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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． IPA

【答案】 IPA is the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet , which is devised by the International Phonetic Association in 1888. IPA is a set of symbols which can be used to represent the phones and phonemes of natural languages.

2． 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.

3． cohort model

【答案】 The cohort model is a supposed doctrine dealing with the spoken word recognition postulated by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990. It is suggested that the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input is analyzed , candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process continues until only one word candidate matches the input- the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.

4． Transformational-Generative grammar

【答案】 Transformational-generative grammar is proposed by Noam Chomsky. He postulated a syntactic base of language （called deep structure ） , which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of （possibly universal） rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that is identical to an actual sentence of a language , after the mediating of a series of rules （called transformations ） that act upon the deep structures.

5． Subordinate construction

【答案】 Subordinate constructions are one of the two subtypes of endocentric constructions. Those in which there is only one head , with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent , are subordinate constructions.

6． Interlanguage

【答案】 It refers to the type of language constructed by second or foreign language learners who are still in the process of learning a language. It‟s a language system between the target language and the learner‟s native language, and imperfect compared with the target language, but not mere translation from the learner^ native language. For example, when the Chinese student is learning English, he may make errors like “to touch the society”.

7． Surface structure

【答案】 It is a term used in generative grammar to refer to the final stage in the syntactic representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological component of the grammar, and which thus most closely corresponds to the structure we articulate and hear. For instance, “John is easy to please.” and “John is eager to please.” are two sentences with the same surface structure.

8． inflectional morpheme

【答案】 Inflectional morpheme: It is also called inflectional affixes, which attaches to the end of words. Inflectional affixes only add a minute or delicate grammatical meaning to the stem. The plural suffix is a typical example of this kind.

9． division of pragmatic labor

【答案】 Horn observes that the Q-based and R-based principles often directly collide and suggests the resolution comes from a division of pragmatic labor，which reads “The use of a marked （relatively complex and/or prolix） expression when a corresponding unmarked （simpler ，less “effortful”）alternate expression is available tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message （one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed） .

10．Stylistics

【答案】 Stylistics is a branch of linguistics studies the features of situationally distinctive uses （varieties ） of language , and tries to establish principles capable of accounting for the particular choices made by individual and social groups in their use of language.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．What is behaviourism?

【答案】 Behaviourism is a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. Behaviourism in linguistics holds that children learn language through a chain of “stimulus-response reinforcement”，and the adult‟s use of language is also a process of “stimulus-response”.

12．What is the definition of cognitive linguistics?

【答案】 Cognitive linguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.

13．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.

14．Cite an example to explain synchronic linguistics.

Synchronic Linguistics is the description of a language at some point of time in history. It 【答案】

focuses on the characteristics of the language at a certain time. For example, when we study English, we learn about the vocabulary, the language points and oral English etc. At this time, we are learning English of current time in synchronic method.

15．What is the difference between meaning, concept, connotation, and denotation?

【答案】 Meaning refers to the association of language symbols with the real world. There are many types of meanings according to different approaches. Concept is the impression of objects in peopled mind ; connotation , meaning the properties of the entity a word denotes , is the implied meaning , similar to implication and implicature ; denotation , like sense , is not directly related to objects , but makes the abstract assumption of the real world. For example, the denotation of human is any person such as John and Mary, and its connotation is “biped‟‟ „„featherless‟‟ „„rational‟‟ etc.

16．What is move-α rule?

【答案】 Move-α rule is a general movement rule accounting for the syntactic behavior of any constituent movement. It goes like this: any element may be moved to another place, or more generally changed in some way, as long as the relevant conditions （principles ） are satisfied. That is to say, the movements are constrained by the other modules of grammar in order to rule out ungrammatical forms, such as the kissed boy girl and were kissed the girl by the boy. It is the interaction of move-α with other syntactic principles that results in grammatical strings. It is responsible for the mapping between active and passive.

三、Essay-question

17．Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language.

【答案】 Semantic change plays a very important role in widening the vocabulary of a language. Since language is symbolic, each word serves as a symbol in relation to a specific meaning. In this sense, we need infinite numbers of words or symbols to code the physical entities and our experiential concepts. But this is impossible for communication. Therefore, users give a new concept to an old form, thus the