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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Polysemy

【答案】 Polysemy means a single word having several or many meanings. According to Crystal: Polysemy is a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexical item which has a range of different meanings. Polysemic words are signs of an advanced culture. Polysemy is also an essential feature of a language‟s economy and efficiency.

2． Allomorph

【答案】 A morpheme may take various shapes or forms, and an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {-s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, as in “cats” /s/, in “bags” /z/，in “matches” /iz/.

3． 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.

4． Concord （or : Agreement）

【答案】 It may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category （or categories ） . For example, the syntactic relationship between that girl and she in the following dialogue: A: Who is that girl? B: Oh, she is my sister.

5． Homonymy

【答案】 In any language there are words which have the same linguistic form but are different in meaning. These words are called homonyms. For example, bank （of a river） , and bank （financial institution ）.

6． 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）

7． IPA

【答案】 IPA is the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet , which is devised by the International Phonetic Association in 1888. IPA is a set of symbols which can be used to represent the phones and phonemes of natural languages.

8． 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.

二、Essay-question

9． Research has found that two-year-old English children produce negative sentences such as a） tod ） , but note）:

a ）He doesn‟t like cabbage.

b ）Doesn‟t like cabbage.

c ）Him no like cabbage.

d ）No like cabbage.

e ）*Him doesn‟t like cabbage.

How can you account for this?

【答案】 This founding firstly demonstrates one point that the acquisition of auxiliary verbs comes later than that of comparatively “simpler” morphemes such as pronouns. Therefore, it is unUkely for children to make mistakes as shown in e） . The reason for this phenomenon could be explained by the fact that in the early stage of children^ language acquisition, the speech at first only contains content words and lacks the function elements.

This founding also shows that children have a certain process of learning the negative form. There are generally three stages.

1） At first, the negative element is not part of the structure of the sentences. It is simply attached to the beginning, as shown in d）.

2 ） The negative element is inserted into the sentence. The additional negative forms don't and can't are used, and with no and not, begin to be placed in front of the verb rather than at the beginning, as shown in c ）.

3） Children begin to produce the appropriate part of do, be or the model verbs, to suit the person or tense, as shown in b） and a）.

10．Categorize the following pairs: child-kid, alive-dead, big-small, husband-wife.

【答案】 Child-kid can be categorized under synonymy , alive-dead complementary antonymy , old-young gradable antonymy, and husband-wife converse antonymy.

Synonymy is the technical term for the sameness relation.

The members of a pair of complementary antonymy are complementary to each other. They divide

up the whole of a semantic field completely, which means not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, and the denial of one also means the assertion of the other.

Pairs of words of gradable antonymy have three characteristics :（1） they are gradable —the members of a pair differ in terms of degree. As such, they can be modified by “very”. And they may have comparative and superlative degrees. （2） Antonyms of this kind are graded against different norms. The criterion varies with the object described.One member of a pair, usually the term for the （3）

higher degree, serves as the cover term.

Converse antonymy shows the reversal of a relationship between two entities. It is the same relationship seen from two different angles, and there is always two entities involved, which makes the major difference between this type and the above two types of antonymy.

11．In informal speech , people often omit sentence subjects because they are commonly understood. What are the omitted subjects in the following two sentences? Why do people know that these are the correct subjects?

a.Hope you like everything here.

b.Just imagine what has just happened here.

【答案】 The omitted subject in sentence a is “I ” and the omitted subject in sentence b is usually “You”. This is a matter of sentence comprehension in language comprehension. Psycholinguists have proposed principles interpreting sentence comprehension with respect to the grammatical constraints. The most popular principle is “Minimal attachment” which defines “structurally simpler”，and it claims that structural simplicity guides all initial analyses in sentence comprehension.

In this view , the sentence processor constructs a single analysis of a sentence and attempts to interpret it. The first analysis is the one that requires the fewest applications of grammatical rules to attach each incoming word into the structure being built; it is the automatic consequence of an effort to get some analysis constructed as soon as possible. In the first sentence, when “hope” as a verb is used to express the speaker‟s desire and expectation for something to happen, it conveys the will of the speaker. So , the subject of “hope” is usually the speaker her/himself and can be omitted when the two are talking to each other. When the speaker is making a s tatement and using “hope” to express other‟s will , the subject will not be omitted.

Therefore , according to “minimal attachment” principle, when the hearer interprets this sentence, they automatically interpret “I”—the speaker, as the subject of “hope”. Sentence b can be said to be an imperative sentence which is a sentence that gives advice or instructions or that expresses a request or a command. This instruction or request is always aimed to the hearer or the reader, so the subject of an imperative is al ways “you”. When the hearer interpret this sentence , he/she will interpret the verb “imagine”, as a request or advice through which the speaker tries to make he/she involved in this action, so it is easier for he/she to consider “you” as the subject.

Context is another important factor for people to understand the subjects. The subjects will be more clear in particular context although they are omitted.

12．What do you think of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

【答案】 Linguistic determinism , is one of the two points of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , and has developed into the strong version of this hypothesis. It could be summarized as follows:

（1）One5s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language.

（2）The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems. Therefore, the following statement could represent this