英语语言学

Language: is an arbitrary system of symbols for human communication. Design Features of Language: refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication. 1. Arbitrariness, 2. Duality, 3. Creativity, 4. Displacement,

5. Cultural-transmission: language is an ability which is acquired, not sth humans are born with. Arbitrariness: It means that there is no logical connection between meaning and sounds. 1. Arbitrary relationship between the sound or a morpheme and its meaning, form. 2. Arbitrariness at the syntactic level. 3. Arbitrariness and convention.

Duality: it means that language is a system which consists of two levels of structures at the lower level, there are the structures, at the high level, there is the structure of words.

Creativity: language is productive in that users can understand and produce novel sentences that they have never heard before. We can apply a rule to create a new sentence , the rule of language can be used repeatedly.

By CREATIVITY we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. 1.openness, 2.recursiveness Displacement: means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present(in time and space) at the moment of communication.

Displacement can be used to refer to sth is not present real or imagined matters in the past present or future or in faraway places.

对人类的意义：Displacement benefits human beings by giving them the power to handle generalizations and abstractions. Functions of Language: 1. Informative/ideational function: Language is the instrument of thought and people often feel need to speak their thoughts aloud.

2. Interpersonal Function: demonstrate one’s social relationship or social status.

3. Performative: one can fulfill a certain task just by saying sth. The performative function of language is primarily to change the social status of persons.

4. Emotive Function: it is crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or sth. 5. Phatic Communion 6. Recreational Function 7. Metalingual Function

Linguistics: 语言学有很多分支：The justification for all these booming ventures should be obvious from our previous discussion. Language is so valuable to the individual. Linguistics should include at least five parameters, namely,

1. Phonetics: studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is, how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech. 2. Phonology

3. Morphology: is concerned with the internal organization of words. 4. Syntax 5. Semantics 6. Pragmatics

Distinctions in Linguistics: 1. Descriptive vs. Prescriptive

2. Synchronic vs. Diachronic: A Synchronic description takes a fixed instant (usually, but not necessarily, the present) as its point of observation. Saussure’s Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history.

3. Langue and Parole: Saussure distinguished the linguistic competence of the speaker and the actual phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances) as Langue and Parole.

4. Competence and Performance: Competence: A language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence. The IPA: International Phonetic Association.国际音标协会 The IPA chart: International Phonetic Alphabet.国际音标符号

Diacritics(变音符号): The diacritics are additional symbols or marks used together with the consonant and vowel symbols to indicate nuance of change in their pronunciation.

Consonants: 界定辅音的方式: 1).Vibration of the vocal cord: VD,VL. 2) Place of obstruction. 3) Manner of obstruction: obstruent, sonorant, nasal

Manner of Place of Articulation Articulation Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Stop/Plosive p, b t, d k, g Nasal Fricative Approximant Lateral Affricate m (w) f, v θ, e n s, z r l ?, ? t?, d? j ? w h

Broad Transcription: when we use a simple set of symbols in our transcription, it is called~ Narrow Transcription: thus the use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription

Minimal Pairs: when two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string, the two words are said to form a minimal pair.

Allophones: [p, ph] are two different Phones and are variants of the phoneme /p/. Such variants of a phoneme are called Allophones of the same phoneme. This phenomenon of variation in the pronunciation of phonemes in different positions is called Allophony of Allophonic Variation. Assimilation: a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound.

Suprasegmental Features: are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmentals are stress, tone, and intonation.

Intonation: involves the occurrence of recurring fall-rise patterns, each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words or on groups of words of varying length. Word: A word, in this sense, is then a grammatical unit, just like morpheme or clause complex. Word is a typical grammatical unit between Morpheme and Word Group.

Morpheme: is the smallest unit of language in regard to the relationship between sounding and meaning.

Types of Morphemes: 1. Free morpheme and bound morpheme: Free morpheme: eg: dog, nation and close. Bound: dogs, national and disclose.

