语言学考试要点复习

The features that define our human languages can be called DESIGN FEATURES. The following are the frequently discussed ones:

1 Arbitrariness The widely accepted meaning of this feature first refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance, we cannot explain why a book is called a/book/ and a pen a/pen/.

However there seems to be different levels of ARBITRARINESS.

(1)Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning

(2)Arbitrariness at the syntactic level

Language is not arbitrary at the syntactic level. In other words, syntax is less arbitrary than words

(3)Arbitrariness and convention

What then is the link between a linguistic sign and its meaning? It is a matter of CONVENTION.

2.Duality

“By DUALITY is meant the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization”

Roughly speaking, the elements of the spoken language are sounds which do not convey meaning in themselves. The only function of sounds is to combine with one another to form units that have meaning, such as words. We call sounds here secondary units as opposed to such primary units as words, since the secondary units are meaningless and the primary units have distinct and identifiable meaning. The property of duality then only exits in such system, namely, with both elements and units.

Now we can perceive the advantage of duality, which lies in the great productive power our language is endowed with.

3 Creativity

By creativity we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. One of the reasons why language is actually a far more complicated entity than traffic lights is that we can use it to create new meanings. This ability is one of the things that sets human

language apart from the kind of communication that goes on, for example, between birds, which can only convey a limited range of message.

Language is creative in another sense, that is, its potential to create endless sentences. The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for this possibility.

4 Displacement

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. Our language enables us to communicate about things that don’t exist or don’t yet exist.

Displacement benefits human beings by giving them the power to handle generalization and abstractions. In a word, the intellectual benefits of displacement to us is that it makes it possible for us to talk and think in abstract terms.

1.5 Functions of language

1 Informative(信息功能)

2 Interpersonal function（人际功能）

3 Performative(行事功能)

4 Emotive function表情功能

The emotive function of language is one of the most powerful uses of language because it is so crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something.. It is a means of getting rid of our nervous energy when we are under stress, e.g. swear words…

It is also discussed under the term expressive function.

5 Phatic communion

It refers to the social interaction of language. And different cultures have different topics of phatic communion. Broadly speaking, this function refers to expressions that help define and maintain interpersonal relations, such as slang’s, jokes, jargons, ritualistic exchanges, switches to social and regional dialects.

6 Recreational function

The Recreational function of a language is often overlooked because it seems so restrictive in purpose and supposedly so limited in usefulness. However, no one will deny the use of

language for the sheer joy of using it.

7 Metalingual function

Our language can be used to talk about itself. For example, I can use the word book to talk about a book. The change in linear order changes our perspective about the concerns of the clause. This is the METALINGUAL function of language.

The lion ate the unicorn all round the town.→

All round the town the lion ate the unicorn.

This makes the language infinitely self-reflexive: We human beings can talk about talk and think about thinking, and thus only humans can ask what it means to communicate, to think, to be human.

1.7 Main branches of linguistics

It is generally agreed that linguistics should include at least five parameters, namely, phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, semantic nd pragmatic. The following are these main branches of linguistics.

1 Phonetics

including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the sound of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech, etc.

2 Phonology音系学

PHONOLOGY studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sound system of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure. A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning. English has approximately 45 phonemes.

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that the human voice is capable of creating whereas phonology is the study of a subset of those sounds that constitute language and meaning. The first focuses on chaos while the second focuses on order.

3 Morphology 形态学

MORPHOLOGY is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meaning—morphemes 词素and word-formation processes. Although many people think of words as the basic meaningful elements of a language, many words can be

broken into still smaller units, called morphemes.

4 Syntax句法

SYNTAX is about principles of forming and understanding correct English sentences.

5 Semantics语义学

Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a language. It is not only concerned with meanings of words as lexical items, but also with levels of language below the word and above it, e.g. meaning of morphemes and sentences.

6 Pragmatics语用学

PRAGMATICS is the study of meaning in context. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is structured.

1.8.1 Psycholinguistics

in processing and producing utterances and in language acquisition.

1.9.4 Competence and performance

A language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence. And performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations.

