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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Linguistic determinism

【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） One‟s 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 hypothesis 4tIf Aristotle had spoken Chinese , his logic would have been different”.

3． Government

【答案】 Government is another type of control over the forms of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the forms of others in terms of certain category. In English, for example, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book. She gave a book to him. In other words , the verb , or the preposition , determines , or governs , the form of the pronoun after it.

4． Subordinate construction

【答案】 Subordinate constructions are one of the two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head , with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent , are subordinate constructions.

5． Relational opposites

【答案】 This is a type of antonymy , in which the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities. For example, “buy/sell” is such a pair. X buys something from Y means Y sells something from X.

6． Assimilation

【答案】 It is a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound. It is often used synonymously with coarticulation. Nasalization, dentalization and，velarization are all instances of assimilation. There are two possibilities of assimilation: if a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, it is regressive assimilation;

the converse process, in which a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, is known as progressive assimilation. For example, in “mink”，“n”，which is originally pronounced aswill be velarized by the following “k”/k/，and therefore the word will be pronounced as

7． 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.

8． Semantic field

【答案】 It is the organization of related words and expressions into a system which shows their relationship to one another. For example, kinship terms such as father, mother, brother, sister, uncle, aunt belong to a semantic field whose relevant features include generation , sex , membership of the father's or mother's side of the family.

9． functional morpheme

【答案】 This is a subtype of free morphemes, which one consists largely of the functional words in language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns, for example, “and, about when on , near, the” an so on.

10．CMC

【答案】 It is computer-mediated communication , distinguished by its focus on language and language use in computer networked environments, and by its use of methods of discourse analysis to address that focus.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．plowed 14. climbed 15. singed 16. hanged

【答案】

12．How would you describe this short exchange in terms of the ardors performed by the speakers?

Motorist : My car needs new exhaust system.

Mechanic : Fll be busy with this other car all day.

【答案】 In the motorist‟s utterance ，there are two types of speech acts performed , namely representative and directive，and as to the latter one, it is recognized as an indirect speech act, which is performed through the performance of the former one. Thus, by stating that his car needs new exhaust

system , the motorist has in fact asked the mechanic to equip a new exhaust system for him.

Similarly ，in the mechanic‟s utterance , there are two types of speech acts performed ; one is representative , the other commissive. The commissive speech act in fact is an indirect one since it is recognized through the performance of representative action. That is to say, by stating that he will be busy with another car all day, the mechanic has in fact told the motorist that he could not repair his car right away.

13．What is behaviourism?

【答案】 Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement”，and the adult‟s use of language is also a process of “stimulus-response”.

14．Illustrate the relationship between morpheme and allomorph by examples.

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language , not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes. Take disagreeable for example, it contains three morphemes, dis-, agree and -able. A morpheme may take various shapes or forms. For instance, -ion, -tion, -sion and -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix. They do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound depending on the final phoneme of the preceding verb. They are called allomorphs. So an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds.

15．How is the illocutionary act different from the perlocutionary act?

【答案】 An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker^ intention; it is the act performed in saying something. Thus, if someone says “Morning”，we can ask questions like “What did he mean?” and the answer could be “He offered a greeting.”

A perlocutionary act, however, is the effect of the utterance. By telling somebody something the speaker may change the opinion of the hearer on something, or mislead him, or surprise him, or induce him to do something, and so on. Therefore，the perlocutionary act of the saying “Morning” could be to keep friendly relations with the hearer.

16．What is entailment? What are the sources of entailment?

Entailment is basically a semantic relation . If sentence A entails 【答案】（or logical implication）

sentence B, it must observe that, in terms of truth value, when sentence A is true, sentence B must be also true; when sentence B is false, sentence A must also be false, and that when sentence B is true, sentence A may be true or false.

The source of entailment may be lexical or syntactical. Lexical source of entailment can be shown in the example like,

（a ）The anarchist assassinated the emperor.

（b ）The emperor died.

The relationship of entailment between and derives from the lexical relationship between （a ）（b ）

assassinate and die. In some sense the meaning of assassinate contains the meaning of die.

Other sources for entailment are syntactic: for example, active and passive versions of the same sentence will entail one another. Sentences below show this well: