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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Arbitrariness

【答案】 Arbitrariness : Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs have no natural relationship to their meaning. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative , a conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation. For example, it is unable to explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/.

2． Morpheme

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content , a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning , whether it is lexical or grammatical. For example , in boys , there are two morphemes : “boy” and “-s”； in international, there are three morphemes: “inter-” “nation” and “-al”.

3． 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）

4． Allomorph

【答案】 A morpheme may take various shapes or forms, and an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds. For instance, the morpheme of plurality {-s} has a number of allomorphs in different sound context, as in “cats” /s/, in “bags” /z/，in “matches” /iz/.

5． CMC

【答案】 It is computer-mediated communication , distinguished by its focus on language and language use in computer networked environments, and by its use of methods of discourse analysis to address that focus.

6． 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.

7． Stem

A stem is a morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be 【答案】

added. For example, “friend-” in friends, and “friendship-” in friendships are both stems. The former shows that a stem can be equivalent to a root, whereas the latter shows that a stem may contain a root and a derivational affix.

8． 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.

9． Stylistics

【答案】 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics studies the features of situationally distinctive uses （varieties ） of language , and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.

10．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.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Conversational implicature is comparable to illocutionary force in speech act theory in that they are both concerned with the contextual side of meaning, or言外之意 in Chinese.

【答案】 We may summarize conversational implicature as a type of implied meaning. It could be inferred only by the dependence on the context of the utterance and shared knowledge between the speaker and listener. Illocutionary force , on the other hand , refers to speaker^ meaning , contextual meaning , or extra meaning, that is, the meaning the speaker wants to convey in a specific context. By an illocutionary force, we can say “What does he mean by saying that?” In this sense, implicature is comparable to illocutionary force in speech act theory in that they are both concerned with the contextual side of meaning, or 言外之意 in Chinese.

12．How do the three branches of phonetics contribute to the study of speech sounds?

【答案】 Phonetics looks at speech sounds from three distinct but related points of view. First, it studies the sounds from the speaker‟s point of view , i.e. ，how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds. Then, it looks at the sounds from the hearer s point of view, i.e., how the sounds are perceived by the hearer. Lastly, it studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another. These three branches of phonetics are labeled articulatory phonetics , auditory phonetics , and acoustic phonetics respectively.

13．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

14．Write the international phonetic alphabet for the following words.

（1） hypothesis （2） academician （3）verbatim （4） technique

（5） capacity （6） standardize （7）guarantee （8） paradigm

（9） primarily （10） rhetoric （11）procedure （12） originate

【答案】（1）

（5）

（9） （6） （10） （2） （7） （11

） （3） （8） （12） （4）

15．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.

16．What is the definition of cognitive linguistics?

【答案】 Cognitive linguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.

三、Essay-question

17．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