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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． The London School of Linguistics

【答案】 The London School generally refers to the kind of linguistic scholarship in England. The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth.

3． Subordinate construction

【答案】 Subordinate constructions are one of the two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head , with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent , are subordinate constructions.

4． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）

【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.

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． Cognition

【答案】 Cognition is, in psychology, used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a concept which argues that the mind has internal mental states （such as beliefs, desires and intentions ） and can be understood as information processing , especially when much abstraction or concretization is involved , or processes such as involving knowledge , expertise or learning for example are at work. Another definition of “cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing , including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

7． 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.

8． 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”.

二、Essay-question

9． Explain speech act theory and list the different kinds of speech acts with examples for each.

【答案】 The speech act theory was proposed by John Austin. According to this theory, we are performing various kinds of acts when we are speaking. Actions performed through utterances are generally called speech acts. An utterance can perform different speech acts depending on the context and that one speech act can be performed by more than one utterances.

According to Searle, speech acts all into five general categories. Specific acts that fall into each type share the same illocutionary point, but differ in their strength.

1）Representatives : the acts of saying what the speaker believes to be true; they include stating, describing , asserting, and so on; such as “It‟s raining”，“They won the game”.

2）Directives : acts of trying to get the hearer to do something. Commands , orders , requests , warnings , suggestions, and on so are of this type, as illustrated in “Be quiet!”，“Don‟t touch that!”

3）Commissives : acts of committing the speaker himself to some future course of action. They include promising，vowing , offering，threatening , and so on. Examples are “I‟ll take her to the vet.” and “We won‟t do that.”

4）Expressives : acts of expressing feelings or attitude towards an existing state. They can be statements of pleasure，pain ，likes ，sorrow , and so on. For example，“I‟m sorry to hear that”.

5）Declarations : acts of bringing about immediate changes by saying something. They include resigning , dismissing , naming, appointing, and so on. For example, the priest may say in a wedding “I now pronounce you husband and wife”.

10．Advantages and Disadvantages of Immediate Constituent Analysis （IC Analysis）.

【答案】 Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, and if there is any ambiguity, it could be revealed. For example, how the sentence “Leave the book on the shelf” is ambiguous could be shown after the IC analysis.

However , there are also problems in IC analysis. First, at the beginning, some advocators insisted on binary divisions, that is, any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not always possible. For example, in the phrase “men and women”，it is not appropriate to combine “and” with only the preceding part or only the succeeding part. Second , constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis. For example, in “make it up” the phrasal verb “make up” is separated by a pronoun. Third，which is also the most serious problem; there are structural ambiguities which cannot be revealed by IC analysis, as shown in “the love of God”. In IC analysis，the different relations of “God” to the word “love” cannot be shown which makes the expression ambiguous.

11．In informal speech , people often omit sentence subjects because they are commonly understood. What are the omitted subjects in the following two sentences? Why do people know that these are the correct subjects?

a.Hope you like everything here.

b.Just imagine what has just happened here.

【答案】 The omitted subject in sentence a is “I ” and the omitted subject in sentence b is usually “You”. This is a matter of sentence comprehension in language comp rehension. Psycholinguists have proposed principles interpreting sentence comprehension with respect to the grammatical constraints. The most popular principle is “Minimal attachment” which defines “structurally simpler”，and it claims that structural simplicity guides all initial analyses in sentence comprehension.

In this view , the sentence processor constructs a single analysis of a sentence and attempts to interpret it. The first analysis is the one that requires the fewest applications of grammatical rules to attach each incoming word into the structure being built; it is the automatic consequence of an effort to get some analysis constructed as soon as possible. In the first sentence, when “hope” as a verb is used to express the speaker‟s desire and expectation for something to happen, it conveys the will of the speaker. So , the subject of “hope” is usually the speaker her/himself and can be omitted when the two are talking to each other. When the speaker is making a statement and using “hope” to express other‟s will , the subject will not be omitted.

Therefore , according to “minimal attachment” principle, when the hearer interprets this sentence, they automatically interpret “I”—the speaker, as the subject of “hope”. Sentence b can be said to be an imperative sentence which is a sentence that gives advice or instructions or that expresses a request or a command. This instruction or request is always aimed to the hearer or the reader, so the subject of an imperative is always “you”. When the hearer interpre t this sentence , he/she will interpret the verb “imagine”, as a request or advice through which the speaker tries to make he/she involved in this action, so it is easier for he/she to consider “you” as the subject.

Context is another important factor for people to understand the subjects. The subjects will be more clear in particular context although they are omitted.

12．Think of the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle proposed by P. Grice, and explain the violation of maxims in the cases below.

1）A : Have you seen my watch?

B : Look in the drawer.

2）A : Reno s the capital of Nevada.

B : Yeah, London s the capital of New Jersey.

3）A : I really liked that dinner.

B : Tm a vegetarian.

4）A : Let‟s dine out with the kids this weekend

B : Okay, but not M-c-D-o-n-a-l-d-s.

【答案】 The four maxims of the Cooperative Principle proposed by P. Grice are the maxim of quantity , the maxim of quality, the maxim of relation and the maxim of manner.

In （1） , B violates the maxim of quantity, for his/her not giving enough information to A9s question. B does not answer “yes” or “no” to a yes-no question，so A doesn‟t know whether B is sure it is in the draw. But B says this way may imply he/she is unsure about it （look at the drawer, maybe it is there ）, or he/she is sure （just go get it, it is in the drawer）.