语言学名词解释

胡壮麟语言学名词解释总结1.Design feature: are features that define our human languages, such as arbitrariness, duality, creativity,displacement, cultural transmission, etc.2.Function: the use of language to communicate, to think, etc. Language functions include informativefunction, interpersonal function, performative function, emotive function, phatic communion,recreational function and metalingual function.3.Synchronic: a kind of description which takes a fixed instant (usually, but not necessarily, thepresent), as its point of observation. Most grammars are of this kind.4.Diachronic: study of a language is carried through the course of its history.5.Prescriptive: a kind of linguistic study in which things are prescribed how ought to be, i.e. layingdown rules for language use.6.Descriptive: a kind of linguistic study in which things are just described.7.Arbitrariness: one design feature of human language, which refers to the face that the forms oflinguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.8.Duality: one design feature of human language, which refers to the property of having two levels ofare composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.9.Displacement: one design feature of human language, which means human language enable theirusers to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present c in time and space, at the moment of communication.10.Phatic communion: one function of human language, which refers to the social interaction oflanguage.11.Metalanguage: certain kinds of linguistic signs or terms for the analysis and description of particularstudies.petence: language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules.13.Performance: the actual use of language in concrete situation.ngue: the linguistic competence of the speaker.15.Parole: the actual phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances).16.Phonetics: it studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. (The study ofsounds which are used in linguistic communication is called phonetics.)17.Phonology: the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages. It aims to discover theprinciples that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur.18.Articulatory phonetics: the study of production of speech sounds.19.Phoneme: the abstract element of sound, identified as being distinctive in a particular language.20.Manner of articulation: in the production of consonants, manner of articulation refers to the actualrelationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract.21.Place of articulation: in the production of consonants, place of articulation refers to where in thevocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of air.plementary distribution: the relation between tow speech sounds that never occur in the sameenvironment. Allophones of the same phoneme are usually in complementary distribution.23.Suprasegmental: suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than singlesound segments. The principal supra-segmental features are syllable, stress, tone, and intonation. 24.Morpheme: the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content, aunit that cannot be divided into further small units without destroying or drastically altering themeaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.25.Inflection: the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the addition of inflectional affixes,such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.26.Affix: the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to anothermorpheme (the root or stem).27.Derivation: different from compounds, derivation shows the relation between roots and affixes.28.Root: the base from of a word that cannot further be analyzed without total lass of identity.29.Stem: any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added.30.Bound morpheme: an element of meaning which is structurally dependent on the world it is added to,e.g. the plural morpheme in “dog’s”.31.Free morpheme: an element of meaning which takes the form of an independent word.32.Lexicon: a list of all the words in a language assigned to various lexical categories and provided withsemantic interpretation.33.Grammatical word: word expressing grammatical meanings, such conjunction, prepositions, articlesand pronouns.34.Lexical word: word having lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action andquality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and verbs.35.Blending: a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining theinitial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words.36.Loanword: a process in which both form and meaning are borrowed with only a slight adaptation, insome cases, to eh phonological system of the new language that they enter.37.Loan blend: a process in which part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning isfully borrowed.38.Loan shift: a process in which the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native.39.Acronym: is made up of the first letters of the name of an organization, which has a heavily modifiedheadword.40.Loss: the disappearance of the very sound as a morpheme in the phonological system.41.Back-formation: an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting animagined affix from a long form already in the language.42.Assimilation: the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is morespecifically called. ”contact” or”contiguous” assimilation.43.Linguistic determinism: one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, i.e. language determinesthought.44.Linguistic relativity: one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, i.e. there’s no limit to thestructural diversity of languages.45.Performative: an utterance by which a speaker does something does something, as opposed to aconstative, by which makes a statement which may be true or false.46.Constative: an utterance by which a speaker expresses a proposition which may be true or false.47.Locutionary act: the act of saying something; it’s an act of conveying l iteral meaning by means ofsyntax, lexicon, and phonology. Namely, the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense andreference.48.Illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something; its force is identical with the speaker’sintention.49.Perlocutionary act: the act performed by or resulting from saying something, it’s the consequence of,or the change brought about by the utterance.50.Conversational implicature: the extra meaning not contained in the literal utterances,understandable to the listener only when he shares the speaker’s knowledge or knows why and how he violates intentionally one of the four maxims of the cooperative principle.。