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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Back-formation

【答案】 Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example , the word “television” appeared before “televise”，and so does “editor” to “edit”.

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． MT

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

4． Gradable antonym

【答案】 Gradable antonym. Gradable antonyms are antonyms that are gradable because there are often intermediate forms between the two members of a pair. For example, cold and warm constitute a pair of gradable antonyms.

5． Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

6． 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/.

7． Idiolect

【答案】 Just as every speech community has a dialect, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and special way of expressing his ideas in language. This language variety of individual users is called “idiolect”

8． 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.

9． 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.

10．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”.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．One of the design features of human language is creativity. What is it? And what makes it possible?

【答案】 The creativity of language means that users can understand and produce sentences they have never heard before. Creativity is a property unique to human language. It is one of design features that only human language has.

Human language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. The speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form all infinite sets of sentences, most of which are never before produced or heard. The fact that human language is recursive could be shown in that words can be used in new ways to mean new things , and can be instantly understood by people who have never come across that word before. For example, I could make a sentence like The old lady who is waiting for the girl who is talking to the boy who is playing with a basketball is my grandma.

Recursiveness also includes coordination and subordination , conjoining and embedding , hypotactic and paratactic. recursiveness, together with openness , is generally regarded as the core of creativity of language.

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．How is language related to society?

【答案】 （1） While language is principally used to communicate meaning, it is also used to establish and maintain social relationships. This social function of language is embodied in the use of such utterances as “Good morning!”，“How is your family?' “Nice day today, isn‟t it?”

（2）Users of the same language in a sense all speak differently. The kind of language each of them chooses to use is in part determined by his social background. And language , in its turn , reveals information about its speaker.

（3）Language , especially the structure of its lexicon , reflects both the physical and social environment of a society. For example, while there is only one word in English for usnow, 9, there are several in Eskimo. This is a reflection of the need for the Eskimos to make distinctions between various kinds of snow in their snowy living environment.

14．crushed 2. heaped 3. kicked 4. pitted

【答案】

15．In English, the phonemeis pronounced differently in pat, spat, and tap, can you form a rule that can generalize this linguistic phenomenon?

【答案】 In English , there is a rule that a is unaspirated

after but aspirated in other places. So in pat , tap

is aspirated but unaspirated in spat since it is

after To bring out the phonetic difference , an aspirated sound is transcribed with a raised “h” after the symbol of the sound. So a

phonetic transcription for peak isand that for speak isSo are two different phones and are variants of the phonemeSuch variants of a phoneme are called allophones of the same phoneme. The allophones are said to be in complementary distribution because they never occur in the same context :

occurs after

while occurs in other places. We can present this rule as:

elsewhere

（note :

is the position in whichappears. ）

In addition, sometimes a phoneme may also have free variants. The final consonant of tap may not be released by some speakers so there is no audible sound at the end of this word. Such phenomenon is called free variation.

16．What are the three important points of the Prague School?

【答案】 The Prague School has three points of special importance , First , it stressed that the synchronic study of language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation. Second, it emphasised the systemic character of language, arguing that no element of any language can be satisfactorily analysed or evaluated if viewed in isolation. In other words, elements are held to be in functional contrast or opposition. Third , it looked on language as a tool performing a number of essential functions or tasks for the community using it.

三、Essay-question