Key: Locutionary act refers to the act of uttering words, phrases, and clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.

2 What are homophones? Please give two pairs of examples.[华南理工2018研]

Key: Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e. different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. Homophones are two or more words that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, origin, and often spelling. For example, meat and meet or bear and bare, the former pair are pronounced [mit] and the latter [be], but they are totally different in meaning, word class and their usage.

3 In what way do we say language is arbitrary?[厦门大学2012研]

Key: Arbitrariness indicates that the absence of any physical correspondence between linguistic signals and the entities to which they refer. There are different levels of arbitrariness. It is the arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. Onomatopoeic words are the words that sound like the sounds they describe. Only when people know the meaning can they infer that the linguistic sign is appropriate for the exact sound. Also, convention is the link between a linguistic sign and its meaning. As learners of English we are often told “this is an idiom”—meaning it is a conventional to say things this way and you can not change the expression any other way even if you think it does not look or sound logical. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes a language be passed from generation to generation.

4 What is an affix? Please exemplify any affixes that attach (relatively) productively to verbs and do not change the category.[北航2012研]

Key: An affix refers to the collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme (the root or the stem), which has three subtypes: prefix, such as un-, mini-, para-; suffix, -ish, -al, -tion; and infix, abso-bloomingly-lutely, un-fucking-believable. All the affixes are the bound morphemes.

The affixes that attach to verbs and do not change the category are usually inflectional affixes. For example, -s in reads, looks and listens; -ed in excited, interested and consisted; -ing in studying, making and sitting. They are just grammatical markers and do not change the category of words.

5 What functions does language have?[北二外2015研]

Key: Language has at least seven functions: informative, interpersonal, performative, emotive, phatic, recreational and metalingual.

6 Define the term “cohesion” and illustrate its importance in discourse analysis.[人大2008研]

Key: Cohesion is an important field of studying discourse analysis, which refers to the grammatical and/or lexical relationships between the different elements of a discourse. This may be the relationship between different sentences or between different parts of a sentence. Actually, cohesion concerns the question of how sentences are explicitly linked together in a discourse by different kinds of overt devices. Such cohesive devices include reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion.

7 Explain with examples the various types of antonyms in English.[上外2000研]

Key: There are three main sub-types of antonyms: gradable antonyms, complementary antonyms, and converse antonyms.

Gradable antonyms refer to antonyms that differ in terms of degree. Such as good and bad. Complementary antonyms are a pair of antonyms complementary to each other: not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other; the denial of one also means the assertion of the other, such as male and female. Converse antonyms do not constitute a positive-negative opposition; they only show the reversal of a relationship between two entities, such as husband and wife.

8 What is the specialization of meaning? Give examples to explain it.[四川大学2009研]

Key: Specialization of meaning is the narrowing of a word to refer to what previously would have been but one example of what it referred to. For instance, the word meat originally referred to “any type of food”, but came to mean “the flesh of animals as opposed to the flesh of fish”. The original sense of meat survives in terms like mincemeat, “chopped apples and spices used as a pie filling”; sweetmeat, “candy”; and nutmeat, “the edible portion of a nut”. When developing your model language, it is meat to leave compounds untouched, even if one of their morphemes has undergone specialization (or any other meaning change).For an example from another language, the Japanese word koto originally referred to “any type of stringed instrument” but came to be used to refer only a specific instrument with 13 strings, which was played horizontally and was popular in the Edo Period.

9 What are endocentric and exocentric compounds? Which compounds below are endocentric and which are exocentric?[北航2013研]

airplane; dog food; pickpocket; policeman; redhead; sky-blue; walkman.

Key: Compounds can be further divided into two kinds: the endocentric compounds and the exocentric compounds. The head of a nominal or adjectival endocentric compound is de-verbal, that is, it is derived from a verb. Consequently, it is also called a verbal compound or a synthetic compound. Usually, the first member is a participant of the process verb. (e.g. self-control, pain-killer; bullet-resistant, sun-tanned.)

The exocentric nominal compounds are formed by V + N, V + Adv., and V + P, whereas the exocentric adjectives come from V + N and V + Adv. (e.g. playboy, sit-down, breakthrough; breakneck, walk-in.)

