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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． Endocentric construction

【答案】 Endocentric construction : An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e. a word or a group of words , which serves as a definable center , or head. Hence an endocentric construction is also known as a headed construction. Noun phrases like “Lovely Lucy” are typical endocentric constructions.

3． Allomorph

【答案】 A morpheme may take various shapes or forms, and an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {-s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, as in “cats” /s/, in “bags” /z/，in “matches” /iz/.

4． Componential analysis

【答案】 It refers to a semantic approach which defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components , or semantic features. For example , the meaning of the word boy may be analyzed into three components: HUMAN, YOUNG and MALE.

5． 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.

6． inflectional morpheme

【答案】 Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

7． Semantic field

【答案】 It is the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation , sex , membership of the father's or mother's side of the family.

8． Concordance

【答案】 The computer has the ability to search for a particular word , sequence of words , or perhaps even a part of speech in a text. The computer can also retrieve all examples of a particular word. It can also calculate the number of occurrences of a certain word so that information on the frequency of the word may be gathered. We may also be interested in sorting the data in some way—for example, alphabetically on words occurring in the immediate context of the word. This is usually referred to as concordance.

9． Textual function

【答案】 Textual function : The textual function is one of the three meta-functions language is composed of. It refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living message different from a random list of sentences.

10．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.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is the relationship between linguistics and behaviorism according to Bloomfield?

【答案】 For Bloomfield, linguistics is a branch of the positivistic brand of psychology known as “behaviourism”. When the behaviourist methodology entered linguistics via Bloomfield, s writings, the popular practice in linguistic studies was to accept what a native speaker says in his language and to discard what he says about it. This is because of the belief that a linguistic description was reliable when based on observation of unstudied utterances by speakers; it was unreliable if the analyst had resorted to asking speakers questions such as “Can you say ... in your language?”

12．A number interesting word-formation processes can be discerned in the following examples. Can you identify what is going on in these?

（a ） The deceased‟s cremains were scattered over the hill.

（b ） He's always taking pills, either uppers or downers.

【答案】 The words “deceased” “upper” and “downer” have undergone a process of class shift. By

shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion. In the sentences above, “deceased”，“upper” and “downer” are originally adjectives, meaning “dead”，“higher” and “lower” respectively; in the sentences above, however, they mean “dead people”，“a drug used as a stimulant.” and “a depressant or sedative drug”，which are nouns.

13．How would you describe this short exchange in terms of the actions performed by the speakers?

Carol : Are you coming to the party tonight?

Lara : I've got an exam tomorrow.

【答案】 In this short exchange, obviously Lara breaks the maxim of relation of CP by talking about something totally irrelevant with CaroFs question. However , we can understand her meaning perfectly. Lara is conveying an indirect meaning by giving out an utterance containing a conversational implicative. Her aim is to refuse Carol‟s invitation in a polite and less harsh manner.

14．What is the purpose of studying language and mind?

【答案】 The study of language and mind aims to model the workings of the mind in relation to language ; for example, it helps explain how the language production and perception is achieved. Since structures and connections in the mind are inevitably unobservable, researchers put forward hypotheses based on fragmentary clues. The label most usually given to the study of “language and mind” is psycholinguistics ，a term which is often perceived as being trendy. Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.

15．What is concord, and what is government?

【答案】 Concord , also known as agreement, may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. For example, in English, the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man , these men; a book, some books. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense as is shown by He speaks English，They speak English.

Government is another type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category. In English, for example, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book. She gave a book to him. In other words , the verb , or the preposition, determines , or governs , the form of the pronoun after it.

16．What are the criteria used in phonetic description of vowels?

【答案】 As the vowels can not be described in the same way as the consonants , a system of cardinal vowels has been suggested to get out of this problem. The cardinal vowels are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined , fixed and unchanging , intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages. The cardinal vowels are abstract concept. The cardinal vowel diagram is a set of hypothetical positions for vowels used as reference points.

The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements : （1） the height of tongue raising ; the position of the highest part of the tongue （high , middle or low）（2）（front , central, back ） ; the length or tenseness of the vowel （tense vs. lax or long vs. short） ; （4） lip-rounding （3）