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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Distinctive features of speech sounds

【答案】 The distinctive feature is a property which distinguishes one phoneme from another. For example , “voicing” is a distinctive feature, since it plays an important role in distinguishing obstruents in English.

2． The Innateness Hypothesis

【答案】 The innateness hypothesis was proposed by Chomsky. It says that the ability to acquire a human language is part of the biologically innate equipment of the human being, and that an infant is bom with this knowledge of basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal.

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． Hyponymy

Hyponymy. It refers to the sense relationship between a more general, more inclusive and 【答案】

a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordiante, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. For example , the hyponymy relationship could be established between “animal” and “rabbit”.

5． Government

【答案】 Government is another type of control over the forms 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 forms 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.

6． 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.

7． Minimal pairs

The two words which are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs 【答案】

in the same place in the string. For example，the English words bear and pear constitute a minimal pair as they differ in meaning and in their initial phonemes /b/ and /p/.

8． Speech community

【答案】 Speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms and expectations regarding the use of language. Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon , distinct social groups like high school students or hip-pop fans. In addition, online and other mediated communities, such as many internet forums, often constitute speech communities. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.

二、Essay-question

9． Can you make a brief introduction to Systemic-Functional Grammar?

【答案】 Stemming from Firth‟s theories in the London School, Halliday‟s Systemic-Functional （SF ） Grammar is a socially oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most influential linguistic theories in the 20th century , exerting a strong impact on various disciplines related to language , such as language teaching , sociolinguistics , discourse analysis , stylistics , and machine translation.

It actually has two components : Systemic Grammar and Functional Grammar. They are two inseparable parts for an integral framework in Halliday^ linguistic inquiry. Systemic Grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential. And this network consists of subsystems from which language users make choices. Functional Grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based on the assumption that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the users or functions which they serve.

10．Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language.

【答案】 Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language. Since language is symbolic, each word serves as a symbol in relation to a specific meaning. In this sense, we need infinite numbers of words or symbols to code the physical entities and our experiential concepts. But this is impossible for communication. Therefore, users give a new concept to an old form, thus the meaning of a form is multiplied. There are three kinds of semantic changes , namely , broadening , narrowing , and meaning shift. Class shift and folk etymology also contribute to change in meaning.

Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. For example, the word holiday used to mean “holy day” in religious English. It means “a day for rest” today regardless of its religious nature , and hence its meaning is widened.

Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. For example, the Old English word “hund” （“hound”）was once used for any breed of dog; whereas in Modem English its meaning has been narrowed to a particular kind of dog.

Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new , sometimes related ，meaning. For example , the word “silly” meant “happy” in Old English , and “naive” in Middle English，but “foolish” in Modem English.

11．Explain this statement and give at least two examples of it: “In studying other cultures，we do so from the perspective of our own culture.”

【答案】 Culture is a semiotic meaning system in which symbols function to communicate meaning from one mind to another. It is related to language in such a way that language is a part of

culture and a part of human behavior, and also the primary medium for transmitting much of culture. Therefore , without language, culture would not be possible. Consequently, when studying a culture, we often rely on the language. Therefore, we may use our own language to describe the target culture, which may be the one interpretation of the statement 6tIn studying other cultures, we do so from the perspective of our own culture”.

What s more , when studying other cultures , we will definitely come across the differences between the target culture and our own culture. We will subconsciously compare the two different cultures. Seeing from the perspective of our own culture, we find how the target culture is different from our own culture, and this makes the target culture more distinctive from our own.

12．Why do you think that, all other things being equal, women use more standard variants of stable sociolinguistic variables than men?

【答案】 Language is a social, value-loaded practice, which reflects an intricate network of social, been explained in terms of a great political, cultural, and age relationships within a society.

Womens speech closely approaches the standard variety than the speech of men , this has consciousness of status on the part of women. Women are more usually more status-conscious than men in the English-speaking world, they are aware of their low status in society and, as a result, use more standard speech forms in their attempt to claim equality or achieve high social status. In a sense, they are up in arms against men's society. The status of men has been traditionally defined by their occupation and wealth, while women have had to find other ways of establishing their position and one of these has been their speech.

A second explanation relates to the ways in which society treats women. Women are expected to behave better than men, traditionally, just as society has been harsher on women with regard to such vices as promiscuity and drunkenness，a better standard of language may have been required.

A third explanation is that, by using standard or polite forms, a woman is trying to protect her face. In other words , a woman claims more status in society. Her greater use of standard forms may also imply that she does not attend solely to her own face needs but also to those of the people she is interacting with, thus avoiding disagreement and seeking agreement and rapport.

13．The British linguist F.R. Palmer argues that 44there is no absolute distinction between gradable antonyms and complementary antonyms. ” Do you believe so? Support your view with examples.

【答案】 I would prefer not to agree with this argument that there is no absolute distinction between gradable antonyms and complementary antonyms. The common way to distinguish gradable antonyms and complementary antonyms could be to see the forms they could occur: adjective gradable antonyms could be modified by “very”，and could have comparative forms and superlative forms; while the complementary counterparts could not. For example, we could say “very warm”, “warmer”, but we could not say “very absent ” or “more absent ” （absent here is opposed to present）.

The expressions with “very” or “more” modifying complementary antonyms are in fact not true comparatives and have a clear indication of either this one or the other one in the pair of complementary antonyms. For example, expression like “He is more dead than alive” actually means “It is more correct to say that he is dead than to say he is alive”. And this sentence could only be used when he is still alive; after all, we do not say someone is more dead than other.

三、Short-answer-questions