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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． MT

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

2． 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.

3． Performatives

【答案】 Performatives are sentences that do not state a fact or describe a state. They cannot be said to be true or false. The uttering of these sentences is, or is part of, the doing an action. The judge‟s imprisonment sentence, the president‟s war or independence declaration, etc., are performatives.

4． Transformational-Generative grammar

【答案】 Transformational-generative grammar is proposed by Noam Chomsky. He postulated a syntactic base of language （called deep structure ） , which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of （possibly universal） rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that is identical to an actual sentence of a language , after the mediating of a series of rules （called transformations ） that act upon the deep structures.

5． 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”.

6． Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

7． Concord （or : Agreement）

【答案】 It may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category （or categories ） . For example, the syntactic relationship between that girl and she in the following dialogue: A: Who is that girl? B: Oh, she is my sister.

8． Assimilation

【答案】 It is a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound. It is often used synonymously with coarticulation. Nasalization, dentalization and，velarization are all instances of assimilation. There are two possibilities of assimilation: if a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, it is regressive assimilation;

the converse process, in which a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, is known as progressive assimilation. For example, in “mink”，“n”，which is originally pronounced aswill be velarized by the following “k”/k/，and therefore the word will be pronounced as

9． Predication analysis

【答案】 Predication analysis is an important step in the analysis of sentential meaning. The predication is the common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Such analysis is to break down the sentence into its smaller constituents: argument and predicate. The predicate is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. The argument is the logical participant.

10．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/.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Do you think there are true synonyms in English? Why?

Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. It is used to mean sameness or 【答案】

close similarity of meaning. Total synonymy is rare. The so-called synonyms are all context dependent. They all differ in one way or another.

There are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects:

① in shade of meaning （finish , complete, close, conclude）;

② in stylistic meaning （buy , purchase ）;

③ in emotive （ or affective） meaning （economical , stingy）;

④ in range of use or collocative meaning （accuse , charge）;

⑤ in British and American English usages （autumn , fall）.

For example, they may differ in style. In the context“Little Tom_____a toy bear”，here buy is more appropriate than purchase. Because purchase is more formal than buy.

12．Explain the characteristic of arbitrariness. What are the relationships between arbitrariness & onomatopoeic words and arbitrariness convention?

【答案】 Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. Onomatopoeic words are the words that sound like the sounds they describe. Only when people know the meaning can they infer that the linguistic sign is appropriate for the exact sound. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation.

13．What are closed-class words and open-class words?

A word that belongs to the closed-class is one whose membership is fixed or limited. New 【答案】

members are not regularly added. Therefore, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc., are all closed items.

The open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited. With the emergence of new ideas , inventions , etc. , new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs are all open-class items.

However , the distinction between closed-class words and open-class words is not quiet as clear-cut as it seems. Preposition，though a closed-class，is relatively open one in English. Expressions such as “regarding”，“throughout”， “out of” are now recognized as prepositions or complex prepositions. In respect of open-class items，auxiliary verbs，which used to be ranked as open-class words, are relatively closed in number.

14．One of the design features of human language is creativity. What is it? And what makes it possible?

【答案】 The creativity of language means that users can understand and produce sentences they have never heard before. Creativity is a property unique to human language. It is one of design features that only human language has.

Human language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. The speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form all infinite sets of sentences, most of which are never before produced or heard. The fact that human language is recursive could be shown in that words can be used in new ways to mean new things , and can be instantly understood by people who have never come across that word before. For example, I could make a sentence like The old lady who is waiting for the girl who is talking to the boy who is playing with a basketball is my grandma.

Recursiveness also includes coordination and subordination , conjoining and embedding , hypotactic and paratactic. recursiveness, together with openness , is generally regarded as the core of creativity of language.

15．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