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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Language acquisition

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

2． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）

【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.

3． phoneme

Phoneme is a basic unit of phonological study, and it is an abstract collection of phonetic 【答案】

features which can distinguish meaning. For example, in English, is described as a phoneme.

4． Functional Sentence Perspective （FSP ）

【答案】 It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to art analysis of utterances （or texts） in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.

5． 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/.

6． Componential analysis

【答案】 It refers to a semantic approach which defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components , or semantic features. For example , the meaning of the word boy may be analyzed into three components: HUMAN, YOUNG and MALE.

7． constituent

【答案】 Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a construction: for example, in the sentence The boy ate the apple, S , the boy , ate the apple , each part is a constituent. （A ）（B ）（C ）

Constituents can be joined together with other constituents to form larger units. If two constituents, in

the case of the example above , B （the boy ） and C （ ate the apple ） , are joined to form a hierarchically higher constituent A （“S”，here a sentence） , then B and C are said to be immediate constituents of A.

8． Syllable

【答案】 Syllable : It refers to a unit of spoken language that is bigger than a speech sound. It consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following.

9． Coarticulation

Coarticulation refers to the phenomenon of sounds continually show the influence of their 【答案】

neighbors. For example , as in lamb , when a is followed by m , the velum will begin to lower itself during the articulation of a so that it is ready for the following nasal. When such simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved, we call the process coarticulation. If the sound becomes more like the following sound, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation. If the sound displays the influence of the preceding sound, it is preservative coarticulation.

10．Transformational-Generative grammar

【答案】 Transformational-generative grammar is proposed by Noam Chomsky. He postulated a syntactic base of language （called deep structure ） , which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of （possibly universal） rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that is identical to an actual sentence of a language , after the mediating of a series of rules （called transformations ） that act upon the deep structures.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is language variation?

【答案】 It is differences in pronunciation, grammar, or word choice within a language. Variation in a language may be related to region, to social class and/or educational background or to the degree of formality of a situation in which language is used.

For sociolinguists , the most important verity is that a language —any language —is full of systematic variation, variation that can only accounted for by appealing, outside language, to socially relevant force and facts.

Sociolinguistics takes as its primary task to map linguistic variation on to social conditions. This mapping helps understand not just synchronic variation （variation at a single point of time）, but also diachronic variation （variation over time） or language change.

12．How would you describe this short exchange in terms of the actions performed by the speakers?

Carol : Are you coming to the party tonight?

Lara : I've got an exam tomorrow.

【答案】 In this short exchange, obviously Lara breaks the maxim of relation of CP by talking about something totally irrelevant with CaroFs question. However , we can understand her meaning perfectly. Lara is conveying an indirect meaning by giving out an utterance containing a conversational implicative. Her aim is to refuse Carol‟s invitation in a polite and less harsh manner.

13．Identify the type of trope employed in the following examples.

1）The boy was as cunning as a fox.

2）…the innocent sleep the death of each day‟s life, …（Shakespeare ）

3）Buckingham Palace has already been told the train may be axed when the rail network has been privatised. （Daily Mirror, 2 February 1993）

4）Ted Dexter confessed last night that England are in a right old spin as to how they can beat India this winter. （Daily Mirror, 2 February 1993）

【答案】 1） simile 2 ） metaphor 3 ） metonymy 4 ） synecdoche

14．What does the concept morphophoneme mean? What is the relationship between phoneme and morphophoneme?

【答案】 Morphophoneme refers to the phoneme （or string of phonemes ） that constitutes the various allomorphs of a morpheme.

Relationship between phoneme and morphophoneme : Generally speaking , the concept of morphophoneme adds a grammatical meaning to the concept of phoneme. For example , as to the phoneme /s/, it is in fact a configuration of allomorphs of different morphemes , such as the plural morpheme and the 3rd person present simple morpheme. Therefore, we would regard this phoneme as a morphophoneme , represented as /s/.

15．Do you think there are true synonyms in English? Why?

Synonymy is the technical name for the sameness relation. It is used to mean sameness or 【答案】

close similarity of meaning. Total synonymy is rare. The so-called synonyms are all context dependent. They all differ in one way or another.

There are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects:

① in shade of meaning （finish , complete, close, conclude）;

② in stylistic meaning （buy , purchase ）;

③ in emotive （ or affective） meaning （economical , stingy）;

④ in range of use or collocative meaning （accuse , charge）;

⑤ in British and American English usages （autumn , fall）.

For example, they may differ in style. In the context“Little Tom_____a toy bear”，here buy is more appropriate than purchase. Because purchase is more formal than buy.

16．Illustrate the relationship between morpheme and allomorph by examples.

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language , not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of