature of human language.

If language had no such design feature , then it would be like animal communicational system which consists of only a number of basic sounds and this would be highly limited. Then we would not be able to produce a very large number of sound combinations （e.g. words ） , which are distinct in meaning. In other words, the number of messages one can send would be restricted to the number of basic sounds.

9． What are the differences between simile and metaphor?

【答案】 Simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing , and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like. For example, the phrase as cold as ice is a common simile.

Although metaphor also makes a comparison between two unlike elements , this comparison is implied rather than stated. That is , it differs from simile in that the words such as like or as do not appear. For example, uThe life is a stage” is a metaphor.

三、Essay-question

10．What is the difference between pidgins and creoles?

【答案】 A pidgin is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it is used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. The term is believed to have originated from the pronunciation of the English word„„business‟‟in Chinese Pidgin English.

Pidgins arose from a blending of several languages such as Chinese dialects and English, African dialects and French, African dialects and Portuguese. Usually a European language serves as the basis of the pidgin in the sense that some of its grammar and vocabulary is derived from the European language used by traders and missionaries in order to communicate with peoples whose languages they did not know.

Pidgins typically have a limited vocabulary and a very reduced grammatical structure characterized by the loss of inflections，gender and case. The“simplified‟‟variety performs its functions as trading and employment.

When a pidgin has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that speech community as their native language , it is said to have become a creole. The structure of the original pidgin is expanded to enable it to fulfill its new functions. The vocabulary is vastly enriched , and new syntactic-semantic concepts developed. Notable examples of Creole are the

English-based Creole of Jamaica, and the French-based Creole of Haiti.

11．The roles of Transformational-Generative linguistics and Functional linguistics in language teaching and learning.

【答案】 （1） In the framework of Transformational-Generative linguistics, language is not learnt by innate. While

acquiring his mother tongue , he compares his innate language system with that of his native language and modifies his grammar. Therefore, language learning is an activity of building and testing hypothesis.

Although the influence of such a formal and abstract grammar remains limited in the field of language education , there are still various attempts to apply TG grammar to language teaching. In designing teaching materials , for example , sentence patterns with the same deep structure can be closely related, such as the active and the passive. Transformational rules may assist the teacher in the teaching of complex sentence construction. In the teaching of literature, TG grammar provides a new instrument for stylistic analysis.

（2） The Functional linguistics sees language learning from a semantic-sociolinguistic perspective. In particular, Systemic-Functional linguistics, which was proposed by Halliday, sees the formal system of language as a realization of functions of language in use.

Its scope is broader than that of formal linguistic theories. In the field of language teaching, it leads to the development of notion/function-based syllabuses, which have attracted increasing attention.

12．A speech act consists of three related acts according to J. L. Austin’s Speech Act theory. What are they? Analyze the following conversation in the light of Speech Act theory.

Customer : Waiter! There's a fly in my soup.

Waiter : Don‟s worry, there's no extra charge.

【答案】 A speech act consists of three related acts according to J. L. Austin‟s Speech Act theory, namely , locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. The locutionary act is the ordinary act we perform when we speak. It is the act of saying. The illocutionary act is the act performed in the performing of a locutionary act , that may said to be the extra meaning of the utterance ; while perlocutionary act concerns the consequential effects of a locution upon the hearer , depending on specific circumstances. Austin suggests that the three kinds of acts are performed simultaneously when a speaker saying something.

In this conversation , by saying “Waiter! There‟s a fly in my soup”，the locutionary act of this utterance is that the customer produces a number of sounds with its literal meaning that there is a fly in his/her soup. The illocutionary act is that the customer intends not to just review the information to the waiter , but might express his feelings and expect the waiter to do something. It might be a complaint, a warn , a criticism, or a threaten, but whatever it might be, it is no doubt a force, making the waiter to change soup or give some compensation. The perlocutionary a ct of the utterance here is the waiter‟s doing nothing but giving a strange respond.

As to the waiter^ responding, by saying that he not only produces a number of sounds to state that there is no extra charge , but also shows his possible misinterpretation or his sense of humor or his indirect refusal.