语言学复习资料.doc

Lecture 11. Why do linguists tend to be so critical to traditional grammar? Traditional Grammar-broadly refers to the study of language covering the period from ancient times to the end of the 18th century .Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive. Linguistics regarded the spoken language as primary, not the written. It lacked autonomy. It was modeled on ancient Greek, Latin grammar. It was based on logical concepts from meaning to form, not from form to meaning. Emphasis was laid on written language. The attitude was prescriptive not descriptive.2. What is the difference between the descriptive and the prescriptive approach to the investigation of language? Which is to be preferred and why? Descriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as it is actually used by speakers and writers. Prescriptive grammar refers to the structure of a language as certain people think it should be used. Both kinds of grammar are concerned with rules-but in different ways. Specialists in descriptive grammar study the rules or patterns that underlie our use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. On the other hand, prescriptive grammarians lay out rules about what they believe to be the “correct” or “incorrect” use of language. Descriptive grammarians generally advise us not to be overly concerned with matters of correctness: language, they say, isnt good or bad; it simply is. As the history of the glamorous word grammar demonstrates, the English language is a living system of communication, a continually evolving affair. Within a generation or two, words and phrases come into fashion and fall out again. Over centuries, word endings and entire sentence structures can change or disappear.3. What are features of modern linguistics?Linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive. Priority of spoken language. Priority of synchronic description. The linguist is interested in all languages.Lecture 21. What branches does general linguistics include? What these branches study? Phonetics: it studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the sound of speech, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech. Phonology: it studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. Morphology: it is concerned with the internal organization of words it studies the minimal units of meaningmorphemes and word-formation processed. Syntax: it is about principles of forming and understanding correct English sentences. Semitics: it examines how meaning is encoded in a language. Pragmatics: it is the study of meaning in context. it deals with particular utterance in particular situation and is especially concerned with the various ways in which the many social contexts of language performance can influence interpretation.3. (1)Langue vs. parole Langue was considered to be the totality of a language. It was a “storehouse”, the sum of word-images stored in the minds of individuals. We may put it loosely in a formula like: In Saussures theory, parole refers to the individual side of speech, i.e. speaking is psychophysical, it being the actual, concrete act of speaking on the part of an individual. Parole is thus not a collective instrument; its manifestations are individual and momentary. Langue is code, parole is message Langue and parole are closely connected, each dependent on the other: the langue of a community can be arrived at only by a consideration of a large number of paroles, whereas parole can only be intelligible with langue in the minds of all the community members. To a linguist, langue is of primary importance as he wants to make statements which apply, not just to the speech of individuals but to the language as a whole.(2)Synchronic vs. Diachronic linguistics. Synchronic study of language- refers to the study of language as a whole and the description of a particular state of a language at a given point of time in the development of language without considering its evolution and change in history. Diachronic study of language - refers to the study of the process of evolution of language at various histories (historical). A diachronic description of a language traces the historical development of the language and records the changes that have taken place in it between successive points in time. (3)Microlinguistics vs. Macrolinguistics Microlinguistics - refers to the study of the structure and systems of language, including the various subjects of study of the internal structures of language, such fields as phonology, morphology, syntax. Macrolinguistics - refers to the study of language from a broad angle in various interdisciplinary subjects, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, mathematical linguistics, and computational linguistics Lecture 31. Define language. How can you understand it? To give the definition, language is a means of verbal communication .it is instrumental in that communicating by speaking or writing is a purposeful act. It is social and conventional in that language is a social semiotic and communication can only take effectively if all the users share a broad understanding of human interaction including such associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation, and socio-cultural roles. Language learning and use are determined by the intervention of biological, cognitive, psychosocial and environmental factors .in short ,language distinguishes us from animals because it is far more sophisticated than any animal communication system.2. Illustrate the differences between human language and animal communication system in terms of displacement and cultural