现代语言学 笔记.doc

本资料来自英语自考网Introduction 一、Linguistics: It is generally defined as the scientific study of language. 二、The scope of linguistics 1、phonetics: How speech sounds are produced and classified. 2、phonology: How speech sounds form systems and function to convey the meaning 3、morphology: How morphemes are combined to form words 4、syntax: How morphemes and words are combined to form sentences 5、semantics: The study of meaning (in abstraction.) 6、pragmatics: The study of meaning in context of use 7、sociolinguistics :The study of language with reference to society 8、psycholinguistics: The study of language with reference to working of the mind 9.applied linguistics: the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning. 三、Someimportant distinction in linguistics 1、descriptive(描述性) :A linguistic study describes and analyzes the language people actually use. 2、prescriptive(规定性): It aims to lay down rules for “correct” behaviors. i.e. what they should say and what they should not to say. 1、synchronic(共时语言学): It refers to the study of variation in language in different places and among different groups at a given point in time. 2、diachronic (历时语言学): Studies language change over various periods of time and at various historical stages. 1、speech2、writing are the two media of communication. Modern linguistics regards the spoken language as primary, not the written. 1、langue(语言): refers to abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of the speech community. It is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to abide by. Such as: In English sentence must have subject and predicate. 2、parole(言语):refers to the realization of langue in actual use. It is concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules.1、competence(语言能力):As the ideal users knowledge of the rules of his language 2、performance(语言应用):the actual realization of his knowledge in linguistic communication. 四、What is language? Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Language is a system i.e. elements of language are combined according to rules. Language is arbitrary .because the fact that different languages have different words for the some object. Language is vocal because the primary medium is sound for all languages. Language is symbols. The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific.五、design features(识别特征) Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication. There are twelve design features, but this book only tell us five of them. Arbitrariness: 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 language, but it is not entirely arbitrary. Productivity: language make possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by it users. Productivity is unique to human language. Duality(二重性):Language is a system, which consists of two sets of structures, or two levels at the lower or the basic level there is a structure of sounds, which are meaningless. But the sounds of language can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning such as morphemes and words. Displacement: Language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in past, present or future. or in far-away place. In other words, language can be used to refer to context removed from the immediate situations of speakers. Phonology 一、phonetics The speech and writing are two media or substance used by natural language as vehicles for communication. Linguists are not interested in all sounds; they are concerned with only those sounds that are produced by the human speech organs. Phonetics is defined as the study of phonic medium of language. Its concerned with all sounds that occur in the worlds language. Phonetics looks at speech sounds from 3distinct but related point of view. They are: Articulation phonetics(发音语音学):How a speaker uses his speech organs articulate the sounds. Auditory phonetics（听觉语音学）:How a hearer perceives the sounds. Acoustic(声学语音学）:How the sounds are transmitter. Organs: pharyngeal cavity the throat oral cavitythe mouth nasal cavitythe nose Voiceless: when the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration.Voicing: sounds produced while the vocal cords are vibrating Broad transcription: the transcription with the letter-symbols only Narrow transcription: the transcription with the letter-symbols and the diacritics. English sounds can be classified two categories: vowels and consonants Consonants: the sounds in the production of which there is an obstruction of the air steam at some point of the vocal tract. Vowels: the sounds in the production of which no articulators come very close together and the air stream passes through the vocal tract without obstruction. Phonology: the study of sound systemthe inventory of distinctive sounds that occur in a language and the patterns into which they fall. Phonetics and phonology: are studies of speech sounds. Phonetics is interested in all speech sound in the worlds language: how they are produced and classified. Phonology is interested in 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(音素): Is 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; some do, some dont. Phoneme（音位）: It is basic unit in phonology; it is collection of distinctive phonetic features. Allophone（音位变体）:Different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called allophones of that phoneme. Phonemic contrast(音位对立);Complementary（音位互补）;Minimal pair（最小对立）:Two sound combinations identical in every way except in one sound element that occurs in the same position. Some rules in phonology: 