现代语言学笔记及课后答案

Linguistics: It is generally defined as the scientific study of language.
General linguistics: The study of language as a whole is called general linguistics.
Applied linguistics:In a narrow sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages. In a broad sense, it refers to the application of linguistic findings to the solution of practical problems such as the recovery of speech ability.
Synchronic study: The study of a language at some point in time.
e.g. A study of the features of the English used in Shakespear e’s time is a synchronic study.
Diachronic study: The study of a language as it changes through time. A diachronic study of language is a historical study, which studies the historical development of language over a period of time. e.g. a study of the changes English has undergone since Shakespeare’s time is a diachronic study.
Language competence: T he ideal user’s knowl edge of the rules of his language. A transformational-generative grammar（转化生成语法）is a model of language competence.
Language performance: performance is the actual realization of the ideal language user’s knowledge of the rules in linguistic communication.
Langue: Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community; Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow; Langue is relatively stable, it does not change frequently. Parole:Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use; parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules; parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.
Language: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.
Arbitrariness: It is one of the design features of language. It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. A good example is the fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages.
Productivity: Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by its users.
Duality: Language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds at the lower or basic level, and the other of meanings at the higher level.
Displacement: language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker.
Cultural transmission: While we are born with the ability to acquire language, the details of any language are not genetically transmitted, but instead have to be taught and learned.
Design features: It refers to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication
phonetics: Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’ s languages
auditory phonetics: It studies the speech sounds from the hearer’s point of view. It studies how the sounds are perceived by the hearer.
acoustic phonetics: It studies the speech sounds by looking at the sound waves. It studies the physical means by which speech sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another. international phonetic alphabet [IPA]: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription.
Broad transcription:the transcription with letter-symbols only, i.e. one letter-symbol for one sound. This is the transcription normally used in dictionaries and teaching textbooks.
Narrow transcription: is the transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics. This is the transcription used by the phoneticians in their study of speech sounds.
diacritics: is a set of symbols which can be added to the letter-symbols to make finer distinctions than the letters alone make possible.
Voiceless（清音）: when the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration, the sounds produced in such a condition are called voiceless sounds.
Voicing （浊音）: Sounds produced while the vocal cords are vibrating are called voiced sounds.
Vowel: the sounds in production of which no articulators come very close together and the air stream passes through the vocal tract without obstruction are called vowels.
Consonants: the sounds in the production of which there is an obstruction of the air stream at some point of the vocal tract are called consonants.
phonology: Phonology studies the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.
phone: Phones can be simply defined as the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.
phoneme:a collection of abstract phonetic features, it is a basic unit in phonology. It is represented or realized as a certain phone by a certain phonetic context.
allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme. For example [l] and [l]
phonemic contrast:Phonemic contrast refers to the relation between two phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.
Complementary distribution:refers to the relation between two similar phones which are allophones of the same phoneme, and they occur in different environments.
minimal pair:When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair. For example: bin and pin.
suprasegmental features: the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features. The main suprasegmental features include stress, tone and intonation.
tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. Pitch variation can distinguish meaning just like phonemes. The meaning-distinctive function of the tone is especially important in tone languages, for example, in Chinese.
intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. For example, English has four basic types of intonation: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone and the rise-fall tone.
Morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. It is divided into two sub-branches: inflectional morphology and lexical or derivational morphology.
Inflectional morphology: The inflectional morphology studies the inflections
Derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word-formation.
Morpheme: It is the smallest meaningful unit of language. For example: the word “boyish” consists of two morphemes: “boy” and “ish”.
Free morpheme: Free morphemes are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves or in combination with other morphemes. For example: “help”, “table”, “room” are all free morphemes.
Bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word. For example: “-er”, “dis-“, “-less” are all bound morphemes.
Root: A root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it bears clear, definite meaning; it must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word. For example: the root “geo-“combines with another root “-ology”, we get the word “geology”.
Affix: morphemes manifesting various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as number, tense, degree and case. Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional affixes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories, such as “-ing”, “-est”, while derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word, such as “-ly”, “dis-“, “un-“.
Inflection（屈折）:the manifestation of various grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, tense, degree and case.
Prefix: Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word. Prefixes modify the meaning of the stem, but they usually do not change the part of speech of the original word.
Suffix: Suffixes are added to the end of the stems; they modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech.
Stem: A stem is the existing form to which a derivational affix can be added. A stem can be a bound root, a free morpheme, or a derived form himself.
Derivation: Derivation is a process of word formation by which derivative affixes are added to an existing form to create a word.
Compounding: Compounding can be viewed as the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words.
1). syntax: Syntax is a subfield of linguistics which studies the
sentence structure of language. It consists of a set of abstract
rules that allow words to be combined with other words to form grammatical sentences.
