大学语言学基础 英语复习资料

Chapter 1:

1.What are the design features of language?

The features that define our human language can be called Design Features.

2.What is Arbitrariness?

Saussure first refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs(symbol forms) bear no natural relationship to their meaning.

3.What are onomatopoeia words?

Words that sound like the sounds they describe.

4.How do you understand of clauses language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level?

The order of elements in a sentence follows certain rules,and there is a certain degree of correspondence between the sequence of clauses and the real happenings.

5.What is duality?

By duality is meant 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.(Lyons)

6.What is the advantage of duality?

It lies in the great productive power our language is endowed with.A large number of different units can be formed out of a small number of elements.And out of the huge number of words,there can be endless number of sentences,which in turn can form unlimited number of texts.

7.How do you understand language is a system?

In terms of internal structure,language is hierarchical.There are 6 level.Speech sounds,morpheme,word,phrase,sentence,text.

8.What is creativity?

By creativity we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and recursiveness.(Chomsky Noam).The recursiveness refers to the potential of language to create endless sentences.

9.What is displacement?

Displacement means that human language enable their users to symbolize objects,events and concepts which are not present at the moment of communication.

10.What is the benefit of displacement?

Displacement benefits human beings by giving them the power to handle generalization and abstractions.

11.What are the 3 theory concerning to the origin of language?

First,the divine origin theory:Language is created by God.

Second,the invention theory:Language is created by man.(①The bow-wow theory拟声说the evidence is onomatopoeic words.②The pooh-pooh theory感叹说the evidence is interjections③The yo-ho-yo theory劳动喊声说some rhythmic grunt.)

Third,the evolutionary theory:when men involved in a certain degree,they have the cognitive ability.There are two basices:Psychical basic(speech organ) and social basises(cooperate communication ),then language came into being.

12.What are the seven functions of language?

Informative信息功能,Interpersonal人际，Performative施为，Emotion感情，Phatic communion 交感,recreational娱乐，meta-lingual元语言。

13.What are the six factors of speech event?