英语语言学资料.doc

英语语言学学习资料说明：各位童鞋，这个资料是在老版本的基础上编写的，故有些内容现在有了很大的变化和更改，大家要学会有选择性的进行学习和参考啊1.28.What is phonetics?Phonetics is the science which studies the characteristics of human sound-making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription (see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp39-40), speech sounds may be studied in different ways, thus by three different branches of phonetics. (1)Articulatory phonetics; the branch of phonetics that examines the way in which a speech sound is produced to discover which vocal organs are involved and how they coordinate in the process. (2)Auditory phonetics, the branch of phonetic research from the hearers point of view, looking into the impression which a speech sound makes on the hearer as mediated by the ear , the auditory nerve and the brain. (3)Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear.Most phoneticians, however, are interested in articulatory phonetics.1.29.How are the vocal organs formed?The vocal organs (see Figure1, Hu Zhuanglin et al.,p41), or speech organs, are organs of the human body whose secondary use is in the production of speech sounds. The vocal organs can be considered as consisting of three parts; the initiator of the air-stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.1.30.What is place of articulation?It refers to the place in the mouth where, for example, the obstruction occurs, resulting in the utterance of a consonant. Whatever sound is pronounced, at least some vocal organs will get involved,e. g. lips, hard palate etc., so a consonant may be one of the following (1 )bilabial:p,b,m; (2) labiodental:f,v; (3) dental:,; (4) alveolar:t,d,l,n.s,z; (5) retroflex; (6) palato-alveolar:,; (7) palatal:j; (8) velark,g,; (9) uvular; (10)glottal:h.Some sounds involve the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English whas both an approximation of the two lips and that two lips and that of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed labial-velar.1.31.What is the manner of articulation?The manner of articulation literally means the way a sound is articulated. At a given place of articulation, the airstream may be obstructed in various ways, resulting in various manners of articulation, are the following : (1) plosive:p,b,t,d,k,g; (2) nasal:m,n,; (3) trill; (4) tap or flap; (5) lateral:l; (6) fricative:f,v,s,z; (7) approximant:w,j; (8) affricate:.1.32.How do phoneticians classify vowels?Phoneticians, in spite of the difficulty, group vowels in 5 types: (1) long and short vowels, e.g.,i:,; (4) rounded and unround vowels,e.g.,i; (5) pure and gliding vowels, e.g.I,.1.33.What is IPA? When did it come into being ? The IPA, abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet, is a compromise system making use of symbols of all sources, including diacritics indicating length, stress and intonation, indicating phonetic variation. Ever since it was developed in 1888, IPA has undergone a number of revisions.1.34.What is narrow transcription and what is broad transcription?In handbook of phonetics, Henry Sweet made a distinction between narrow and broad transcriptions, which he called Narrow Romic. The former was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the most minute shades of pronunciation while Broad Romic or transcription was intended to indicate only those sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language.1.35.What is phonology? What is difference between phonetics and phonology?(1) Phonology is the study of sound systems- the invention of distinctive speech sounds that occur in a language and the patterns wherein they fall. Minimal pair, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonologist.(2) Phonetics, as discussed in I.28, is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. A phonetist is mainly interested in the physical properties of the speech sounds, whereas a 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 from meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign accent, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to from plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in ones language.1.36.What is a phone? What is a phoneme? What is an allophone? (1) A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. When we hear the following words pronounced:pit, tip, spit, etc., the similar phones we have heard are p for one thing, and three differentps, readily making possible the narrow transcription or diacritics. Phones may and may not distinguish meaning. A phoneme is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. As an abstract unit, a phoneme is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. For example, the phonemep is represented differently in pit, tip and spit.(2) The phones representing a phoneme are called its allophones, i. e., the different (i.e., phones) but do not make one word so phonetically different as to create a new word or a new meaning thereof. So the differentps in the above words are the allophones of the same phonemep. How a phoneme is represented by a phone, or which allophone is to be used, is determined by the phonetic context in which it occurs. But the choice of an allophone is not random. In most cases it is rule-governed; these rules are to be found out by a phonologist.1.37.What are minimal pairs?When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string , the two forms(i. e., word) are supposed to form a minimal pair, e.g., pill and bill, pill and till, till and dill, till and kill, etc. All these words together constitute a minimal set. They are identical in form except for the initial consonants. There are many minimal pairs in English, which makes it relatively easy to know what are English phonemes. It is of great importance to find the minimal pairs when a phonologist is dealing with the sound system of an unknown language(see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp65-66).1.38.What is free variation?If two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast; namely, if the substitution of one for the other does not generate a new word form but merely a different pronunciation of the same word, the two sounds then are said to be in free variation. The plosives, for example, may not be exploded when they occur before another plosive or a nasal (e. g., act, apt, good morning). The minute distinctions may, if necessary, be transcribed in diacritics. These unexploded and exploded plosives are in free variation. Sounds in free variation should be assigned to the same phoneme.1.39.What is complementary distribution?When two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in complementary distribution. For example, the aspirated English plosives never occur afters, and the unsaturated ones never occur initially. Sounds in complementary distribution may be assigned to the same phoneme. The allophones ofl, for example, are also in complementary distribution. The clearl occurs only before a vowel, the voiceless equivalent ofl occurs only after a voiceless consonant, such as in the words please, butler, clear, etc., and the darkl occurs only after a vowel or as a syllabic sound after a consonant, such as in the words feel, help, middle, etc.1.40.What is the assimilation rule? What is the deletion rule?