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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． 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.

3． Open-class words

【答案】 Open-class words refer to words whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited and with the emergence of new ideas , inventions , and so on ; new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. For example , nouns , verbs , and adjectives all belong to this class.

4． Paradigmatic relations

【答案】 Paradigmatic relation , Saussure originally called associative , is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure , or between one element present and the others absent.

5． Slang :

【答案】 It refers to casual , very informal speech , using expressive but informal words and expressions.

For some people , slang is equivalent to colloquial speech but for others , it means “undesirable speech”. Usually , “colloquial speech” refers to a speech variety used in informal situations with colleagues , friends or relatives ，and “slang” is used for a very informal speech variety which often serves as an “in-group” language for a particular set of people such as teenagers , army recruits , pop-groups etc. Most slang is rather unstable as its words and expressions can change quite rapidly, for example , “Beat it!” “Scram!”，and “Rack off!” for “leave”.

6． 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”.

7． stream of consciousness writing

【答案】 The term was originally coined by the philosopher William James in his Principle of Psychology （1890） to describe the free association of ideas and impressions in the mind. It was later applied to the writing of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others experimenting early in the 20th century with the novelistic portrayal of the free flow of thought. Note, however, that the majority of thought presentation in novels is not stream of consciousness writing. The examples we have discussed above are not stream of consciousness writing because they are too orderly to constitute the free association of ideas. Perhaps the most famous piece of stream of consciousness writing is that associated with Leopold Bloom in Joyce‟s Ulysses. Here he is in a restaurant thinking about oysters.

“Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. （sic ） He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar （sic ） no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old , blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery.66 This cognitive meandering is all in the most free version of direct thought. It is also characterised by a highly elliptical sentence structure , with as many grammatical words as possible being removed consistently allowing the reader to be able to infer what is going on. The language is not very cohesive ，and breaks the Gricean maxims of Quantity and Manner. But we must assume that apparently unreasonable writing behaviour is related to a relevant authorial purpose. It is the assumption that Joyce is really cooperating with us at a deeper level , even though he is apparently making our reading difficult, that leads us to conclude that he is trying to evoke a mind working associatively.

8． Language acquisition

【答案】 It refers to the gradual development of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations.

9． Concatenation

【答案】 What makes a word separate from other words is that all the letters are lined up together with no intervening spaces. That is, in a word, all letters are concatenated. Sometimes new words can be made by concatenating two existing words—for example, “airline” is a concatenation of the words “air” and “line” into a new word.

10．IC analysis

【答案】 IC analysis: IC analysis （immediate constituent analysis） refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents---word groups （or phrases ） , which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own , and the process goes on until the ultimate

constituents are reached. In practice, for the sake of convenience, we usually stop at the level of word.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is your opinion on “true synonymy is non-existent”？

【答案】 Generally speaking , synonyms are the words which have different forms but similar meaning. There are several types of synonyms: dialectal synonyms, such as lift/elevator, flat/apartment; synonyms of different styles , as shown in gentleman/guy; synonyms of different registers , such as salt/sodium chloride ; synonyms differing in affective meaning , such as attract/seduce; synonyms differing in collocation, such as beautiful/handsome, able/capable.

12．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.

13．What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of 【答案】

all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. For example the sense of the word “dog” is “a domesticated canine mammal , occurring in many breeds that show a great domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form”. It does not refer to any particular dog that exists in the real world, but applies to any animal that meets the features described in the definition.

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world ; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic unit and the non-linguistic world of experience. If we say “The dog is barking”，we must be talking about a certain dog existent in the situation. The word ^dog^ refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference of the word “dog” in this particular situation.

It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

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

【答案】 The three important points developed in Prague School are:（a ） It was stressed that the synchronic study of

language is fully justified as it can draw on complete and controllable material for investigation but no rigid theoretical barrier is erected to separate diachronic study, （b ） There was an emphasis on the systemic character of language. （ c ） Language was looked on as functional in another sense, that is, as a tool performing a number essential functions or tasks for the community using it.