3.1.3 Classification of words

(1)Variable and invariable words

Words can be classified according to their variability. In V ARIABLE WORDS, one could find ordered and regular series of grammatically different words forms; on the other hand, part of the word remains relatively constant. Thus, each ordered series constitutes a paradigm, e.g. follow, follows, following, followed.

INVIARIABLE WORDS refer to those words such as since, when, seldom. They do not have inflective endings.

(2) Grammatical words and lexical words

In terms of the meaning expressed by words, they can be classified into GRAMMATICAL

WORDS and LEXICAL WORDS.

lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns,

verbs, are lexical words.

As the lexical words carry the main content of a language while the grammatical ones serve to link its different parts together, the lexical words are also known as CONTENT WORDS and grammatical ones FUNCTION WORDS.

(3)Closed-class words and open-class words

A word that belongs to the CLOSED CLASS is one whose membership is fixed or limited. New members are not regularly added.

The OPEN-CLASS is one whose membership is in principle infinite or limited. With the emergence of new ideas, inventions, etc., new expressions are continually and constantly being added to the lexicon.

As a matter of fact, the distinction between closed-class words and open-class words is not quite as clear-cut as it seems.

(3)Word class词类

Here are some of the categories newly introduced into linguistic analysis:

PARTICLES AUXILIARIES PRO-FORM

●DETERMINERS限定词

It refers to words which are used before the noun (including its premodifiers like adjectives) acting as head of a noun phrase, and determine决定the kind of reference the noun phrase has.

●Predeterminers: all, both, half, double, twice, three times, one-third, one-fifth and the

like.

●Central determiners: this, that, these, those, every, each, some, any, no, either, neither,

my,

●Postdeterminers: including cardinal numbers; ordinal numbers; general ordinals like

next, last, past, other, additional, many, few, several, much, little, a lot of,, plenty of, a great deal of, etc.

When different sub-classes of determiners occur together, they follow the order of predeterminers + central determiners +postdeterminers.

3.2.1 Morpheme 词素and Morphology形态学

Morpheme is the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and

content, a unit that can’t be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.

Morpheme is the immediate concern of a branch of linguistics called MORPHOLOGY, which studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

3.2.3 Inflection and word formation

There are two fields Morphology concerns: (i)

the study of INFECTIONS (also called INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY), and (ii) the study of WORD-FORMATION (often referred to as LEXICAL DERIV ATIONAL MORPHOLOGY)

(1)Inflection. INFLECTION is the manifestation

of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect 体and case格, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.

(2)Word formation

WORD-FORMATION, in its restricted sense,

refers to the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships. It can be further subclassified into the compositional type (COMPOUND) and the derivational type(DERIV ATION)

https://www.360docs.net/doc/411910688.html,pound

Compounds can be further divided into two kinds:

the endocentric内向的compound and the exocentric外向的compound

ii.Derivation

Different from compounds, DERIV ATION shows the relation between roots and affixes.

In contrast with inflections, derivations can make the word class of the original word either changed or unchanged.

3.2.4 The counterpoint of phonology音系学and morphology 形态学(1) Morpheme词素and phoneme音素

Since a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound and a morpheme is the smallest unit in grammar, is there any correspondence between the two levels of language? To answer the question, we have to move on to the “joint venture”of the two levels, that is, MORPHOPHONOLOGY形态音位学or MORPHOPHONEMICS词素音位学.

(3) Allomorph 词素变体

Some morphemes have a single form in all contexts. In other instances there may be considerable variations. It is to be noted some morphemic shapes represent different morphemes and thus have different meanings.

(4) Morphophonology or Morphophonemics

MORPHONOLOGY (MORPHONOLOGY) or MORPHOPHONEMICS (MORPHONEMICS) is a branch of linguistics referring to the analysis and classification of the phonological factors that affect the appearance of morphemes, and, correspondingly, the grammatical factors that affect the appearance of phonemes音素. At any rate, it studies the relationships between phonology音系学and morphology形态学.