1Sequential rules, 2Assimilation rules (one sound to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus make the two phones similar) 3Deletion rule (it tell us when a sound is to be deleted although it is orthographically represented.) Suprasegmental features: the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments .the main suprasegmental features are: stress, tone, intonation. Morphology It is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules that form the words. Morphology is two sub-branch: inflectional morphology and lexical or derivational morphology. Morpheme: the smallest meaningful unit of language. (A phoneme is the basic unit in the study of phonology, so is a morpheme the basic unit in the study of morphology.) Type of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes (include root and affixes) Free morphemes: are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves. For example: boy. Bound morphemes: can not be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word. Roots: A root is often seen as a 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. Such roots are numerous in English for example: geo-“bears the meaning of “the earth”. When it combines with another root “-ology”meaning “a branch of learning”, we got the word “geology” which means “the study of the earths structure. Affixes are two types: inflectional affixes (inflectional morpheme) and derivational affixes. Inflectional affixes: manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as number, tense, degree, and case. -(e)s, indicating plurality of nouns. -(e)s, indicating third person singular, present tense. -(e)d, indicating past tense for all three persons. -ing, indicating progressive aspect. -er, indicating comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs. -est, indicating superlative degree of adjectives and adverbs. -s, indicating the possessive case of nouns. Derivational affixes: are added to an existing form to create a word. Such a way of word-formation is called derivation and the new word formed by derivation is called a derivative. The existing form to which a derivational affix can be added is called a stemAffixes can be divided into two kinds: prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes and Suffixes Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word, modify the meaning of the stem, but usually do not change the part of speech of the original word. Suffixes at the end of a word, are added to the end of stems. They modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech. Compounding is popular and important way of forming new words in English. In terms of morphemic analysis, derivation can be viewed ad the addition of affixes to stems to form new words, and compounding the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to create new words. Features of compounds 1.orthographically(拼写特征): a compound can be written as one with or without a hyphen, or as two separate words. For example: armchair, follow-up, thunder bird. 2.syntactically(句法特征): the part of speech of the compound is generally determined by the part of speech of the second element. For example: ice-cold (adj.) greenhouse (noun). 3.sematically（语意特征）: the meaning of a compound is often idiomatic, not always being the sum total of the meanings of the meanings of its components. For example: a blackleg is not a leg that is black, it means cheater 4.phonetically（语音特征）: the stress of a compound always falls on the first element, while the second element receives secondary stress.Syntax Syntax is a subfield of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language. Sentences are structured according to particular arrangement of words.Syntax as a system of rules. as a major component of grammar, syntax consists of a set of abstract rules that allow words to be combined with other words to form grammatical sentences Sentence structure Subject all language have ways of referring to some entity, such as a person , a place, a thing, an idea, or an event, this referring expression is grammatically called subject. A subject may be a noun or a noun phrase in a sentence that usually precedes the predicate. Type of sentence 1. The simple sentence: a simple sentence consists of a single clause which contains a subject and a predicate and stands alone as its own sentence. For example: John reads extensively. Mary decided to take a linguistics class the next semester. 2. The coordinate sentence: a coordinate sentence contains two clauses joined by a linking word called coordinating conjunction, such as “and”, “but”, “or”. The two clauses in a coordinate sentence are structurally equal parts of the sentence; neither is subordinate to the other. In another words, each clause is separable from the other and can stand on its own as a structurally independent sentence. 3. The complex sentence: a complex sentence contains two, or more, clauses, one which is incorporated into another. That is, the two clauses in complex sentence hold unequal status, one subordinating the other. The incorporated, or subordinated, clause is normally called an embedded clause, and the clause into which it is embedded is called matrix clause.Some conclusions can be drawn from the complex sentence.1. an embedded clause functions as a grammatical unit in its matrix clause.2.most embedded clauses require an introductory word called a subordinator, such as “that”,” if ”.3.an embedded clause may not function as a grammatically well-formed sentence if it stands independently as a simple sentence unless it form changes. Language is a highly structured system of communication. Sentences are not formed by randomly(随意)combining lexical items, but by following a set of syntactic rules that arrange linguistic elements in a particular order to make a string of words not only meaningful but also linearly- and hierarchically-structured.