语言学名词解释00480.doc

语言学名词解释Chapter 1:1. Linguistics: the scientific or systematic study of language. 2. language:a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. 3. arbitrariness:It refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meanings. For instance, we cant explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/.4. duality:It refers to the way meaningless elements of language at one level (sounds and letters) combine to form meaningful units (words) at another level. For example, sounds such as d, g, f, o, mean nothing separately. They normally take on meaning only when they are combined in certain ways, as in dog, fog and god.5. competence:It is knowledge of the grammar of a language as a formal abstraction and distinct from the behavior of actual use, i.e. performance. 6. performance:It is Chomskys term for actual language behavior as distinct from the knowledge that underlies it, or competence.7. stylistics:It refers to the study of how literary effects can be related to linguistic features. 8. phatic communion:Broadly speaking, this function of language refers to expressions that help define and maintain interpersonal relations. Greetings, farewells and comments on the weather serve the function. For example, the expressions such as “How do you do?” and “Ah, here you are”, do not convey any meaning, but are used to establish a common sentiment between the speaker and the hearer.9. functionalism:It is an approach to linguistics which is concerned with the forms of language in reference to their social function in communication. It considers the individual as a social being and investigates the way in which he or she acquires language and uses it in order to communicate with others in his or her social environment. A good example is Hallidays systemic-functional grammar.10. formalism:It is the study of the abstract forms of language and their internal relations. The most outstanding representative of formalism is Chomskys transformational-generative grammar.11. synchronic linguistics:It is an approach to linguistics which is the study of language and speech as they are used at a given moment and not in terms of how they have evolved over time. For example, if you take something called A Grammar of Modern Greek from the library shelves, it will usually claim to be a synchronic grammar. 12. diachronic linguistics:It is the study of a language through the course of its history. For example, when linguists take historical researches into the development of the Chinese language from Qin Dynasty to Qing Dynasty in ancient China, they will take a diachronic approach.13. design feature:The design features refer to those features of human language, like arbitrariness and duality, which are thought to distinguish it from other kinds of animal communication.Design features refer to those features that define our human languages, such as arbitrariness, duality, creativity, displacement, cultural transmission, etc. (interchangeability, specialization)14. function:The primary function of language is to transmit information and to convey commands, feelings and emotions. That is, language is a tool of communication. The major categories are informative, interpersonal, performative, emotive, phatic communion, recreational and metalingual function. function: the use of language to communicate, to think, etc. Language functions include informative function, interpersonal function, performative function, emotive function, phatic communion, recreational function and metalingual function. 15. creativity:By creativity we mean language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness.16. displacement:It 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. For example, I can refer to Confucius, even though he has been dead for over 4000 years.17. metalanguage:Our language can be used to talk about itself. This is the metalingual function of language. metalanguage: certain kinds of linguistic signs or terms for the analysis and description of particular studies.18. macrolinguistics:They are concerned with the relationship between language and other scopes, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics and so on. macrolinguistics: the interacting study between language and language-related disciplines such as psychology, sociology, etc. 19. langue:Saussures term for the abstract linguistic system which is common social knowledge and which underlies individual uses of language, or parole. 20. parole:Saussures term for the actual language behavior of individual language users, as distinct from the abstract language system or langue.21. etic:etic: a term in contrast with emic which originates from American linguist Pikes distinction of phonetics and phonemics. Being etic means making far too many, as well as behaviously inconsequential, differentiation, just as was often the case with phonetics v.s. phonemic analysis in linguistics proper. 22. emic:emic: An emic set of speech acts and events must be one that is validated as meaningful via final resource to the native members of a speech community rather than via appeal to the investigators ingenuity and intuition alone.Chapter 21. phonetics:It refers to the study of linguistic speech sounds, how they are produced, how they are perceived, and their physical properties.2. Phonology:It refers to the study of the abstract systems underlying the sounds of language. 