语言学基本定义.doc

语言language
Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used by social group for communication.
Arbitrariness: the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.
Productivity:language is resourceful because of its duality and its reclusiveness. We can use it to create new meanings.
Duality:the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of element of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.
Displacement:human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present(in time and spare) at the movement of communication.
Cultural transmission:language is not genetically inherited. Passed from generation to generation, it requires some learning. It is true human are born with language capacity, but a particular language a person learns to speak is a cultural one, rather than a genetic one like the dogs’ barking system.
Interchangeability:any human being can be both a producer and receiver of messages.
Language function:
informative: language is the instrument of thought, record the facts. The use of language to record the facts is a prerequisite of social development.
Interpersonal: by far the most important sociological use of language, and by which people establish and maintain their status in a society.
Performative: the performative function of language is primarily to change the social status of persons
Emotive: to change the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something.
Phatic communion: we all use such small, seemingly meaningless expressions to maintain a comfortable relationship between people without involving any factual contents.
Recreational: the recreational function of a language is often overlooked because it seems so restrictive in purpose and supposedly so limited in usefulness.
Metalingual: our language can be used to talk about itself.
Sociolinguistics—the study of language with reference to society.
Psycholinguistics---the study of language with reference to the working of the mind.
Applied linguistics---the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning.
Important distinctions in linguistics: 规定性Prescriptive .描述性Descriptive /8.共时语言学Synchronical linguistics 7.历时语言学Diachronic linguistics /5.语言能力Competence 6.语言运用performance /9.语言langue 10.言语parole /speech, writing/ traditional grammar and modern linguistics
第二章 音系学
1 Phonology
is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages. It aims to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur.
2 international phonetic alphabet
A set of standard phonetic symbols in the form of a chart, designed by the international phonetic association since 1888. It has been revised from time to time to include new discoveries and changes in phonetic theory and practice.
3 consonants and vowels
Consonant are produced by a closure in the vocal tract, or by a narrowing, which is so marked that air can not escape without producing audible friction.
Vowel is produced without such stricture so that air escapes in a relatively unimpeded way through the mouth or nose.
4 cardinal vowel
Are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing language.
5 anticipatory and perseverative co-articulation
when such simultaneous or overlapping articulation are involved, we call the process co-articulation.
If the sound becomes more like the following sound, it is known as anticipatory co-articulation. If the sound shows the influence of the proceeding sound,it is perseverative co-articulation.
6Phoneme
The smallest of sound which can distinguish two words
7Allophones
Different phones which can represent a phoneme in different environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.
8Minimal pair
Are two words in a language which differ from each other by only one distinctive sound and which also differ in meaning.
9free variation
if two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast, that is the substitution of one for the other does not produce a different word form, but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, then the two words are in free variation.
Chapter three 词汇学
The total number of words stored in the brain is called the lexicon.
Words are the smallest free units of language that unite sounds with meaning.
Word :A unit of expression that has universal intuitive recognition by native speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form.
Lexeme: the abstract unit underlying the smallest unit in the lexical system of a language, which appears in different grammatical contexts.
Grammatical/Functional words: express grammatical meanings, such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns.
Lexical/content words: have lexical meanings, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Open-class words: a word group whose membership is in principle in finite or unlimited. New members can be added.
Closed-class words: a word group whose membership is fixed or limited, new members are not regularly added.
Morphology; the study of word formation, the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.
Morphemes: the smallest unit language in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit that cannot be further divided into smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Free morphemes: those that may constitute words by themselves.
Bound morphemes；those that can not occur alone
Root: the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. It is that part of a word-form that remains when all the inflectional affixes and derivational affixes have been removed.
Affix: the types of formative/morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme.
Base: any form to which affixes of any kind can be added; a form to which a rule of word formation is applied.
Stem: the part of the word form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed.
Inflection: indicates grammatical relations by adding inflectional affixes.
Derivation: combination of an existing word and an affix to form a new word.
Compounding/composition is word-formation process consisting of joining two or more bases to form a new unit, a compound word-An Introduction to Modern Linguistics.
Endocentric: one element serves as the head, of same syntactic class as the whole the relationship of ‘a kind of’.
Exocentric: there is no head, no elements is of the same syntactic class as the whole, so not a relationship of ‘a kind of ‘something.
Derivation: is also called ‘affixation’. It is the morphological process whereby grammatical of lexical information is added to the base.
Conversion: is a word-formation process by which a word is altered from one part of speech to anther without the addition or deletion of any morpheme.
Allomorph: some morphemes have a single form in all contexts. But a morpheme may have considerable variations, alternate shapes or phonetic forms called the allomorph.
Blending: a process of word-information in which a new word is formed by combining the meanings and sounds of two words, one of which is not in its full form or both of which are not in their full forms.
Back-formation: a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language.
Acronym: words formed from the initial letters of the name of an organization or scientific term, etc. it differs from initialisms in that they are pronounced as words rather than as sequence of letter.
Initialism: a type of shortening, using the first letter of words to form a proper name, a technical term, or phrase; an initialism is pronounced letter by letter.
Analogical creation: It can account for the coexistence of two forms, regular and irregular, I the conjugation of some English verbs.
Loanwords: both form and meaning are borrowed with only a slight adaptation.
Loanblend: part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed.
Chapter 4 syntax
Syntax: the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply the study of the formation of sentences.
Category: the term category in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense. More specifically, it refers to the defining properties of these general units.
Phrase: is a single element of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of clause.
Word group is an extension of word of a particular class by way of modification with its main features of the class unchanged.
Clause: a constituent with its own subjects and predicate when it is included in a lager sentence.
Syntagmatic is a relation between one item and others in a sequence or between elements which are all present.
Paradigmatic relation refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with the same structure.
grammatical construction; any syntactic construct which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contribution to the meaning or use the construct contains.
constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a construction.
An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to one of its constituents, which serves as the center or head of the whole.
Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable “Centre” or “Head” inside the group, usually including the basic sentence, the prepositional phrase, the predicate construction, and the connective construction.
Subordinate construction those in which there is only one head, with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent,
Coordinate construction:there are more than one head, the head can stand for the original construction functionally.
Deep structure: the abstract representation of the syntactic properties of a construction
Surface structure: the final stage in syntactic derivation of a construction.
Chapter five Semantics
Denotation involves the relationship between a linguistic unit and the non-linguistic entities to which it refers. Thus it is equivalent to referential meaning.
Connotation-opposite to denotation, means the properties of the entity a word denotes.
Sense be defined as the semantics relations between one word and another, or more generally between the one linguistic unit and another.
Reference: is concerned with the relation between a word and the thing it refers to , or more generally between a linguistic unit and non-linguistic entity it refers to.
Synonymy-refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning
Antonymy-oppositeness of meaning.
Complementary antonymy-the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the other.
Converse/reversal antonyms/relational opposites-exhibits the reversal of the relationship between the two items, one presupposes the other.
Hyponymy上下义-inclusiveness, a relation of inclusionCompositionality-the idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of the constitute words and the way they are combined-the principle of compositionality.
Polysemy一次多义-the same one word may have more than one meaning.
Homonymy同音同形异义-the phenomenon that words having different meaning have the same form.
Conceptual meaning-leech defined as the logical, cognitive, or denotative content. In other words, it overlaps to a large extent with the notion of reference.
Linguistic semantics-the study of the meaning of linguistic units, words and sentences in particular
Propositional logic-it is also know as propositional calculus or sentential calculus, is the study of the truth conditions for propositions
Proposition-is expressed by a declarative sentence when that sentence is uttered to make a statement.