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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． 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 antonyms , （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 ）.

3． The London School of Linguistics

【答案】 The London School generally refers to the kind of linguistic scholarship in England. The man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized distinct academic subject in Britain was J.R. Firth.

4． cohort model

【答案】 The cohort model is a supposed doctrine dealing with the spoken word recognition postulated by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990. It is suggested that the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed , candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process continues until only one word candidate matches the input- the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.

5． phoneme

Phoneme is a basic unit of phonological study, and it is an abstract collection of phonetic 【答案】

features which can distinguish meaning. For example, in English

, is described as a phoneme.

6． Functional Sentence Perspective （FSP ）

【答案】 It is a theory of linguistic analysis which refers to art analysis of utterances （or texts） in terms of the information they contain. The principle is that the role of each utterance part is evaluated for its semantic contribution to the whole.

7． 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”.

8． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）

【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.

二、Essay-question

9． 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.

10．How much does our language influence the way we think? How deeply do language and culture interpenetrate and influence one another? These questions about language have fascinated thinkers throughout the ages. For example, Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt in the German Romantic tradition regarded language as a prisma or grid spread over things in the world so that each language reflects a different worldview. Write a short essay to explain your position on this view.

【答案】 Humans have a unique linguistic system for communication that serves as the primary vehicle for expressing thoughts. Language and thought may be viewed as two independent circles that develop along two different routes but overlap in some parts, where language and thought are consistent with each other. But language is not the only means of expressing thought. As for the relationship between language and the thought , we think that language does not determine the way we think but

influence the way we perceive the world and recall things, and affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks. That is, language may be used to provide new ideas, bring about a change in beliefs and values , solve problems，and keep track of things in memory. For example, a well-developed vocabulary may well assist us in learning the concepts the lexis covers. We recall things more easily when they correspond to readily available words or phrases. It is certainly easier for us to make a conceptual distinction if it neatly corresponds to a particular lexical item available in our language. When we label our experience with linguistic symbols, our language will influence how we remember and think about those experiences ; otherwise the relationship between language and perception , memory or thinking will be greatly reduced.

In terms of relationship between language and culture , we can infer that a language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events that represent similar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the people‟s attitudes, beliefs， world outlooks , and etc. Language expresses cultural reality. On the other hand, as peopled language uses express their culture represented by its social conventions, norms and social appropriateness, the culture both emancipates and constrains people socially, historically and metaphorically. Sharing a same community culture, people have acquired common ways of viewing the world through their speech interactions with other members of the same group. Although language and culture are inextricably intertwined , culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. The knowledge and beliefs that constitute a people‟s culture are habitually encoded and transmitted in the language of the people. Language as an integral part of human being, permeates his thinking and way of viewing the world, language both expresses and embodies cultural reality.

As for the relationship between language and world views , the language system does not necessarily provide specifics of one‟s world view. All humans share a general conceptualizing capacity; Speakers of different languages are capable of distinguishing and recognizing experiences according to their respectively different linguistic coding systems for the same objective world. On the one hand , people speaking the same language may have different world views , including political , social , religious , scientific and philosophical views. On the other hand , people speaking different languages may share similar world views on above aspects. Moreover, one language can describe many different worldviews , as is evident in the case of successful translation.

According to the theories shown above, we can infer that Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt^ view has both merits and limitations. First , they see clearly that there exists a relationship between language and thoughts. Second, they assume that language influences so much the way people think that people who think in different ways will have different world views. Based on the theoretical views above we think this view is not rational in this aspect.

11．Explain one of the teaching approaches that you’re familiar with and discuss its advantages and disadvantages.

【答案】 The functional language teaching, which emerged during the 70s, is a reaction against both the structurally and situationally based approaches to language teaching. Its main feature is that we should teach people what functions the various linguistic forms fulfill. We should teach people not only what the language is but what the language does. Linguistic forms should not be presented as abstract structures but should always be presented as fulfilling a particular language function. For example, if the simple present tense is to be taught, it should not just be a matter of learning to accurately repeat the structure , but also a matter of knowing what the structure is actually used for.

Organizing language teaching functionally emphasizes what we can do with language. The basic units of language are seen as short exchanges. Linguistic forms are presented and learned in close relation to their function. Such teaching encourages appropriateness of language in terms of the respective roles of speaker and hearer and also in terms of the topic of conversation. Fluency is stressed and developed.