语言学名词解释.doc

Chapter 1: Introduction1. Linguistics: Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language.8. langue: Lange refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community.9. parole :Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use.10. competence : The ideal users knowledge of the rules of his language.11.performance : The actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication.12. language : Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.13.design features : Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication.14. arbitrariness: Arbitrariness refers to no logical connection between meaning and sound.15. productivity: Users can understand and produce sentences that they have never heard before.16. duality: Language consists of two sets of structure, with lower lever of sound, which is meaningless, and the higher lever of meaning.17. displacement: Language can be used to refer to the contexts removed from the immediate situation of the speaker no matter how far away from the topic of conversation in time or space.18. cultural transmission: Language is culturally transmitted. It is taught and learned from one generation to the next, rather than by instinct.Chapter 2: Phonology1. phonic medium : The meaningful speech sound in human communication.2. phonetics : The study of phonic medium of language and it is concerned with all sounds in the worlds languages. 3. articulatory phonetics : It studies sounds from the speakers point of view, i.e. how a speaker uses his speech organs to articulate the sounds. 4. auditory phonetics: The studies sounds from the hearers point of view, i.e. how the sounds are perceived by the hearer.5. acoustic phonetics: It studies the way sounds travel by looking at the sound waves, the physical means by which sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.6. voicing: the way that sounds are produced with the vibration of the vocal cords.7. voiceless: the way that sounds are produced with no vibration of the vocal cords.8. broad transcription: The use of letter symbols only to show the sounds or sounds sequences in written form.9. narrow transcription: The use of letter symbol, together with the diacritics to show sounds in written form.10. diacritics: The symbols used to show detailed articulatory features of sounds.11. IPA: short for International Phonetic Alphabets, a system of symbols consists of letters and diacritics, used to represent the pronunciation of words in any language.12. aspiration: A little puff of air that sometimes follows a speech sound.13. manner of articulation : The manner in which obstruction is created.14. place of articulation : The place where obstruction is created.15. consonant: a speech sound in which the air stream is obstructed in one way or another.16. vowel : a speech sound in which the air stream from the lung meets with no obstruction.17. monophthong : the individual vowel.18. diphthong : The vowel which consists of two individual vowels, and functions as a single one.19. phone : The speech sound we use when speaking a language.20. phoneme : The smallest unit of sound in a language which can distinguish two sounds. 21. allophone : any different forms of the same phoneme in different phonetic environments. 22. phonology : The description of sound systems of particular languages and how sounds function to distinguish meaning. 23. phonemic contrast : two similar sounds occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning.24. complementary distribution : allophones of the same phoneme and they dont distinguish meaning but complement each other in distribution.25. minimal pair: two different forms are identical in every way except one sound and occurs in the same position. The two sounds are said to form a minimal pair.26. sequential rules: The rules to govern the combination of sounds in a particular language.27. assimilation rule: The rule assimilates one sound to another by copying a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar.28. deletion rule: The rule that a sound is to be deleted although it is orthographically represented.29. suprasegmental features: The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments-syllable, word, sentence.30. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.31. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation.Chapter 3: Morphology 1. morphology: A branch of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words and rules for word formation.2. open class: A group of words, which contains an unlimited number of items, and new words can be added to it.3. closed class: A relatively few words, including conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns, and new words are not usually added to them.4. morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning of a language. It can not be divided without altering or destroying its meaning.5. affix: a letter or a group of letter, which is added to a word, and which changes the meaning or function of the word, including prefix, infix and suffix.6. suffix: The affix, which is added to the end of a word, and which usually changes the part of speech of a word.7. prefix: The affix, which is added to the beginning of a word, and which usually changes the meaning of a word to its opposite.8. bound morpheme: Morpheme that can not be used alone, and it must be combined wit others. E.g. ment.9. free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone as a word.10. derivational morpheme: Bound morpheme, which can be added to a stem to form