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1. Creativity is one of the features of human language. It refers to the fact that language provides opportunities for sending messages that have never been sent before and for understanding novel messages. The grammatical rules and the words of a language are finite, but the sentences are infinite. Every speaker uses langue creatively.

2. In sociolinguistics, taboo refers to a prohibition on the use of, mention of or association with particular objects, actions, or persons. Euphemism is an expression that substitutes one which may be seen as offensive or disturbing to the addressee. Taboo and euphemism are actually two sides of the same coin. Taboos are usually expressed by their euphemistic expressions in our daily life.

3. The general roles language plays are called metafunctions by Hallidy. There are three

metafunctions: Ideational function ---- we use language to talk about our experience of the world,

including our inner world, to describe events, states and the entities involved;

Interpersonal function ---- we use language to interact with others, to establish and maintain relations with them, to please them, to anger them, and influence their behavior, to get their help or sympathy.

Textual function ---- language as a system organizes messages in a unified manner so that chunks of messages fit logically with others around them and with the wider context in which the talking or writing takes place.

3. Target domain and source domain are the components of metaphors. That is to say all metaphors are composed of two domains. They allow us to understand one domain of experiences in terms of another. The domain to be conceptualized is called target domain while the conceptualizing domain is termed the source domain. The transference of properties of the source domain to the target domain is referred to by some cognitive linguistics as mapping. The source domain s concrete and familiar. The target domain is abstract and novel.

1. Semantics and pragmatics both are concerned with the study of meaning, but they study meanings from different perspectives. Generally peaking, semantics is defined as the study of meaning, and pragmatics is defined as the study of meaning in context. The meanings communicated through language are of two types: conventional meanings and intentional meanings. The former is studied in semantics and the latter in pragmatics. So semantics concentrates on meanings that come from linguistic knowledge, while pragmatics concentrates

on meanings that people mean by their utterances rather that what they words, phrases and sentences mean by themselves. In other words, semantics is concerned with linguistic meaning, while pragmatic analysis is concerned with speaker meaning.

2. The three types of antonyms in English are gradable antonyms, complementary antonyms and reversal antonyms. Gradable antonyms are pairs of words opposite to each other, but the positive of one word does not necessarily imply the negative of the other, or vice versa. For example, a person who is not rich is not necessary poor. Complementary antonyms are words opposite to each other and the positive of one implies the negative of the other. For examples, dead and alive, male and female. Reversal antonyms are words that denote the same relation or process from one or the other direction. For examples, push and pull, come and go.

1. Intonation and stress generally occur simultaneously in utterance. When intonation contour falls on a syllable, the nucleus is stressed and the vowel is naturally lengthened a bit. In the meantime, there is a little pause after the syllable. This simultaneous functioning of the features serves to highlight the information focus, or to eliminate ambiguity.

Every component of a sentence contains some information. It may or may not be highlighted in speech, depending on the speaker’s intention and the situation. Intonation contour can indicate the information focus of the sentence.

2. The study of speech sounds is called Phonetics. It includes articulatory phonetics, which focuses on the production of sounds; acoustic phonetics, which analyses the physical properties of speech sounds and auditory phonetics, which focuses on perceptive mechanism of speech sounds. Phonology and phonetics are both concerned with the study of speech sounds, but the two differ in perspectives.Phonetics is a part of phonology and provides the means for describing speech sounds; phonology is concerned with the ways in which these speech sounds form systems and patterns in human language. Phonetics is static, phonology is dynamic.

1.Function of phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds that form meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to made up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to form plurals and past tenses, to produce aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops in the appropriate context, to know what is or is not a sound in one’s language, and to know that different phonetic strings may represent the same morpheme.

1 The advantages of this approach to meaning analysis are obvious. Firstly, it is a breakthrough in the formal representation of meaning. Once formally represented, meaning components can be seen. Secondly, it reveals the impreciseness of the terminology in the traditional approach to meaning analysis. The limitations of componential analysis are also apparent. It cannot be applied to the analysis of all lexicons, but merely to words within the same semantic field. It is controversial whether semantic features are universal primes of word meanings in all languages.

2 Homonyms are words which have the same form, but different meanings. Words which have the same spelling but different meanings are called homograph. Homonyms are listed as separate entries in a dictionary, because lexicographers see them as unrelated in sense. A polyseme is a word which has several related senses. Lexicographers make the distinction between homonyms and polysemes based on the intuition of native speakers as well as the etymology or history of words.

1. Metaphors have three main features: systematicity, creation of similarities, and imaginative 1. Metaphors have three main features: systematicity, creation of similarities, and imaginative rationality. Metaphors are systematic precisely because they are conceptual in nature. Metaphor can create similarities between the two domains involved. This runs counter to the traditional view which holds that similarities are inherent in the entities themselves. But cognitive linguists hold that the similarities relevant to metaphors are experiential rather than objective. Metaphors are characterized by imaginative rationality. They unite reasoning and imagination. Metaphors as a form of reasoning by analogy involve categorization, entailment and inference. By metaphors we understand one kind of thing in terms of another kind of thing.

2. The term variety is the label given to the form of a language used by any group of speakers or used in a particular field. A variety is characterized by the basic lexicon, phonology, syntax shared by members of the group. Varieties of a language are of four types: the standard variety, regional (geographical) dialects, sociolects (social dialects) and registers (functional varieties). The standard variety is the form of a language used by the government and communication media, taught in schools and universities and is the main or only written form. A regional dialect is a variety of a language spoken by people living in an area. Sociolects are forms of a language that characterize the speech of different social classes. Register is a term widely used in sociolinguistics to refer to “varieties according to use.”

3. Reference is the relation by which a word picks out or identifies an entity in the world. London refers to or denotes the capital of Great Britain. The word dog denotes a kind of domestic animal. The referential theory, the simplest theory of meaning, claims that meaning is reference. Words stand not only in relation to the world but also to human mind. So in addition to reference, there is another dimension of word meaning called sense. For example, when you hear the expression dog, you will naturally reflect on its features in addition to the kind of animal as the referent of the expression. Sense is mental representation, the association with something in the speaker/hearer's mind. Words like dragon, but, of and phrases like a round triangle have sense, but no referent. Words like dog, horse, car and gun have both referent and sense.