4.1.1 Number, gender and case

NUMBER is mostly a category of the noun and pronoun. There are usually two terms of number: singular and plural.

Gender性is also mostly a category of the noun and pronoun. In English, the gender distinctions are on the whole natural, determined by the biological gender of the creature.

The category of CASE is prominent in the grammar of Latin with six distinctions of nominative主格, vocative呼格, accusative宾格, genitive属格, dative与格and ablative离格,夺格. In English, pronouns have three cases of nominative (e.g. I…), accusative (e.g. me…) and genitive (e.g. my…). But nouns have only two cases: general (e.g. John, boy) and genitive (e.g. John’s, boy’s), distinguished by the morphological形态学form, that is, the genitive has an additional morpheme/’s/. The distinctions of nominative and accusative in nouns are realized by word order, with the one before the verb as the nominative and the one after it as the accusative. The dative case is shown by prepositions like to as in I gave a book to him. And the ablative case is shown by prepositions like with as in He opened the door with a key.

The syntagmatic relationship is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present, such as the relation between weather and the others in the following sentence:

If the weather is nice, we’ll go out.

There are syntactic and semantic conditions the words in a syntagmatic relation must meet.

For example, 1 below is an acceptable sentence, but 2 and 3 are not:

1.The boy kicked the ball.

2.Boy the ball kicked the.

3.The ball kicked the boy.

The paradigmatic relation, Saussure originally called Associative, is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent. For example, in the context The ____________ is smiling, there are constraints on the possible elements occurring here.

4.2.2 Immediate constituent analysis

So immediate constituent analysis may be defined as: the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents—word groups(or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached.

The immediate constituent analysis of a sentence may be carried out with brackets as: ((Poor)(John)) ((ran)(away))

Now the question is : how do we know where to make the cuts? The answer, the criterion used here, is substitutability: whether a sequence of words can be substituted for a single word and the structure remains the same.: (John)( ran)

(2) Its advantages

Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, and ambiguities, if any, will be revealed.

(3) Its problems

However, there are also problems in IC analysis. First, at the beginning, some advocators insisted on binary divisions. Any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not always possible.

Leave the book on the shelf.→Leave + the book +on the shelf.≠Leave it there.

Second, constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis

The former may be defined as the abstract representation of the syntactic properties of a

construction, e.g. the underlying level of structural relations底层结构关系between its different constituents, such as the relation between the underlying subject and its verb, or a verb and its object. In contrast, the latter is the final stage in the syntactic derivation of a construction, which closely corresponds to structural organization of a construction people actually produce and receive.

5.1 Meanings of “meaning”

G. Leech in a more moderate tone recognize 7 types of meaning in his Semantics.

1. Conceptual概念上的meaning: Logical, cognitive, or denotative外延的content. Associative meaning联想意义:

2. Connotative内涵的meaning: What is communicated by virtue效力of what language refers to.

3. Social meaning: What is communicated of the social circumstances of language use.

4. Affective情感的meaning: What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the

speaker/writer.

5. Reflected meaning反映意义: What is communicated through association with another sense

of the same expression.

6. Collocative meaning搭配意义: What is communicated through association with words which

tend to occur in the environment of another word.

7.

It is believed that SCHEMATA, meaning packets of stored knowledge, play an important role in language processing.The features of schemata are as follows:

1.Schemata can vary considerably in the information they contain, from the very simple to the very complex.

2.Schemata are frequently organized hierarchically, for example, in addition to a rather general restaurant schema or script, we probably also have more specific restaurant schemata for different kinds of restaurant （e.g. fast-food places，up-market French restaurants, and so on）

3.Schemata operate in a top-down or conceptually driven way to facilitate interpretation of

environmental stimuli.

There are various characteristics of language processing which indicate the key role played by schematic and other stored knowledge. For example, language comprehension frequently requires us to go far beyond the literal meanings of the sentences we read or hear. Essential information is often only implied, so it is necessary to draw inferences in order to understand fully what is intended.

