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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Textual function

【答案】 Textual function : The textual function is one of the three meta-functions language is composed of. It refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into a coherent and unified text and make a living message different from a random list of sentences.

2． Conversational implicature

【答案】 Conversational implicature refers to a type of implied meaning, which is deduced on the basis of the conventional meaning of words together with the context, under the guidance of the CP and its maxims. For example, the implicature of He is a tiger could probably be he has some characteristics of a tiger.

3． 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.

4． 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.

5． Lexical relations

【答案】 There are several types of lexical relations concerning the sense of the words. Those are synonymy , antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, homonymy, and so on. （a ） Synonymy refers to the sameness relation ; “autum”, and “full ” are synonyms , for example , （b ） Antonymy refers to the oppositeness relation ; for example , “buy” and “sell ” are antonyms , （c ） Hyponymy refers to the inclusiveness relation; for example, “apple” is a hyponym of “fruit”, （d ） Polysemy means one word that has more than one related meaning ，and “bank”，as an example, is a polysemous word. （e ） Homonymy refers to the relation of two different words which are identical either in sound, or spelling, or both, such as “bow” （bau ） and “bow” （b əu ）.

6． Foregrounding

【答案】 This term is meant for what is unusual, attractive, unconventional, salient. In literature, foregrounding is often achieved through unconventional expressions which attract the readers9 attention. The main manifestations of foregrounding are deviation and parallelism.

7． The London School of Linguistics

【答案】 The London School generally refers to the kind of linguistic scholarship in England. The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth.

8． 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.

二、Essay-question

9． Explain one of the teaching approaches that you’re familiar with and discuss its advantages and disadvantages.

【答案】 The functional language teaching, which emerged during the 70s, is a reaction against both the structurally and situationally based approaches to language teaching. Its main feature is that we should teach people what functions the various linguistic forms fulfill. We should teach people not only what the language is but what the language does. Linguistic forms should not be presented as abstract structures but should always be presented as fulfilling a particular language function. For example, if the simple present tense is to be taught, it should not just be a matter of learning to accurately repeat the structure , but also a matter of knowing what the structure is actually used for.

Organizing language teaching functionally emphasizes what we can do with language. The basic units of language are seen as short exchanges. Linguistic forms are presented and learned in close relation to their function. Such teaching encourages appropriateness of language in terms of the respective roles of speaker and hearer and also in terms of the topic of conversation. Fluency is stressed and developed.

The teaching of language functions also presents problems. For example , what is exactly a language function? How many functions are there? In what order should they be taught?

While functions are a very significant aspect of language use, too great an emphasis on them may ignore other aspects of language, not least its structure. There is also no rigid correspondence between function and form, so some people object that we lose too much control over grammatical complexity if the syllabus is entirely organized on the basis of functions. What?s more, some argue that fluency and appropriate use of language may be encouraged but this should not be achieved at the cost of formal accuracy.

10．What are the major types of semantic Changes?

There are mainly three kinds of semantic changes, namely, broadening, narrowing, and 【答案】

meaning shift. Class shift and folk etymology also contribute to change in meaning.

（1）Broadening

Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its originally specific sense to a

relatively general one. For instance , the word holiday used to mean“holy day‟‟in religious English. Today it means“a day for rest‟‟regardless of its religious nature.

（2）Narrowing

Contrary to broadening, the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense. A typical example is the word meat which originally meant “ food”. In the course of time, the range of meaning was narrowed to mean specifically “ the flesh of animals used as food”.

（3 ） Meaning shift

All semantic changes involve meaning shift. Yet, in its narrow sense, meaning shift refers to the change of meaning, which has nothing to do with generalization or restriction. What makes the meaning of a word different is its departure from its original domain as a result of its metaphorical usage. For instance , the word bead originally means “prayer”, but later it refers to “the prayer bead”, the visible manifestation of a prayer, finally “small, ball-shaped piece of glass, metal or wood”.

（4）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. The word engineer as a noun means “a person trained in a branch of engineering”，but it means “to act as an engineer” or “to plan, to maneuver” when used as a verb.

（5）Folk etymology

It refers to a change in form of a word or phrase resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous. As a result of this modification, the word sparrowgrass in English derived from asparagus; the Spanish cucaracha changed into English cockroach.

11．What are the unique features of Halliday’s systemic linguistics?

【答案】 Halliday‟s Systemic Grammar is different from other linguistic theories in the following aspects. First, it attaches great importance to the sociological aspects of language.

Secondly , it views language as a form of doing rather than a form of knowing. It distinguishes linguistic behavior potential from actual linguistic behavior.

Thirdly , it gives a relatively high priority to description of the characteristics of particular languages and particular varieties of languages.

Fourthly , it explains a number of aspects of language in terms of dines （i.e. ungrammatical —>more unusual —> less unusual—>less usual —> grammatical）.

Fifthly , it seeks verification of its hypotheses by means of observation from texts and by means of statistical techniques.

Lastly , it has as its central category the category of the system.

12．When a teacher says “It ’s so hot in here.” during a class, what does she probably mean? Refer to the theory of pragmatics when you analyze the situation.

【答案】 This utterance would be semantically ambiguous if it was seen isolated without any context of situation. Its interpretation has to rely on the context in which it was uttered.

There could be generally two types of situation in which this utterance could happen. One may be that it is summer; the teacher just came into the class and was sweating heavily. The other may be that in class the students are quite active towards the questions or problems the teacher has posed, for example, discussing in group, or debating in a large scale.

According to the cooperative principle, in our conversation, in order to be cooperative, that is, to