transmission.Displacement means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication. With language, we can recall the past or anticipate the future. For example, we can refer to the first has been dead for over 2500 years .Most animals respond communicatively as soon as they are stimulated by some occurrence of communal interest. For instance, a warning cry of a bird instantly announces danger. Such animals are under “immediate stimulus control”. Human language is, unlike animal communication systems, stimulus free. What we talk about need not be triggered by any external stimulus in the world or any internal state. Cultural transmission - refers to the fact that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. They are not biologically transmitted from generation to generation. Though the capacity for language in human being has a genetic basis, the particular language a human being learns is a cultural fact, not a genetic one. Simply, while you may inherit brown eyes and dark hair from your parents, you do not inherit their language. You acquire a language in a culture with other speakers and not from parental genes. e.g. An infant born to Korean parents, who is adopted and brought up from birth by English speakers in the U.S, may have physical characteristics inherited from its natural parents, but it will inevitably speak English. And if the child is isolated from the society, he cant acquire the language successfully. So language is acquired in a socio-cultural context. 3. Why is language human specific?Firstly, human language has “design features” which animal communication system do not have, at least not in the true sense of them. Secondly, linguists have done a lot trying to teach animals such as chimpanzees to speak a human language but have achieved nothing inspiring. Washoe, a female chimpanzee, was brought up like a human child by Beatnice and Alan Gardner. She was taught “American sign Language”, and learned a little that made the teachers happy but did mot make the linguistics circle happy, for few believed in teaching chimpanzees. Thirdly, a human child reared among animals cannot speak a human language, not even when he is taken back and taught to do so4. List basic functions of language and define each of them by their aimsReferential Function whenever we ask people for information or tell others about our circumstances and things alike, we are using language in an attempt to share what we know and exchange what we have in our minds. This is often called referential, or ideational. Interpersonal Function is concerned with interaction between the addresser and addressee in a discourse situation and the addressers attitude toward what he speaks or writes about. Textual Function relates our abilities to construct texts out of our utterances and writings. The performative function is primarily to change the social status of persons; the performative function can extend to the control of reality as on some magical or religious occasions. Emotive function is a means of getting rid of our nervous energy when we are under stress. For example, swear words, obscenities are probably the commonest signals to be used in this way, especially when we are in an angry or frustrated state. Phatic Communion language can serve the function of creating or maintaining social relationship between speakers. Identifying function Our use of language can tell our listener or reader a great deal about ourselves, in particular, about our regional origins, social background, and level of education, occupation, age, sex, and personality.The recreational function of a language is often overlooked because it seems restrictive in purpose and supposedly limited in usefulness. However, no one will deny the use of language for the sheer joy of using it. 5. Arbitrariness, Duality of structure, Displacement, Discreteness, Cultural transmission.Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. Take the case of the English word “man”. In Chinese “rn” Duality refers to the property of having two levels of structures, units of the primary level being composed of elements of the secondary level and each level having its own principles of organization. For instance, tens of thousands of words out of a small set of sounds, around 48 in the case of the English language. Creativity- the speaker is able to combine the basic linguistic units to form an infinite set of sentences, most of which are never produced or heard before. Creativity is a universal property of human language. For example, we can write a sentence like the following and go on endlessly:This is the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Tom built. Lecture 41. How do phonetics and phonology differ from each other? And how are they related to each other? Phonetics- general, descriptive, and classificatory. It studies speech sounds as they are. Phonology- concerned with the sound system of language, studies the functioning of the speech sounds. Phonetics provides the means for describing speech sounds; phonology studies the ways in which speech sounds form system and patterns. Phonetics is of general nature; it is the branch of linguistics ,studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description ,classification , and transcription without reference to the function of speech sounds in a particular language ,while phonology is language specific . It deals with speech sounds within the context of a particular language; it is concerned with the working and functioning of speech sounds in a language. Phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their semantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind. Phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which form meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to form plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in ones language.2 Illustrate phone, phoneme and allophone by examples. How is a phone different from a phoneme?A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. But phones do not necessarily distinguish meaning.When we hear the following words produced: pit, spit, tip, feel, leaf, the phones we have heard are ph (as in pit), p (as in spit), p (as in tip), s, t, f, i:, i, l. A phoneme is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. So a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two words. It is an abstract unit. It is not any particular sound but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. We use slant lines “/ /” pan and ban differ only in their initial sounds /p/ and /b/. Allophone: the different phones that represent or are derived from one phoneme are called the allophones of that phoneme. For example: /p/ is a phoneme, but it may be pronounced as phones ph, p, p .So ph, p, p are the allophones of the same phoneme /p/. 3. Explain the sequential rules, assimilation rules and deletion rule by examples. Assimilation rule It assimilates one segment to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar. When a phoneme is realized differently in actual connected speech from what it usually is, as a result of being near some other phonemes belonging to a neighboring word, assimilation takes place “in” may be pronounced differently as in, or i? or im, when occurring in different phonetic contexts: indiscrete alveolar in, inconceivable velar i? ,input bilabial imThe deletion rule It tells us when a sound is to be deleted although it is orthographically represented. e.g. “g” is mute in “sign”, “design”. It is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives “signature”, “designation”. The rule is: delete a g when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. 4 Minimal pairs When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string, the two words are said to have formed a minimal pair.Lecture 51 What does morphology study? It studies morphemes and their different forms and the way they combine in word formation (the study of the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed). 2 What are the main features of morpheme? (1) Morphemes cannot be broken down any further into recognizable or meaningful parts. In other words, a morpheme cant be divided without altering or destroying its meaning. (2) A word may consist of one morpheme or more than one morpheme, while a morpheme may not necessarily represent a word.(3) Morpheme is also a two-fact language unit, which possesses both sound and meaning.(4) Morpheme is not identical with a syllable for syllable has nothing to do with meaning.3 Free morpheme, Bound morpheme Free morpheme, if a morpheme can constitute a word (free form) by itself, it is called a free morpheme.Bound morpheme, If a morpheme has meaning only when connected with at least another morpheme, it is bound. Traditionally, these prefix and suffix morphemes have been called bound morphemes. Lecture 61 Do you think that morphology and syntax should be treated as separate areas of study? Give your views and support them with reasons. Morphology & Syntax(1) A principle distinction between morphology and syntax, is that the former is concerned with the internal composition of a word, whereas the latter is concerned with combinations of words(2) From a nineteen-century linguistic perspective,morphology is the science of the forms of language and more abstractly, of the formatives(构形成分) that give form to words. Syntax, by contrast, is concerned not with formation or forms or formatives but with comparatively insubstantial notions of order or arrangement, in keeping with the etymology of the term. Syntax is thus outside the scope of linguistic morphology, because of the abstract nature of the elements whose arrangement it deals with.(3) Morphology is considered to be part of syntax, both may be grouped together as grammar.(4) Since sentence is usually regarded as the largest grammatical unit of a language, syntax has long been the center of grammatical study.(5) Different linguistics theories differ in their treatment of sentence structure.Conclusion: There are arguments in favor of morpheme-based grammar and there are arguments against it. The same is true of the more traditional word-based grammar. 2. Explain and exemplify IC analysis. IC analysis is one of the structuralist grammars. It is a major feature of Bloomfieldian descriptivism. This approach works through the different levels of structure within a sentence in a series of steps. At each level, a construction is divided into its major constituents, which are termed immediate constituents, and the process continues until no further divisions can be made. The constituents in the last step are called ultimate constituents. In general, the division is binary. IC analysis can be represented in different ways.3. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations Syntagmatic: a linear relationship between the signs present in the sentence. (the relation between one item and others in a sequence) . Paradigmatic is a particular one in that it denotes a relationship between a sign in a sentence and a sign not in a sentence. (A word may be said to have paradigmatic relations with words that could be substituted for it in the sentence.) 4. Rheme vs. ThemeRheme refers to information that is new. The nucleus, or the core of the utterance - wha