语言学复习要点

语言学的复习要点

（一）1、Linguistics：Linguistics is generally defined as scientific study of language.

2、Language can be generally defined as a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

3、Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between the word and the thing

4、Design features”refers to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication.

（1）Arbitrariness :the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relational to their meaning

（2)Daulity:the property of having two levels of structures.

(3)Creativity:it refers to the property that language enables language user to produce or understand an indefinite number of sentence.

(4)Displacement:human language enable their user to symbolize object,events and concepts which are not present at the moment of communication.

5、Informative function：Language is the instrument of thought and people often feel need to speak their thoughts aloud. The use of language to record the facts is a prerequisite of social development. The informative function is indeed a crucial function of language.

6、Interpersonal function：he interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between the addresser and addressee in the discourse situation and the addresser's attitude toward what he speaks or writes about.people establish and maintain their status in a society.

7、Performative function：The performative function of language is primarily to change the social status of persons, as in marriage ceremonies, the sentencing of criminals, the blessing of children, the naming of a ship at a launching ceremony, and the cursing of enemies.

8、Emotive function：The emotive function of language is one of the most powerful uses of language because it is crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something.

9、Phatic communion：Phatic communion refers to the social interaction of language

10、Recreational function

11、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.

12、Phonology: studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables.

13、Morphology is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meaning —morphemes and word-formation processes.

14、Morphemes serve different purposes. Some derive new words by changing the meaning or the part of speech, others only refine and give extra grammatical information about the already existing meaning of a word.

15、Syntax is about principles of forming and understanding correct sentences. The form or structure of a sentence is governed by the rules of syntax, which specify word order, sentence organization, and the relationships between words, word classes and other sentence elements.

16、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.

17、Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. It deals with particular utterances in particular situations and is especially concerned with the various ways in which the many social contexts of language performance can influence interpretation. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is internally structured.

（二）

1、Phonetics mainly deals with the description, classification and transcription of speech sounds.

2、Phonology explores the patterns that govern the combination of sounds, i.e, it studies how speech sounds are grouped together to convey meaning in linguistic communication

3、phone (音素，语音)—the phonetic segment and unit is called a phone

4、Phoneme—a sound segment with distinctive value. It is the smallest unit of sound in a language to distinguish words.

5、allophones (音位变体)—the different phones that represent the one phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme.

6、minimal pair/minimal set：For two words (pronunciation concerned), if they are identical in every way except for one sound segment that occurs in the same place in the string, then they are minimal pairs(最小对立体).If more than two sound combinations are involved, then they are minimal sets(最小对立组).

7、Distinctive features：It is this phonetic feature [±voiced] that distinguishes the two words.

8、General rule1：In English, a vowel is nasalized before a word-final or syllable-final nasal consonant.

9、General rule 2：In English, a voiceless stop is aspirated when it occurs word initially or syllable initially.

10、（1）If they are two distinctive phonemes, they are said to be in phonemic contrast.（2）If they are allophones of the same phoneme, then they occur in different phonetic contexts but not contrast meanings. Then, the allophones are said to be in complementary distribution.

11、phonological rules：The patterning of phonemes in a language is rule-governed. The phonological rules determine how phonemes are combined to form permissible words in a language for communication.

12、Distinctive features that occur in units larger than sound segments, such as the syllables, words, phrases and sentences, are called suprasegmental features (超音段特征).

（三）

1、Morphology: the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

2、The most basic element of meaning is traditionally called morpheme.The smallest meaningful unit of language

3、A syllable is a phonetic and phonological unit. In PHONETICS, a syllable is defined as a chest pulse. In PHONOLOGY, a syllable is defined by the way in which VOWELS and CONSONANTS combine to form various sequences. In a word, the definition of a syllable is related with pronunciation and has nothing to do with meaning. A morpheme may be represented by one syllable, like boy and dog, or by two or more syllables.The syllabic structure of a word and the morphemic structure of

a word don’t always correspond

4、Free morpheme----is one that may constitute a word (free form) by itself Bound morpheme----is one that may appear with at least one other morpheme. They can not stand by themselves

5、Affix: Collective term for bound formatives or word-forming elements that constitute subcategories of word classes. Affixes are classified according to their functions and then their placement on the stem.

