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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． IPA

【答案】 IPA is the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet , which is devised by the International Phonetic Association in 1888. IPA is a set of symbols which can be used to represent the phones and phonemes of natural languages.

3． 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.

4． 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.

5． Lexical word

【答案】 Lexical word, lexical words are also called content words, referring to those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives , and adverbs.

6． 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.

7． Denotation

【答案】 The core sense of a word or a phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world. In the

case of linguistic signs, the denotative meaning is what the dictionary attempts to provide. It is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning, opposite to connotation.

8． 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”.

二、Essay-question

9． What are the special features of American structuralism?

【答案】 American Structuralism is a branch of synchronic linguistics that developed in a very different style from that of Europe. While linguistics in Europe started more than two thousand years ago, linguistics in America started at the end of the nineteenth century. While traditional grammar plays a dominating role in Europe, it has little influence in America. While many European languages have their own historical traditions and cultures, English is the dominating language in America, where there is no such a tradition as in Europe. In addition, the pioneer scholars in America were faced with the urgent task of recording the rapidly perishing native American Indian languages because there was no written record of them. However , these languages were characterised by features of vast diversity and differences which are rarely found in other parts of the world. To record and describe these exotic languages , it is probably better not to have any presuppositions about the nature of language in general. This explains why there was not much development in linguistic theory during this period but a lot of discussion on descriptive procedures.

Structuralism is based on the assumption that grammatical categories should be defined not in terms of meaning but in terms of distribution , and that the structure of each language should be described without reference to the alleged universality of such categories as tense , mood and parts of speech , Firstly , structural grammar describes everything that is found in a language instead of laying down rules. However , its aim is confined to the description of languages, without explaining why language operates the way it does. Secondly, structural grammar is empirical, aiming at objectivity in the sense that all definitions and statements should be verifiable or refutable. However , it has produced almost no complete grammars comparable to any comprehensive traditional grammars. Thirdly , structural grammar examines all languages, recognising and doing justice to the uniqueness of each language. But it does not give an adequate treatment of meaning. Lastly , structural grammar describes even the smallest contrasts that underlie any construction or use of a language , not only those discoverable in some particular use.

10．Chomsky sets up three different targets to aim at : observational adequacy , descriptive adequacy and explanatory adequacy. Define and discuss them.

【答案】 According to Chomsky , observational adequacy requires a grammar to be able to produce correct explanations for raw linguistic data ; that is , it should be able to capture speakers intuitions about grammaticality.

On the second level , that is , on the level of descriptive adequacy , a grammar should not only

produce correct explanations for raw linguistic data , but also produce correct explanations for the linguistic competence of the speaker and hearer; that is, it should reflect speakers5 competence.

On the third , and the highest , level , i.e. explanatory adequacy , a grammar that is sufficiently described should reveal linguistic competence and then relate it with universal grammars in order to be related to the initial state of the human mind for the purpose of revealing human cognitive systems; that is , it should account for the leamability of language.

In Chomsky‟s point of view , it is far from adequate for a grammar to merely distinguish those strings of words which are sentences of the language from those which are not sentences of the language in question. Neither is it for a grammar to assign structures to sentences that match native speaker‟s intuition about structure and meaning. However , this is where the Structuralistic approach stops. Therefore , Chomsky argues for a generative grammar since it is able to explain how the facts are the way they are and how they arise in the mind of the speaker and hears. And it is after successful descriptions of many languages and subsequent generalizations of universal features of human language that it is possible to explore the initial state of the human mind that contains universal grammars.

11．Use examples to illustrate different ways to extend syntactic constituents.

【答案】 In this chapter , several ways to extend syntactic constituents are brought under the category of recursiveness , including coordination and subordination , conjoining and embedding , hypotactic and paratactic and so on. Coordination and conjoining are the different names for the same linguistic phenomenon , that is , to use and , but or or to join together syntactic constituents with the same [unction. For instance, the sentence A man got into the car could be extended into a sentence like this “[NP A man , a woman , a boy , a cat and a dog] got into the car”. While subordination and embedding can be understood as the extension of any syntactic constituent by inserting one or more syntactic elements with different functions, into another. I saw the man who had visited you last year is an extended sentence by changing the independent clause The man had visited you last year into a dependent element （here a relative clause）.

However , hypotaxis and parataxis are the two traditional terms for the description of syntactic relations between sentences. In the examples below , the former is hypotactic , while the latter is paratactic :

We live near the sea. So we enjoy a healthy climate. He dictated the letter. She wrote it.

12．MORPHEME is defined as the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content. Then is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? Can a morpheme and a phoneme form an organic whole?

【答案】 As a matter of fact, morpheme is both a grammatical concept and a semantic one. for instance , we can recognize that English word-forms such as talks , talker , talked and talking must consist of one element talk , and a number of other elements such as -s , -er , -ed , -ing. All these elements are described as morphemes. The definition of morpheme is “the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression and content”. We would say that the word reopened in the sentence The pglice reopened the investigation consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- （meaning again） , and a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed （indicating past tense） . Therefore, we are in a position to conclude that those which can stand by themselves as single words , e.g. open , are semantic concepts , and those which cannot normally stand alone, but which are typically attached to another form, e.g. re-, -ist, -ed, -s , are grammatical concepts.

As we know , each one of the meaning-distinguishing sounds in a language is described as a phoneme. An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. If we substitute one