英语语言学介绍

合集下载
  1. 1、下载文档前请自行甄别文档内容的完整性,平台不提供额外的编辑、内容补充、找答案等附加服务。
  2. 2、"仅部分预览"的文档,不可在线预览部分如存在完整性等问题,可反馈申请退款(可完整预览的文档不适用该条件!)。
  3. 3、如文档侵犯您的权益,请联系客服反馈,我们会尽快为您处理(人工客服工作时间:9:00-18:30)。

Design features
Charles Hockett (1960): a set of key properties of language not shared or not known to be shared as a set, with systems of communication in any other species. Their number and names vary from one account to another; but all include, as among the most important, the properties of duality, arbitrariness and productivity. Characterize language, distinguish it from other communication systems If a system lacks even one feature, it is communication, not language
Human language vs. animal communication
We are Uniquely LanguageUsers
Other Animals also Communicate Cats arch their back to scare the neighbor cat Bees tell each other when they have found food Chimpanzees can be taught to use primitive sign language to communicate desires.
Political decisions Economic reason Diseases others
Language and dialect
Language or dialect?
Five types of relationship between dialect and language
Introduction
I. Some interesting facts about language II. What is linguistics? III. Why study linguistics? IV. Distinctive features of language V. Basic attributes of language
Core fields of linguistics
Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics
Outer fields of linguistics
Sociolinguistics Psycholinguistics Neurolinguistics Computational linguistics Historical linguistics …
e.g. English
different languages
Mutually intelligible different cultural history
源自文库
Hindi
community B Danish
Type 3
community A e.g. Norwegian
?
Type 4 community A
p
e.g., [pat]
[tap] t
a
[apt]
Duality
Duality enables us to use our language in a very economic way for a virtually infinite production of linguistic units. All human languages have a small, limited set of speech sounds. The limitation derives from the restricted capacity of our vocal apparatus. Linguistically speaking, the distinctive speech sounds are called phonemes, which are explained in more detail in the chapter on phonology. You cannot use isolated phonemes for communication, because phonemes are by themselves meaningless. But we can assemble and reassemble phonemes into larger linguistic units. These are commonly called "words". Although our capacity to produce new phonemes is limited, we frequently coin new words. Hence, our capacity to produce vocabulary is unlimited.
Type 1
community A
Mutually intelligible common cultural history
community B
e.g. British Eng. Eng.
same language
American
Type 2
community A
Mutually unintelligible community B different cultural history
Class attendance Take notes carefully Final examination The examination will be based on the ppt slides and the textbook. At the end of the whole classes, I will let you copy this ppt material.
Reasons for the Uncertainty over Numbers of language
New discoveries: new people (and therefore languages) continue to be discovered in the unexplored regions of the world (esp. in the Amazon basin, Central Africa, and New Guinea). Alive or dead language?
What Is Linguistics?
Definition
the systematic & scientific study of language
Purpose: to learn the different aspects of language
How it is structured; how we produce & understand it in ongoing time; how we learn it; how it develops in humans; how we use it every day & what we use it for; how it works in our minds and in society.
Prescriptive rules: school grammar
“Don’t end a sentence with a preposition!” “Don’t split infinitives!” “Don’t use double negatives!”
Distinctive features of language
e.g. Turkish
?
Uzbek
The number of sentences is infinite. We are able to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences. We are able to recognize truncated sentences (“Stop it”) that are missing nouns. We are able to recognize ambiguous sentences (“Andrew saw the girl with binoculars”) We can create sentences that paraphrase each other.
Why study linguistics?
To explore the nature of human languages From studying language, one may have a closer look at human nature. A joke: it is harmless to study linguistics.
Readings
Textbook: The Study of Language, by George Yule. (copy it) Additional readings: Pinker, S. The Language Instinct (available at bookstore)
Requirements
1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Spanish 3. English 4. Bengali 5. Hindi/Urdu 6. Portuguese 7. Russian 8. Japanese 9. German 10. Chinese-Wu
Ten Most Widely Spoken Languages
What is grammar?
Descriptive grammar
Describes the rules that govern what people do or can say (their “mental grammar”)
Prescriptive grammar
Prescribes rules governing what people should/shouldn’t say
7 Design features
Discreteness Duality Arbitrariness Cultural transmission Displacement Productivity Recursiveness
Discreteness
Larger, complex messages can be broken down into smaller, discrete parts. Each sound is discrete.
According to David Crystal The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, p. 287)—mother tongue speakers 1. Chinese (Mandarin) 2. English 3. Spanish 4. Hindi 5. Arabic 6. Bengali 7. Russian 8. Portuguese 9. Japanese 10. German
e.g. Cantonese (Chinese) Type 5 Community A
Mutually unintelligible same cultural history
community B Hakka (Chinese) community B
?
Partially (un)intelligible overlapping cultural history
I. Some Interesting Facts About Language
Number of languages: about 6,809 languages in the world (or about 4,000 ~ 8000 languages because it’s hard to define what counts as a language), about 50% of these are dying out. Most of them do not have a written form. Ten most widely spoken languages:
相关文档
最新文档