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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

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． MT

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

4． Metonymy

【答案】 Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by 也e name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance , “Washington ”，as the capital of the United States, can be used as a metonym （an instance of metonymy） for the United States government.

5． Minimal pairs

The two words which are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs 【答案】

in the same place in the string. For example，the English words bear and pear constitute a minimal pair as they differ in meaning and in their initial phonemes /b/ and /p/.

6． Embedding

【答案】 It refers to the inclusion of a clause within a phrase or another clause, or of a phrase into another phrase. An example of embedded clauses is: What I do is none of your business. （Nominal clause embedded as subject of another clause）

7． IC analysis

【答案】 IC analysis: IC analysis （immediate constituent analysis） refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents---word groups （or phrases ） , which are in turn

analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own , and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. In practice, for the sake of convenience, we usually stop at the level of word.

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． Consider the following sentence, and then, answer questions （1） to （3） . The boy saw the man with the telescope.

（1）Is this sentence ambiguous? If so, describe the ambiguity briefly in your own words.

（2）Draw the constituent structure trees for each possible interpretation.

（3）What can be known about tree diagrams from （1） and （2） ?

Yes , this is an ambiguous sentence. This is a structurally ambiguous sentence, which 【答案】（1）

can be rewritten in two ways as follows:

a.The boy saw the man. The man had a telescope.

b.Using the telescope, the boy saw the man.

Since the sentence is an ambiguous one, which has two ways of interpretation, there are two （2）

ways of drawing constituent structure trees for it.

（3） Tree diagrams are more advantageous and informative than linear structure analysis. In addition to revealing a linear order, a constituent structure tree has a hierarchical structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic category of each structural constituent, and consequently , can truthfully illustrate the constituent relationship among linguistic elements.

10．What is communicative competence? How should we develop it in our foreign lauguage learning?

【答案】 Communicative competence is what a learner knows about how a language is used in particular situations for effective and appropriate communication. Communicative competence includes knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary, knowledge of rules of speaking, knowledge of how to use and respond to different types of speech acts and social conventions , and knowledge of how to use language appropriately.

In order to develop communicative competence in our foreign language learning, language learners are encouraged to deal with accomplishing actions, which are believed to help them acquire the target language. Two types of tasks are usually required to be performed by the learners: real-world tasks and pedagogical tasks. For example, students may be asked to work or discuss in groups.

Besides , teachers can adopt the communicative syllabus which aims at the learner‟s communicative competence. It teaches the language needed to express and understand different kinds of functions, and emphasizes the process of communication.

11．List different types of Speech presentation and Thought presentation.

【答案】（1） Speech presentation:

Direct speech （DS ） : With the direct speech, what the character said is in its fullest form and with quotation marks.

Indirect speech （IS ） : The propositional content of what the speaker said is presented, but it is not stated in the original words.

Narrator‟s representation of speech acts （NRSA ） : We don‟t know what the speaker said, and all we know is that he used the speech act of doing something. It can be regarded as a summary of a longer piece of discourse and give more background information than indirect speech.

Narrator‟s representation of speech （NRS ） : It is a sentence which merely tells us that speech occurred , and which does not even specify the speech act involved.

（2） Thought presentation : The categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters are exactly the same as those used to represent a speech.

Direct thought （DT ） : DT tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought.

Free indirect thought （FIT ）: It refers to a kind of thought presentation between DT and IT, which is certainly not DT，but takes on some features of the thoughts in the character‟s mind.

12．When a teacher says “It ’s so hot in here.” during a class, what does she probably mean? Refer to the theory of pragmatics when you analyze the situation.

【答案】 This utterance would be semantically ambiguous if it was seen isolated without any context of situation. Its interpretation has to rely on the context in which it was uttered.

There could be generally two types of situation in which this utterance could happen. One may be that it is summer; the teacher just came into the class and was sweating heavily. The other may be that in class the students are quite active towards the questions or problems the teacher has posed, for example,