语言与应用语言学教学辅导.

《语言与应用语言学》教学辅导

An Overview

This book contains ten units. The last unit gives the general view about the course and its assessment. It is intended to give you a better idea of what the book is about. But unfortunately the book gives neither clear system of linguistics nor clear titles for each unit, thus causes certain difficulty in students’ understanding and self-study. As a matter of fact:

Unit 1: Awareness of Our Language talks about Historical Linguistics;

Unit 2: Physical Aspects of Language mainly discusses Phonetics;

Unit 3: The Symbolic Nature of Language is about Semantics;

Unit 4: Organizing Our Experiences of the Material World is about the basic function of language: naming;

Unit 5: Doing Things with Language is about Pragmatics;

Unit 6: Managing Interpersonal Relations is also about Pragmatics;

Unit 7: Talk, Talk and Talk is about Discourse Analysis;

Unit 8: Language in Society is about Social Linguistics;

Unit 9: Language, Brain, and Mind is about Psycholinguistics;

Unit 10: General Review and Course Assessment: A preface which gives the main idea of the book.

Generally speaking, the first nine units can be reorganized into three parts: Part 1, bases of the production of language (the social bases: Unit 1 and the psychological bases: Units 2 and 9); Part II, the nature of language (Unit 3); Part III, the functions of language (Units 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).

Part I Bases of the production of language

I. The social bases: Historical Linguistics (Unit 1)

There are different explanations as to the coming into being of language: The Bible and Historical Linguistics. The latter explores from a scientific view the history of human beings and the language. The unit also deals with a nature-nurture controversy about language.

A lot of facts on the history of human development with the time are to be

remembered in this unit.

II.The psychological bases:

1)Psycholinguistics or Neurolinguistics (Unit 9)

First distinguish between the brain, the mind and the heart; human brain has two nervous systems. Language is controlled by the left hemisphere; there are necessary conditions and sufficient conditions in language acquisition; to acquire a language means a child learns his mother tongue naturally without any effort; to learn a language need s a man’s positive effort.

2)Phonetics (Unit 2)

This unit deals with some speech organs. There are face-to-face communication and written communication. There are four steps: hit upon an idea ... The production of speech needs three stages: initiation, phonation, and articulators. It is important to remember the names of speech organs matched with pictures: tip, blade, front, center and back of the tongue, hard palate, soft palate, uvula, epiglottis, and teeth.

Part II The nature of language (Unit 3)

We human beings live in multiple worlds. First there is a physical and tangible world; it is also called a material world. Second, there is a subjective world. It consists of things like feelings, attitudes, beliefs, values, motives, and intentions. No one else can verify them. Furthermore, there is a third symbolic world, that is, the world artificially constructed by symbols. This may be confusing. Simply speaking, the symbolic world is just the world in the books. This shows that words have symbolic functions, because they are used to refer to things found in the three worlds.

The sounds of a word, or its spelling or its strokes are to a word as the material, the shape and the size are to a chair. They are material realizations of an abstract word-form with a meaning attached to it. It is the abstract word-form with its meaning and its relation with other words in communication that makes a word a word. This chapter needs to be read more times for better understanding.

Part III Functions of Language

Function 1: Organizing, i.e. naming and categorizing (Unit 4)