6、Derivational morphemes —the morphemes which change the meaning, or grammatical class of words, e.g. Inflectional morphemes —the morphemes which are for the most part purely grammatical markers, signifying such concepts as tense, number, case and so on; they never change their syntactic category, never add any lexical meaning, e.g.

7、Prefix: Morphemes that occur only before other morphemes. (Bound morphemes that precede the stem.)Suffix: Morphemes that only occur after other morphemes. (Bound morphemes that are attached finally to free morpheme constructions)

8、A root is the basic form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. That is to say, it is that part of the word left, whether free or bound, when all the affixes are removed. It carries the main component of meaning in a word.

9、A stem is a form that is of concern only with inflectional morphology, i.e. only inflectional affixes (but not derivational affixes) can be added to it. (Bauer 1983:20) A base is any form to which affixes of any kind can be added. It is the form that the morphological operation applies to.

10、There are two kinds of root morphemes: free root morphemes that can stand by

themselves and bound root morphemes that can not stand by themselves and whose number is relatively limited

11、A word can be defined the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can be used independently. It is different from a morpheme in that a word can constitute by itself a complete utterance while a morpheme cannot sometimes.

12、A minimum free form: the smallest unit that can constitute a complete utterance by itself, eg

13、Closed-class words: New members cannot normally be added, egOpen-class words: New members can be added, eg

14、Determiner: all the articles, demonstratives, and quantifiers that appear before the noun and its modifiers.

15、Derivation: refers to the process of how new words are formed.

16、Compound: refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single word.

17、Orthographically: a compound can be written as one word with or without a hyphen in between, or as two separate word.

18、Syntactically: the part of speech of the compound is generally determined by the part of speech of the second element.

19、Semantically: the meaning of the compound is often idiomatic, not always being the sum total of the meanings of its components.

20、Phonetically: the stress of a compound a word always fall on the first element, while the second element receives second stress.

21、Invention: technological and economic activities

22、Blending: a new word is formed by combining parts of two words or a word plus a part of another word

23、Back-formation: A shorter word is derived by deleting a supposed affix from an already existing longer word.

24、Analogy: words are created in imitation of other words. It is also called reanalysis.

(四）

1、Syntax (句法学) is a branch that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences. To put it simple, it is the study of the formation of sentences.

2、A sentence is a sequence of words arranged in a certain order in accordance with grammatical rules.

3、Tense: indicating time related to the time of utterance.

4、Aspect: the internal temporal structure of a verb.

5、Concord: the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories.

6、Government: a word of a certain class governs the form of others. Usually the verb or the preposition determines the form of pronoun after it.

7、Positional relation, or word order, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in

a language. This positional relation is also called horizontal relation or chain relation

8、endocentric construction向心结构is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents

9、exocentric construction 离心结构refer to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole

10、Category refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence,a noun phrase or a verb.

11、.yntax categories (句法范畴) A syntax category is a word or phrase that perform

a particular grammatical function.

12、Subordination structures the structures in which there is only one head, with the head being dominant and the other constituents dependent.

13、Conjoining: Refers to the process where one clause is coordinated or conjoined with another.

14、Embedding: refers to the means by which one clause is included into another sentence (main/matrix clause) in syntactic subordination.

15、Cohesion:It refers to relations of meaning exist within text, and defines it as a text.

16、Semantically, specifiers make more precise the meaning of the head; syntactically, they typically mark a phrase boundary.

17、Complements themselves can be a phrase, they provide information

18、A transformation is a special type of rule that can move an element from one position to another. It can be inversion (倒置), insertion (插入) or other kinds of movement.

(五）

1、Semantics is generally considered to be the study of meaning in language.

2、Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in the real , physical world.

3、Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms.

（1）Absolute or complete synonyms are words identical in meaning in all its aspects, i.e. words that are mutually substitutable under all circumstances.

（2）Relative or near synonyms may differ in different ways.

