1、Chapter 11What is language?Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication2. Design features of language ？a) Arbitrariness: It refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.b) Duality: the property of having two level

2、s of structures. Such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organizationc) Productivity/creativity: Language is resourceful because of its duality and recursiveness. Language has its potential to create en

3、dless sentences.d) Displacement: Human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.3. Functions of language1) Informative: The speakers use language to talk about their thoughts, ideas, beliefs or wha

4、t they believe, they see, they hear.e.g. Water boils at 212 degree Fahrenheit.2) Interpersonal function: people use language to establish and maintain their status in society.e.g. It includes forms of address, speech function, modality, etc.3) Performative: Language is used to “do things”, to perfor

5、m actions.4) Emotive function: It is crucial in changing the emotional status of an audience for or against someone or something.5) Phatic communion: The speaker will use seemingly meaningless expressions to establish a comfortable relationship between people without involving any factual content.6)

6、 Recreational function: The language is used for the sheer joy.7) Metalingual function: Language can be used to talk about language.Language is self-reflexive.E.g. paraphrase: (order change, similar expressions)definition: (/a:/ is a vowel and /b/ is a consonant.)4. Main branches of linguistics

7、1) Phonetics-speech soundsIt studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is, how the speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the sounds of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, etc.2) Phonology -phonemeIt studies the rules governing of th

8、e structure, distribution and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. Simply put it, it studies how sounds are put together and used to convey meaning in communication.3) Morphology-morphemeIt is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meani

9、ng-morphemes and word-formation process.4) SyntaxIt studies the rules in the formation, organization of a sentence. Or specifically, it studies the word order of a sentence.5) SemanticsIt concerns the study of meaning in a language.6) PragmaticsIt is the study of meaning in a context, in a particula

10、r situation.5.Macrolinguistics: Linguistics is a discipline. It has relationships with other disciplines such as psychology, sociology, computer science and so on.1)Psycholinguistics: It investigates the interrelation of language and mind.2) Sociolinguistics: It concerns the relationship between lan

11、guage and society, including the social functions of language and the social characteristics of its users.3) Anthropological linguistics: It uses the theories and methods of anthropology to study language variation and language use in relation to the cultural patterns and beliefs of man.6. Important

12、 distinctions in linguistics1) Descriptive vs. prescriptiveThe distinction lies in prescribing how things ought to be and describing how things are. Descriptive linguistics describes and analyzes the facts observed. Prescriptive linguistics tries to lay down rules for “correct” behavior.2) Synchroni

13、c and DiachronicA synchronic description takes a fixed instant as its point of observation. That is, if we study language at some point in time, it is synchronic study.Diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history. That is, if we study language as it exists in d

14、ifferent historical periods, it is diachronic study.3) Langue and paroleLangue is the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community, including rules, conventions; It is stable and systemic.Parole is the concrete use of rules. Parole is subject to personal and situational

15、 constraints4) Competence and performanceCompetence refers to the language users underlying knowledge about the system of rules.Performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations.Chapter 21. Phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived.Articulator

16、y Phonetics is the study of the production of speech sounds.Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds.Perceptual or Auditory Phonetics is concerned with the perception of speech sounds.2. Consonants and vowelsConsonants are produced with some form of obstruction of

17、the air passage, with or without the vibration of the vocal cords.A vowel is produced without any obstruction of the air stream in the mouth, The distinction between vowels and consonants lies in the obstruction of airstream.Place of articulation(1).Bilabial (雙唇音): p, b, m, w(2). Labial-dental（唇齒音:

18、f, v(3). Dental（齒音）: ð, (4). Alveolar（齒齦音）: t, d, s, z, n, l(5). Post-alveolar（后齒齦音）:, 3 (7). Palatal（硬腭音）: j(8). Velar（軟腭音）: k, g, (11). Glottal（聲門音）: h3. What is minimal pair?two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same pl

19、ace.4. Allophonesp, ph are two different phones and are variants of the phoneme /p/. Such variants of a phoneme are called allophones of the same plementary distribution: they never occur in the same context:Phonetic similarity: the allophones of a phoneme must bear some phonetic resembla

20、nce.5. Assimilation: Nasalization, dentalization, and velarization are all instances of assimilation, a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound.6. Suprasegmentals features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The

21、 principle suprasegmentals are stress, tone, and intonation.7. The syllable structure: All syllables must have a nucleus but all syllables contain an onset and a coda. A syllable that has no coda is called an open syllable while a syllable with coda is a closed syllable.8. Tone: languages like Chine

22、se are known as tone languages.Chapter 31. Morpheme（詞素）: the smallest meaningful unit in composition of words.Morphology: the study of word-formation, or the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed from smaller components - morphemes.1. types of morphemes1)free morpheme

23、and bound morpheme（自由詞素和粘附詞素）Free morphemes -morphemes which may occur alone or may constitute words by themselves, e.g. dog, nation, desk, close.Bound morphemes - morphemes which can not occur alone and must appear with at least another morpheme, e.g. dis-, un-, -ed, -ment.2)root, affix and stem (詞

24、根、詞綴和詞干)Root- the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed without total loss of identity. It is the part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. All words contain a root.Affix- the morphemes that can be used only when added to another morpheme (the root or stem). There are thr

