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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． basic level category

【答案】 Basic level category is the most economical level at which you can find the most relevant information. The information on our interactions with objects in the real world are stored at this level. It is at this level that we conjure up the general gestalt of the category.

2． Prefix

【答案】 In linguistics, a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can attach. Prefixes are bound morphemes （they cannot occur as independent words ） . While most languages employ both prefixes and suffixes, prefixes are less common. Some languages employ mostly suffixes and almost no prefixes at all. The use of prefixes has been found to correlate statistically with other linguistic features, such as a verb-object word order and the use of prepositions.

3． Lexical word

【答案】 Lexical word, lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives , and adverbs.

4． Bound morpheme

【答案】 Bound morphemes refer to those morphemes that can not occur alone and must appear with at least another morpheme. For example , in the word “careless”，“-less” is a bound morpheme since it could not occur by itself as a word.

5． 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.

6． 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.

7． Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. It 【答案】

can be divided into three main areas of study articulatory phonetics , acoustic phonetics and

perceptual/auditory phonetics.

8． Linguistic relativity

【答案】 This is one of two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It states that similarity between languages is relative , the greater their structural differentiation is , the more diverse their conceptualization of the world is. For example, not every language has the same set of words for the colors ; in Spanish there is no word that corresponds to the English meaning of “blue”.

二、Essay-question

9． List different types of Speech presentation and Thought presentation.

【答案】（1） Speech presentation:

Direct speech （DS ） : With the direct speech, what the character said is in its fullest form and with quotation marks.

Indirect speech （IS ） : The propositional content of what the speaker said is presented, but it is not stated in the original words.

Narrator‟s representation of speech acts （NRSA ） : We don‟t know what the speaker said, and all we know is that he used the speech act of doing something. It can be regarded as a summary of a longer piece of discourse and give more background information than indirect speech.

Narrator‟s representation of speech （NRS ） : It is a sentence which merely tells us that speech occurred , and which does not even specify the speech act involved.

（2） Thought presentation : The categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters are exactly the same as those used to represent a speech.

Direct thought （DT ） : DT tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought.

Free indirect thought （FIT ）: It refers to a kind of thought presentation between DT and IT, which is certainly not DT，but takes on some features of the thoughts in the character‟s mind.

10．What are the major types of semantic Changes?

There are mainly three kinds of semantic changes, namely, broadening, narrowing, and 【答案】

meaning shift. Class shift and folk etymology also contribute to change in meaning.

（1）Broadening

Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its originally specific sense to a relatively general one. For instance , the wor d holiday used to mean“holy day‟‟in religious English. Today it means“a day for rest‟‟regardless of its religious nature.

（2）Narrowing

Contrary to broadening, the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense. A typical example is the word meat which originally meant “ food”. In the course of time, the range of meaning was narrowed to mean specifically “ the flesh of animals used as food”.

（3 ） Meaning shift

All semantic changes involve meaning shift. Yet, in its narrow sense, meaning shift refers to the change of meaning, which has nothing to do with generalization or restriction. What makes the meaning of a word different is its departure from its original domain as a result of its metaphorical usage. For instance , the word bead originally means “prayer”, but later it refers to “the prayer bead”, the visible manifestation of a prayer, finally “small, ball-shaped piece of glass, metal or wood”.

（4）Class shift

By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion. The word engineer as a noun means “a person trained in a branch of engineering”，but it means “to act as an engineer” or “to plan, to maneuver” when used as a verb.

（5）Folk etymology

It refers to a change in form of a word or phrase resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous. As a result of this modification, the word sparrowgrass in English derived from asparagus; the Spanish cucaracha changed into English cockroach.

11．How does Halliday relate the functions performed by language to its structures?

【答案】 According to Halliday, structure is the outward form of the system, which lies behind the former. Structure , therefore , is less abstract , and closer to the “surface”. By studying the constituency structure of grammar , it is assumed that the semantic system above it could become plausible. In the constituency structure , elements are recognized with reference to their functions in relation to the whole. Therefore, in 4

This step is followed by labeling, which is to reveal the specific function of that element in relation to the whole. For example, by labeling “the huge tiger” a functional label: “Subject”，we get to know the interpersonal function that element plays. It is through these two steps the structures are related to the functions performed by language.

12．MORPHEME is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic whole?

【答案】 As a matter of fact, morpheme is both a grammatical concept and a semantic one. for instance , we can recognize that English word-forms such as talks , talker , talked and talking must consist of one element talk , and a number of other elements such as -s , -er , -ed , -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes. The definition of morpheme is “the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression and content”. We would say that the word reopened in the sentence The pglice reopened the investigation consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- （meaning again） , and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed （indicating past tense） . Therefore, we are in a position to conclude that those which can stand by themselves as single words , e.g. open , are semantic concepts , and those which cannot normally stand alone, but which are typically attached to another form, e.g. re-, -ist, -ed, -s , are grammatical concepts.

As we know , each one of the meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language is described as a phoneme. An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. If we substitute one sound for another in a word and there is a change of meaning, then the two sounds represent different phonemes.

The relation between morpheme and phoneme is also of two fold feature , viz. one-to-one , one-to-more. As with the former type, one-to-one, re- is the kind of morpheme that always consists of two phonemesas for the latter type, one-to-more relation, a typical example would be the plural