4、Dialectal synonyms（方言同义词）Synonyms belonging to different dialects of the language

5、Stylistic synonyms (文体同义词)Words having the same cognitive meaning but having different stylistic meanings

6、Synonyms differing in emotive or evaluative meaning

7、Semantically different synonyms These are synonyms that differ slightly in what they mean

8、Dialectal synonyms---- synonyms used in different regional dialects

9、Stylist synonyms----synonyms differing in style

10、Antonymy--- is used for oppositeness of meaning.words that are opposite in meaning are antonyms

11、Complementaries (互补反义词) = binary antonyms the denial of one member of the pair implies the assertion of the other.

12、Contraries (相对反义词) = gradable antonyms there are often intermediate forms between the two members of a pair.

13、Converses (逆反反义词) = relational opposites exhibit the reversal of the relationship between the two items.

14、Polysemy--- the phenomenon that the same one word may have more than one meaning.

15、Homonymy --- the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, e.g. different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both.

（1)Homophones when two words are identical in sound

（2)Homograph when two words are identical in spelling

(3)Complete Homonyms when two words are identical in both sound and spelling 16、Hyponymy (上下义关系) is the sense relation between a more general word, a inclusive word and a more specific word.

17、(1) Synonymy (同义关系)(2) inconsistency (自相矛盾)(3) Entailment (蕴涵)(4) Presupposition (预设)(5) X is a contradiction (自相矛盾)(6) X is semantically anomalous (反常的)(7) Implicature (含意)

18、Synonymy (同义关系) :X is synonymous with Y

19、inconsistency (自相矛盾) :X is inconsistent with Y

20、Entailment (蕴涵): X entail Y

21、Presupposition (预设)X presupposes Y

22、Semantic components (语义成分) or semantic features (语义特征) are the smallest units of meaning in a word. The meaning of words may be described as a combination of semantic components or features.

23、There are two aspects to sentence meaning: grammatical meaning and semantic meaning

24、Predication analysis (述谓结构分析) is a way to analyze sentence meaning, proposed by the British linguist G. Leech. (P81)Predication (述谓结构) is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. A predication consists of argument(s) (变元) and predicate (谓词).An argument is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal elements in a sentence.A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.

25、Predication (述谓结构) is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. A predication consists of argument(s) (变元) and predicate (谓词).An argument is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal elements in a sentence.A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.

(六）

1、Pragmatics:A general definition: The study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successfully communication.

2、If we think a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication, it becomes an utterance, and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually used.

3、Sentence meaning: abstract, detextulazied .Utterance meaning: concrete, and context-dependent

4、Constatives: utterances which roughly serves to state a fact, report that something is the case, or describe what something is

5、Performatives: utterances which are used to perform acts, do not describe or report anything at all; the uttering of the sentence is the doing of an action; they cannot be said to be true or false.

6、Conclusion:The distinction between constatives & performatives cannot be maintained.All sentences can be used to do things.

7、A locutionary act is the act of uttering words, phrases, clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.

8、illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s intention; It is the act preformed in saying something.

9、A perloutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; It is the consequence of , or the change brought about by the utterance

10、Directives指令类: are attempts by the speaker to get the hearer to do something.

11、commissives承诺类: committing the speaker himself to some course of action. When speaking the speaker puts himself under obligation.

12、Expressives表达类: expressing feelings and attitude towards an existing state.

13、declarations: bringing about immediate change by saying something.

(七)

1、Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

2、Culture：

3、Language determines culture (linguistic determinism)Culture determines language (culture determinism)

4、（1）Culture is a wider system that completely includes language as a subsystem. The relation of language to culture is that of part to whole.

（2）Language both expresses and embodies cultural reality.

（3）Language plays a major role in perpetuating culture (or consolidating it over time)

（4）Culture affects language.

5、Benjamin Lee Whorf studied at Yale University under Edward Sapir and became interested in Sapir's ideas. He was influenced by the work of 18th-century German philosophers John Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm von Humbolt, who theorized, based on their study of European languages, that language had a bearing on how people viewed the world.

6、Linguistic determinism: L may determine our thinking patterns.

7、Linguistic relativity: Similarity between language is relative, the greater their structural differentiation is, the more diverse their conceptualisation of the world will be. (modified hypothesis)