1. What are three categories of antonyms?
Complementary antonyms 互补性反义(male一颗流星—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 parate 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 purpo or direction of the talk exchange in which you ar
e 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 caus of language change? Give examples for illustration孩子起名.
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. Plea 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 n that there is no intrinsic connection between the sounds that people u and the objects to which the 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 n relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. It is ud to refer to specific-general mantic 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?汇报演出
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 sma
ll t of sounds, around 48 in the ca of the English language. And out of the huge number of words, there can be astronomical number of possible ntences and phras, which in turn can combine to form unlimited number of texts. 现实感Most animal communication systems do not have this design feature of human language.
随笔600字高中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?
乱炖的家常做法It is difficult to define language, as it is such a general term that covers too many things. 听证申请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, Afri
can小孩可以艾灸吗 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.