The endocentric compounds are airplane, dog food, redhead, sky blue.

The exocentric compounds are pickpocket, policeman, walkman.

10 How do you understand “performative” and “constative”?[南开大学2012研]

Key: In the Speech Act Theory, Austin claims that there are two types of sentences: performatives and constatives, which could not be valued from the traditional view of truth-value. Thus, he made a distinction between performatives and constatives. Performatives are statements which are used to do something, which do not state or describe a fact and are not verifiable. Constatives are statements that state or describe a fact and are thus verifiable.

11 How does human language differ from the communication systems of animals?[浙江大学2009研]

Key: The design features of language which refers to the defining properties of human language that tells the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

Arbitrariness: this is a core feature of language, which means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. Duality, which means the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels, has its own principles of organization. Creativity means language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Because of duality the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic unites to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never heard before. Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters, in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places.

12 Give examples to distinguish between three different types of antonyms: contraries, complementaries, conversives.[四川大学2009研]

Key: The term antonymy is used for oppositeness of

meaning and it can be classified on the basis of semantic contrast: contraries, complementaries and conversives.1) Contraries, also called contrary terms, or gradable antonyms such as rich-poor; good-bad; long-short. 2) Complementaries, also called contradictory terms and the contrast is absolute, such as alive-dead; single-married; male-female. 3) Conversives, also called relational opposites, one member of the pair presupposes the other member, and one of them cannot be used without suggesting the other, such as lend-borrow; give-receive; husband-wife.

(本题主要考查同义关系以及其分类。)

13 There are many ways of word formation in English lexicology. Can you define back formation and give two examples?[华南理工2014研]

Key: Back formation refers to a usually abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. Take televise for example. The word television appeared before televise. The first part of the word television was pulled out and analyzed as a root, even though no such root occurs elsewhere in the English language. Instead of taking out part of a word as a root, back formation allows us to take out a word of a given category and form a new homophonous word of a different category, such as the noun form white-wash that becomes the verb form whitewash.

14 What is Contrastive Analysis (in Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching)?[北航2013研]

Key: Contrastive Analysis (CA) came into fashion in the 1960s. It is a way of comparing the forms and meanings across the native language and the target language to spot the mismatches or differences so that people could predict learner’s difficulty, and then what to be learned and what doesn’t need to be learned in a second language learning situation is decided.

15 How do traditional semantics and pragmatics differ in their approach to the study, of meaning?[上外2000研]

Key: Pragmatics is different from the traditional semantics. The major difference between them lies in that pragmatics studies meaning in a dynamic way, while semantics studies meaning in a static way. Pragmatics takes context into consideration while semantics does not. Pragmatics takes care of the aspect of meaning that is not accounted for by semantics.

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in the context. It studies meaning in a dynamic way and as a process. In order to have a successful communication, the speaker and hearer must take the context into their consideration so as to effect the right meaning and intention. The development and establishment pragmatics in 1960s and 1970s resulted mainly from the expansion of the study semantics.

16 How do you distinguish “error” from “mistake”?[南开大学2012研]

Key: In the literature on error analysis, errors and mistakes are often differentiated. Errors usually result from the learner’s lack of knowledge; it represents a lack of competence. In other words, learners don’t know the right form or are unable to use language correctly. Mistakes often occur when learners fail to perform their competence. In other words, the learner has already learned the knowledge or skill but simply cannot function correctly due to lack of attention or other factors.

17 What is language aptitude? Please give three examples to illustrate this concept.[华南理工2014研]

Key: People differ in the extent to which they possess a natural ability for learning an L2. This ability, known as language aptitude, is believed to be partially related to general intelligence but also to be in part distinct. Language aptitude is thought to be a combination of various abilities, such as the ability to identity sound patterns in a new language, the ability to recognize the different grammatical functions of words in sentences, and the ability to infer language rules, and so on. It has been generally accepted that learners who achieve high scores in language aptitude tests learn rapidly and achieve high proficiency in second language learning. Yet how the components work on the learner’s inter-language development still remains speculative.

科学研究好象钻木板，有人喜欢钻薄的；而我喜欢钻厚的。——爱因斯坦