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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． 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.

2． Cross-cultural communication

【答案】 Cross-cultural communication is an exchange of ideas , information , etc , between persons from different cultural backgrounds. The cultural conventions of the participants may widely different , and misinterpretation and misunderstanding can easily arise , even leading to a total communication breakdown.

3． 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.

4． 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.

5． Coarticulation

Coarticulation refers to the phenomenon of sounds continually show the influence of their 【答案】

neighbors. For example , as in lamb , when a is followed by m , the velum will begin to lower itself during the articulation of a so that it is ready for the following nasal. When such simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved, we call the process coarticulation. If the sound becomes more like the following sound, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation. If the sound displays the influence of the preceding sound, it is preservative coarticulation.

6． Corpus

【答案】 Corpus is a collection of linguistic data , either compiled as written texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to verify a hypothesis about language~~for example , to determine how the application of a particular sound , word , or syntactic construction varies.

7． Broad and narrow transcription

【答案】 Broad and narrow transcription: In broad transcription, one letter symbol is used for one sound. In narrow transcription , there are diacritics added to the one letter symbols to show the finer

differences between sounds.

8． 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.

二、Essay-question

9． What is the main difference between literal language and figurative language?

【答案】 The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually its literal meaning , while figurative language is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense.

Appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. It always makes use of a comparison between different things. Figurative language compares two things that are different in enough ways so that their similarities, when pointed out , are interesting, unique and/or surprising. Figurative language uses “figures of speech” to express something other than the literal meaning of the words, in other words, figurative language cannot be taken literally （or should not be taken literally only） . Simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, apostrophe, are all forms of figurative language.

For example, the literal meaning of the word “tree ” is “a large plant”. However, once we start talking about a tree in the context of “a family tree” for example, it is no longer a literal tree we are talking about, but a figurative 〇此^ literal use of the word “tree” refers to an organism which has bark, branches and leaves. A “family tree” shares some of these qualities—graphically , a plan of a family and a representation of a tree can look similar, and in a way they are both a process of organic growth, so we use the same term for both. But when we use the term for a plant it is a literal usage and when we use the term to describe our ancestry, it is a figurative usage.

10．Read the following quote from Chomsky. What do you think about Chomsky^ criticism and the revival of corpus linguistics?

It seems clear that the description which is of greatest psychological relevance is the account of competence , not that of performance, for anyone concerned with intellectual processes, or any question that goes beyond mere data arranging, it is the question of competence that is fundamental. ...

These rather obvious comments apply directly to study of language, child or adult. This it is absurd to attempt to construct a grammar that describes observed linguistic behaviour directly ，…a direct record —an actual corpus —is almost useless as it stands , for linguistic analysis of any but the most superficial kind. ...

【答案】 Regarding linguistics as a branch of psychology, Chomsky insisted that what should be studied is linguistic competence , not performance. As he has claimed , the description of language performance only tells what is there, and is very inadequate in telling why language performs in the way as it does, or rather, how the intellectual processes affects it.

What ＇s more, language performance is more than often degenerated; there are false statements, hesitations , and so on. Therefore, the corpus linguistics which is based on the language performance is somewhat distorted from the goal of linguistics. Because, according to Chomsky, what linguistics is aimed for , should be the discovering of the constants , the general principle which all languages are

constructed and operated as systems of communication in societies in which they are used.

Therefore , he suggested the construction of universal grammar, which is the ideal knowledge of language , is what linguists should be concerned with , and the postulation of grammar based on the observed behavior is also a distortion.

11．Please list and explain the 7 types of meaning recognized by G. Leech.

【答案】 The seven types of meaning were first postulated by G. Leech. They are respectively illustrated as follows:

（1）Conceptual meaning, which refers to logical, cognitive, or denotative content. This type of meaning is “denotative” in that it is concerned with the relationship between a word and the thing it denotes , or refers to.

（2）Connotative meaning, what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to. It refers to some additional, especially emotive, meaning.

（3）Social meaning, referring to what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.

（4）Affective meaning, which refers to what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.

（5）Reflected meaning, which refers to what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression.

（6）Collocative meaning, what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word.

The five types of meanings from （2） to （6） are collectively known as Associative meaning in the sense that an elementary associated theory of mental connections is enough to explain their use.

（7）Thematic meaning, what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis. It is more peripheral since it is only determined by the order of the words in a sentence and the different prominence they each receive.

12．Illustrate the ways of lexical change.

【答案】 Lexical change includes invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, back-formation, analogical creation, borrowing, compound and derivation.

a.Coinage : it is the invention of totally new terms. The most typical sources are invented trade names of one company‟s product that become general terms for any version of that product. Such as Kleenex ，Teflon and Xerox.

b.Borrowing : it is the taking over of words from other languages. The English language has adopted a vast number of words from other languages，such as encore, which is borrowed from French.

c.Compounding : it is the process of a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. For example , “fingerprint” is composed of “finger” and “print”.

d.Blending : blending is typically accomplished by jointing part of one word to the other whole word or other part of the word. For example, the word smog is formed by combing parts of two words “smoke” and “fog”.

e.Clipping : it occurs when a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form. Common example is like ad （“advertisement”）.

f.Backformation : it is a specialized type of word formation in which new words are coined from