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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Polysemy

【答案】 Polysemy means a single word having several or many meanings. According to Crystal: Polysemy is a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexical item which has a range of different meanings. Polysemic words are signs of an advanced culture. Polysemy is also an essential feature of a language‟s economy and efficiency.

2． Syllable

【答案】 Syllable : It refers to a unit of spoken language that is bigger than a speech sound. It consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following.

3． 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/.

4． Pidgins and Creoles

【答案】 A pidgin refers to a variety of a language that is not native language of anyone, but is learned on contact situations such as trading. When a pidgin develops beyond its role as a trade language and becomes the first language of a social community , it becomes a creole. The process by which a pidgin becomes a creole is called creolization.

5． 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.

6． Cognition

【答案】 Cognition is, in psychology, used to refer to the mental processes of an individual, with particular relation to a concept which argues that the mind has internal mental states （such as beliefs, desires and intentions ） and can be understood as information processing , especially when much

abstraction or concretization is involved , or processes such as involving knowledge , expertise or learning for example are at work. Another definition of “cognition” is the mental process or faculty of knowing , including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment.

7． 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.

8． 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.

9． 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/.

10．Meaning shift

Meaning shift: In a narrow sense, meaning shift is used to refer to the change of meaning 【答案】

that has nothing to do with generalization or restriction such as broadening or narrowing of meaning.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．How would you describe this short exchange in terms of the ardors performed by the speakers?

Motorist : My car needs new exhaust system.

Mechanic : Fll be busy with this other car all day.

【答案】 In the motorist‟s utterance ，there are two types of speech acts performed , namely representative and directive，and as to the latter one, it is recognized as an indirect speech act, which is performed through the performance of the former one. Thus, by stating that his car needs new exhaust system , the motorist has in fact asked the mechanic to equip a new exhaust system for him.

Similarly ，in the mechanic‟s utterance , there are two types of speech acts performed ; one is representative , the other commissive. The commissive speech act in fact is an indirect one since it is recognized through the performance of representative action. That is to say, by stating that he will be busy with another car all day, the mechanic has in fact told the motorist that he could not repair his car right away.

12．What is the cognitive interpretation of image schema?

【答案】 Image schema is a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience.

Image schema exists at a level of abstraction, operates at a level of mental organization between propositional structures and concrete image , and it can be subdivided into the following items : a center-periphery schema , a continent schema ，a cycle schema ，a force schema ，a link schema ，a part-whole schema，a path schema，a scale schema and a vertical schema.

13．It is claimed in sociolinguistics that you are what you say. How would you comment on this theoretical claim?

【答案】 Everyone speaks differently. A personal dialect of an individual speaker combines elements regarding regional, social, gender, and age variations. In other words, an individual speaker^ regional and social back ground, his/her gender and age jointly determine the way he/she talks. From this point, we can claim that44You are what you say99.

Following this claim , we may expand the scope of our observation by introducing some social factors that are believed to influence our language behavior in a social context. Among these factors, some major ones include a） class ; b） gender ; c ） age ; d） ethnic identity; e） education background, f ） occupation , and g ） religious belief. In our daily speaking, the potential selection of linguistic forms can reflect the above factors, which determine our identities.

For example , women use more “fancy” color terms such as “mauve” and “beige”； use less powerful curse words; use more intensifiers such as “terrible” and “awful ”； use more tag questions. On the other hand, your way of speaking, to some extent, reflect your identity.

14．What are the differences between simile and metaphor?

【答案】 Simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing , and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like. For example, the phrase as cold as ice is a common simile.

Although metaphor also makes a comparison between two unlike elements , this comparison is implied rather than stated. That is , it differs from simile in that the words such as like or as do not appear. For example, uThe life is a stage” is a metaphor.