3. articulatory phonetics:It is the study of how the vocal tract produces speech sounds.4. acoustic phonetics:It is a branch of phonetics, which deals with the transmission of speech sounds through the air.5. auditory phonetics:It is the study of the perception of speech sounds.6. articulator:Articulators are the tongue, lips, and velum, which change the shape of the vocal tract to produce different speech sounds.7. vowel:It is a sound produced without significant constriction of the air flowing through the oral cavity, e.g. i: L.8. consonant:A consonant is a speech sound produced by partial or complete closure of part of the vocal tract, thus obstructing the airflow and creating audible friction. Consonants are described in terms of voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation. 9. allophone:It is a phonetic form in which a phoneme is realized, e.g. pand p.10. phoneme: It refers to the abstract element of a sound, identified as being distinctive in a particular language. 11. voicing:It refers to pronouncing a sound (usually a vowel or a voiced consonant) by vibrating the vocal cords.12. voiceless:It refers to pronouncing a sound (always a voiceless consonant) without the vibration of the vocal cords. 13. coarticulation:It is a kind of phonetic process in which simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved. Coarticulation can be further divided into anticipatory coarticulation and perseverative coarticulation. 14. broad and narrow transcription:The use of a simple set of symbols in transcription is called broad transcription. While the use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is called narrow transcription.15. manner of articulation:In the production of consonants, manner of articulation refers to the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract.16. place of articulation:In the production of consonants, place of articulation refers to where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of air. 17. distinctive features:A term of phonology, i.e. a property which distinguishes one phoneme from another, e.g. +nasal which is used to distinguish nasals from non-nasals as m and p.18. complementary distinction:The relation between two speech sounds that never occur in the same environment. Allophones of the same phoneme are usually in complementary distribution. 19. IPA:the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet.20. suprasegmental: suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmental features are syllable, stress, tone, and intonation.21. assimilation:It is a phonological process whereby a sound becomes phonetically similar (or identical) to a neighboring sound, e.g. a vowel becomes +nasal when followed by a +nasal consonant. (regressive and progressive)22. elision:the leaving out of a sound or sounds in speech.23. intonation:the variation in pitch and stress which gives beat and rhythm to the tune the voice plays in ordinary speech. 24. stress:the prominence given to certain sound in speech.25. minimal pair:a pair of words that differ by only a single sound in the same position. e.g. look/ took, spill/ still and keep/ coop. Chapter 31. morphology:It is concerned with the study of the structure of words.2. morpheme:It is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning or serves a grammatical function, e.g. boy and check and s (as in boys) and ing (as in checking) are all morphemes.3. bound morpheme:It refers to a morpheme that can not stand alone as a word, e.g. ment (as in establishment), and er (as in painter).4. free morpheme:It is a morpheme that can stand alone as a word, e.g. book, etc.5. morph:Morphs are the smallest meaningful phonetic segments of an utterance on the level of parole, e.g. student.6. allomorph:It is a phonetic form in which a morpheme is realized, e.g. s, -es, and en are all allomorphs (in writing) of the plural morpheme. 7. root:It is the morpheme that remains when all affixes are removed from a complex word, e.g. system from un+system+atic+ally. 8. affix:the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme (the root or stem), e.g. s as in books and ment as in movement.9. prefix:A prefix is a syllable or syllables placed before the stem of a word to change its meaning, e.g. dis- as in disagree and mid- as in midnight.10. suffix:A suffix is a syllable or syllables added to the end of a word to change its meaning or function, e.g. ness as in kindness and ful as in careful. 11. affixation:It is generally defined as the formation of words by adding word-forming affixes to stems, e.g. the formation of the word unfair by adding the prefix un- to the stem fair.12. stem: It refers to the base to which one or more affixes are attached to create a more complex form that may be another stem or a word, e.g. the stem work as in works, the stem worker as in workers and the stem workshop as in workshops.13. lexeme:The lexeme is postulated as the abstract unit underlying the smallest unit in the lexical system of a language, which appears in different grammatical contexts. For example, “write” is the lexeme of the set of words: writes, wrote, writing and written.14. lexicon:It refers to a list of all the words in a language assigned to various lexical categories and provided with semantic interpretation. 15. word:In defining “word”, three senses are involved. First, word may be seen as a cluster of sound segments or letters between two pauses or blanks. Secondly, word is the common factor underlying a set of forms, a unit of vocabulary, a lexical item, or a lexeme. Thirdly, a word is a grammatical unit of the same theoretical kind as morpheme and sentence.16. grammatical word:Those which express grammatical meanings such as, conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns, are grammatical words, e.g. but, he.17. lexical word:Those which have lexical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, are lexical words, e.g. book and make.18. closed-class:A word that belongs to the closed-class is one whose membership is fixed or limited. Pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, etc. are all closed items. 