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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Functional Sentence Perspective （FSP ）

【答案】 It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to art analysis of utterances （or texts） in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.

3． Achievement test

【答案】 Achievement test is a test which measures how much of a language someone has learned with reference to a particular course of study or program of instruction.

4． Categorization

Categorization is the process of classifying our experiences into different categories based 【答案】

on commonalities and differences. There are three levels in categories: the basic level，the superordinate level ，and the subordinate level.

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． Glottal Stop

【答案】 V ocal tract is composed of oral cavity, nasal cavity and pharynx. When the vocal folds are totally closed, no air can pass between them. The result of this gesture is the glottal stop.

7． Polysemy

【答案】 Polysemy means a single word having several or many meanings. According to Crystal: Polysemy is a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexical item which has a range of different meanings. Polysemic words are signs of an advanced culture. Polysemy is also an essential feature of a language‟s economy and efficiency.

8． Foregrounding

【答案】 This term is meant for what is unusual, attractive, unconventional, salient. In literature, foregrounding is often achieved through unconventional expressions which attract the readers9 attention. The main manifestations of foregrounding are deviation and parallelism.

9． 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.

10．Arbitrariness

【答案】 Arbitrariness : Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs have no natural relationship to their meaning. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative , a conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation. For example, it is unable to explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Please explain the original idea in the speech act theory.

Motorist : My car needs new exhaust system.

Mechanic : I‟ll be busy with this other car all day.

【答案】 Speech act theory, originally proposed by Austin, is a philosophical explanation of the nature of linguistic communication.

Austin made a distinction between what he called “constatives” and “performatives”. Constatives were statements that either state or describe, and were thus verifiable; performatives, on the other hand, were sentences that did not state a fact or describe a state, and were not verifiable.

Later on, for a variety of reasons, Austin gave up his initial distinction between constatives and performatives. He set up another model to explain the way acts were performed by means of language. According to his new model, a speaker might be performing three acts simultaneously when speaking: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act.

12．deeded 6. bagged 7. killed 8. nabbed

【答案】

13．What is the difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and denotation?

【答案】 Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meanings according to different approaches. Concept is the impression of objects in peopled mind ; connotation , meaning the properties of the entity a word denotes , is the implied meaning , similar to implication and implicature ; denotation , like sense , is not directly related to objects , but makes the abstract assumption of the real world. For example, the denotation of human is any person such as John and Mary, and its connotation is “biped‟‟ „„featherless‟‟ „„rational‟‟ etc.

14．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.

15．What is entailment? What are the sources of entailment?

Entailment is basically a semantic relation . If sentence A entails 【答案】（or logical implication）

sentence B, it must observe that, in terms of truth value, when sentence A is true, sentence B must be also true; when sentence B is false, sentence A must also be false, and that when sentence B is true, sentence A may be true or false.

The source of entailment may be lexical or syntactical. Lexical source of entailment can be shown in the example like,

（a ）The anarchist assassinated the emperor.

（b ）The emperor died.

The relationship of entailment between and derives from the lexical relationship between （a ）（b ）

assassinate and die. In some sense the meaning of assassinate contains the meaning of die.

Other sources for entailment are syntactic: for example, active and passive versions of the same sentence will entail one another. Sentences below show this well:

（c ）The Etruscans built this tomb.

（d ）This tomb was built by Etruscans.

16．What is the definition of cognitive linguistics?

【答案】 Cognitive linguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.

三、Essay-question

17．What do you think are the similarities and dissimilarities between learning a first and a second language?

【答案】 Similarities between first and second language acquisition:

（1） Both LI and L2 are constructed from prior conceptual knowledge. Language emerges as a procedural acquisition to deal with events that the child already understands conceptually and to achieve communicative objectives that the child can realize by the other means.

（2）Second language learners seem to use similar strategies to those learning their first language.