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1. What are three categories of antonyms?
Complementary antonyms 互补性反义(male—female; alive--dead); Gradable antonyms 可分等级的反义词 (rich—poor; old--young); Relational antonyms 关系反义词 (husband—wife; father--son)
2. What are the main features of the English compounds?
Orthographically a compound can be written as one word, two separate words with or without a hyphen in between. Syntactically, the part of speech of a compound is determined by the last element. Semantically, the meaning of a compound is idiomatic, not calculable from the meanings of all its components. Phonetically, the word stress of a compound usually falls on the first element.
3. What is the cooperative principle and its four maxims?
Cooperative principle: Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Its four maxims are the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner.
4. What are the causes of language change? Give examples for illustration. 1. Development of science and technology (hovercraft; CD-ROM) 2. Social and political changes and needs (hot line; jungle war)
3. More women taking up men’s jobs (former: fireman; chairman new: fire fighter; chairperson)
4. The way children acquire a language (It’s I. It’s me.)
5. The result of economy of memory (dog—dogs; cow--cows)
6. Regularization of exceptional plurals (dwarfs—dwarfs (more often than dwarves))
7. The result of “theory of least effort” (Cathy got it cheap. Cathy got it cheaply.) 8. Others
5. After World War II, neologisms (new words or new meanings for established words) swept in at any rate much faster than that of the pre-war period. Please illustrate the main reasons for the frequent appearance of neologisms.
The main reasons for the frequent appearance of neologisms are three: 1. Marked progress of science and technology (e.g. overkill; fall-out); 2. Socio-economic, political and cultural changes (e.g. gay; spokeswoman); 3. The influence of other cultures and languages (e.g. karaoke)
6. Why do you think speech is more basic than writing?
Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as the natural or the primary medium of human language for some obvious reasons. Speech plays a greater role than writing in the amount of information conveyed. Speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue.
7. Why do we say language is arbitrary?
Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between the sounds that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. The fact that different language has different words for the same object is a good illustration of the arbitrary nature of language. (e.g. type-writer, shoe- maker)
8. What is hyponym?
Hyponymy is the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. It is used to refer to specific-general semantic relationship between lexical items. (Animal—dog, cat, etc.)
9. 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?
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, around 48 in the case of the English language. 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 has no such design feature, then it will be like animal communicational system which will be highly limited. It cannot produce a very large number of sound combinations (e.g. works), which are distinct in meaning.
10. Why is it difficult to define language?
It is difficult to define language, as it is such a general term that covers too many things. Thus, definitions for it all have their own special emphasis, and are not totally free from imitations.
11. Is American English superior to African English? Why or why not?
American English is not superior to African English. As different branches of English, African English and American English are equal. Similar as they are influenced by their respective cultural context and thus form respective systems, for pronunciation, words and even grammar.
12. What is sense and what is reference? How are they related?
Sense: the way people relate words to each other within the framework of their language. Reference: how language refers to this external world
Relationship: 1. sense but not reference: function words, such as and, or, never. These make connections between meanings of different units of language. 2. same reference but different sense. For example, Venus,
13. How are sentence meaning and utterance meaning related, and how do they differ?
The meaning if a sentence is abstract, and decontextualized. The meaning of an uttenrance is concrete, and context-dependent. The meaning of an utterance is based
on sentence meaning; it is the realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in context. For example, my bag is heavy.
14. According to Austin, what are the three acts a person is possibly performing while making an utterance? Give an example.
The three acts are (1) locutionary act(言内行为). It is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology. (2) illocutionary act(言外行为). It is the act of expressing the speaker’s intension, it is the act performed in saying something. (3) perlocutionary act(言后行为). It is the act performed by or resulting from saying something, it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance.
15. How is the notion of context interpreted?
The notion of context is essential to the pragmatics study of language. It is generally considered as constituted by the knowledge shared by the speaker and hearer. The shared knowledge is of two types. 1. the knowledge of the language they use. 2. the knowledge about the world, including the general knowledge about the word and the specific knowledge about the situation in which linguistic communication is taking place.
【 1 】 a: Don't say X.
b: People don't say X.
? The first is a prescriptive command, while the second is a descriptive statement.
? The distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are.
【 2 】 a: Boy the ball kicked the.
b: The ball kicked the boy.
There are syntactic conditions and semantic conditions the words must meet.
Words in A violate syntactic rules and in B violate semantic conditions.
【 3 】 the love of God:
a: God loves somebody b: Somebody loves God
The difference between them simply comes from the operation of relevant transformations. Sentence a, means ….. sentence b, means……
【 4 】 My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late.
Antonyms can also be used as a rhetorical device to make the expressions more contrastive and impressive.
To achieve emphasis by putting contrasting ideas together, to express economically the opposite of a particular thought.
【 5 】 a: Let’s get the kids something.
b: Okay, but I veto I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M.
(违反了方式原则 the maxim of manner ，拐弯抹角，咬文嚼字，其中必有
缘故.)
含义：I don’t want the children to know we are talking about ice-cream.
【 6 】Analyze the different thematic meaning in the following sentences.
A: The young man donated the car voluntarily.
B: The car was donated by the young man voluntarily.
This is what is communicated by the way in which the message is
organized in terms of order and emphasis.
Sentence 1, 主题是the young man Sentence 2. 主题是the car
【 7 】/p/=[ ph ] + [ p ] + [ p? ] (unreleased)
Allophone 音位变体
? allophone: phonic variants/realizations of a phoneme ? A phoneme is realized as allophone 1+allophone 2+….
【 8 】A: We’ll all miss Bill and Rose, won’t we?
B: Well, we’ll all miss Bill.
根据Co-operative Principle B说话人违反了量的原则the maxim of quantity 只说
BILL 不提ROSE .B违反了CP而Politeness Principle在起作用
【 9 】A: The hostess is an awful bore. Don’t you think?
B: The roses in the garden are beautiful, aren’t they?
违反了关联原则 the maxim of relevance 答非所问 含义：I don’
t want to make any comments on the hostess in such a rude way .
【10 】A: Someone has eaten the icing of the cake!
B: It wasn’t me!
B违反了关系原则 the maxim of relevance 暗示 it was someone else 至于是谁 他不愿
说出来