25、ee subtypes: Prefixes, Suffixes & Infixes.Stem- any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added. Or it is the part of word form which remains when all inflectional affixes have been removed.3).inflectional affix and derivational affix（屈折詞綴和派生詞綴）Inflectional a

26、ffix- affixes which often only add a grammatical meaning to the stem.Derivational affix- affixes which change the lexical meaning. Two fields of Morphology: Inflectional morphology- the study of inflections. Derivational morphology (派生形態(tài)學(xué)): the study of word-formation.2.what is word1)stability2)rela

27、tive uninterruptbility3)a minimum free form(A word is a minimal free form of a language that has a given sound, meaning and syntactic function.)3.classification of words1) Variable & invariable wordsVariable: words with ordered and regular series of grammatically different word forms. Part of th

28、e word remains relatively constant.Invariable: words without inflective endings.e.g. since, when, seldom, through, etc.2) Grammatical words and Lexical wordsGrammatical / Function words: words which express grammatical meaning; to link different parts together.Lexical / Content words: words which ha

29、ve lexical meaning, or which carry the main content of a language3) Closed-class & open-class wordsClosed-class: whose membership is fixed or limited, i.e., new members cannot normally be added, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, auxiliaries.Open-class: whose membership is i

30、n principle infinite or unlimited, i.e., new members can be added, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs4) Word class: known as Parts of Speech in traditional grammar, which establishes nine word classes, such as noun, verb, adjectives, adverbs, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjectio

31、n and article.Pro-form: substitutes for other terms.l Pro-adjective: Your car is red. So is his.l Pro-verb: He speaks English better than he does.l Pro-adverb: He hopes to win and I hope so too.l Pro-locative: He went there, under the tree.4. Lexical Change1) Invention/Coinage 發(fā)明法2) Blending混成法:3) B

32、ack-formation逆構(gòu)詞法4) Clipping /Abbreviations縮寫詞5) Acronym縮略語(yǔ)6) Analogical creation類推構(gòu)詞7) Borrowing借詞5.Compound refers to a word that is composed of more than one morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form.Derivation shows a relationship between roots and affixes. New der

33、ivational words are created by attaching prefixes or suffixes to already existing words.Chapter 41.Positional relation, or WORD ORDER, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language, or (a relation between one item and others in a sequence or between elements which are all present).Posi

34、tional relations are a manifestation of one aspect of Syntagmatic Relations observed by F. de Saussure.2. The Relation of Substitutability refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with the same structure, (or relation holding between elements replace

35、able with each other at a particular place in a structure, between one element present and the others absent).3. The technique of breaking up sentences into smaller units by making successive binary cutting is called Immediate Constituent (IC) Analysis.4. Immediate constituents: constituents immedia

36、tely, directly, below the level of construction, or, the two parts that are yielded after each cut. An immediate constituent can be further segmented until we obtain the smallest grammatical unitAdvantage of IC analysisn On one hand, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly i

37、n IC analysis.n On the other hand, if some ambiguities exist, they will also be revealed.5. Endocentric: Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable centre or h

38、ead.6. Exocentric: Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable “Centre” or “Head” inside the group,7. Category: It refers to classes and functions in its narrow sen

39、se, e.g. noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically, it refers to the defining properties of these general units:Categories of the noun: number, gender, case and countabilityCategories of the verb: tense, aspect, voice8. Agreement: Agreement (or Concord) may be

40、defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also, be characterized by the same paradigmaticlly marked category (or categories).Chapter51. Semantics:It refers to the study of meaning in la

41、nguage. More specifically, semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistic units, words and sentences in particular2. The word “meaning” itself has different meanings. In this lecture The Meaning of Meaning written in 1923, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards presented a “representative list of the m

42、ain definitions which reputable students of meaning have favored”.3.Seven types of meaning:*Conceptual/denotative meaningConnotative meaningSocial meaningAffective meaningReflected meaningCollocative meaningThematic meaning4. “Semantic triangle” theory （語(yǔ)義三角理論）n a)Proposed by Ogden and Richards in t

43、he book The Meaning of Meaning.n b)They argue that the relation between a word and a thing it refers to is not direct. It is mediated by concept, mental image. In other words, the link between words and things can be made only through the use of mind. For every word, there is an associated concept.n

44、 Concept- is the mental image, the abstraction or generalization of objects of the same kind. It is abstracted from the object which is referred to.5. 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 ab

45、stract and de-contextualised.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.6.Sense relations:a)Synonymy:1)Dialectal synonymy: regional dialects2) Stylis

46、tic synonymy (Register)3) Synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning4)Collocational synonymy:5)Semantically different synonymsUsage of Synonymy:1. Paraphrase2. Cohesion in textual analysisb) Antonymy1)Gradable antonymy2)Complementary antonymy3)Converse antonymyc)Hyponymyn Superordin

47、ate/hypernym: the more general termn Hyponym: the more specific termn Co-hyponyms: members of the same class8.Componential analysis: It is an approach that analyzes word meaning by decomposing it into its semantic features.Chapter61. Six subjects of researchn Language acquisition (L1 / L2)n Language comprehensionn Language productionn Language di