语言学考试复习资料

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

Design features of the language Arbitrariness:As one design feature of the language, it was discussed by Saussure first refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.

Duality: As one design feature of the language, 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.

Creativity: As one design feature of the language, we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness.

Displacement: As one design feature of the language, human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not presentat the moment of communication.

Function of language

Informative: The use of language to record the facts, it is also called ideational function in the framework of functional grammar.

Interpersonal function: As one function of language, it is concerned with interaction between the addresser and addressee in the discourse situation and the addresser’s attitude toward what he speaks or writes about. Metalingual Function: As one function of language, our language can be used to talk about itself.

Ritual exchanges about health or weather such as Good morning, God bless you, Nice day often state the obvious. Linguistics is usually defined as the science of language or, alternatively, as the scientific study of language.

Main branches of Linguistics Phonetics: It studies speech sounds, including the production of speech.

Phonology: It studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables.

Morphology: It concerned with the internal organization of words.

Syntax: Syntax is about principles of forming and understanding correct English sentences.

Semantics: It examines how meaning is encoded in a language.

Pragmatics: It is the study of meaning in context. Psycholinguistics: It investigates the interrelation of language and mind, in processing and producing utterances and in language acquisition for example. (It is the study of psychological aspects of language)

Sociolinguistics: It is an umbrella term which covers a variety of different interests in language and society, including the social functions of language and social characteristics of its users. (As an interdisciplinary study of language, attempt to show the relationships between language and society.)

A synchronic description takes a fined instant as its point of observation.

Saussure’s diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history.

Chomsky points out that this distinction is related to the language-parole distinction of Saussure. Phonetics: It studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted and perceived.

Phonology: It is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages.

In either case, the allophones are both phonetically similar and in complementary distribution.

Distinctive features: A bundle of phonetic features used to distinguish one phoneme from another in terms of binary categories.

Languages like Chinese are known as tone languages. Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in regard to the relationship between sounding and meaning. Morphology is a branch of linguistics and it is also a systematic study of morpheme.

Free Morphemes: they may occur alone, that is, those which may make up words by themselves.

Bound Morpheme They must appear with at least one different morpheme.

Root is the base form of a word that cannot befurther analyzed without destroying its meaning.

Affix is the collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added another morpheme. Affix is naturally bound.

Word is the smallest unit that can be used, by itself, as a complete utterance.

Derivation shows a relationship between roots and affixes. Inflection indicates grammatical relations by adding inflectional affixes will not change the grammatical class of the stems (to which they are attached).

Compound: It refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a singlenew word.

Syntax: It is 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. horizontal relations chain relations

To make it more understandable, they are called vertical relations or choice relations.

Syntactic Function: It shows the relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of the linguistic pattern in which it is used.

In traditional semantics, reference is the relation between the linguistic expression and the object in extra-linguistic reality to which the expression refers.

Antonymy: It is the name for oppositeness relation.

While Bronislaw Malinowski and John P.Firth can be regarded as the pioneers of this movement in England, Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf are naturally seen as the representatives of a parallel but independent tradition from North America. Sociolinguistics, as an interdisciplinary study of language use, attempts to show the relationships between language and society.

Sapir-Whorf Hropthesis: Hropthesis put forth by

B.L.Whorf on the basis of his research into the dialects of Hopi, which claim that each individual language determines the perception, experience, and action of its speakers, and therefore speakers necessarily develops views that differ to the same degree that their language differ structurally.

Performatives: J. L. Austin’s term which, in the first stage of speech act theory, refers to utterances in the uttering of which, in appropriate circumstance, one performs certain actions.