语言学修改

Assimilation: it assimilates one sound to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar. Assimilation of neighboring sounds is, for the most part, caused by articulatory or physiological processes. There are some kinds of this rule, for instance, bean, green, indiscreet, incorrect, irregular, implausible.

Broad transcription: the transcription with letter-symbols only

Closed class words: functional words in English include conjunctions, prepositions articles and pronouns.

Competence and performance: they were proposed by N. Chomsky. Competence is defined as the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, and performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. Competence is the potential ability of individual to acquire knowledge. Performance is actual speech what speakers say or does.

Complementary distribution: if they are allophones of the same phoneme, then they do not distinguish meaning, but complement each other in distribution, i.e. they occur in different phonetic environments. For instance, the clear l always occurs before a vowel while the dark l always occurs between a vowel and a consonant, or at the end of a word. So the allophones are said to be in complementary distribution. Complementizers are words which introduce the sentence complement. The sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause. The comlementizer and complement clause together in the sentence are called a complement phrase (CP) and the construction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clause.

Compound words are by stringing words together.

Deep structure and surface structure: the structure formed by the XP rule in accordance with the head’s subcategorization properties, is called deep structure. The structure, corresponding to the final syntactic form of the sentence which results from appropriate transformation, is called surface structure.

Derivational and inflectional morphemes: the former are conjoined to other morphemes a new word is derived, or formed; the latter are attached to words of morphemes, but they never change their syntactic category.

Deletion rule: it tells us when a sound is to be deleted although it is represented. /g/+final nasal: /g/ will be deleted: sign; /m/+/b/: /b/ is deleted such as numb, comb and climb.

Stress: ⑴word stress (morphologically) such as a blackbird and a black bird.⑵sentence stress(syntactically) Chinese has no stress.

Intonation: when pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. English is an intonation language.

Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. First of all language is a system. Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between a linguistic symbol and what the symbol stands for. Language is vocal because the primary medium for all languages is sound. The term “human” is meant to specify that language is human-specific.