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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Cross-cultural communication

【答案】 Cross-cultural communication is an exchange of ideas , information , etc , between persons from different cultural backgrounds. The cultural conventions of the participants may widely different , and misinterpretation and misunderstanding can easily arise , even leading to a total communication breakdown.

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． Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

4． Distinctive features of speech sounds

【答案】 The distinctive feature is a property which distinguishes one phoneme from another. For example , “voicing” is a distinctive feature, since it plays an important role in distinguishing obstruents in English.

5． Subordinate construction

【答案】 Subordinate constructions are one of the two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head , with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent , are subordinate constructions.

6． 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） .

7． 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.

8． Entailment

【答案】 It refers to the relation between propositions one of which necessarily follows from the other. If X is true, Y is necessarily true，and if X is false, Y may be true or false. For example, the sentence “He has been to France” entails “He has been to Europe”.

二、Essay-question

9． What are phonemes, phones and allophones? Explain their relationship with examples from English or Chinese.

【答案】 A phoneme is a minimally distinctive set of sounds in a language that can signal a difference in meaning. It is an abstract phonological unit represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context.

A phone is an individual phonetic unit or segment that occurs in speech. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. Each of the set of phones which correspond to a single phoneme of a language is called an allophone.

Phonemes are placed between slant

lines and phones are placed between square

brackets Allophones of the same phoneme generally occur in different contexts and never distinguish one word from another.

For example, when we pronounce the two words peak and speak, we are aware that the soundis pronounced differently, in the word peak,

the soundis pronounced with a strong puff of air stream; but the same stop sound is pronounced slightly differently in the word speak, the puff of air is withheld

a little. The

sound in peak is called an aspirated

and the

sound in speak is an unaspirated

There is a slight difference in the way they are pronounced, but such a difference dose not give rise to difference in meaning.

So a phoneme in the English sound system , and it can be realized differently as aspirated or unaspirated in different contexts. The phoneme /p/ in English can be realized as aspirated

and unaspirated

which are allophones of the phoneme

stressed than the other. The more stressed syllable is the primary stress while the less stressed syllable is known as the secondary stress.

Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. Different rates of vibration produce what is known as different frequencies , and in auditory terms as different pitches. Pitch variations may be distinctive like phoneme, that is, when they may contribute to distinguish between different words.

When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. When we speak, we change the pitch of our voice to express ideas. The same sentence uttered with different intonation may express different attitude of the speaker. In English , there are four intonation patterns: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone, and the rise-fall tone.

10．How many types of data analysis have been employed in language acquisition research? How are these types of data analysis significant in SLA research?

【答案】 Four types of data analysis have been employed. They are contrastive analysis，error analysis , performance analysis, and discourse analysis.

Contrastive analysis （CA ） systematically compares native languages and target languages to find the interference of native language when acquiring target languages. It has a close relationship with behaviourism. Although contrastive analysis was faced with a downfall as behaviorism was challenged, as a methodological option it was not abandoned.

Error analysis （EA ） studies and analyzes the errors made by L2 learners and suggests that many learner errors are not due to the learner‟s mot her tongue interference but reflect universal learning strategies such as overgeneralization and simplification of rules. Error analysis also fell into disfavor for

（1） its narrowness——focusing on errors only and having difficulty in identifying the unitary source of an error, and （2） its failure to account for all the areas of the SL in which learners have difficulty. Nevertheless error analysis was not doomed to death rather incorporated into performance analysis.

Performance analysis （PA ） is an analysis of the learners5 interlanguage performance. It is superior to error analysis in that it is not limited to analyzing the errors learners commit. Also like its predecessors , however, performance analysis was found to be too limiting; it did not take the input to the learner into consideration. And this limitation led to the emergence of discourse analysis.

Discourse analysis （DA ） recognizes the need to examine not only the leamer?s performance but also the input to the learner. Another quality of discourse analysis applied to SLA is that researchers are concerned not only with how IL forms evolve , but how learners learn how to use the forms appropriately for a particular discourse function as well.

11．What is linguistic relativity and why is it so important in linguistic studies?

【答案】 Linguistic relativity is one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that distinctions encoded in one language are unique to that language alone , and “there is no limit to the structural diversity of language”. Therefore, similarity between languages is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualization of the world will be. For example, in English, the boundaries among the color spectrum are made in this way: red, orange, violet, blue, and yellow. In fact, these discriminations are arbitrary, and in other language the boundaries are indeed different. In neither Spanish, Italian nor Russian is there a word that corresponds to the English meaning of “blue”.

Linguistic relativity is important in linguistic studies because it recognizes the fact of linguistic diversity , which stands as the base which descriptive linguistics lies on. Linguistic diversity also triggers out the study of the linguistic similarity.

The study of the linguistic relativity has shed light on two important insights: there is nowadays recognition that language, as a code, reflects cultural and preoccupations and constrains the way people think.

12．Disambiguate the following sentences, using the tree diagram with labels or analyzing their syntactic structures.

（1）Times flies like an arrow.

（2）We got down from the duck.

（3）Old men and women will be served first.

（4）John passed the hammer and saw through the window.

（5）Who would you like to visit?