英语专业必修语言学期末小论文

The Final Examination of English Linguistics

To elaborate what you have learned and state the reasons why you believe you have learned them in the linguistics class in this term.

Syntax

Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies how words combined to sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences. Personally, syntax studies three categories including words, phrase and sentences. Words are the smallest unit, which have internal classifications including major lexical level providing information and minor lexical level as function words classifying by their meaning, inflection and distribution. Phrases’categories are determined by the head of the phrases. The phrases’ rule - XP represents any phrase; X can be any central word. The other rule is combining words in some type before head words with the help of conjunctions. Sentences formed by different phrases, in which the inflection of head word implies the tense and agreement.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successfully communication. Personal understanding: pragmatics is studying how a person in a specific context uses correct sentences including grammatical meaning and abstract meaning to express his meaning successfully. Context which includes cognitive context, linguistic context and situational context plays a very important role in the pragmatics, for it determines speakers’expression and recipients’understanding. In our daily communications, we often come across some sentences without grammar wrong is difficult understood by us, for it is out of our previous knowledge, normal logical thinking and different cultural background and so on. For the speech act theory, I believe there are state things, implication meaning and imperative meaning.

Language acquisition

Language acquisition refers to a child’s acquisition of his mother tongue; how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community. Children learn mother tongue through imitation and enforcement; children can acquire language, for they are born with language competence; another important factor is interaction between children’s character and the environment around them. The development of children’s cognition has great influence on their language acquisition, or to say they conceptualize the things around them helping the development of their language acquisition. During the growth of children their phonology, vocabulary, grammar and pragmatic ability develop gradually. However, during this processing, there are two important influencing factors. One is critical time, after which children will study slowly or can never acquire. The other is environment.