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一、Essay-question

1． 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. Thesound in peak is called an aspiratedand thesound 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 aspiratedand 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.

2． Advantages and Disadvantages of Componential Analysis.

【答案】 The componential analysis is a way to analyze the lexical meaning , which treats the meaning of a word as a composite of some smaller semantic units , which are called semantic components , or semantic features.

One advantage of componential analysis is that by specifying the semantic features of certain words, it will be possible to show how these words are related in meaning. For example，the two words “man” and “woman” share the features of +HUMAN, + ADULT, and + ANIMATE, but differ in the features

of MALE. Additionally , the sense relations could be better accounted for. Two words , or two expressions , which have the same semantic components, will be synonymous with each other; words which have a contrasting component are antonyms; and words which have all the semantic components of another are hyponyms of the latter.

The semantic components are also able to explain sense relations between sentences, for example, the contradictory relationship, and the entailing relationship.

However , as have been found, there are also difficulties in the approach to analyze the meaning of a word in terms of semantic components. First, many words are polysemous. They have more than one meaning ; consequently they will have different sets of semantic components. Second, some semantic components are seen as binary taxonomies. However , sometimes the distinction to differentiate two semantic components such as “ADULT” and “YOUNG”, is rather vague. Third, apart from the neatly organized parts of the vocabulary, there are words whose semantic components are difficult to ascertain. For example, the semantic components themselves, like HUMAN, ADULT, are not ordinary words of English ; they belong to a meta-language. To someone who does not know the meta-language , the semantic components explain nothing.

3． What kind of linguistic phenomenon can you identify in the following dialogue? Define , analize and explain the phenomenon.

甲：上车请买票。

乙：三张天安门。

甲：您拿好。

【答案】 This conversation consists of the linguistic phenomenon which is called the “Cooperative Principle”，proposed and formulated by P. Grice , based on such a pragmatic hypothesis that the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate; otherwise, it would not be possible to carry on talk. It goes as follows:

Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. To be more specific, there are four maxims under this general principle:

The maxim of quantity

a ）Make your contribution as informative as is required （for the current purpose of the exchange）. b ）Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

The maxim of quality

a ）Do not say what you believe to be false.

b ）Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

The maxim of relation

Be relevant.

The maxim of manner

a ）Avoid obscurity of expression.

b ）Avoid ambiguity.

c ）Be brief （avoid unnecessary prolixity） •

d ）Be orderly.

There are circumstances where speakers may not follow the maxims of the cooperative principle. For example , in this conversation , the speaker may violate the maxim expectations by using an

expression like “ 三张天安门” in response to a question. Although it is typically “more informative than is required” in the context, it is naturally interpreted as communicating more than is said （i.e. the speaker knows the answer）. This typical reaction （i. e. there must be something “special” here） of listeners to any apparent violation of the maxims is actually the key to the notion of conversational implicature. When we violate any of these maxims, our language becomes indirect. In this way, we can convey more than is literally said.

二、Short-answer-questions

4． What is move-α rule?

【答案】 Move-α rule is a general movement rule accounting for the syntactic behavior of any constituent movement. It goes like this: any element may be moved to another place, or more generally changed in some way, as long as the relevant conditions （principles ） are satisfied. That is to say, the movements are constrained by the other modules of grammar in order to rule out ungrammatical forms, such as the kissed boy girl and were kissed the girl by the boy. It is the interaction of move-α with other syntactic principles that results in grammatical strings. It is responsible for the mapping between active and passive.

5． The following is a statement by a Japanese businessman: “You buy in your own language, but you sell in your customer’s language.” How do you understand it?

【答案】 This reflects some features of pidgin which is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it id used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. And also, it reflects the tendency of intercultural communication from the aspect of language.

6． 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.

7． What are the criteria used in phonetic description of vowels?

【答案】 As the vowels can not be described in the same way as the consonants , a system of cardinal vowels has been suggested to get out of this problem. The cardinal vowels are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined , fixed and unchanging , intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages. The cardinal vowels are abstract concept. The cardinal vowel diagram is a set of hypothetical positions for vowels used as reference points.

The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements : （1） the height of