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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Entailment

【答案】 It refers to the relation between propositions one of which necessarily follows from the other. If X is true, Y is necessarily true，and if X is false, Y may be true or false. For example, the sentence “He has been to France” entails “He has been to Europe”.

2． Displacement

Language can be used to refer to what is present, what is absent, what happens at present, 【答案】

what happened in the past, what will happen in the future or what happens in a far-away place. This property of language enables language users to overcome the barriers caused by time and place. For example , we can talk about Sapir, who is already dead; we can even talk about next week, which is in the future.

3． Innateness hypothesis

【答案】 The “Innateness Hypothesis” of child language acquisitio n 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． Concord （or : Agreement）

【答案】 It may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category （or categories ） . For example, the syntactic relationship between that girl and she in the following dialogue: A: Who is that girl? B: Oh, she is my sister.

5． Design features

【答案】 Design features : It refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

6． 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.

7． 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.

8． Audiolingual method

【答案】 Audiolingual method refers to the teaching of a second language through imitation , repetition , and reinforcement. It emphasizes the teaching of speaking and listening before reading and writing and the use of mother tongue in the classroom is not allowed.

9． 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.

10．Assimilation

【答案】 It is a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound. It is often used synonymously with coarticulation. Nasalization, dentalization and，velarization are all instances of assimilation. There are two possibilities of assimilation: if a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, it is regressive assimilation;

the converse process, in which a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, is known as progressive assimilation. For example, in “mink”，“n”，which is originally pronounced aswill be velarized by the following “k”/k/，and therefore the word will be pronounced as

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Illustrate the relationship between morpheme and allomorph by examples.

【答案】 Morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit of language , not divisible or analyzable into smaller forms. What is usually considered a single word in English may be composed of one or more morphemes. Take disagreeable for example, it contains three morphemes, dis-, agree and -able. A morpheme may take various shapes or forms. For instance, -ion, -tion, -sion and -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix. They do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound depending on the final phoneme of the preceding verb. They are called allomorphs. So an allomorph is any of the variant forms of a morpheme as conditioned by position or adjoining sounds.

12．How is the illocutionary act different from the perlocutionary act?

【答案】 An illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker^ intention; it is the act performed in saying something. Thus, if someone says “Morning”，we can ask questions like “What did he mean?” and the answer could be “He offered a greeting.”

A perlocutionary act, however, is the effect of the utterance. By telling somebody something the speaker may change the opinion of the hearer on something, or mislead him, or surprise him, or induce him to do something, and so on. Therefore，the perlocutionary act of the saying “Morning” could be to keep friendly relations with the hearer.

13．Whafs your understanding of language?

【答案】 Language is a system of vocal symbols used for human communication. Language must

be a system, since elements in it are arranged according to certain rules, they cannot be combined at will. Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no logic connection between the word and the thing it refers to. Language has symbolic nature : words are associated with objects , actions , ideas by convention. For all languages, the primary medium is sound, no matter how well developed are their writing system. Language is human-specific, it is very different from the communication system other forms of life possess.

14．How to analyze dramatic language?

【答案】（1） Turn quantity and length

How much a character talks can be indicative either of their relative importance in the play, or of how important they appear to think they are. Generally speaking , central characters have longer and more speeches than minor characters.

（2）Exchange sequence: The patterns of exchange of a dramatic dialogue which are considered appropriate by speakers of English. For example , the two-part exchanges such as greeting-greeting , question-answer.

（3）Production errors: Deliberately used forms such as hesitation to convey something about the character

（4）The cooperative principle : this principle is proposed by Grice. He asserted people used to make sense of their conversation by enabling them to distinguish between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. He also suggested that people actually break these maxims quite often when they talk.

（5）Status marked through language: Many of the properties of language discussed can be used to signal the relative status and changes in status , of characters. Particularly , language can be used to signal to what extent the relationship between an addresser and addressee is based on a social power difference , and to what extent it is based on solidarity.

（6）Register : It is the term used in linguistics to describe the relationship between a particular style of language and its context of use. An example of a linguistic register is legal discourse, we recognize a legal document when we see one, but lawyers are the only people who are trained to produce them using appropriate linguistic choices.

（7）Speech and silence: Concerning female characters in plays, there is evidence that men tend to talk more than women in mixed sex conversations.

15．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.

16．What are the four obvious barriers to adult L2 acquisition?

【答案】 A variety of explanations have been put forward for the apparent decline in adults:

Physical factors such as the loss of “plasticity” in the brain and “lateralization” of the brain; social factors such as the different situations and relationships that children encounter compared to adults ; cognitive factors such as the interference with natural language learning by the adulfs more abstract mode of thinking; and input factors that adults spend only a few hours each week of school time, rather than via the constant interaction experienced by a child, with a lot of other occupations.