For example, in the text interpretation, schemata presumably play a part. Readers make use of a restaurant schema or script to understand a story about Jack eating out at a restaurant. Subsequently, they falsely recognized sentences fitting into the schema but not actually included in the story (e.g. Jack sat down at the table.) Schemata thus lead people to draw schema-relevant inferences which facilitate comprehension and interpretation.

6.3.2 Story structure

Our comprehension of and memory for stories highly “selective”, in the sense that we focus on the central theme of the story rather than on the relatively unimportant details.

They argued that there were additional processes involved in the task of understanding the gist or MACROSTRUCTURE 宏观结构of a story. More specially, they claimed that readers or listeners make extensive use of their general knowledge to work out the major theme of a story. This leads to the production of MACROPROPOSITIONS宏观命题, which are general propositions used to form an overall macrostructure of the story.

7.1.1 How does language relate to culture?

Firth, a leading figure in a linguistic tradition later known as the London School, tried to set up a model for illustrating the close relationship between language use and its co-occurance 共现factors. In the end, he developed his own theory of CONTEXT OF SITUATION情景语境理论.

SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESES: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different language may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world. 7.1.5Culture in language teaching classroom

Principally, there are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our language class:

1.to get the students familiar with cultural differences;

2.to help the students transcend超越their own culture and see things as the members of the

target culture will;

3.to emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and understanding culture

through various classroom practices.

All this leads to a belief that a good understanding of structural things in some cases has much to do with a conscious understanding of the cultural background of the target language from language learners. In other words, a successful master of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure.

7.2.3 What should we know more about sociolinguistics?P239

Sociolinguistics, as an interdisciplinary study of language use, attempts to show the relationship between language and society. More specifically, in this discipline we have two important things to think about: structural things and their uses in a sociocultural context. Similarly, when we are conducting a sociolinguistic study of language use, we have two big issues to deal with. First, we want to show how these two factors are related to each other and second, we attempt to know why it should be so….These dual objectives make this new type of linguistic study as an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary enterprise in nature….which could be further specified as two related but not identical perspectives of observation identified as a SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF SOCIETY and a SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE, respectively.

7.2.4 What implications can we get from sociolinguistics?

What is wrong with the traditional perspective in language teaching? By asking a question like this, we are in fact making a choice between training our students as GRAMMARIANS and training them as ACTIVE LANGUAGE USERS. This contrast reflects two different views of philosophy in language teaching. For the traditional school, language learning is treated as a process of acquiring knowledge, like studying history or mathematics. The end result is that learners will know something about the language in the same way a linguist does, but will know little about the language used by others. A change in language teaching in the middle of the 1970s when Hyme’s theory of COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE was introduced into the field as an antagonism to the traditional philosophy in language teaching. Consequently, as the name of this theory suggested, language teachers began to pay more attention to the

question of how to train their students as active and successful language users in a real

1)Sociolinguistics has contributed to a change of emphasis in the content of language

teaching;

2)It has also contributed to innovations in materials and activities for the classroom;

3)It has also contributed to a fresh look at the nature of language development and use;

4)It has contributed to a more fruitful research in this field.

In Austin’s opinion, there are three senses in which saying something (e.g. GOOD MORNING!) may be understood as doing something.

“Morning!”The act performed in this sense is called a LOCUTIONARY ACT发话行为.(the act of saying something; it’s an act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon, and phonology. Namely, the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference.)

In the example of “Morning!” we can say it has the force of a greeting, or it ought to have been taken as a greeting. This is the second sense in which to say something is to do something, and the act performed is known as an ILLOCUTIONARY ACT言外之意.(the act performed in saying something; its force is id entical with the speaker’s intention.)

This act, which is performed through, by means of, a locutionary act, is called a PERLOCUTIONARY ACT.（the act performed by or resulting from saying something, it’s the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance.）

8.2.1 The cooperative principle

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. And this principle is known as the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE or CP for short.

To specify the CP further, Grice introduced for categories of maxims as follows:

QUANTITY: QUALITY: RELATION:MANNER

11.2.5 The theory of communicative competence

The concept COMPETENCE originally comes from Chomsky. It refers to the