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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

【答案】 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts : linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism refers to the notion that a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Different languages offer people different ways of expressing around , they think and speak differently. Linguistic relativity refers to the claim that the cognitive processes that are determined are different for different languages. Thus, speakers of different languages are said to think in different ways. The hypothesis is now interpreted mainly in two different ways: a strong version and a weak one. The strong version believes that the language patterns determine peopled thinking and behavior ; the weak one holds that the former influence the later. So far , many researches and experiments conducted provide support to the weak version.

2． Embedding

【答案】 It refers to the inclusion of a clause within a phrase or another clause, or of a phrase into another phrase. An example of embedded clauses is: What I do is none of your business. （Nominal clause embedded as subject of another clause）

3． Glottal Stop

【答案】 V ocal tract is composed of oral cavity, nasal cavity and pharynx. When the vocal folds are totally closed, no air can pass between them. The result of this gesture is the glottal stop.

4． 1-narrator

【答案】 The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this ease the critics call the narrator a FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR or I- NARRATOR because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun I is used. First-person narrators are often said to be “limited” because they don‟t know all the faces or “unreliable” because they trick the reader by withholding information or telling untruths. This often happens in murder and mystery stories.

5． Gradable antonym

【答案】 Gradable antonym. Gradable antonyms are antonyms that are gradable because there are often intermediate forms between the two members of a pair. For example, cold and warm constitute a pair of gradable antonyms.

6． The Innateness Hypothesis

【答案】 The innateness hypothesis was proposed by Chomsky. It says that the ability to acquire a

human language is part of the biologically innate equipment of the human being, and that an infant is bom with this knowledge of basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal.

7． Prefix

【答案】 In linguistics, a prefix is a type of affix that precedes the morphemes to which it can attach. Prefixes are bound morphemes （they cannot occur as independent words ） . While most languages employ both prefixes and suffixes, prefixes are less common. Some languages employ mostly suffixes and almost no prefixes at all. The use of prefixes has been found to correlate statistically with other linguistic features, such as a verb-object word order and the use of prepositions.

8． 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.

9． 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.

10．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”.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．How do you understand syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations?

【答案】 In Saussure‟s view, language is a system of signs, each of which consists of two parts: signified and signifier. And the relationships between these two parts are arbitrary. Syntagmatic relation is a relation between elements that form part of the same form , sequence , construction , etc. e.g. between s, p, and r in a form such as spring, or between a subject and a verb in constructions such as Bill hunts. The syntagmatic relation is also called horizontal relation or chain relation. Paradigmatic relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure. The paradigmatic relation is also called vertical relation or choice relation.

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．What is reference?

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real, physical world; it deals with 【答案】

the relationship between linguistic elements and non-linguistic world of experience.

Reference in its wider sense would be the relationship between a word or phrase and an entity in the external world. For example, the word tree refers to the object “tree”.

Reference in its narrower sense is the relationship between a word or phrase and a specific object, e.g. a particular tree or a particular animal. For example, Peter's horse would refer to a horse which is owned , ridden by, or in some way associated with Peter.

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 purpose of studying language and mind?

【答案】 The study of language and mind aims to model the workings of the mind in relation to language ; for example, it helps explain how the language production and perception is achieved. Since structures and connections in the mind are inevitably unobservable, researchers put forward hypotheses based on fragmentary clues. The label most usually given to the study of “language and mind” is psycholinguistics ，a term which is often perceived as being trendy. Psycholinguistics is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structures.

16．What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of 【答案】

all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. For example the sense of the word “dog” is “a domesticated canine mammal , occurring in many breeds that show a great domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form”. It does not refer to any particular dog that exists in the real world, but applies to any animal that meets the features described in the definition.

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world ; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic unit and the non-linguistic world of experience. If we say “The dog is barking”，we must be talking about a certain dog existent in the situation. The word ^dog^ refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference of the word “dog” in this particular situation.

It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

三、Essay-question

17．Shakespeare has Juliet say:

Whats in a name? That which we call a rose.