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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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”.

2． 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.

3． 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.

4． Design features

【答案】 Design features : It refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

5． Performatives

【答案】 Performatives are sentences that do not state a fact or describe a state. They cannot be said to be true or false. The uttering of these sentences is, or is part of, the doing an action. The judge‟s imprisonment sentence, the president‟s war or independence declaration, etc., are performatives.

6． Contrastive analysis

【答案】 Contrastive analysis is an approach to analysis of second language acquisition, based on a belief that a more effective teaching pedagogy would come out when the similarities and differences between native language and target language are taken into consideration. By such an analysis , it is supposed that some leaning difficulties could be predicted in terms of language transfer.

7． Semantic field

【答案】 It is the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation , sex , membership of the father's or mother's side of the family.

8． division of pragmatic labor

【答案】 Horn observes that the Q-based and R-based principles often directly collide and suggests the resolution comes from a division of pragmatic labor，which reads “The use of a marked （relatively complex and/or prolix） expression when a corresponding unmarked （simpler ，less “effortful”）alternate expression is available tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message （one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed） .

二、Essay-question

9． Is English a language that uses a phonetic alphabet system? Explain briefly why or why not with examples.

【答案】 The Phonetic Alphabet is a system of letters and symbols that are used to represent the individual sounds of a language. English is a language that uses a phonetic alphabet system because it is a phonographic language by nature.

There are mainly three types of language concerning its writing system : ideographic language which uses symbols （ideograms ） to represent whole words or concepts （ideas ） , with Chinese as an example ; syllabic language which word or concepts are represented by syllable , with Japanese syllabic system as an example ; phonographic language which uses special alphabetic or other typographical characters to express the sounds of an actual spoken utterance in writing , with many European languages as examples. English uses alphabetic script to represent certain single type sound. For example, the sound which is written sh in English can be expressed by symbols of （ f ） ship ; and the sound that is written in c can be expressed by the symbol of （k ） cup.

10．Words in our mental lexicon are known to be related to one another. Discuss the relationships between words, using examples from the English language.

【答案】 Words are in different sense relations with each other in our mental lexicon. There are generally three kinds of sense relationships recognized , namely , sameness relation , oppositeness relation and inclusiveness relation. Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning, and words that are close in meaning are called synonyms. Total synonymy is rare, generally synonyms can be divided into several groups: dialectal synonyms like British English autumn and American English fall ; stylistic synonyms like child and offspring ; synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning like collaborate and accomplices collocational synonyms like accuse and charge; semantically different synonyms like amaze and astound. Antonymy refers to oppositeness of meaning. There are three main sub-types: gradable antonymy in which the members of a pair differ in terms of degree，like long and short ; complementary antonymy which is a matter of either one or the other , like alive and dead ; converse antonymy which shows the reversal of a relationship between two entities，like teacher and student.Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a

more specific word. The word that is more general in meaning is called the superordinate, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms to each other. For example under the superordinate flower there are many hyponyms like rose, tulip, lily, etc. These members of the same flower class are co-hyponyms.

Another common relationship is homonymy which refers to the phenomenon that words having different meaning have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. When two words are identical in sound, they are homophones, like knight and night; when two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs, like lead v. and lead n.; when two words are identical in both sound and spelling, they are complete homonyms, \ikt fast adj. mdfast v.

11．What are the unique features of Halliday’s systemic linguistics?

【答案】 Halliday‟s Systemic Grammar is different from other linguistic theories in the following aspects. First, it attaches great importance to the sociological aspects of language.

Secondly , it views language as a form of doing rather than a form of knowing. It distinguishes linguistic behavior potential from actual linguistic behavior.

Thirdly , it gives a relatively high priority to description of the characteristics of particular languages and particular varieties of languages.

Fourthly , it explains a number of aspects of language in terms of dines （i.e. ungrammatical —>more unusual —> less unusual—>less usual —> grammatical）.

Fifthly , it seeks verification of its hypotheses by means of observation from texts and by means of statistical techniques.

Lastly , it has as its central category the category of the system.

12．What do you think of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

【答案】 Linguistic determinism , is one of the two points of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , and has developed into the strong version of this hypothesis. It could be summarized as follows:

（1）One5s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language.

（2）The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems. Therefore, the following statement could represent this hypothesis <4If Aristotle had spoken Chinese，his logic would have been different”.

13．When a teacher says “It ’s so hot in here.” during a class, what does she probably mean? Refer to the theory of pragmatics when you analyze the situation.

【答案】 This utterance would be semantically ambiguous if it was seen isolated without any context of situation. Its interpretation has to rely on the context in which it was uttered.

There could be generally two types of situation in which this utterance could happen. One may be that it is summer; the teacher just came into the class and was sweating heavily. The other may be that in class the students are quite active towards the questions or problems the teacher has posed, for example, discussing in group, or debating in a large scale.

According to the cooperative principle, in our conversation, in order to be cooperative, that is, to make his intentions to be known by the hearer , the speaker will try to make his conversational contribution such as is require, at the stage at which it occurs.

Therefore , according to the third maxim of cooperative principle , RELATION , which says “be relevant”，the utterance could be interpreted differently as follows: