语言学复习要点

1. Linguistics

The study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

2. design features

They are a series of features which are uniquely a part of human language and unlikely to be found in the communication system of other creatures. They are displacement, productivity, cultural transmission, arbitrariness, discreteness and duality.

3. Displacement

Language can be used to refer to things which are in the past, present or future, real or imagined, or in far-away places.

4. Duality

It is generally the case that language is organized at two levels or layers which is known as the physical level and meaningful level simultaneously.

?5. Arbitrariness

It is generally the case that there is no ?natural? connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. ? 6. Manner of articulation

It is the case that we describe the consonant sounds in terms of how they are articulated.

7. Place of articulation

It focuses on describing consonant sounds in terms of where they are articulated.

8. articulator phonetics

The general study of the characteristics of speech sounds is called phonetics. And the study of how speech sounds are made, or ?articulated? is articulatory phonetics.

9. Phonology

The description of the systems and patterns of the speech sounds in a language.

10. Assimilation

It is the process when two phonemes occur in sequence and some aspect of one phoneme is taken or ?copied? by the other. For example, the word ?can? in the sentence ?I can go.?may pronounce as [k??] instead of [k?n] because of the influence of the following sound [g].

11. Back-formation

A word of one type is reduced to form another word of different type. For example, the word ?donation? first came into use and then the verb ?donate? was created from it.

12. Morpheme

It is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. For example, the word tourists contains three morphemes tour, -ist, and -s.

13. Immediate Constituent

It is an approach to describe the regular structures of the language. It is designed to show constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction.

14. Syntax

The study of structure and ordering of components within a sentence.

15.semantics

The study of the meaning of linguistic units, words and sentence in particular.

16. Hyponymy

When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another, the relationship is described as hyponymy.

17. Homonymy

It is used when one word is written and spoken are the same while possessing different meanings. For example, the bank can be referred to a river and financial institution as well.

18.synonymy

It refers to the case that two or more forms have very closely related meanings, which are often, but not always, intersubstitutable in sentence,such as broad and wide.

19. Pragmatics

The study of what the writer or speaker of those words intended to convey.

20. Synchronic

It is the case that we concentrate on variation in language in terms of differences within one language in different places and among different groups at the same time.

第一章语言的起源

概念辨析

? The “bow-wow” theory

? The ‘’y o-heave-ho” theory

思考

“bow-wow”理论和“哟哦呵”理论的差异何在？

The former theory means that primitive words could have been imitations of the natural sounds which e arly men and women heard around them while‘yo-he-ho? theory means a set of grunts, groans and curses involved in physical effort