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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Broad and narrow transcription

【答案】 Broad and narrow transcription: In broad transcription, one letter symbol is used for one sound. In narrow transcription , there are diacritics added to the one letter symbols to show the finer differences between sounds.

2． MT

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

3． 1-narrator

【答案】 The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this ease the critics call the narrator a FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR or I- NARRATOR because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun I is used. First-person narrators are often said to be “limited” because they don‟t know all the faces or “unreliable” because they trick the reader by withholding information or telling untruths. This often happens in murder and mystery stories.

4． Stylistics

【答案】 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics studies the features of situationally distinctive uses （varieties ） of language , and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.

5． Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

6． CALL

【答案】 It is the abbreviation of computer-assisted language learning, which refers to the use of a computer in the teaching or learning of a second or foreign language. In this kind of CALL programs, the computer leads the student through a learning task step-by-step , asking question to check comprehension. Depending on the student^ response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material.

7． 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.

8． Applied linguistics

【答案】 It is a branch of linguistics which studies the application of linguistics in reality. For example , there are studies on multilingualism, language acquisition, first and second language teaching and learning.

9． Relational opposites

【答案】 This is a type of antonymy , in which the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities. For example, “buy/sell” is such a pair. X buys something from Y means Y sells something from X.

10．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 ）.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is a syntactic category?

【答案】 A syntactic category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics. The classification is based on similar structure and sameness of distribution （the structural relationships between these elements and other items in a larger grammatical structure） , and not on meaning. There are major and minor syntactic categories: major categories include all phrasal syntactic categories such as NP, VP, and PP, and word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories such as N and V; while minor categories are categories that do not project to a phrasal level such as the Yes-No question markers. More specifically , a syntactic category also refers to the defining properties of these general units : the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender and case; and the categories of the verb, for example, include tense, aspect and voice, etc.

12．What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?

【答案】 The distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes could be illustrated in the following four aspects.

Inflectional affixes very often only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem, for instance , those inflectional affixes in words such as toys, walks, John's, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast , derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning , e.g. cite, citation; generate, generation.

Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to，such as flower, flowers ; whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.

Very often inflectional affixes are conditioned by non-semantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. Whereas, derivational affixes are more often based on simple meaning distinctions.

In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes, which are always word final. But derivational affixes can be prefixes or suffixes.

13．Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for different types of sand, and in Arabic one must choose from a whole range of words which are subsumed under the Western category CAMEL. Can you explain these phenomena with your linguistic knowledge?

【答案】 These phenomena can be explained from the following perspectives:

（1）These phenomena show a relationship between language and society. Language changes from region to region , from one social group to another and from individual to individual. The living environment makes great impact on the changes of language. As Eskimo are always living in an environment of a snow world, they have made a good cognition to snow and classified it in different types. Human use language to describe the world they have cognized.

（2）These phenomena can be explained from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that : our language helps mould our way of thinking and , consequently , different languages may probably express speaker‟s unique ways of understanding the world. So Eskimos^ different words for different types of snow reflect their different ways to understand snow.

14．What is behaviourism?

【答案】 Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement”，and the adult‟s use of language is also a process of “stimulus-response”.

15．What is assimilation? Is it similar to coarticulation? What dose it include?

【答案】 Assimilation is a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighbouring 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.

16．What are the differences between simile and metaphor?

【答案】 Simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing , and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like. For example, the phrase as cold as ice is a common simile.

Although metaphor also makes a comparison between two unlike elements , this comparison is implied rather than stated. That is , it differs from simile in that the words such as like or as do not appear. For example, uThe life is a stage” is a metaphor.