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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． figure-ground alignment

【答案】 Figure-ground alignment seems to apply to space with the ground as the prepositional object and the preposition expressing the spatial relational configuration. It also applies to human perception of moving objects. Since the moving object is typically the most prominent one, because it is moving , it is typically the figure, while the remaining stimuli constitute the ground.

2． Inflection

【答案】 Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes , such as number , person , finiteness , aspect and case , which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. For example, the past form of the verb work is realized by the addition of the inflectional suffix: „„-ed‟‟； the plural form of the noun child is realized by the inflectional suffix: „„-ren‟‟.

3． Register

【答案】 It is a speech variety used by a particular group of people , usually sharing the same occupation （e.g. doctors, lawyers） or the same interests. A particular register often distinguishes itself from others by having a number of distinctive words, by using words or phrases in a particular way, and sometimes by special grammatical constructions （e.g. legal language）.

4． 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.

5． stream of consciousness writing

【答案】 The term was originally coined by the philosopher William James in his Principle of Psychology （1890） to describe the free association of ideas and impressions in the mind. It was later applied to the writing of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and others experimenting early in the 20th century with the novelistic portrayal of the free flow of thought. Note, however, that the majority of thought presentation in novels is not stream of consciousness writing. The examples we have discussed above are not stream of consciousness writing because they are too orderly to constitute the free association of ideas. Perhaps the most famous piece of stream of consciousness writing is that associated with Leopold Bloom in Joyce‟s Ulysses. Here he is in a restaurant thinking about oysters.

“Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz

and Red bank oysters. Effect on the sexual. Aphrodis. （sic ） He was in the Red bank this morning. Was he oyster old fish at table. Perhaps he young flesh in bed. No. June has no ar （sic ） no oysters. But there are people like tainted game. Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old , blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery.66 This cognitive meandering is all in the most free version of direct thought. It is also characterised by a highly elliptical sentence structure , with as many grammatical words as possible being removed consistently allowing the reader to be able to infer what is going on. The language is not very cohesive ，and breaks the Gricean maxims of Quantity and Manner. But we must assume that apparently unreasonable writing behaviour is related to a relevant authorial purpose. It is the assumption that Joyce is really cooperating with us at a deeper level , even though he is apparently making our reading difficult, that leads us to conclude that he is trying to evoke a mind working associatively.

二、Short-answer-questions

6． Why do people take duality as one of the important design features of human language? Can you tell us what language will be if it has no such design feature?

【答案】 Duality makes our language productive. A large number of different units can be formed out of a small number of elements——for instance, tens of thousands of words out of a small set of sounds. And out of the huge number of words, there can be astronomical number of possible sentences and phrases, which in turn can combine to form unlimited number of texts. Most animal communication systems do not have this design feature of human language.

If language had no such design feature , then it would be like animal communicational system which consists of only a number of basic sounds and this would be highly limited. Then we would not be able to produce a very large number of sound combinations （e.g. words ） , which are distinct in meaning. In other words, the number of messages one can send would be restricted to the number of basic sounds.

7． Please disambiguate the following 5 sentences, using the tree-diagram, or any other means that you think is appropriate.

（1）Jane showed her baby pictures.

（2）The old man is drinking in the air.

（3）We need more realistic officials to handle the economy.

（4）We are sweeping the ground cigarettes on the street.

（5）Tom exchanged the money and fell around the corner.

【答案】（1）

8． What is the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes?

【答案】 The distinction between inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes could be illustrated in the following four aspects.

Inflectional affixes very often only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem, for instance , those inflectional affixes in words such as toys, walks, John's, etc. Therefore, they serve to produce different forms of a single word. In contrast , derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning , e.g. cite, citation; generate, generation.

Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to，such as flower, flowers ; whereas derivational affixes might or might not, such as the relation between small and smallness for the former, and that between brother and brotherhood for the latter.

Very often inflectional affixes are conditioned by non-semantic linguistic factors outside the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence. Whereas, derivational affixes are more often based on simple meaning distinctions.

In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes, which are always word final. But derivational affixes can be prefixes or suffixes.

9． What distinguishes prescriptive studies of language from descriptive studies of language?

【答案】 The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are. To say that linguistics is a descriptive science is to say that the linguist tries to discover and record the roles to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, or norms, of correctness, which are in the scope of prescriptive linguistics.

三、Essay-question

10．What kind of linguistic phenomenon can you identify in the following dialogue? Define , analize and explain the phenomenon.

甲：上车请买票。

乙：三张天安门。

甲：您拿好。

【答案】 This conversation consists of the linguistic phenomenon which is called the “Cooperative Principle”，proposed and formulated by P. Grice , based on such a pragmatic hypothesis that the