19. open-class:The open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives and many verbs are all open-class items. 20. derivation:It is a major way of word-formation, which is done by adding affixes to other words or morphemes.21. derivational morpheme:It is a morpheme that serves to derive a word of one class or meaning from a word of another class or meaning. For example, -ment (as in establishment) derives the noun from the verb establish. 22. clipping:The process by which parts of a word have been cut off is called clipping. For example, the word gas is clipped from gasoline.23. compounding:Words like typewriter, workshop are formed by putting two words together. This way of building new words is called compounding.24. conversion:A noun can become a verb easily, and a verb can be used as a noun. Such instances are called conversion. For example, the word water (noun) becomes water (verb) by adding the verb class status to it. 25. acronym:Words which are composed of the first letter of a series of words and are pronounced as single words are called acronyms, e.g. NATO, radar and laser.26. blending:Blending is a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by joining the initial parts of the two words. For example, gasohol = gasoline + alcohol, motel =motor + hotel.27. initialism:Some new words are composed of the first letters of a series of words and pronounced by saying each letter in them, such as CD, WTO.28. back-formation:It refers to an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. A good example of back-formation is the process whereby the noun television first came into being and then the verb televise was made from it. 29. loanword:The borrowing of loanwords is a process in which both form and meaning are borrowed with only a slight adaptation, in some cases, to the phonological system of the new language they enter. For example, English borrowed au pair from French, tea from Chinese.30. loanblend:Loanblending is a process in which part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed, e.g. China-town which came from Chinese, but the second part is of the English origin.31. loanshift:Loanshift is a process in which the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native. For example, bridge is an English word, but when it refers to a type of card games, the meaning was borrowed from the Italian ponte.32. loss:The loss of sound can first refer to the disappearance of the very sound as a phoneme in the phonological system. For example, sounds loss may occur in utterances at the expense of some unstressed vowels, e.g. temperature.33. assimilation:It refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound. For example, in expressions such as immobile, irrevocable, impolite, illegal, the negative prefixes im-, il-, or ir- should be in- etymologically. 34. dissimilation:It means the influence exercised by one sound segment upon the articulation of another, so that the sounds become less alike, or different. For example, the sound r in the Latin peregrines became l in the English word pilgrim. 35. broadening:Broadening is a process to extend or elevate the meaning from its originally specific sense to a relatively general one. For example, the word holiday used to mean “holy day” in religious English. Today it means “a day for rest” regardless of its religious nature, so the meaning is widened.36. narrowing:It is a process in which the original meaning of a word can be narrowed or restricted to a specific sense. For example, the word meat means “food” in the 17th century, but the meaning is now restricted to “the edible flesh of mammals”37. meaning shift:It means that the change of meaning has nothing to do with generalization or restriction. What makes the meaning of a word different is its departure from its original domain as a result of its metaphorical usage. For instance, the word bead originally means “prayer”, but later it refers to “the prayer bead”, finally “small, ball-shaped piece of glass, metal or wood.”38. class shift:By shifting the word class one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution. For instance, the word engineer as a noun means “a person trained in a branch of engineering”, but it means “to act as an engineer” or “to plan” when used as a verb. 39. Folk etymology:It refers to a change in form of a word or phrase, resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous. For example, as a result of this modification, the word sparrowgrass in English derived from asparagus. 40. Loan translation: It is a special type of borrowing in which each morpheme or word is translated in the equivalent morpheme or word in another language. For example, black humor is a loan translation from French humournoir. Chapter 41. syntax:The term refers to the structure of sentences and to the study of sentence structure. 2. word class:Word classes are the categories traditionally called parts of speech. For example, words such as book, dog are called nouns, and words such as take, read are called verbs.3. inflection:It refers to the morphological process which adjusts words by grammatical modification, e.g. in The rains came, rain