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

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. Explain the relationship between the standard language and dialects in the development of a society by giving some proper examples.（人大2008研）

Key: The co-existence of the standard language and dialects in a society is a phenomenon called diglossia, which refers to a situation that two or several very different varieties of the same language are used, side by side, for different sets of functions. All those varieties are standardized to some degree and felt to be alternatives by native speakers and usually have special names. Usually the more standard variety (i.e. the standard language) is called the High-variety or H-variety; the others (i.e. dialects) are called Low-variety or L-variety. The H-variety is co妹妹only used in government, education, media and other public and formal areas; while the L-varieties are used by people when they are with family members, intimate friends or other informal circumstances. Thus the High-variety has greater social prestige, while the Low-variety is used in relatively informal contexts. For example, in standard English, we come across words like “tornado”, “hurricane”, while people also call it “willy-willy” in informal situations. Both of them are understandable and play different functions in our life.

5. Use examples to define “gradable antonymy”, “complementary antonymy”, and “converse antonymy”.（浙江大学2009研）

Key: Gradable antonymy is the sense relation between two anyonyms which differ in terms of degree. There is an intermediate ground between the two. The denial of one is not necessarily the assertion of the other. Something which is not “good” is not necessarily “bad”. It may simply be “so-so” or “average”.

Complementary antonymy is the sense relation between the two antonyms which are complementary to each other. That is, they divided up the whole of semantic field completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other. Not only he is alive means he is not dead, he is not alive also means he is dead.

Converse antonymy is a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities. X is the parent of Y means the same as Y is the child of X. it is the same relationship seen from two different angles.

6. What are linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity?（华南理工2015研）

Key: Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity are two parts of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Linguistic determinism says that linguistic structure determines cognitive structure. That is, learning a language changes the way a person thinks. Linguistic relativity says that the resulting cognitive systems are different in speakers of different languages. These two parts have shed two important insights. The first one is that there is nowadays a recognition that language, as code, reflects cultural occupations and constraints the way people think. The second one is that more than in Whorf’s days, however, we recognize how important context is in complementing the meanings encoded in the language.

7. What is a phoneme? How to discover phonemes?（北航2013研）

Key: Phoneme is a basic unit of phonological study, and it is an abstract collection of phonetic features which can distinguish meaning. By convention, phonemic transcription are placed between slant lines (//), like, / t / or / d /.

A phoneme is a phonological unit that is of distinctive value. It’s the smallest distinctive unit in the sound system of a language. It’s a unit of explicit sound contrast. If two sounds in a language make a contrast between two different words, they are said to be different phonemes.

8. The relationship between pragmatics and semantics.（华南理工2018研）

Key: Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It deals with particular utterances in particular situations and is especially concerned with the

various ways in which the many social contexts of language performance can influence interpretation. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to co妹妹unicate rather than with the way language is internally structured. While semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a language. It is not only concerned with meanings of words as lexical items, but also with levels of language below the word and above it.

Semantics studies the relationship between the symbols and the world, and pragmatics is the study of the relationship between the symbols and the speaker. In other words, the main difference between the two terms lies in whether the speakers are taken into consideration. So pragmatics is related to more dynamic study targets, while semantics is to study more static phenomena, and in linguistics

research they complement each other.

9. What is psycholinguistics mainly concerned with and what contribution can it make to language study?（人大2008研）

Key: Psycholinguistics, earlier called the psychology of language, is the study of the language-processing mechanisms. It is concerned with the relationship between the language and the human mind, and it is a subject which links psychology and linguistics. There are two possible directions of study in psycholinguistics. One is that we may use language as a way of explaining psycholinguistic theories and processes, for example, the role of language as it influences memory, perception, attention and learning. And it is for this that the term psycholinguistics is sometimes used. The other is that we may study the effects of psychological constraints on the use of language, for example, how memory limitations affect speech production and comprehension. It is the latter which has provided the main focus of interest in linguistics, where the subject is basically regarded as the study of the mental processes underlying the planning, production, perception and comprehension of speech.

10. How does human language differ from the co妹妹unication 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 co妹妹unication.

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.

11. 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 an 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.

12. 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 co妹妹unication, 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.

13. What is the difference between sentence meaning and utterance meaning?（华南理工2016研）

Key: A sentence is a gra妹妹atical concept, and the meaning of a sentence is often studied as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of predication. But if we think of a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of co妹妹unication, it becomes an utterance, and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered (or used). So it is impossible to tell if “The dog is barking” is a sentence or an utterance. It can be either. It all depends on how we look at it and how we are going to analyze it. If we take it as a gra妹妹atical unit and consider it as a self-constrained unit in isolation from context, then we are treating it as a sentence. If we take it as something a speaker utters in a certain situation with a certain purpose, then we are treating it as an utterance. Therefore, while the meaning of a sentence is abstract, and decontextualized, that of an utterance 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 co妹妹unication, or simply in the context.

学而时习之，不亦说乎？——孔子