2. Root, affix and stem: An Affix is the collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme (the root or stem). Prefix, suffix, infix. 3. Inflectional affix and derivational affix: 1) Inflectional affixes are generally less productive than derivational affixes: they very often add a minute or delicate grammatical function only to the stem.

2) Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word they attach to.

3) That whether on should add inflectional affixes or not depends very often on other factors within the phrase or sentence at stake.

Morphological change takes the form of inflectional changes in affixes. Identify words: 1) Stability. 2) Relative uninterruptibility. 3) A minimum free form. Word class: This is close to the notion of Parts of Speech or Parts of Sentence. 1) Particles. 2) Auxiliaries. 3) Pro-form. 4) Determiners.

Word Formation(构词法): There are two fieldsthat Morphology concerns: (i) the study of Inflections (also called Inflectional Morphology), and (ii) the study of Lexical or Derivational Morphology (often referred to as Word-formation). 1. The Inflectional Way of Formation 2. The Derivational Way of Formation 1) Derivation

2) Compound: is usually conventional is not the simple combination of two words. Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a singlenew word.

·In compounds, the lexical morphemes can be of different word classes: a) Noun compounds b) Verb compounds c) Adjective compounds d) Preposition compounds

·Compounds can be further divided into two kinds: the endocentric compound and the exocentric compound.

Syntax: is the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures.

Syntax Relations: 1.Positional Relation. 2.Relation of Substitutability. 3.Relation of Co-occurrence. Positional Relations: are a manifestation of one aspect of “Syntagmatic Relations” observed by F. de Saussure. In some elementary linguistic textbooks, they are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations. Interestingly, word order is among the three basic ways (word order, genetic and areal classifications) to classify languages in the world. In this way of classification, there are totally six possible types of language, they are SVO, VSO, SOV, OVS, OSV, and VOS. English belongs to SVO type, though this does not mean that SVO is the only possible word order. Subject: refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case. Grammatical Subject: Since the core object noun sits in the slot before the verb in the passive, it is called the Grammatical Subject, for the original object noun phrase occupies the grammatical space before a verb, the space that a subject normally occupies.

Logical Subject: the core subject, now the object of a preposition, is called the Logical Subject, since semantically the core subject still does what a subject normally does: it performs an action. Subject’s characteristics: 1. Word order. Subject ordinarily precedes the verb in statement. 2. Pro-forms. The first and third person pronouns in English appear in a special form when the pronoun is a subject.

3. Agreement with verb. In the simple present tense, an –s is added to the verb when a third person subject is singular. However, the number and person of the object or any other element in the sentence have no effect at all on the form of the verb.

4. Content questions. If the subject is replaced by a question word (who or what), the rest of the sentence remains unchanged. If the basic sentence does not contain an auxiliary verb, we must insert did or do (es) immediately after the question word.

5. Tag question. A Tag Question is used to seek confirmation of a statement. It always contains a pronoun which refers back to the subject, and never to any other elements in the sentence.

Recursiveness: together with openness, is generally regarded as the core of creativity of language. Sense and Reference: Connotation: refers to the abstract properties of an entity. Denotation: refers to the concrete entities having these properties.

We can say every word has a sense, i.e. some conceptual content, otherwise we will not be able to use it or understand it. But not every word has a reference.

Sense: may be defined as the semantic relations between one word and another, or more generally between one linguistic unit and another. Sense Relations: 1. Synonymy 2. Antonymy:

1) Gradable antonymy: eg. good: bad, long: short, big: small. a) They are Gradable. b) No absolute criterion

c) One member of a pair, usually the term for the higher degree, serves as the cover them. 2) Complementary antonymy a) They divide up the whole of a semantic field completely. b) The norm in this type is absolute. c) There is no cover term for the two members of a pair.

3) Converse antonymy: This is a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities.

·Relational Opposites: in reciprocal social roles, kinship relations, temporal and spatial relations. It is in this sense that they are also known as Relational Opposites. There are

always two entities involved. One presupposes the other. This is the major difference between this type and Gradable and Complementary.

Hyponymy: is a kind of inclusiveness which one word include another word. The meaning of one word is included in that of another word.