语言学PPT

• A language refers to a particular language system, e.g. Chinese. A language usually has a set of varieties, for example, dialects, sociolects.(Pg.4)(token)
3) duality “Language is organized at two levels or layers simultaneously.” This is called duality or “double articulation”. (Yule, 2000:25)
Note: This feature, together with arbitrariness, makes language economical and productive, a design feature of language to be discussed next.
2. The species-specificity
of language
1) arbitrariness The link between a linguistic form and its meaning is not natural but conventional. What’s in a name? That which we
5. Two important changes of attitudes in language study
1). From prescriptivism to Descriptivism
A linguist is carrying out a prescriptive study of language when he tries to lay down rules to prescribe what is correct in a language for its speakers.
call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
2) displacement Displacement refers to the fact that our human language can be used to talk about the past, the present or the future, and things here in our immediate vicinity or far removed from us, and things which are concrete or abstract, even imagined, in fact any possible worlds.
•Discovered and summarized in modern linguistic study a. We discover our identity as individuals and social beings when we acquire a language during childhood. b. Language serves as a means of cognition and communication. c. Language provides for present needs and future plans, and at the same time carries with it the impression of things in the past. (quotation in the textbook) (Widdowson, 2000:3)
• Nativism or mentalism (e.g. Chomsky’s UG, Pg.9):
a. principles b. input c. parameters
• Behaviorism or empiricism:
One’s brain is blank when he is born and experience is the only thing that contributes to language knowledge.
4. Language and languages as the object of linguistic study
• Language refers to the general system of human communication as a whole, namely the structured arrangement of sounds into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into sentences, etc. (type)
The knowledge of language was arrived at by convention and agreement of the speakers of a given language.
Man’s knowledge came from universal truths.
2) The two opposing camps in modern times
4) productivity or creativity Productivity or creativity is a feature of language that we humans can make use of finite linguistic resources to create or produce infinite novel expressions or sentences never heard before. (honeybees’ communication system:
A linguist is conducting a descriptive study of language when he “tries to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other (i.e. extraneous) rules, or norms, of correctness”. (Lyons, 1982:47)
3. The knowledge of language: endowed or conventional?
• Plato’s innateness hypothesis:
1) The two opposing camps in ancient times
• Aristotle’s conventional hypothesis:
6) cultural transmission Children are good at acquiring a language. But the prerequisite is that they should be exposed to one language or another, and a child living in isolation from the human community and without exposure to any language will not have the acquisition of language at all and it is still harder for him to learn a language fluently after the so-called critical period.
round dance: within 20 feet sickle dance: between 20 and 60 feet tail-wagging dance: more than 60 feet)
5) Discreteness Discreteness refers to the fact that “the sounds used in language are meaningfully distinct”. (Yule, 2000:24) To put it in another way, we humans have the ability to divide or cut continuous streams of speech into meaningfully distinctive segments.
2) From diachronic study to
synchronic study
Diachronic study of language deals with a language as it changes with time. Synchronic study of language is concerned with a language at a certain period of time, normally but not necessarily, a language in the present.
An Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics
Series of Lectures by Dai Zhijun
Chapter Oபைடு நூலகம்e
Human Language
1. The centrality of
language in human life
• Reflected in the scriptures In the beginning was the word. ……Bible God created the world by a Word, instantaneously, without toil or pains. ……Talmud