a new word.11. inflectional morpheme: A kind of morpheme, which are used to make grammatical categories, such as number, tense and case.12. morphological rules: The ways words are formed. These rules determine how morphemes combine to form words.13. compound words: A combination of two or more words, which functions as a single words14. inflection: the morphological process which adjusts words by grammatical modification, e.g. in The rains came, rain is inflected for plurality and came for past tense. Chapter 4: Syntax1. syntax: A branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.2. category: It refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb.6. phrase: syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrase, the category of which is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built.8. head: The word round which phrase is formed is termed head.9. specifier: The words on the left side of the heads are said to function as specifiers.10. complement: The words on the right side of the heads are complements.11. phrase structure rule: The special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up a phrase is called a phrase structure rule.14. coordination: Some structures are formed by joining two or more elements of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and or or. Such phenomenon is known as coordination.15. subcategorization: The information about a words complement is included in the head and termed suncategorization.16. complementizer: Words which introduce the sentence complement are termed complementizer.17. complement clause: The sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause.18. complement phrase: the elements, including a complementizer and a complement clause is called a complement phrase.19. matrix clause: the contrusction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clause.20. modifier: the element, which specifies optionally expressible properties of heads is called modifier.21. transformation : a special type of rule that can move an element from one position to another22. inversion : the process of transformation that moves the auxiliary from the Infl position to a position to the left of the subject, is called inversion.23. Do insertion : In the process of forming yes-no question that does not contain an overt Infl, interrogative do is inserted into an empty Infl positon to make transformation work.24. deep structure : A level of abstract syntactic representation formed by the XP rule.25. surface structure : A level of syntactic representation after applying the necessary syntactic movement, i.e., transformation, to the deep structure. (05)26. universal grammar: the innateness principles and properties that pertain to the grammars of all human languages.Chapter 5: Semantics1. semantics: Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning.3. sense : 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-contexturalized. It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in.4. reference : 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.5. synonymy: Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonyms.6. dialectal synonyms: synonyms that are used in different regional dialects.7. stylistic synonyms: synonyms that differ in style, or degree of formality.8. collocational synonyms: Synonyms that differ in their colllocation, i.e., in the words they go together with.9. polysemy : The same word has more than one meaning.10. homonymy: Homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. 11. homophones: When two words are identical in sound, they are homophones.12. homographs: When two words are identical in spelling, they are homographs.13. complete homonymy: When two words are identical in both sound and spelling, they are complete homonyms.14. hyponymy: Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word.15. superordinate: The word which is more general in meaning is called the superordinate.16. co-hyponyms: Hyponyms of the same superordinate are co-hyponyms.17. antonymy: The term antonymy is used for oppositeness of meaning.20. relational opposites: Pairs if words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items are called relational opposites. For example, husband-wife, father-son, buy-sell, let-rent, above-below.21. entailment: the relationship between two sentences where the truth of one is inferred from the truth of the other. E.g. Cindy killed the dog entails the dog is dead.22. presupposition: What a speaker or writer assumes that the receiver of the massage already knows. e.g. Some tea has already been taken is a presupposition of Take some more tea.Chapter 6: Pragmatics1. pragmatics: The study of how speakers uses sentences to effect successful communication.2. context: The general knowledge shared by the speakers and the hearers. 3. sentence meaning: The meaning of a self-contained unit with abstract and de-contextualized features.4. utterance meaning: The meaning that a speaker conveys by using a particular utterance in a particular context. 5. utterance: expression produced in a particular context with a particular intention.6. Speech Act Theory: The theory proposed by John Austin and deepened by Searle, which believes that we are performing actions when we are speaking. 7. constatives: Constatives are statements that either state or describe, and are thus verifiable. 8. performatives: Performatives are sentences that dont state a fact or describe a state, and are not verifiable.9. locutionary act: The act of conveying literal meaning by virtue of syntax, lexicon and phonology.10. illocutionary act: The act of expressing the speakers intention and performed in saying something. 