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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Distinctive features of speech sounds

【答案】 The distinctive feature is a property which distinguishes one phoneme from another. For example , “voicing” is a distinctive feature, since it plays an important role in distinguishing obstruents in English.

2． Phatic function （ communion ）

【答案】 Phatic function: The phatic function of language refers to the use of the language which often consists of small , seemingly meaningless expression for setting up a certain atmosphere or maintaining social contacts rather than for exchanging information or ideas. For example , greetings , farewells , and comments on the weather in English could serve this function.

3． Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. It 【答案】

can be divided into three main areas of study articulatory phonetics , acoustic phonetics and perceptual/auditory phonetics.

4． Language acquisition

【答案】 It refers to the gradual development of ability in a language by using it naturally in communicative situations.

5． Government

【答案】 Government is another type of control over the forms of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the forms of others in terms of certain category. In English, for example, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book. She gave a book to him. In other words , the verb , or the preposition , determines , or governs , the form of the pronoun after it.

6． 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”.

7． Slang :

【答案】 It refers to casual , very informal speech , using expressive but informal words and expressions.

For some people , slang is equivalent to colloquial speech but for others , it means “undesirable

speech”. Usually , “colloquial speech” refers to a speech variety used in informal situations with colleagues , friends or relatives ，and “slang” is used for a very informal speech variety which often serves as an “in-gr oup” language for a particular set of people such as teenagers , army recruits , pop-groups etc. Most slang is rather unstable as its words and expressions can change quite rapidly, for example , “Beat it!” “Scram!”，and “Rack off!” for “leave”.

8． 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.

二、Essay-question

9． List different types of Speech presentation and Thought presentation.

【答案】（1） Speech presentation:

Direct speech （DS ） : With the direct speech, what the character said is in its fullest form and with quotation marks.

Indirect speech （IS ） : The propositional content of what the speaker said is presented, but it is not stated in the original words.

Narrator‟s representation of speech acts （NRSA ） : We don‟t know what the speaker said, and all we know is that he used the speech act of doing something. It can be regarded as a summary of a longer piece of discourse and give more background information than indirect speech.

Narrator‟s representation of speech （NRS ） : It is a sentence which merely tells us that speech occurred , and which does not even specify the speech act involved.

（2） Thought presentation : The categories used by novelists to represent the thoughts of their characters are exactly the same as those used to represent a speech.

Direct thought （DT ） : DT tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought.

Free indirect thought （FIT ）: It refers to a kind of thought presentation between DT and IT, which is certainly not DT，but takes on some features of the thoughts in the character‟s mind.

10．The roles of Transformational-Generative linguistics and Functional linguistics in language teaching and learning.

【答案】 （1） In the framework of Transformational-Generative linguistics, language is not learnt by innate. While

acquiring his mother tongue , he compares his innate language system with that of his native language and modifies his grammar. Therefore, language learning is an activity of building and testing hypothesis.

Although the influence of such a formal and abstract grammar remains limited in the field of language education , there are still various attempts to apply TG grammar to language teaching. In designing teaching materials , for example , sentence patterns with the same deep structure can be closely related, such as the active and the passive. Transformational rules may assist the teacher in the teaching of complex sentence construction. In the teaching of literature, TG grammar provides a new instrument for stylistic analysis.

（2） The Functional linguistics sees language learning from a semantic-sociolinguistic perspective.

In particular, Systemic-Functional linguistics, which was proposed by Halliday, sees the formal system of language as a realization of functions of language in use.

Its scope is broader than that of formal linguistic theories. In the field of language teaching, it leads to the development of notion/function-based syllabuses, which have attracted increasing attention.

11．When a teacher says “It ’s so hot in here.” during a class, what does she probably mean? Refer to the theory of pragmatics when you analyze the situation.

【答案】 This utterance would be semantically ambiguous if it was seen isolated without any context of situation. Its interpretation has to rely on the context in which it was uttered.

There could be generally two types of situation in which this utterance could happen. One may be that it is summer; the teacher just came into the class and was sweating heavily. The other may be that in class the students are quite active towards the questions or problems the teacher has posed, for example, discussing in group, or debating in a large scale.

According to the cooperative principle, in our conversation, in order to be cooperative, that is, to make his intentions to be known by the hearer , the speaker will try to make his conversational contribution such as is require, at the stage at which it occurs.

Therefore , according to the third maxim of cooperative principle , RELATION , which says “be relevant”，the utterance could be interpreted differently as follows:

In the first situation, when the students hear the teacher saying “it‟s so hot in here”，they would probably assume that the teacher is obeying the Cooperative Principle, and what he says is relevant to the context, which is that the teacher is sweating, and maybe accompanied by fanning himself with his hand. Therefore, what the teacher means is probably that the temperature is high. What5s more, if the windows in the classroom are closed, this utterance will go further to be an implication of an request for opening the windows.

In the second situation , the students would assume that the teacher should have observed the maxim of relation, since it is under normal circumstances. Given the context in which the students are discussing or debating about certain questions furiously, the hearer would tend to interpret the teacher‟s utterance as: “You are discussing （or debating） so actively.‟‟，which implies a praise for the active participation of the students in class activity.

12．How many types of data analysis have been employed in language acquisition research? How are these types of data analysis significant in SLA research?

【答案】 Four types of data analysis have been employed. They are contrastive analysis，error analysis , performance analysis, and discourse analysis.

Contrastive analysis （CA ） systematically compares native languages and target languages to find the interference of native language when acquiring target languages. It has a close relationship with behaviourism. Although contrastive analysis was faced with a downfall as behaviorism was challenged, as a methodological option it was not abandoned.

Error analysis （EA ） studies and analyzes the errors made by L2 learners and suggests that many le arner errors are not due to the learner‟s mother tongue interference but reflect universal learning strategies such as overgeneralization and simplification of rules. Error analysis also fell into disfavor for

（1） its narrowness——focusing on errors only and having difficulty in identifying the unitary source of an error, and （2） its failure to account for all the areas of the SL in which learners have difficulty. Nevertheless error analysis was not doomed to death rather incorporated into performance analysis.

Performance analysis （PA ） is an analysis of the learners5 interlanguage performance. It is superior