2). linguistic competence: Universally found in the grammars of
all human languages, syntactic rules comprise the system of
internalized linguistic knowledge of a language speaker
known as linguistic competence.
3). sentence: A sentence is a structurally independent unit that
usually comprises a number of words to form a complete
statement, question or command. Normally, a sentence
consists of at least a subject and a predicate which contains
a finite ver
b or a verb phrase.
4). finite clause（定式子句）: a clause that takes a subject and a
finite verb, and at the same time stands structurally alone. (A
simple sentence satisfies the structural requirements of a
finite clause.)
5). simple sentence: a simple sentence consists of a single
clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands
alone as its own sentence.
6). coordinate sentence（并列句）: A coordinate sentence
contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”, “but”,“or”.
7). complex sentence（复合句）: a complex sentence contains
two or more clauses, one of which is incorporated （合成一体
的）into the other. That is, the two clauses hold unequal
status, one subordinating the other. The incorporated, or subordinate, clause is normally called an embedded clause,
and the clause into which it is embedded is called a matrix
clause.
8). hierarchical structure（层次结构）: the sentence structure that
groups words into structural constituents and shows the
syntactic category of each structural constituent, such as NP
and VP.
9). syntactic category: Apart from sentences and clauses, a
syntactic category usually refers to a word (called a lexical category) or a phrase (called a phrasal category) that performs a particular grammatical function, such as the
subject or object in a sentence. Constituents that can be substituted for one another without loss of grammaticality
belong to the same syntactic category.
10). grammatical relations: The structural and logical functional
relations of constituents are called grammatical relations. The
grammatical relations of a sentence concern the way each
noun phrase in the sentence relates to the verb. In many
cases, grammatical relations in fact refer to who does what to
whom.
11). phrase structure rules: a rewrite rule that allows for the
possible combinations of words to form phrases and
sentences.
12). X-bar theory is a general and highly abstract schema that
collapses all phrasal structure rules into a single format: X″→ (Spec) X (Compl). (In this format, Spec stands for specifier
while Compl stands for complement. This theory is capable of
reducing the redundancies of individual phrasal structure
rules and may well capture certain basic properties shared by
all phrasal categories, i.e. NP, VP, AP, PP, across the
languages of the world. )
13). transformational rules: Transformational rules are the rules
that transform one sentence type into another type.
14). D-structure: D- structure is the level of syntactic
representation that exists before movement takes place.
Phrase structure rules, with the insertion of the lexicon,
generate sentences at the level of D-structure.
(Phrase structure rules + the lexicon→D-structure →
Movement rules →S-structure)
15). S-structure: a level of syntactic representation after the
operation of necessary syntactic movement
16). Move a: a general movement rule accounting for the
syntactic behavior of any constituent movement.
17). Universal Grammar: a system of linguistic knowledge which
consists of some general principles and parameters about natural languages.
1). Semantics: Semantics can be simply defined as the study of
meaning in language.
2). Sense: Sense is concerned with the inherent meaning of the
linguistic form. It is the collection of all the features of the linguistic form; it is abstract and de-contextualized.
3). Reference: Reference means what a linguistic form refers to in
the real, physical world; it deals with the relationship between the linguistic element and the non-linguistic world of experience.
4). Synonymy: Synonymy refers to the sameness or close
similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms.
5). Polysemy: Polysemy refers to the fact that the same one word
may have more than one meaning.
6). Homonymy（同音异义，同形异义）: Homonymy refers to the
phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e. , different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both.
7). Homophones（同音异义）: When two words are identical in
sound, they are called homophones. e.g. rain/reign.
8). Homographs同形异义: When two words are identical in
spelling, they are homographs. e.g. tear v. / tear n.
9). Complete homonyms: When two words are identical in both
sound and spelling, they are called complete homonyms. e.g.
fast v. / fast adj.; scale v. /scale. n.
10). Hyponymy（下义关系）: Hyponymy refers to the sense relation
between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. The word which is more general is called a superordinate（上坐标词）, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. (Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms to each other.) e.g. superordinate: animal, hyponyms: dog, cat, lion, tiger.
11). Antonymy: Antonymy refers to the relation of oppositeness of
meaning (on different dimensions).
12). Componential analysis（成分分析法）: Componential analysis
is a way proposed by structural semanticists to analyze word meaning. This approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be divided into meaning components, which are called semantic features. For example: the word “man”is analyzed as comprising the features of +HUMAN, +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE.
