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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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 an tonyms , （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 ）.

2． Language acquisition

【答案】 It refers to the gradual development of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations.

3． Displacement

Language can be used to refer to what is present, what is absent, what happens at present, 【答案】

what happened in the past, what will happen in the future or what happens in a far-away place. This property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by time and place. For example , we can talk about Sapir, who is already dead; we can even talk about next week, which is in the future.

4． 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”.

5． Stylistics

【答案】 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics studies the features of situationally distinctive uses （varieties ） of language , and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.

6． Contextual meaning

【答案】 It is also called speaker‟s meaning, or utterance meaning, which is more closely related to the context. For example, when a person says “My bag is heavy”，what he actually means may be asking the hearer to help him carry the bag.

7． Duality

【答案】Duality refers to the fact that in all languages so far investigated there are two levels of structure or patterning. At the first , higher level , language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units ; at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence （such as morphemes, words etc.）

of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which combine to form units of meaning. For example , a syllable is the smallest unit that is normally spoken by itself, and scores of syllables become the carriers of hundreds of meaningful segments of words that are called morphemes.

8． Corpus

【答案】 Corpus is a collection of linguistic data , either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to verify a hypothesis about language~~for example , to determine how the application of a particular sound , word , or syntactic construction varies.

二、Essay-question

9． What is communicative competence? How should we develop it in our foreign lauguage learning?

【答案】 Communicative competence is what a learner knows about how a language is used in particular situations for effective and appropriate communication. Communicative competence includes knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary, knowledge of rules of speaking, knowledge of how to use and respond to different types of speech acts and social conventions , and knowledge of how to use language appropriately.

In order to develop communicative competence in our foreign language learning, language learners are encouraged to deal with accomplishing actions, which are believed to help them acquire the target language. Two types of tasks are usually required to be performed by the learners: real-world tasks and pedagogical tasks. For example, students may be asked to work or discuss in groups.

Besides , teachers can adopt the communicative syllabus which aims at the learner‟s communicative competence. It teaches the language needed to express and understand different kinds of functions, and emphasizes the process of communication.

10．What is the main difference between literal language and figurative language?

【答案】 The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually its literal meaning , while figurative language is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense.

Appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. It always makes use of a comparison between different things. Figurative language compares two things that are different in enough ways so that their similarities, when pointed out , are interesting, unique and/or surprising. Figurative language uses “figures of speech” to express something other than the literal meaning of the words, in other words, figurative language cannot be taken literally （or should not be taken literally only） . Simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, apostrophe, are all forms of figurative language.

For example, the literal meaning of the word “tree ” is “a large plant”. However, once we start talking about a tree in the context of “a family tree” for example, it is no longer a literal tree we are talking about, but a figurative 〇此^ literal use of the word “tree” refers to an organism which has bark,

branches and leaves. A “family tree” shares some of these qualities—graphically , a plan of a family and a representation of a tree can look similar, and in a way they are both a process of organic growth, so we use the same term for both. But when we use the term for a plant it is a literal usage and when we use the term to describe our ancestry, it is a figurative usage.

11．Imagine you were at a bus stop and two people approached you one after the other.

The first said:

“哎，几点了？”

and the second said:

“不好意思，打搅一下，请问您戴表了吗？”

What assumptions would you make if you were addressed in these two ways and why would you make them?

【答案】 As to the first one, an immediate assumption coming to our mind would be the person is asking for the time. The assumption that the hearer gets arises out of the conventional meaning of the expression. The conventional meaning is related to the existing knowledge of the world , and is the meaning that is achieved by the conventions, and is generally accepted by the society. It can be accessed to when we turn to the knowledge towards the world that we have. The expression “几点了” is such a conventional meaning that when it is spoken out，everyone will unexceptionally accept it as a way of asking for the time.

As to the explanation of the second one, Levinson‟s M-principle could come into use. Considering the context， which is in the bus stop, what it expresses is no longer a conventional one, but rather a conversational implicature. According to M-principle , the speaker normally will not use a prolix , obscure sentence. It is the ability not only to apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom.

12．Words in our mental lexicon are known to be related to one another. Discuss the relationships between words, using examples from the English language.

【答案】 Words are in different sense relations with each other in our mental lexicon. There are generally three kinds of sense relationships recognized , namely , sameness relation , oppositeness relation and inclusiveness relation. Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning, and words that are close in meaning are called synonyms. Total synonymy is rare, generally synonyms can be divided into several groups: dialectal synonyms like British English autumn and American English fall ; stylistic synonyms like child and offspring ; synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning like collaborate and accomplices collocational synonyms like accuse and charge; semantically different synonyms like amaze and astound. Antonymy refers to oppositeness of meaning. There are three main sub-types: gradable antonymy in which the members of a pair differ in terms of degree，like long and short ; complementary antonymy which is a matter of either one or the other , like alive and dead ; converse antonymy which shows the reversal of a relationship between two entities，like teacher and student.Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. The word that is more general in meaning is called the superordinate, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms to each other. For example under the superordinate flower there are many hyponyms like rose, tulip, lily, etc. These members of the same flower class are co-hyponyms.

Another common relationship is homonymy which refers to the phenomenon that words having different meaning have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. When two words are identical in sound, they are homophones, like knight and night; when two words