(1) The assimilation rule assimilates one segment to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar. This rule accounts for the raring pronunciation of the nasaln that occurs within a word. The rule is that within a word the nasal consonantn assumes the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The negative prefix in- serves as a good example. It may be pronounced as in, i or im when occurring in different phonetic contexts: e. g., indiscrete- (alveolar)inconceivable- (velar)input-imput(bilabial)(3) The deletion rule tells us when a sound is to be deleted although is orthographically represented. While the letter g is mute in sign, design and paradigm, it is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives: signature, designation and paradigmatic. The rule then can be stated as: delete a g when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. This accounts for some of the seeming irregularities of the English spelling (see Dai Weidong ,pp22-23).1.41.What is suprasegmental phonology? What are suprasegmental features?Suprasegmental phonology refers to the study of phonological properties of linguistic units larger than the segment called phoneme, such as syllable, word and sentence.Hu Zhuanglin et al.,(p,73) includes stress, length and pitch as what they suppose to be principal suprasegmental features, calling the concurrent patterning of three intonation. Dai Weidong(pp23-25) lists three also, but they are stress, tone and intonation.1.42.What is morphology?Morphology is the branch of grammar that studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed. It is generally divided into two fields: inflectional morphology and lexical/derivational morphology.1.43.What is inflection/inflexion?Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which does not change the grammatical class of the items to which they are attached.1.44.What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph?(1) The morpheme is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. The word boxes, for example, has two morphemes: box and -es, neither of which permits further division or analysis if we dont wish to sacrifice meaning. Therefore a morpheme is considered the minimal unit of meaning.(2) Allomorphs, like allophones vs. phones, are the alternate shapes (and thus phonetic forms) of the same morphemes. Some morphemes, though, have no more than one invariable form in all contexts, such as dog, cat, etc. The variants of the plurality -s make the allomorphs thereof in the following examples: map-maps, mouse-mice, sheep-sheep etc.1.45.What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?A free morpheme is a morpheme that constitutes a word by itself, such as bed, tree ,etc. A bound morpheme is one that appears with at least another morpheme, such as -s in beds , -al in national and so on. All monomorphemic words are free morphemes. Those polymorphemic words are either compounds (combination of two or more free morphemes )or derivatives (word derived from free morphemes).1.46.What is a root ? What is a stem? What is an affix?A root is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. In other words, a root is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. Internationalism is a four-morpheme derivative which keeps its free morpheme nation as its root when inter-, -al and -ism are taken away.A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as , and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word friends , friend is both the root and the stem, but in the word friendships, friendships is its stem, friend is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e. g., mailman , girlfriend ,ect.An affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used, only when added to another morpheme(the root or stem). Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes: prefix, suffix and infix, e. g. , mini-, un-, ect.(prefix); -ise, -tion, ect.(suffix).1.47.What are open classes? What are closed classes?In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. They are open -class words, since we can regularly add new lexical entries to these classes. The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, closed classes, or closed-class words. The number of them is hardly alterable, if they are changeable at all.1.48.What is lexicon? What is word? What is lexeme? What is vocabulary? Lexicon? Word? Lexeme? Vocabulary?Lexicon, in its most general sense, is synonymous with vocabulary. In its technical sense, however, lexicon deals with the analysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. Word is a unit of expression which has universal intuitive recognition by native-speakers, whether it is expressed in spoken or written form. This definition is perhaps a little vague as there are different criteria with regard to its identification and definition. It seems that it is hard , even impossible, to define word linguistically. Nonetheless it is universally agreed that the following three senses are involved in the definition of word, none of which, though, is expected to cope with all the situations: (1)a physically definable unit ,e. g.,it iz w (phonological), It is wonder (orthographic); (2) the common factor underlying a set of forms (see what is the common factor of checks, checked, checking , etc.); (3) a grammatical unit(look at (1) again; every word plays a grammatical part in the sentence).According to Leonard Bloomfield, a word is a minimum free form (compare: a sentence is a maximum free form, according to Bloomfield ). There are other factors that may help us identify words: (1) stability (no great change of orthographic features); (2)relative uninterruptibility (we can hardly insert anything between two parts of a word or between the letters). To make the category clearer we can subclassify words into a few types: (1) variable and invariable words(e. g.,-mats, seldom-?); (2) grammatical and lexical words(e. g. to, in ,etc., and table, chair, ect. By lexical words we mean the words that carry a semantic content, e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs; (3) closed-class and open-class words(see I.47).In order to reduce the ambiguity of the term word ,the term lexeme is postulated as the abtract unit which refers to the smallest unit in the meaning system of a language that can be distinguished from other smaller units. A lexeme can occur in many different forms in actual spoken or written texts. For example, write is the lexeme of the following words: write, write, wrote, writing, and written.Vocabulary usually refers to all words or lexical items a person has acquired about technical or/and untechnical things. So we encourage our students to enlarge their vocabulary. vocabulary is also used to mean word list or glossary.1.49.What is collocation?Collocation is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can read a book; correct can narrowly occur with book which is supposed to have faults, but no one can read a mistake because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.1.50.What is syntax?Syntax is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.1.51.What is a sentence?L. Bloomfield defines sentence as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.1.52.What are syntactic relations?Syntactic relations refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence.(1) Positional relation, or word order, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called syntagmatic relations, or of what other linguists call horizontal relations or chain relations.(2) Relations of substitutability refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them associative relations. Other people call them paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations.(3) By relations of co-occurrence, one means that words of different sets of clauses may permit or require the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.1.53.What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents(and ultimate constituents)?IC analysis is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two(or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really ar