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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Open-class words

【答案】 Open-class words refer to words whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited and with the emergence of new ideas , inventions , and so on ; new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. For example , nouns , verbs , and adjectives all belong to this class.

2． 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.

3． distinctive features

a means of working out a set of phonological contrasts or oppositions to capture particular 【答案】

aspects of language sounds , first suggested by Roman Jacobson in the 1940s and then developed by numerous other people.

4． 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.

5． IC analysis

【答案】 IC analysis: IC analysis （immediate constituent analysis） refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents---word groups （or phrases ） , which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own , and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. In practice, for the sake of convenience, we usually stop at the level of word.

6． Presupposition

【答案】 A presupposition is a proposition （expressed in a sentence） that is assumed to be true in order to judge the truth or falsity of another sentence. For example , John didn't pass chemistry

presupposes that John took chemistry.

7． Pidgins and Creoles

【答案】 A pidgin refers to a variety of a language that is not native language of anyone, but is learned on contact situations such as trading. When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade language and becomes the first language of a social community , it becomes a creole. The process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called creolization.

8． 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）

9． CAI and CAL

【答案】 Computer-assisted instruction （CAI ） means the use of a computer in a teaching program. This includes:

a. A teaching program which is presented by a computer in a sequence. The student responds on the computer , and the computer indicates whether the responses are correct or incorrect.

b. The use of computers to monitor student progress, to direct students into appropriate lessons, material , etc. This is also called computer-managed instruction.

Parallel to CAI , there is CAL （Computer-Assistant Learning ） . The former aims at seeing educational problems on the part of the teacher, whereas the latter emphasizes the use of a computer in both teaching and learning in order to help the learner achieve educational objectives. The first kind of CAL programs which were developed reflected principles similar to programmed instruction. The computer leads the student through learning task step-by-step, asking questions to check comprehension. Depending on the studenfs response, the computer gives the student further practice or progresses to new material （see branching ）. In more recent CAL courseware students are able to interact with the computer and perform higher-level tasks while exploring a subject or problem.

10．Audiolingual method

【答案】 Audiolingual method refers to the teaching of a second language through imitation , repetition , and reinforcement. It emphasizes the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing and the use of mother tongue in the classroom is not allowed.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What distinguishes prescriptive studies of language from descriptive studies of language?

【答案】 The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are. To say that linguistics is a descriptive science is to say that the linguist tries to discover and record the roles to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, or norms, of correctness, which are in the scope of prescriptive linguistics.

12．What is move-α rule?

【答案】 Move-α rule is a general movement rule accounting for the syntactic behavior of any constituent movement. It goes like this: any element may be moved to another place, or more generally changed in some way, as long as the relevant conditions （principles ） are satisfied. That is to say, the movements are constrained by the other modules of grammar in order to rule out ungrammatical forms, such as the kissed boy girl and were kissed the girl by the boy. It is the interaction of move-α with other syntactic principles that results in grammatical strings. It is responsible for the mapping between active and passive.

13．What is the difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and denotation?

【答案】 Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meanings according to different approaches. Concept is the impression of objects in peopled mind ; connotation , meaning the properties of the entity a word denotes , is the implied meaning , similar to implication and implicature ; denotation , like sense , is not directly related to objects , but makes the abstract assumption of the real world. For example, the denotation of human is any person such as John and Mary, and its connotation is “biped‟‟ „„featherless‟‟ „„rational‟‟ etc.

14．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:

（c ）The Etruscans built this tomb.

（d ）This tomb was built by Etruscans.

15．What are the criteria used in phonetic description of vowels?

【答案】 As the vowels can not be described in the same way as the consonants , a system of cardinal vowels has been suggested to get out of this problem. The cardinal vowels are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined , fixed and unchanging , intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages. The cardinal vowels are abstract concept. The cardinal vowel diagram is a set of hypothetical positions for vowels used as reference points.

The description of English vowels needs to fulfill four basic requirements : （1） the height of tongue raising ; the position of the highest part of the tongue （high , middle or low）（2）（front , central, back ） ; the length or tenseness of the vowel （tense vs. lax or long vs. short） ; （4） lip-rounding （3）