语言学常识

Part One: Definitions

nguage:Language is a means of verbal communication. It is (1) human speech; (2) the

ability to communicate by this means; (3) a system of vocal sounds and combinations of such sounds to which meaning is attributed, used for the expression or communication of thoughts and feelings; (4) the written representation of such a system.

ngue: the language system shared by a speech community.

Parole: the concrete utterances of a speaker.

nguage competence:unconscious knowledge of the system of grammatical rules in a

language.

Language performance: the language actually used by people in speaking or writing.

4.Creativity: Language is resourceful because of its duality and recursiveness.

5.Phonology:the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages. It aims to

discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur.

6.Articulatory phonetics: the study of how speech sounds are produced.

7.Phoneme:a unit explicit sound contrast. If two sounds in a language make a contrast

between two different words, they are said to be different phonemes.

8.IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet is a set of standard phonetic symbols in the form of a

chart.

9.Morpheme: the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression

and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.

Lexical

Free

Functional

Morpheme

Derivational

Bound

Inflectional

10.Inflection: is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of

inflectional affixes such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and cases to which they are attached.

11.Derivation: is the most common word-formation process to be found in the production of

new English words. It is accomplished by means of a large number of affixes of English language, and shows the relationship between roots and affixes.

12.Syntax:the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to

form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures.

13.Constituent:Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic

unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit.

14.Subordination: Subordination refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that

they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other. Thus the subordinate constituents are words which modify the Head.

Consequently, they can be called modifiers.

15.Reference: Reference is concerned with the relation between a word and the thing it refers

to, or more generally between a linguistic unit and a non-linguistic entity it refers to.

plementary antonymy:Complementary antonomy is the sense relation between two

antonyms which are complementary to each other. That is, they divide up the whole of a semantic field completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other.

17.Hyponymy:Hyponymy, the technical name for inclusiveness sense relation, is a matter of

class membership.

18.Context of Situation:is a framework put forward by Firth. This theory has the following

elements.

A.The relevant features of the participants, persons, personalities:

(1)The verbal action of the participants.

(2)The non-verbal action of the participants.

B.The relevant objects.

C.The effects of the verbal action.

19.Linguistic Relativity: This term has the same meaning with linguistic determinism and the

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

20.Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: is a theoretic assumption which suggests that our language helps

mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speakers’unique ways of understanding the world. In a loose sense, this term can be interchangeably used with linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism.

II. Explanation

1. Describe the recursive nature of language. (1-7: Workbook: chapter-item number)

The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the creativity of language. For instance, we can write a sentence like this:

Today I encountered an old friend who was my classmate when I was in elementary school where there was an apple orchard in which we slid to select ripe apples that…

2. Prescriptive and descriptive types of linguistic studies (1-1)

Prescriptive:to make authoritarian statement about the correctness of a particular use of language.

Descriptive: to make an objective and systematic account of the patterns and use of a language or variety.