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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． 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.

3． 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/.

4． 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.

5． CMC

【答案】 It is computer-mediated communication , distinguished by its focus on language and language use in computer networked environments, and by its use of methods of discourse analysis to address that focus.

6． Slang :

【答案】 It refers to casual , very informal speech , using expressive but informal words and expressions.

For some people , slang is equivalent to colloquial speech but for others , it means “undesirable speech”. Usually , “colloquial speech” refers to a speech variety used in informal situations with colleagues , friends or relatives ，and “slang” is used for a very informal speech variety which often serves as an “in-group” language for a particular set of people such as teenager s , army recruits , pop-groups etc. Most slang is rather unstable as its words and expressions can change quite rapidly, for

example , “Beat it!” “Scram!”，and “Rack off!” for “leave”.

7． 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”.

8． Locutionary Act, Illocutinary Act and Perlocutionary Act

【答案】 According to Austin , a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking.

A locutionary act is the uttering of words, phrases, and clauses, which conveys meaning by giving out meaningful sounds. Therefore, when somebody says „„Morning‟‟，we can ask a question like “What did he do?‟‟，and the answer could be “He offered a greeting.”

An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker‟s intention; it is the act performed in saying something. Therefore, for the same example，we can say “He meant it as a greeting”.

A perlocutionary act is the effect of the utterance. Thus，by saying “Morning!” the speaker has made it clear that he wants to keep friendly relations with the hearer.

9． Homonymy

【答案】 In any language there are words which have the same linguistic form but are different in meaning. These words are called homonyms. For example, bank （of a river） , and bank （financial institution ）.

10．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）

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Illustrate the relationship between morpheme and allomorph by examples.

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language , not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes. Take disagreeable for example, it contains three morphemes, dis-, agree and -able. A morpheme may take various shapes or forms. For instance, -ion, -tion, -sion and -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix. They do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound depending on the final phoneme of the preceding verb. They are called allomorphs. So an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds.

12．Why is back-formation a productive way of forming verbs?

【答案】 Backformation is a type of word-formation by which a shorter word is derived by the

deletion of an imagined affix of a longer form already present in the language. It is a special kind of metanalysis , combined with analogical creation, e.g. the verb edit was formed from editor by dropping the imagined derivational suffix -or.

The majority of backformed words are verbs，for verbs have a peculiar property to develop around them a number of deverbal nouns, such as the agent noun and the noun of action, like edit from editor. Verbs also generate various types of participial adjectives, such as creating and created. Hence people expect to find a family of derivatives attached to a verb. On the other hand, when people come across one or more apparently deverbal nouns, they often take for granted that there must he a corresponding verb , and they simply create the verb base from which the original word seems to be derived.

13．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.

14．thrived 10. breathed 11. turned 12. hissed

【答案】

15．How well, in your opinion, does the word “communication ” represent the function of human language?

【答案】 We use language for an almost infinite number of purposes , from writing letters to gossiping with our friends , making speeches and talking to ourselves in the mirror. But the primary function of language is to transmit information and to convey commands, feelings and emotions. That is, language is a tool of communication. The term “communication” can be used to cover much of the function of language. This function can be further divided into more specific functions, such as phatic function/communion, directive function , informative function , interrogative function , expressive function , evocative function, performative function etc.

16．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.

三、Essay-question

17．Is it possible to separate semantics and pragmatics? Why or why not? What are the implications of your answer for second language teaching?

【答案】 Though both semantics and pragmatics have to do with the meaning of language, and link language to the world , we think it is possible to separate semantics and pragmatics in linguistic