语言学重要任务功绩理解万岁,如果背不下来可以用自己的话组织

1. J.R.Firth J.R.Firth was the first professor of general linguistics inBritain. He was the man who turned linguistics proper into a recognized academic subject inBritain. Firth defined the context of situation as including the entire cultural setting of speech and the personal history of the participants rather than as simply the context of human activity going on at the moment. Recognizing that sentences are infinitely various, he used the notion of typical context of situation, meaning that social situations determine the social roles participants are obliged to play. He put forward that in analyzing a typical context of situation, one has to take into consideration both the linguistic context and situational contaxt. Firth’s second important contribution to linguistics is his method of prosodic analysis. Since utterance is a continuous speech flow made up of at least one syllable, it cannot be cut into independent units. In order to analyze the functions on various levels, mere phonetic and phological descriptions are insufficient. Phonological description only deals with paradigmatic relations, leaving syntagmatic relations out of consideration. Firth pointed out that it is not phonemes that make up of the paradigmatic relations, but phonematic units. There are fewer features in phonematic units than in phonemes. When these features are considered in syntagmatic relations, they are all called prosodic units.

2. M.A.K.Halliday M.A.K.Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar is a socially oriented functional linguistic approach and one of the most

influential linguistic theories in the 20th century, having great effect on various disciplines related to language. Halliday believes that language is what it is because it has to serve certain functions.Systemic-functional grammar is based on two facts: Language users are actually making choices in a system of systems and trying to realize different semantic functions in social interaction, and language is inseparable from social activities of man. It takes actual use of language as the object of study, in opposition to Chomsky’s approach that takes the ideal speaker’s linguistic competence as the object of study. Systemic grammar and functional grammar are two inseparable parts for an integral framework of linguistic theory. Systemic grammar contains a functional component, and the theory behind functional grammar is systemic. Systemic grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, which consists of subsystems from which language users make choices. Functional grammar aims to reveal that language is a means of social interaction, based on the position that language system and the forms that make it up are inescapably determined by the functions which they serve. Systemic-functional grammar aims to provide a taxonomy for sentences, a means of descriptively classifying particular sentences. Although systemic-functional grammar may not seem as influential as Chomsky’s transformational-generative theory in some parts of the world, it is much more relevant to the needs of various groups of people who