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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Cognition

【答案】 Cognition is, in psychology, used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a concept which argues that the mind has internal mental states （such as beliefs, desires and intentions ） and can be understood as information processing , especially when much abstraction or concretization is involved , or processes such as involving knowledge , expertise or learning for example are at work. Another definition of “cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing , including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

3． Denotation

【答案】 The core sense of a word or a phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world. In the case of linguistic signs, the denotative meaning is what the dictionary attempts to provide. It is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning, opposite to connotation.

4． Transformational-Generative grammar

【答案】 Transformational-generative grammar is proposed by Noam Chomsky. He postulated a syntactic base of language （called deep structure ） , which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of （possibly universal） rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that is identical to an actual sentence of a language , after the mediating of a series of rules （called transformations ） that act upon the deep structures.

5． Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

6． 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.

7． Surface structure

【答案】 It is a term used in generative grammar to refer to the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure we articulate and hear. For instance, “John is easy to please.” and “John is eager to please.” are two sentences with the same surface structure.

8． inflectional morpheme

【答案】 Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

二、Essay-question

9． Illustrate the ways of lexical change.

【答案】 Lexical change includes invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, back-formation, analogical creation, borrowing, compound and derivation.

a.Coinage : it is the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are invented trade names of one company‟s product that become general terms for any version of that product. Such as Kleenex ，Teflon and Xerox.

b.Borrowing : it is the taking over of words from other languages. The English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages，such as encore, which is borrowed from French.

c.Compounding : it is the process of a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. For example , “fingerprint” is composed of “finger” and “print”.

d.Blending : blending is typically accomplished by jointing part of one word to the other whole word or other part of the word. For example, the word smog is formed by combing parts of two words “smoke” and “fog”.

e.Clipping : it occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form. Common example is like ad （“advertisement”）.

f.Backformation : it is a specialized type of word formation in which new words are coined from already existing words by “subtracting‟‟ an affix thought to be part of the old word. For example, the noun television first came into use and then the verb televise was created from it.

g.Analogical creation. It refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, „„marathon‟‟ appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modem English created such words as “telethon”，“talkthon”.

h.Acronyms : some new words, known as acronyms, are formed form the initial letters of a set of other words. These can remain essentially “alphabetisims” such as CD （“compact disk”）where the pronunciation consists of the set of letters. More typically, acronyms are pronounced as single words, as in NATO （“North Atlantic Treaty Organization”）.

i.Derivation : it is the process of forming new words by adding prefixes, infixes or suffixes to the root. For example, the prefix un- is added to pleasant to form “unpleasant ” the suffix -able-is used to form “predictable”

10．In interpreting utterances such as（1）and （2），the hearer generally treats the events described in the two sentences in each group as causally related even though such relationship is not encoded in the meanings of the sentences. That is . the hearer tends to think that Helen fell on the ground because of Torn's pushing and that the vase broke because it was dropped. Explain why.

（1）Tom pushed Helen. Helen fell on the ground.

（2）Peter dropped the vase. It broke.

【答案】 The phenomenon described can be illustrated by the theory of cohesion and coherence in discourse analysis , especially the conjunctive kind of cohesive relation. Text processing requires inferences for establishing coherence between successive sentences. The achievement of coherence partly relies on the cohesive relationships within and between the sentences. Cohesion occurs where the interpretation of some elements in the discourse is dependent on that of another.

It is realized partly through grammatical device and partly through lexical cohesion. Conjunction is one of the grammatically cohesive relations. It is based on the assumption that there are forms of systematic relationships between sentences in the linguistic system. Conjunction can be realized by some conjunctive words and some adverbs , such as so , but , furthermore , and so on. But in fact , the conjunctive relation between the discourses need not be realized by conjunctive words, as can be seen in these two examples.

Yet it is not enough for the text to have connections between elements, there is also the coherence which distinguishes connected texts which make sense from those which do not. It enables people to make sense of what they read and hear, and then try to arrive at an interpretation which is in line with their experience of the way the world is. In fact, our ability to make sense of what we read is probably only a small part of that general ability we have to make sense of what we experience or perceive in the world.

Therefore , by the coherence which helps us to connect the discourse with the world we experience, we the hearers will tend to make the discourse fit some situation which could accommodate all the details , and just as in the two examples, the causal conjunctive relations are established.

11．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.