Linguistic.doc

LinguisticChapter 11.3 Design Features of language Arbitrariness: It refers the fact that the forms of linguistic signs have no nature relationship to their meanings.Duality: It is meant the property of having two levels 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 organization.Creativity: it meant language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness.Displacement: It means that human language enable their users to symbolize objects，events ,and concepts which are not present at the moment of communication.1.5 Function of Language Informative: language is the instrument of thought and people often use it to communicate new information.Interpersonal function: it means people can use language to establish and maintain their social status.Performative: it is primary to change the social statue of person, as in marriage ceremonies, the blessing of children and the curing of enemies.Emotional function: it is one of the most powerful uses of language because it is important in changing the emotional status of an listener for or against someone or something.Phatic function: we all use such small, seemingly meaningless expression to maintain a comfortable relationship between people without involving any factual content.Recreational function: it means people use language for the joy.Metalingual function: people usu language to talk about itself.1.7Main Branches of LinguisticsPhonetics studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is, how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received.Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables(音节).Morphology is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meaningmorphemes and word formation processes.Syntax is about principle of forming and understanding correct English sentences. It is studying the rules governing the way different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationship between elements in sentence structure.Semantic is the subject concerning the study of meaning, more specifically, it is the study of the meaning of linguistic units, words and sentences in particular.Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.1.9 Important Distinction in LinguisticsDescriptive: to make an objective and systematic account of the patterns and use of a language or variety.Prescriptive: to make authoritarian statement about the correctness of a particular use of language.Synchronic: said of an approach that studies language at a theoretical “point “in time.Diachronic: said of the study of development of language and languages over time.Competence: unconscious knowledge of the system of grammatical rules in a language.Performance: the language actually used by people in speaking or writing.Langue: the language system shared by a “speech community”.Parole: the concrete utterance of a speaker.Chapter 33.1 What Is Morpheme Morpheme: The smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between expression and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. Those that may occur alone, and may make up words by themselves, are Free Morphemes. Those must appear with at least one different morpheme, and are called Bound Morphemes.A root is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without destroying its meaning. An affix is the collective term of the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme, so affix is naturally bound. There are two types of affix: inflectional affix and derivational affix. A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added.3.3 Word Formation (1): From Morpheme to WordThere are two fieldsthat Morphology concerns: the study of Inflection and the study of Lexical or Derivational Morphology.Inflection indicates grammatical relationship by adding inflectional affixes. For instance, tabletables, talk talkingtalked, boyboys.Derivation shows a relationship between roots and affixes. For example, un+healthy =unhealthy, fool+ish=foolish.Compound refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single new word. For example, day+break=daybreak, baby+sit=babysit.3.4 Word Formation (2): Lexical changeInversion: with the science and economic activities development in modern human life, many new lexical items appear.Blending: it is a relatively complex form of compounding, in which two words are blending joining together the initial part of the first word and the final part of the second word, or by only joining the initial parts of the two words. For example, smoke+fog=smog.Abbreviation: a new word is created by the following methods. (1)cutting the final part; (2)cutting the intimal part; (3)cutting both the intimal and final parts accordingly. For example, advertisement ad, telephonephone, refrigeratorfridge.Acronym: it is made up from the first letters of the name of an organization, which has a heavily modified headword. For example, WB is World Bank.Back-formation: it refers to an abnormal type of wordformation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language. For example, editoredit.Analogical creation: the principle of Analogical Creation can account for the co-existence of two forms, regular and irregular, in the combination of some English verbs. For example, wroughtworked.Class shift: by class shift, one can change the meaning of a word from a concrete entity or notion to a process or attribution.Borrowing: English in its development has managed to borrow vocabulary by borrowing words from other languages.Chapter 44.1Syntactic Relation Positional relation, or word order, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language.Relation of substitutability: firstly, it refers to class or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with the same structure; secondly, it refers to groups of more than one word which may be jointly substitutable grammatically for a single word of a particular set.Relation of co-occurrence: one means that words of different sets of clause may permit, or require, the occurrence of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence.4.2 Grammatical Construction and its ConstituentsGrammatical constitution or construction can be used to mean any syntactic construct which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language. The external syntax of a construction refers to the properties of the construction as a whole. The internal syntax of a construction is really a description of the constructions “makeup”.Immediate construction analysis or IC analysisConstituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a large linguistic unit.This tree contains three Nodes. The topmost node, A, is the mother of the two lower nodes, B and C. B and C are Daughter of the same mother, and so we refer to them as Sister nodes. The simple tree in the above represents a constituent of category A which is composed of two parts, one of category B and the other category C, occurring in that order. To dismantle a grammatical construction in this way is called Immediate Construction analysis or IC analysis.The most common of these are listed in the following:Tree diagram Backeting(The) (boy) (ate) (the) (apple)Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, that is, a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable center or head. For example, very late(head).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 center or head inside the group. For example, The boy smiled.Coordination is a common syntactic pattern in English and other languages formed by grouping together two or more categories of same type with the help of a conjunction such as and, but, or.Subordination refers to the process or the result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other.4.3 syntactic function Subject: subject refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case.In English, “subject” may have the following characteristics:Word order: subject ordinarily precedes the verb in a statement such as” Jack like apple”.Pro-form: the first and third person pronouns in English appear in a special form when the pronoun is a subject. For example, He love me, I love him.Agreement with verb: in the simple present tense, an s is added to the verb when a third person subject is singular. But the number and person of the object or other elements in the sentence have no effect at all on the form of the verb.For example: She angers him; She angers them; They anger him.Content question: if the subject is replaced by a question word (who or what), the rest of the sentence remains unchanged. But when any other element of the sentence is replaced by a question word, an auxiliary verb must appear before the subject. For example: John stole / would steal Mrs. Thatchers picture from the British Council. Who stole/ would steal Mrs. Thatchers picture from the British Council? What would John steal, if he had the chance? What did john steal from the British Council? Tag question: a tag question is used to seek confirmation of a statement. It always contains a pronoun which refers back to the subject, and never to any other elements in the sentence.For example: John loves Mary, doesnt he?4.6 RecursivenessRecursiveness: it mainly means that a constituent can be embedded within another constituent having the same category, but it can be used to any means to extend any constituent.Conjoining: it refers to the process where one clause is coordinated or conjoined with another.Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence in syntactic subordination.Chapter 55.2 The Referential Theory The t