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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Contrastive analysis

【答案】 Contrastive analysis is an approach to analysis of second language acquisition, based on a belief that a more effective teaching pedagogy would come out when the similarities and differences between native language and target language are taken into consideration. By such an analysis , it is supposed that some leaning difficulties could be predicted in terms of language transfer.

2． Phatic function （ communion ）

【答案】 Phatic function: The phatic function of language refers to the use of the language which often consists of small , seemingly meaningless expression for setting up a certain atmosphere or maintaining social contacts rather than for exchanging information or ideas. For example , greetings , farewells , and comments on the weather in English could serve this function.

3． Innateness hypothesis

【答案】 The “Innateness Hypothesis” of child language acquisition was proposed by Noam Chomsky , who states that language are somewhat innate and that children are bom with what he calls a language acquisition device, which is a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning.

4． 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.

5． Endocentric construction

【答案】 Endocentric construction : An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e. a word or a group of words , which serves as a definable center , or head. Hence an endocentric construction is also known as a headed construction. Noun phrases like “Lovely Lucy” are typical endocentric constructions.

6． Idiolect

【答案】 Just as every speech community has a dialect, every speaker has his own pet words and expressions and special way of expressing his ideas in language. This language variety of individual

users is called “idiolect”

7． Compound

【答案】 Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form, such as the compound words “blackboard” and “well-known”.

8． 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.

9． Language acquisition

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

10．Performatives

【答案】 Performatives are sentences that do not state a fact or describe a state. They cannot be said to be true or false. The uttering of these sentences is, or is part of, the doing an action. The judge‟s imprisonment sentence, the president‟s war or independence declaration, etc., are performatives.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is concord, and what is government?

【答案】 Concord , also known as agreement, may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. For example, in English, the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man , these men; a book, some books. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense as is shown by He speaks English，They speak English.

Government is another type of control over the form 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 form 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.

12．Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for different types of sand, and in Arabic one must choose from a whole range of words which are subsumed under the Western category CAMEL. Can you explain these phenomena with your linguistic knowledge?

【答案】 These phenomena can be explained from the following perspectives:

（1）These phenomena show a relationship between language and society. Language changes from region to region , from one social group to another and from individual to individual. The living environment makes great impact on the changes of language. As Eskimo are always living in an environment of a snow world, they have made a good cognition to snow and classified it in different types. Human use language to describe the world they have cognized.

（2）These phenomena can be explained from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that : our language helps mould our way of thinking and , consequently , different languages may probably express speaker‟s unique ways of understanding the world. So Eskimos^ different words for different types of snow reflect their different ways to understand snow.

13．What is a syntactic category?

【答案】 A syntactic category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics. The classification is based on similar structure and sameness of distribution （the structural relationships between these elements and other items in a larger grammatical structure） , and not on meaning. There are major and minor syntactic categories: major categories include all phrasal syntactic categories such as NP, VP, and PP, and word-level syntactic categories that serve as heads of phrasal syntactic categories such as N and V; while minor categories are categories that do not project to a phrasal level such as the Yes-No question markers. More specifically , a syntactic category also refers to the defining properties of these general units : the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender and case; and the categories of the verb, for example, include tense, aspect and voice, etc.

14．Why is Saussure hailed as the father of modem linguistics?

【答案】 Saussure occupies such an important place in the history of linguistics that he is often described as ''father of modem linguistics”：

A. The book Course in General Linguistics （1916），which is the most important source of Saussure‟s ideas, marked the beginning of modem linguistics.

B.Saussure was the first to notice the complexities of language. He believed that language is a system of signs, called conventions. He held that the sign is the union of the signifier and the signified.

C.By providing answers to questions concerning many aspects of language, Saussure made clear the object of study for linguistics as a science. His ideas on the arbitrary nature of sign, on the relational nature of linguistic units , on the distinction of langue and parole and of synchronic and diachronic linguistics , etc. pushed linguistics into a brand new stage.

15．What is free variation?

【答案】 Free variation is a linguistic term used both in phonology and sociolinguistics. In phonology , if two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast. For example ，the substitution of one for the other does not generate a new word but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, the two sounds are said to be in “free variation”.

For instance，both either and direction are pronounced differently in British English and American English without changing their meaning, which are often caused by the regional differences.

16．Explain the characteristic of arbitrariness. What are the relationships between arbitrariness & onomatopoeic words and arbitrariness convention?

【答案】 Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. Onomatopoeic words are the words that sound like the sounds they describe. Only when people know the meaning can they infer that the linguistic sign is appropriate for the exact sound. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation.