36. What are minimal pairs?
When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string, the two forms (i. e., word) are supposed to form a “minimal pair”, e.g., “pill” and “bill”, “pill” and “till”, “till” and “dill”, “till” and “kill”, etc. All these words together constitute a minimal set. They are identical in form except for the initial consonants. There are many minimal pairs in English, which makes it relatively easy to know what are English phonemes. It is of great importance to find the minimal pairs when a phonologist is dealing with the sound system of an unknown language.
37. What is free variation?
If two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast; namely, if the substitution of one for the other does not generate a new word form but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, the two sounds then are said to be in “free variation”. The plosives, for example, may not be exploded when they occur before another plosive or a nasal (e. g., act, apt, good morning). The minute distinctions may, if necessary, be transcribed in diacritics. These unexploded and exploded plosives are in free variation. Sounds in free variation should be assigned to the same phoneme.
38. What is complementary distribution?
When two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in “complementary distribution”. For example, the aspirated English plosives never occur after [s], and the unsaturated ones never occur initially. Sounds in complementary distribution may be assigned to the same phoneme. The allophones of [l], for example, are also in complementary distribution. The clear [l] occurs only before a vowel, the voiceless equivalent of [l] occurs only after a voiceless consonant, such as in the words “please”, “butler”, “clear”, etc., and the dark [l] occurs only after a vowel or as a syllabic sound after a consonant, such as in the words “feel”, “help”, “middle”, etc.
39. What is the assimilation rule? What is the deletion rule?
The “assimilation rule” assimilates one segment to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar. This rule accounts for the raring pronunciation of the nasal [n] that occurs within a word. The rule is that within a word the nasal consonant[n] assumes the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The negative prefix “in-“ serves as a good example. It may be pronounced as [in], or [im] when occurring in different phonetic contexts: e. g., indiscrete-[    ] (alveolar) inconceivable-[    ](velar) input-[‘imput] (bilabial)
The “deletion rule” tells us when a sound is to be deleted although is orthographically represented. While the letter “g” is mute in “sign”, “design” and “paradigm”, it is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives: “signature”, “designation” and “paradigmatic”. The rule then can be stated as: delete a [g] when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. This accounts for some of the seeming irregularities of the English spelling.
40. What is suprasegmental phonology? What are suprasegmental features?
“Suprasegmental phonology” refers to the study of phonological properties of linguistic units larger than the segment called phoneme, such as syllable, length and pitch, stress, intonation.
41.  What is morphology?
“Morphology” is the branch of grammar that studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed. It is generally divided into two fields: inflectional morphology and lexical/derivational morphology.
42. What is inflection/inflexion?
“Inflection” is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which does not change the grammatical class of the items to which they are attached.
43. What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph?
The “morpheme” is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. The word “boxes”, for example, has two morphemes: “box” and “-es”, neither of which permits further division or analysis if we don’t wish to sacrifice meaning. Therefore a morpheme is considered the minimal unit of meaning. Allomorphs, like allophones vs. phones, are the alternate shapes (and thus phonetic forms) of the same morphemes. Some morphemes, though, have no more than one invariable form in all contexts, such as “dog”, “cat”, etc. The variants of the plurality “-s” make the allomorphs thereof in the following examples: map-maps, mouse-mice, sheep-sheep etc.
44. What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?
A “free morpheme” is a morpheme that constitutes a word by itself, such as ‘bed”, “tree”, etc. A “bound morpheme” is one that appears with at least another morpheme, such as “-s” in “beds”, “-al” in “national” and so on. All monomorphemic words are free morphemes. Those polymorphemic words are either compounds (combination of two or more free morphemes) or derivatives (word derived from free morphemes).
45. What is a root ? What is a stem? What is an affix?
A “root” is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. In other words, a “root” is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “Internationalism” is a four-morpheme derivative which keeps its free morpheme “nation” as its root when “ inter-”, “-al” and “-ism” are taken away.
A “stem” is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as, and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word “friends”, “friend” is both the root and the stem, but in the word “friendships”, “friendships” is its stem, “friend” is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e. g., “mailman” , “girlfriend” ,ect. An “affix” is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used, only when added to another morpheme(the root or stem). Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes: prefix, suffix and infix, e. g. , “mini-”, “un-”, ect.(prefix); “-ise”, “-tion”, ect.(suffix).
46. What are open classes? What are closed classes?
In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. They are “open-class words”, since we can regularly add new lexical entries to these classes. The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, closed classes, or closed-class words. The number of them is hardly alterable, if they are changeable at all.
47.  What is lexicon? What is word? What is lexeme? What is vocabulary? Lexicon? Word? Lexeme? Vocabulary?
“Lexicon”, in its most general sense, is synonymous with vocabulary. In its technical sense, however, lexicon deals with the analysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. “Word” is a unit of expression which has universal intuitive recognition by native-speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. This definition is perhaps a little vague as there are different criteria with regard to its identification and definition. It seems that it is hard, even impossible, to define “word” linguistically. Nonetheless it is universally agreed that the following three senses are involved in the definition of “word”, none of which, though, is expected to cope with all the situations: (1) a physically definable unit, e.g. [it iz ‘w   ] (phonological), “It is wonder” (orthographic); (2) the common factor underlying a set of forms (see what is the common factor of “checks”, “checked”, “checking ”, etc.); (3) a grammatical unit (look at (1) again; every word plays a grammatical part in the sentence). According to Leonard Bloomfield, a word is a minimum free form (compare: a sentence is a maximum free form, according to Bloomfield). There are other factors that may help us identify words: (1) stability (no great change of orthographic features); (2) relative uninterruptibility (we can hardly insert anything between two parts of a word or between the letters). To make the category clearer we can subclassify words into a few types: (1) variable and invariable words; (2) grammatical and lexical words (e. g. to, in, etc., and table, chair, etc. By “lexical words” we mean the words that carry a semantic content, e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs; (3) closed-class and open-class words. In order to reduce the ambiguity of the term “word”, the term “lexeme” is postulated as the abstract unit which refers to the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be distinguished from other smaller units. A lexeme can occur in many different forms in actual spoken or written texts. For example, “write” is the lexeme of the following words: “write”, “write”, “wrote”, “writing”, and “written.” “Vocabulary” usually refers to all words or lexical items a person has acquired about technical or/and untechnical things. So we encourage our students to enlarge their vocabulary. “vocabulary” is also used to mean word list or glossary.
48. What is collocation?
“Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.
49. What is syntax?
“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.
50. What is a sentence?
L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.
51. What are syntactic relations?
“Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence. “Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”. “Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”. By “relations of co-occurrence”, one means that words of different sets of clauses may permit or require the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.
52. What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents (and ultimate constituents)?
“IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two (or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are. What remain of the first cut are called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”.
53. What are endocentric and exocentric constructions?
“Endocentric construction” is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable “centre” or “head”. Usually noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases belong to endocentric types because the constituent items are subordinate to the head. “Exocentric construction”, opposite of endocentric construction, refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as whole; that is to say, there is no definable centre or head inside the group. Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate (verb + object) construction, and connective (be + complement) construction.
54. What is a subject? A predicate? An object?
In some language, an “subject” refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case, such as “pater” in the following example: “pater filium amat” (put literally in English: the father the son loves). In English, a “grammatical subject” refers to a noun which can establish correspondence with the verb and which can be checked by a tag-question test, e.g., “He is a good cook, (isn’t he?).” A “predicate” refers to a major constituent of sentence structure in a binary analysis in which all obligatory constituents other than the subject are considered together. e.g., in the sentence “The monkey is jumping ”, “is jumping ” is the predicate. Traditionally “object” refers to the receiver or goal of an action, and it is further classified into two kinds: direct object and indirect object. In some inflecting languages, an object is marked by case labels: the “accusative case” for direct object, and the “dative case ” for direct object, and the “dative case” for indirect to word order (after the verb and preposition) and by inflections (of pronouns). e.g., in the sentence “John kissed me”, “me” is the object. Modern linguists suggest that an object refers to such an item that it can become a subject in passive transformation.