13). Predication analysis（述谓结构分析）: It is an approach
proposed by British linguist G. Leech for sentential meaning analysis. In semantic analysis of a sentence, predication is the basic unit which is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence. This applies to all forms of sentence, including statements, imperative and interrogative forms. A predication consists of argument(s) and predicate. An argument is a logical participant in a prediction, largely identical with the nominal element(s) in a sentence. A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.
14). The grammatical meaning: The grammatical meaning of a
sentence refers to its grammaticality, i.e., its grammatical well-formedness. The grammaticality of a sentence is governed by the grammatical rules of the language.
15). Two-place predication: A two-place predication is one which
contains two arguments.
1). Pragmatics: the study of how speakers of a language use
sentences to effect successful communication.
2). Context: The notion of context is essential to the pragmatic
study of language. It consists of (It is generally considered as constituted by) the knowledge that is shared by the speaker and the hearer. The shared knowledge is of two types: the knowledge of the language they use, and the knowledge about the world, including the general knowledge about the world and the specific knowledge about the situation in which linguistic communication is taking place.
3). Utterance meaning: the meaning of an utterance is concrete,
and context-dependent. Utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context. 4). Sentence meaning: The meaning of a sentence is often
considered as the abstract, intrinsic property of the sentence itself in terms of a predication.
5). Constative: Constatives were statements that either state or
describe, and were verifiable;
6). Performative: performatives, on the other hand, were
sentences that did not state a fact or describe a state, and were not verifiable. Their function is to perform a particular speech act.
7). Locutionary act: 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: An illocutionary act is the act of expressing
the speaker’s intention; it is the act performed in saying something.
9). Perlocutionary act: A perlocutionary act is the act performed by
or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something.
10). Cooperative Principle: It is a principle advanced by Paul Grice.
His idea is that in making conversations, the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate, otherwise it would not be possible for them to carry on the talk. The content is: Make your conversational contribution such as required at the stage at which it occurs by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.
11). Conversational implicature: Most of the violations of the
cooperative principles give rise to what Paul Grice calls “conversational implicatures.”When we violate any of these maxims, our language becomes indirect and implies an extra meaning.
1) historical linguistics: a subfield of linguistics that studies
language change (or historical development of language).
2) diachronic linguistics: a term used instead of historical
linguistics to refer to the study of language change at various points in time and at various historical stages.
3) Old English: a major period in the history of English
development that began in 449 and ended in 1100.
4) Middle English: a major period in the history of English
development that began with the arrival of the Norman French invaders in England in 1100 and ended in 1500.
5) Modern English: a period in the history of English development
that began roughly from 1500 to the present.
6) the Great Vowel Shift: a series of systematic sound change in
the history of English that involved seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major discrepancies（差异）between English pronunciation and its spelling system.
7) apocope: the deletion of a word-final vowel segment.
8) epenthesis: the insertion of the consonant or vowel sound to
the middle of a word.
9) Metathesis: Sound change as a result of sound movement is
known as metathesis. It involves a reversal in position of two neighbouring sound segments.
10) Compounding: It is a process of combining two or more than
two words into one lexical unit. For example: sailboat, big-mouth, three-year-old.
11) Derivation: It is a process by which new words are formed by
the addition of affixes to the roots, stems or words. For example: uglification（丑化），finalize.
12) Acronym: An acronym is a word created by combining the
initials of a number of words. For example: UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization国际教科文组织)，CD-ROM （compact disk of read-only-memory）
13) blending: a process of forming a new word by combining parts
of two words. For example: smog (smoke + fog), brunch (breakfast + lunch)
14) abbreviation: an abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or
phrase which represents the complete form. For example: TV (television), Dr (doctor), hr (hour), Jan (January)
15) clipping: clipping is a kind of abbreviation of otherwise longer
words or phrases. For example: gym (gymnasium), zoo (zoological garden), fridge (refrigerator), e-mail (electronic mail), hi-fi (high fidelity).
16) Back-formation: It is a process by which new words are formed
by taking away the supposed suffix of an existing word. For example: typewrite (typewriter), edit (editor)
17) semantic broadening: the process in which the meaning of a
word becomes more general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
18) Semantic narrowing: Semantic narrowing is a process in which
the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning.
19) Semantic shift: Semantic shift is a process of semantic change
in which a word loses its former meaning and acquires a new, sometimes related, meaning.
20) protolanguage: the original (or ancestral) form of a language
family which has ceased to exist.
21) language family: a group of historically (or genetically) related
languages that have developed from a common ancestral language.
22) Great Vowel Shift: It is a series of systematic sound change at
the end of the Middle English period approximately between 1400 and 1600 in the history of English that involved seven long vowels and consequently led to one of the major discrepancies between English pronunciation and its spelling system.
23) Sound assimilation: Sound assimilation refers to the
physiological effect of one sound on another. In an assimilative process, successive sounds are made identical, or more similar, to one another in terms of place or manner of articulation, or of haplology.
