1.语言学导论

第一章语言学导论

一. Why Study Language?

二. What is Language?

三. Design Features of Language

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

What makes language unique to human beings?

The design features of language which refer to the defining properties of human language tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication.

Arbitrariness is a core feature of language, which means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. Duality, which means the property of having 2 levels of sturctures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the 2 levels has its own principles of organization. Creativity means language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Because of duality, the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic unites to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never heard before. Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters, in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places.

So all these features make language unique to human beings.

Design features refer to the distinctive features of human language that essentially make human langugae distinguishable from any animal system of communication.

ARBITRARINESS

By ‘language is arbitrary’ we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. For example, there is no reason why English speakers use the sounds /dog/ to denote the animal ‘dog’, or /pig/ to refer to the animal ‘pig’ while Chinese speakers use different sounds (狗and 猪respectively) to indicate them. There are different levels of arbitrariness.

(1) Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning.

We must admit that there are certain words with different degrees of onomatopoeia in every language which imitate natural sounds, such as ‘bang, crash, and roar’ in English, and ‘叮叮当，咔嚓，扑哧’ in Chinese. However arbitrariness and onomatopoeic effect may work at the same time. Widdowson’s illustration of a line ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves’ in Keats’Ode to a Nightinggale by attempting the substitution of ‘murderous’ for ‘murmurous’ shows that no connection will be established between sounds and the little noiseness of the flying flies. ‘It is only when you know the meaning that you infer that the form is appropriate.’(Widdowson, 1996:6)

(2) Arbitrariness at the syntactic level

As to arbitrariness at the syntactic level, there are 2 opposite points of view.

According to some functional linguists (Halliday, 1985/1994), language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level because there may be a certain degree of correspondence between the sequence