55. What is category?
The term “category” in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense, e.g., noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender, case and countability; and of the verb, for example, tense, aspect, voice, etc.
56.  What is number? What is gender? What is case?
“Number” is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc. In English, number is mainly observed in nouns, and there are only two forms: singular and plural. Number is also reflected in the inflections of pronouns and verbs.
“Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we natural gender (the opposite is grammatical gender).
“Case” identifies the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence. In Latin grammar, cases are based on variations in the morphological forms of the word, and are given the terms “accusative”, “nominative”, “dative”, etc. In English, the case category is realized in three ways: by following a preposition and by word order.
57. What is concord? What is government?
“Concord ” may be defined as requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories, e.g., “man runs”, “men run”. “Government” requires that one word of a particular class in a given syntactic class shall exhibit the form of a specific category. In English, government applies only to pronouns among the variable words, that is, prepositions and verbs govern particular forms of the paradigms of pronouns according to their syntactic relation with them, e.g., “I helped him; he helped me.”
58. What is a phrase? What is a clause?
A “phrase” is a single element of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of “clauses”. Traditionally, it is seen as part of a structural hierarchy, falling between a clause and word, e.g., “the three tallest girls” (nominal phrase). There is now a tendency to make a distinction between word groups and phrases. A “word group” is an extension of a word of a particular class by way of modification with its main features of the class unchanged. Thus we have nominal group, verbal group, adverbial group, conjunction group and preposition group.
A “clause” is group of words with its own subject and predicate included in a larger subject-verb construction, namely, in a sentence. Clauses can also be classified into two kinds: finite and non-finite clauses, the latter referring to what are traditionally called infinitive phrase, participle phrase and gerundial phrase.
59. What is conjoining? What is embedding? What is recursiveness?
“Conjoining” refers to a construction where one clause is co-ordinated or conjoined with another, e. g., “John bought a cat and his wife killed her.” “Embedding” refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (or main clause) in syntactic subordination, e.g., “I saw the man who had killed a chimpanzee.” By “recursiveness” we mean that there is theoretically no limit to the number of the embedded clauses in a complex sentence. This is true also with nominal and adverbial clauses, e.g., “I saw the man who killed a cat who…a rat which…that…”
60. What is hypotactic relation? What is paratactic relation?
“Hypotactic relation” refers to a construction where constituents are linked by means of conjunction, e.g. “He bought eggs and milk.” “Paratactic relation” refers to constructions which are connected by juxtaposition, punctuation or intonation, e. g., “He bought tea, coffee, eggs and milk” (pay attention to the first three nouns connected without “and”).
61.What is semantics（语义学）?
“Semantics” refers to the study of the communication of meaning through language. Or simply, it is the study of meaning.
62. What is meaning?
Though it is difficult to define, “meaning” has the following meaning: (1) an intrinsic property固有特性; (2) the connotation of a word; (3) the words put after a dictionary entry; (4) the position an object occupies in a system; (5) what the symbol user actually refers to; (6) what the symbol user should refer to; (7) what the symbol user believes he is referring to; (8) what the symbol interpreter refers to; (9) what the symbol interpreter believes it refers to; (10) what the symbol interpreter believes the user refers to…linguists argued about “meaning of meaning” fiercely in the result of “realism”, “conceptualism概念论/mentalism心灵主义”, “mechanism”, “contextualism（文脉上的，前后有关系的）”, “behaviorism（行为学派，行动主义）”, “functionalism”, etc. Mention ought to be made of the “Semantic Triangle Theory” of Ogden & Richards. We use a word and the listener knows what it refers to because, according to the theory, they have acquired the same concept/reference of the word used and of the object/referent.