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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Metonymy

【答案】 Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by 也e name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance , “Washington ”，as the capital of the United States, can be used as a metonym （an instance of metonymy） for the United States government.

2． subordination

【答案】 Subordination refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other. Thus the subordinate constituents are words which modify the Head. Consequently, they can be called modifiers. In the phrase swimming in the lake , swimming is the head and in the lake are the words modifying the head.

3． Arbitrariness

【答案】 Arbitrariness : Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs have no natural relationship to their meaning. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative , a conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation. For example, it is unable to explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/.

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． Speech and thought presentation

【答案】 Speech and thought presentation: These two terms are used for the language in fiction, referring to the presenting forms for indicating the narrator‟s speech or thought. The speech presentation may have the following four possibilities : direct speech , indirect speech , narrator‟s representation of speech acts, and narrator‟s representation of speech. The Thought presentation can also be categorized into : narrator‟s representation of thought , narrator‟s representation of thought acts , indirect thought , free indirect thought, and direct thought.

6． Lingua franca

【答案】 It is language that is used for communication between different groups of people, each

speaking a different language , lhe lingua franca could be an internationally used language of communication （e. g. English） , it could be the native language of one of the groups, or it could a language which is not spoken natively by any of the groups but has a simplified sentence structure and vocabulary and is often a mixture of two or more languages.

7． figure-ground alignment

【答案】 Figure-ground alignment seems to apply to space with the ground as the prepositional object and the preposition expressing the spatial relational configuration. It also applies to human perception of moving objects. Since the moving object is typically the most prominent one, because it is moving , it is typically the figure, while the remaining stimuli constitute the ground.

8． 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.

9． 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.

10．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.

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．A number interesting word-formation processes can be discerned in the following examples. Can you identify what is going on in these?

（a ） The deceased‟s cremains were scattered over the hill.

（b ） He's always taking pills, either uppers or downers.

【答案】 The words “deceased” “upper” and “downer” have undergone a process of class shift. By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. This process of word formation is also known as zero-derivation, or conversion. In the sentences above, “deceased”，“upper” and “downer” are originally adjectives, meaning “dead”，“higher” and “lower” respectively; in the sentences above, however, they mean “dead people”，“a drug used as a stimulant.” and “a depressant or sedative drug”，which are nouns.

13．plowed 14. climbed 15. singed 16. hanged

【答案】

14．What are phonologically conditioned and morphologically conditioned form of morphemes?

Some phonological factors can affect the appearance of morphemes, namely, the form of 【答案】

a morpheme; and there could be assimilation, and dissmilation. For example, the negative morpheme could be realized as “in-” or “im-” followed by different phonological environments, as in “inefficient” and “imperfect”，as a result of assimilation.

Morphemes can also be conditioned by morphological factors; for example, the allomorphs of the plural morpheme, as could be seen in “oxen”，“cows”，and “feet”.

15．What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?

【答案】 The distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes could be illustrated in the following four aspects.

Inflectional affixes very often only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem, for instance , those inflectional affixes in words such as toys, walks, John's, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast , derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning , e.g. cite, citation; generate, generation.

Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to，such as flower, flowers ; whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.