(线形结构和层次结构) Hierarchical structure: the sentence structure that groups words into structural constituents and shows the syntactic categories of each structural constituent, such as NP and VP. Syntactic categories: 1. lexical categories (four major lexical categories and six minor lexical categories) 2. Phrasal categories (lexical items have certain combinational properties that allow them to combine with words of different categories to form phrase. NP VP PP AP) Grammatical relations(语法关系) the structural and logical functional relations between every noun phrase and sentence. S-structure(表层结构): A level of syntactic representation after the operation of necessary syntactic movement. X-bar: a general and highly abstract schema that collapses all phrase structure rules into a single format: x”(spec) X (comp.) General grammar: a system of linguistic knowledge which consists of some general principles and parameters about natural language.Move :A general movement rule accounting for the syntactic behavior of any constituent movement.Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning. Some views concerning the study of meaning: 1. The naming theory. One of the oldest notions concerning meaning, and also a very primitive one, was the naming theory proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato. The words used in a language are taken to be labels of the objects they stand for. 2. The conceptualist view(意念论): was holds that there is no direct link between a linguistic form and what it refers to (i.e., between language and the real world); rather, in the interpretation（解释） of meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the mind. This view is suggested by Ogden and Richards. 3.Contextualism(语境论)：contextualism is based on the presumption(假定)that one can derive(推导) meaning from or reduce meaning to observable(可观测的) contexts. Two kinds of context are recognized, the situational context and the linguistic context. 4. Behaviorism(行为主义论): behaviorism refers to the attempt(企图) to define the meaning of a language form as the “situation in which the speaker utter it and the response it calls forth in the hearer”(Bloomfied,1933). This theory somewhat close to contextualism emphasizes on the psychological response. Sense and reference Reference（所指意义）: 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. Sense(意义):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. Major sense relations:1.synonymy(同义): refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms. Synonymy can be divided into the following groups: Dialectal synonyms(地域性同义词)-synonyms used in different regional dialects. These are words with more or less the same meaning used in different regional dialects. Such as: American English and British English. Stylistic synonyms (文体同义词)- synonyms differing in style. Words having the same meaning may differ in style, or degree of formality(礼节). Such as: old man ,daddy, father. synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning. collocational synonyms(搭配上的区别) semantically different synonyms(语意上的差别)。 Surprise and amaze 2.polysemy(多义)：refers to different words may have the same or similar meaning; the same one word may have more than one meaning. For example: table 1 a piece of furniture 2 all the people seated at a table 3 the food that is put on a table . 3.homonymy(同音异意，同形异意)：homonymy refers to the phenomenon(现象) that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e. different words are identical (相同的)in sound or spelling , or in both.Homophones(同音异意):refer to two words are identical in sound, e.g. rain/ reign Homographs(同形异意):refer to two word are identical in spelling, e.g. tear n./tear v. 4.hyponymy(上下关系):refers to the sense relating between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. The word which is more general in meaning is called superordinate, and the more specific words are called its hyponyms. Componential analysis(成分分析法): is a way propose by the structural semanticists(语义学者) to analyze word meaning. This approach is based upon the belief that meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. Predication analysis(述谓分析法): is a new approach for sentential meaning analysis. Predication is usually considered an important common category shared by propositions,questions,commands ect. Predication is to break down the sentence into their smaller constituents: argument (logical participant) and predicate(relation element). The predicate is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. What is grammaticality? What might make a grammatically meaningful sentence semantically meaningless(无意义的)? Grammaticalitythe grammatical well-formedness of a sentence. A sentence may be well-formed grammatically, i.e. it conforms to the grammatical rules of the language, but it is not necessarily semantically well-formed, i.e. it may not make sense at all.Presupposition(先设前提): is a semantic relationship or logical connection. A presupposes B. e.g. A: John watch needs repairing. B: John has a watch. If A is true, B must be true. Entailment(蕴涵):can be illustrated by the following two sentences in which sentence A entails sentence