当代语言学导论复习要点详细!含课后单词

Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics

Chapter1

Human superiority lies in his unique endowment-----the ability to talk, or rather, to communicate by means of language.

Talmud: god created the world by a word, instantaneously, without toil or pains.

Widdowson: the primacy of language in the way human beings conceive of the world.

Language is a vehicle of power, for control, for creation, and for change.

The study of human language is called linguistics.

Linguistics deals with human language as a whole or as particular languages.

1.As a whole: the system of human communication which consists of the

structured arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) into larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences, utterances.

2.As particular language: like French language, they are particular systems of

human communication used by people living in different parts of the world.

There is a continuum from one language to another.

Varieties of language: Any particular language is in essence a set of varieties.

1.local varieties区域变体–dialects and accents(the former differ from each

other in pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar; the latter only in pronunciation )

2.social varieties—sociolects社会方言(=social dialects , used by people of

different classes, ages, or sexes ),

3.historical varieties—temporal variety.(e.g. the 17th century English)

4.stylistic or occupational varieties---registers语域(e.g. formal English, scientific

English)

5.individual varieties—idiolects个人语言.

ually a language has an officially declared or generally considered

standard dialect(e.g. Putonghua in China, General American in the US)

From Prescriptivism to Descriptivism

Prescriptivism is the view that one variety of language has an inherently higher value than others.(try to impose rules from some high prestige language to some lower prestige language, like Latin and English)

Descriptivism is the policy of describing languages as they are bound to exist.

Usages of different varieties should be observed and recorded instead of being judged with some imposed norms.

Endowed or conventional?

Plato’s problem: How can every human being develop a rich system of linguistic knowledge on the basis of limited and fragmentary empirical

evidence?

Side of endowment: nativists(天生论) or mentalists（心智说）

Plato:

1.Man’s knowledge came from universal truths.

2.There was a universally correct and acceptable logic of language for man to

follow in expressing his ideas.

3.Knowledge of language was not learned but recalled.

Chomsky:

There is a biological, physiological entity inside our brain which decides what we speak.

Chomsky has given a name to this entity----UG, or universal grammar. His epistemology of the knowledge of language foes as follows:

1.Every human being has the language competence能力, because he has the

inborn UG which other species lack.

2.UG is the initial state of the human language faculty语言器官/机制which

alone cannot enable a human baby to speak. A baby needs to be exposed to the linguistic environment of a certain language and accumulate experience.

3.Due to the effect of later experience, the baby’s mind develops from the

initial state into the steady state, which corresponds to the competence of speaking a specific human language.

Side of convention: behaviorist or empiricists

Aristotle: knowledge of language was arrived at by convention and agreement