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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Diglossia

【答案】 When two languages or language varieties exist together in a community and each one is used for different purposes, this is called diglossia. Usually, the more standard variety can be called the high variety or H-variety , which is used in government , the media , education , and for religious services. The other one is usually a non-prestige variety, the low variety or L-variety used in the family, with friends, when shopping, etc.

3． 1-narrator

【答案】 The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this ease the critics call the narrator a FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR or I- NARRATOR because when the narrator refers to himself or herself in the story the first person pronoun I is used. First-person narrators are often said to be “limited” because they don‟t know all the faces or “unreliable” because they trick the reader by withholding information or telling untruths. This often happens in murder and mystery stories.

4． Speech and thought presentation

【答案】 Speech and thought presentation: These two terms are used for the language in fiction, referring to the presenting forms for indicating the narrator‟s speech or thought. The speech presentation may have the following four possibilities : direct speech , indirect speech , narrator‟s representation of speech acts, and narrator‟s representation of speech. The Thought presentation can also be categorized into : narrator‟s representation of thought , narrator‟s representation o f thought acts , indirect thought , free indirect thought, and direct thought.

5． basic level category

【答案】 Basic level category is the most economical level at which you can find the most relevant information. The information on our interactions with objects in the real world are stored at this level. It is at this level that we conjure up the general gestalt of the category.

6． bound root

Bound root refers to the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed without total 【答案】

loss of identity, and this base form could not occur alone, such as “-ceive” in “receive”.

7． 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.

8． Hyponymy

Hyponymy. It refers to the sense relationship between a more general, more inclusive and 【答案】

a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordiante, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. For example , the hyponymy relationship could be established between “animal” and “rabbit”.

9． 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.

10．Lingua franca

【答案】 It is language that is used for communication between different groups of people, each speaking a different language , lhe lingua franca could be an internationally used language of communication （e. g. English） , it could be the native language of one of the groups, or it could a language which is not spoken natively by any of the groups but has a simplified sentence structure and vocabulary and is often a mixture of two or more languages.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．How to understand a sentence?

【答案】 Besides decoding sounds and lexical meanings, comprehension also includes untangling the meaning of sentences. There are a few elements influencing the comprehension of sentences. The first is that the ambiguity of word meaning leads to difficulties in sentence understanding. The more complex information the word has , the more difficult the sentence is to be understood. The second factor is that the linguistic structure of the sentence affects the processing time. Psycholinguists have addressed th phenomena of sentence comprehension in different ways. Firstly , serial models propose that the sentence comprehension system continually and sequentially follows the constraints of a language‟ s grammar with remarkable speed. Secondly, parallel models emphasize the comprehension system is sensitive to a vast range

12．Is American English superior to African English? Why or why not?

【答案】 American English is not superior to African English. As different branches of English, African English and American English are equal. Similar as they are , they are influenced by their respective cultural context and thus form respective systems of pronunciation, words and even grammar.

13．What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?

Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the linguistic form. It is the collection of 【答案】

all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized. For example the sense of the word “dog” is “a domesticated canine mammal , occurring in many breeds that show a great domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form”. It does not refer to any particular dog that exists in the real world, but applies to any animal that meets the features described in the definition.

Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world ; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic unit and the non-linguistic world of experience. If we say “The dog is barking”，we must be talking about a certain dog existent in the situation. The word ^dog^ refers to a dog known to both the speaker and the hearer. This is the reference of the word “dog” in this particular situation.

It is a matter of the relationship between the form and the reality.

14．How does modem language define “object ”？ Provide an example.

【答案】 In modem language, object is defined as such an item that it can become a subject in passive transformation. For example, in sentence tcThe lion chased the tourist,, ? “the tourisf” acts as the object. In the passive voiced sentence “The tourist was chased by the lion”，“the tourist” acts as the subject of the sentence.

15．What is the relationship between tree diagrams and structural ambiguity?

【答案】 In a theory of syntax using tree diagrams （phrase markers ） to represent syntactic structure , the explanation of the phenomenon of structural ambiguity is straightforward : whereas an unambiguous sentence is associated with just one basic tree diagram, a structurally ambiguous sentence is associated with more than one basic tree diagram.

16．cinched 18. played 19. hated 20. branded

is found

after

【答案

】appears after these sounds

:

afteri The general factor to determine

whether , or

distinctive feature of voicing. Therefore, occurs after a voiceless sound, except

voiced sound, except

and occurs after either the consonantor

and occurs

is used is the occurs after a

三、Essay-question

17．Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language.

【答案】 Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language. Since language is symbolic, each word serves as a symbol in relation to a specific meaning. In this sense, we need infinite numbers of words or symbols to code the physical entities and our experiential concepts. But this is impossible for communication. Therefore, users give a new concept to an old form, thus the