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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Back-formation

【答案】 Back formation refers to an abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example , the word “television” appeared before “televise”，and so does “editor” to “edit”.

2． 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.

3． 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.

4． 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.

5． 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.

二、Short-answer-questions

6． Briefly explain what phonetics and phonology are concerned with and what kind of relationships hold between the two.

【答案】 By definition , phonetics is the study of speech sounds , including the production of speech , while phonology is the study of the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. Both phonetics and phonology are concerned with speech. Phonetics is the study of the production , perception , and physical properties of speech sounds ; phonology attempts to account for how they are combined , organized , and convey meaning in particular languages. Phonetics is the study of actual sounds , that is , the analysis and modeling the speech signal; phonology is concerned with a more abstract description of speech sounds and tries to describe the regularities of sound patterns in different languages or within a language. In this sense , phonetics is concrete, while phonology is abstract. What phonetics studies is the speech sound, namely phone , what phonology studies is phoneme.

7． 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.

8． cinched 18. played 19. hated 20. branded

is found

after

【答案

】appears after these sounds

:

afteri The general factor to determine

whether , or

distinctive feature of voicing. Therefore, occurs after a voiceless sound, except

voiced sound, except

and occurs after either the consonantor

9． 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）.

and occurs

is used is the occurs after a

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.