语言学名词解释和简答题的出题范围 (修复的)

一、Directions: Please define the following terms.

1.minimal pair test

words that differ in only one sound

They differ in meaning, they differ only in one sound segment, the different sounds occur in the same environment

Example: beat, bit They form a minimal pair

So /ea/ and /i/ are different sounds in English

They are different phonemes

2.the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

linguistic determinism (语言决定论) -Language determines thought.

and linguistic relativity (语言相对论)-There is no limit to the structural diversity of languages.

3.Behaviorism

Behaviorism in linguistics holds the view that Children learn language through a chain of stimulus-response-reinforcement (刺激—反应—强化), and adults‟ use of language is also a process of stimulus-response.

4.discovery procedures

A grammar is discovered through the performing of certain operations on a corpus of data

5.Universal Grammar

UG consists of a set of innate grammatical principles.

Each principle is associated with a number of parameters.

6.Systemic Grammar

It aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, or meaning potential.

7.Ideational Metafunction

The Ideational Function (Experiential and Logical) is to convey new information, to communicate a content that is unknown to the hearer. It is a meaning potential.

It mainly consists of “transitivity” and “voice”. This function not only specifies the available options in meaning but also determines the nature of their structural realisations. For example, “John built a new house” can be analysed as a configuration of the functions (功能配置):

Actor: John

Process: Material: Creation: built

Goal: Affected: a new house

8.Interpersonal Metafunction

The INTERPERSONAL FUNCTION embodies all uses of language to express social and personal relations. This includes the various ways the speaker enters a speech situation and performs a speech act.

9.basic speech roles

The most fundamental types of speech role are just two: (i) giving, and (ii) demanding.

Cutting across this basic distinction between giving and demanding is another distinction that relates to the nature of the commodity being exchanged. This may be either (a) goods-&-services or (b) information.

10.finite verbal operators

Finiteness is thus expressed by means of a verbal operator which is either temporal or modal.

11.Textual Metafunction

The textual metafunction enables the realization of the relation between language and context, making the language user produce a text which matches the situation.

It refers to the fact that language has mechanisms to make any stretch of spoken or written discourse into coherent and unified texts and make a living passage different from a random list of sentences.

It is realized by thematic structure, information structure and cohesion.

12.theme and rheme