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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Speech Act Theory

【答案】 Speech act theory was proposed by J. L. Austin and has been developed by J. R. Searle. Basically , they believe that language is not only used to inform or to describe things, it is often used to “do things”，and to perform acts.

2． MT

【答案】 It refers to machine translation, the use of machine （usually computers） to translate texts from one natural language to another

3． Idiolect

【答案】 Just as every speech community has a dialect, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and special way of expressing his ideas in language. This language variety of individual users is called “idiolect”

4． Conceptualism

It is the view which holds that there is no direct link between a linguistic form and what it 【答案】

refers to; rather, in the interpretation of meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind.

5． Displacement

Language can be used to refer to what is present, what is absent, what happens at present, 【答案】

what happened in the past, what will happen in the future or what happens in a far-away place. This property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by time and place. For example , we can talk about Sapir, who is already dead; we can even talk about next week, which is in the future.

6． Cognition

【答案】 Cognition is, in psychology, used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a concept which argues that the mind has internal mental states （such as beliefs, desires and intentions ） and can be understood as information processing , especially when much abstraction or concretization is involved , or processes such as involving knowledge , expertise or learning for example are at work. Another definition of “cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing , including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

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． CAI and CAL

【答案】 Computer-assisted instruction （CAI ） means the use of a computer in a teaching program. This includes:

a. A teaching program which is presented by a computer in a sequence. The student responds on the computer , and the computer indicates whether the responses are correct or incorrect.

b. The use of computers to monitor student progress, to direct students into appropriate lessons, material , etc. This is also called computer-managed instruction.

Parallel to CAI , there is CAL （Computer-Assistant Learning ） . The former aims at seeing educational problems on the part of the teacher, whereas the latter emphasizes the use of a computer in both teaching and learning in order to help the learner achieve educational objectives. The first kind of CAL programs which were developed reflected principles similar to programmed instruction. The computer leads the student through learning task step-by-step, asking questions to check comprehension. Depending on the studenfs response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material （see branching ）. In more recent CAL courseware students are able to interact with the computer and perform higher-level tasks while exploring a subject or problem.

9． 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.

10．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.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Linguists have taken an internal and/or external focus to the study of language acquisition. What is the difference between the two?

【答案】 The difference between internal and/or external focus to the study of language acquisition.

（1） The internal focus seeks to account for speakers9 internalized , underlying knowledge of language. The

external focus emphasizes language use, including the functions of language which are realized in learners production at different stages of development.

（2）According to the above difference, the linguist Noam Chomsky claims that human beings are biologically programmed for language and that the language develops in the child just as other biological

functions such as walking. Originally Chomsky referred to this innate ability as Language Acquisition Device ，also known as LAD. Later Chomsky prefers this innate endowment as Universal Grammar （UG ） and holds that if children are pre-equipped with UG, then what they have to learn is the ways in which their own language makes use of these principles and the variations on those principles which may exist in the particular language they are learning.

The interaetionist view holds that language develops as a result of the complex interplay between the human characteristics of the child and the environment in which the child develops. Integrated with the innatist view, the interaetionist further claims that the modified language which is suitable for the child‟s capability is crucial in his language acquisition.

12．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.

13．What are the four obvious barriers to adult L2 acquisition?

【答案】 A variety of explanations have been put forward for the apparent decline in adults:

Physical factors such as the loss of “plasticity” in the brain and “lateralization” of the brain; social factors such as the different situations and relationships that children encounter compared to adults ; cognitive factors such as the interference with natural language learning by the adulfs more abstract mode of thinking; and input factors that adults spend only a few hours each week of school time, rather than via the constant interaction experienced by a child, with a lot of other occupations.

14．What is concord, and what is government?

【答案】 Concord , also known as agreement, may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. For example, in English, the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man , these men; a book, some books. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense as is shown by He speaks English，They speak English.

Government is another type of control over the form 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 form 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.

15．Produce surface structures from the following deep structures without going through the process of transformations.

（1）Neg she past work last week