11. perlocutionary act: The act resulting from saying something and the consequence or the change brought about by the utterance.12. representatives: Stating or describing, saying what the speaker believes to be true.13. directives: Trying to get the hearer to do something.17. cooperative Principle: The principle that the participants must first of all be willing to cooperate in making conversation, otherwise, it would be impossible to carry on the talk.18. conversational implicature: The use of conversational maxims to imply meaning during conversation.Chapter 7: Language Change 8. acronyms: Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words.9. protolanguage: The original form of a language family, which has ceased to exist.10. Language family: A group of historically related languages that have developed from a common ancestral language.Chapter 8: Language And Society1. sociolinguistics: The subfield of linguistics that study language variation and language use in social contexts.2. speech community: A group of people who form a community and share at least one speech variety as well as similar linguistic norms. 3. speech varieties: It refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or a group of speakers.4. regional dialect: A variety of language used by people living in the same geographical region.5. sociolect: A variety of language used by people, who belong to a particular social class.6. registers : The type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation.7. idiolect : A persons dialect of an individual speaker that combines elements, regarding regional, social, gender and age variations. 8. linguistic reportoire : The totality of linguistic varieties possessed by an individual constitutes his linguistic repertoire.9. register theory : A theory proposed by American linguist Halliday, who believed that three social variables determine the register, namely, field of discourse, tenor of discourse and mode of discourse.10. field of discourse : the purpose and subject matter of the communicative behavior.11. tenor of discourse: It refers to the role of relationship in the situation in question: who the participants in the communication groups are and in what relationship they stand to each other.12. mode of discourse: It refers to the means of communication and it is concerned with how communication is carried out.13. standard dialect: A superposed variety of language of a community or nation, usually based on the speech and writing of educated native speakers of the language.14. formality: It refers to the degree of formality in different occasions and reflects the relationship and conversations. According to Martin Joos, there are five stages of formality, namely, intimate, casual, consultative, formal and frozen.15. Pidgin: A blending of several language, developing as a contact language of people, who speak different languages, try to communication with one another on a regular basis.16. Creole : A pidgin language which has become the native language of a group of speakers used in this daily life.17. bilingualism : The use of two different languages side by side with each having a different role to play, and language switching occurs when the situation changes.(07C)18. diaglossia : A sociolinguistic situation in which two different varieties of language co-exist in a speech community, each having a definite role to play.19. Lingua Franca : A variety of language that serves as a medium of communication among groups of people, who speak different native languages or dialects20. code-switching: the movement back and forth between two languages or dialects within the same sentence or discourse. Chapter 10: Language Acquisition1. language acquisition: It refers to the childs acquisition of his mother tongue, i.e. how the child comes to understand and speak the language of his community.2. language acquisition device (LAD): A hypothetical innate mechanism every normal human child is believed to be born with, which allow them to acquire language. 3. Universal Grammar: A theory which claims to account for the grammatical competence of every adult no matter what language he or she speaks.4. motherese: A special speech to children used by adults, which is characterized with slow rate of speed, high pitch, rich intonation, shorter and simpler sentence structures etc.-又叫child directed speech，caretaker talk.5. Critical Period Hypothesis: The hypothesis that the time span between early childhood and puberty is the critical period for language acquisition, during which children can acquire language without formal instruction successfully and effortlessly. 6. under-extension: Use a word with less than its usual range of denotation.7. over-extension: Extension of the meaning of a word beyond its usual domain of application by young children.8. telegraphic speech: Childrens early multiword speech that contains content words and lacks function words and inflectional morphemes.9. content word: Words referring to things, quality, state or action, which have lexical meaning used alone.10. function word: Words with little meaning on their own but show grammatical relationships in and between sentences.11. taboo: Words known to speakers but avoided in some contexts of speech for reasons of religion, politeness etc. 12. atypical development: Some acquisition of language may be delayed but follow the same rules of language development due t