24) Haplology: It refers to the phenomenon of the loss of one of
two phonetically similar syllables in sequence.
25) cognate: a word in one language which is similar in form and
meaning to a word in another language because both languages have descended from a common source.
26) internal borrowing: the application of a rule from one part of the
grammar to another part of the grammar by analogy（类推，类似）to its earlier operation.
27) Grimm’s Law：Because these sound changes were so
strikingly regular and law-like, they became known as Grimm’s Law. According to this law, the Germanic languages were subject to a rule that changed all voiceless stops into fricatives after they split off from other Indo-European languages.
1) sociolinguistics: the subdiscipline of linguistics that studies
language variation and language use in social context.
2) speech community: a group of people who form a
community and share at least one speech variety as well as
similar linguistic norms.
3) speech variety: Speech variety, also known as language
variety, refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by
a speaker or group of speakers. The distinctive
characteristics of a speech variety may be lexical,
phonological, morphological, syntactic, or a combination
of linguistic features.
4) language planning: language standardization is known as
language planning. This means that certain authorities, such
as the government or government agency of a country,
choose a particular speech variety and spread the use of it,
including its pronunciation and spelling systems, across
regional boundaries.
5) sociolect: a variety of language used by people belonging to
a particular social class.
6) idiolect: An idiolect is a personal dialect of an individual
speaker that combines aspects of all the elements regarding
regional, social, and stylistic variation, in one form or another （以这样或那样的方式综合了有关地域、社会和文体变异的所
有成份）. In a narrower sense, what makes up one’s idiolect
includes also such factors as voice quality音质, pitch音高
and speech rhythm言语节奏, which all contribute to the
identifying features in an individual’ s speech.
7) register: a functional speech or language variety that
involves degrees of formality depending on the speech
situation concerned.
8) standard language: a superposed（迭生的，重合的）
prestigious variety of language of a community or nation,
usually based on the speech and writing of educated native
speakers of the language. (P170)
9) nonstandard language: Language varieties other than the
standard are called nonstandard languages
10) lingua franca: a variety of language that serves as a common
speech for social contact among groups of people who
speak different native languages or dialects.
11) pidgin: a marginal contact language with a limited vocabulary
and reduced grammatical structures, used by native
speakers of other languages as a means of business
communication.
12) creole: A creole language is originally a pidgin that has
become established as a native language in some speech
community. When a pidgin comes to be adopted by a
population as its primary language, and children learn it as their first language, then the pidgin language is called a creole.
13) diglossia: a sociolinguistic situation in which two very
different varieties of language co-exist in a speech community, each serving a particular social function and used for a particular situation
14) bilingualism: ilingualism refers to a linguistic situation in
which two standard languages are used either by an individual or by a group of speakers, such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation.
15) ethnic dialect: Within a society, speech variation may come
about because of different ethnic backgrounds. An ethnic language variety is a social dialect of a language, often cutting across regional differences. An ethnic dialect is spoken mainly by a less privileged population that has experienced some form of social isolation, such as racial discrimination or segregation.
16) slang: Slang is a casual use of language that consists of
expressive but non-standard vocabulary, typically of arbitrary, flashy浮华的and often ephemeral短暂的coinages创新词and figures of speech characterized by spontaneity自发性and sometimes by raciness活泼，充满活力.
17) linguistic taboo: an obscene猥亵的, profane,亵渎的or
swear word or expression that is prohibited from general use by the educated and “polite” society.
18) euphemism: a word or expression that is thought to be mild,
indirect, or less offensive and used as a polite substitute for the supposedly harsh and unpleasant word or expression. 19) Domain使用域: Domain refers to the phenomenon that most
bilingual communities have one thing in common, that is, fairly clear functional differentiation of the two languages in respect of speech situations. For example: the Home Domain, Employment Domain etc.
1) psycholinguistics: the study of language in relation to the
mind, with focus on the processes of language production生成, comprehension理解and acquisition掌握.
2) cerebral cortex: the outside surface of the brain, it is the
decision-making organ of the body, which receives messages from all the sensory organs and where human cognitive abilities reside.
3) brain lateralization: the localization of cognitive and
perceptual functions in a particular hemisphere of the brain.
4) linguistic lateralization: hemispheric specialization or
dominance for language.
5) dichotic listening: a research technique which has been used
to study how the brain controls hearing and language. The subjects wear earphones and simultaneously receive different sounds in the right and left ear, and are then asked to repeat what they hear.
6) Broca’s area : It refers to the frontal lobe in the left cerebral
hemisphere, which is vital to language. This area is discovered by Paul Broca, a French surgeon and anatomist.。