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一、Explain-the-fllowing-terms

1． Language Acquisition Device （LAD ）

【答案】 Language Acquisition Device: LAD refers to an innate faculty of language in general with which children are bom. It is posited by Chomsky , who argues that LAD probably consists of three elements : a hypothesis-maker, linguistic universal, and an evaluation procedure.

2． The Innateness Hypothesis

【答案】 The innateness hypothesis was proposed by Chomsky. It says that the ability to acquire a human language is part of the biologically innate equipment of the human being, and that an infant is bom with this knowledge of basic grammatical relations and categories, and this knowledge is universal.

3． Predication analysis

【答案】 Predication analysis is an important step in the analysis of sentential meaning. The predication is the common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Such analysis is to break down the sentence into its smaller constituents: argument and predicate. The predicate is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. The argument is the logical participant.

4． 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.

5． 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.

6． Open-class words

【答案】 Open-class words refer to words whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited and with the emergence of new ideas , inventions , and so on ; new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon. For example , nouns , verbs , and adjectives all belong to this class.

7． 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.

8． 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/.

9． 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.

10．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.

二、Short-answer-questions

11．Why is back-formation a productive way of forming verbs?

【答案】 Backformation is a type of word-formation by which a shorter word is derived by the deletion of an imagined affix of a longer form already present in the language. It is a special kind of metanalysis , combined with analogical creation, e.g. the verb edit was formed from editor by dropping the imagined derivational suffix -or.

The majority of backformed words are verbs，for verbs have a peculiar property to develop around them a number of deverbal nouns, such as the agent noun and the noun of action, like edit from editor. Verbs also generate various types of participial adjectives, such as creating and created. Hence people expect to find a family of derivatives attached to a verb. On the other hand, when people come across one or more apparently deverbal nouns, they often take for granted that there must he a corresponding verb , and they simply create the verb base from which the original word seems to be derived.

12．thrived 10. breathed 11. turned 12. hissed

【答案】

13．How are affixes classified?

【答案】 Considering the free and bound morpheme, affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme, so it is naturally bound.

Depending on their position with reference to the root or stem of the word, affixes are generally classified into three subtypes , namely , prefix , suffix , and infix. For examples , “para-” as prefix ，“-tion” as suffix, and “-bloomingly-” in word “abso-bloomingly-luty” as infix.

Affix can also be classified depending on the distinction between inflectional affixes and derivational affixes. The former often only add a minute grammatical function to the stem and do not change the word class of the word they attach to; while the latter are very productive in making new words and often change the lexical meaning. For instances, “-s” in words “toys”，“walks” and “John‟s” is inflectional affixes, while “-tion” is a derivational affix in word “recitation”.

14．What are the major concerns of pragmatics?

【答案】 Pragmatics is the study of the language in use. It is mainly about how speakers use language appropriately and effectively in accordance with a given context. It is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker （or writer） and interpreted by a listener （or reader） . It has more to do with participants of communication and context in which communication takes place. Hence the study of speaker meaning, that of contextual meaning, of what is unsaid but communicated.

15．What is register? Use an example to illustrate your idea.

【答案】 There are many social constraints that come into play in controlling which variety from the linguistic repertoire of a speaker is to be used on a particular occasion. The type of language that is selected as appropriate to the type of situation is a register. The register is determined by three social variables : field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. For example, an appropriate language to an academic lecture in a college should be formal and polite, which is called register.

16．Analyze the following dialogue with reference to Grice’s Cooperative Principle

A : Oh I like this popular song so much How about you?

B : I often hear classical music, especially, the symphonies composed by Beethoven His Symphony No.9 is my favorite.

【答案】 B has obviously violated Maxim of Relation: A was asking B‟s opinion about a particular popular song , but B‟s response was actually about classical music. By such a violation , B probably wanted to imply that he did not like that popular song.

三、Essay-question

17．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