Design features: features that define our human languages, such as arbitrariness, duality, creativity, displacement, cultural transmission, etc.
Arbitrariness: the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meanings.
E.g. Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between a linguistic symbol and what the symbol stands for. (2010)
Language is arbitrary in nature, which can be best illustrated by such words as rumble, bang, crash and photocopy. (2017)
Duality: 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: language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness.
Recursiveness refers to the rule which can be applied repeatedly without any definite limit. The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the possibility of creating endless sentences.
E.g. The feature of displacement of language enables human being to talk about matter that happened at any time and place also to talk about abstract ideas. (2009) Language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker. This feature is known as “productivity” of language. (2011)
Displacement: human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of conversation.
E.g. The feature of displacement of language enables human being to talk about matters that happen at any time and place and also to talk about abstract ideas.
(2007)
Functions of language
As is proposed by Jacobson, language has six functions:
1.Referential: to convey message and information;
2.Poetic: to indulge in language for its own sake;
3.Emotive: to express attitudes, feelings and emotions;
4.Conative: to persuade and influence others through commands and entreaties;
5.Phatic: to establish communion with others;
6.Metalingual: to clear up intentions, words and meanings.
What is linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It studies not just one language of any one community, but the language of all human beings.
Main branches of linguistics：
Phonetics(区分 phonetics & phonology)
Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, it includes three main areas: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics.
Phonology
Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables.
Morphology
Morphology studies the minimal units of meaning – morphemes and word-formation processes.
Syntax
Syntax refers to the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences.
Semantics(区分 semantics & pragmatics)
Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a language.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context.
E.g. Pragmatics is a study of the intended meaning of speakers in a particular context.
(2013)
Important distinctions in linguistics Descriptive vs. Prescriptive
To say that linguistics is a descriptive science is to say that the linguist tries to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language-community actually conform and does not seek to impose upon them other rules, or norms, of correctness.
Prescriptive linguistics aims to lay down rules for the correct use of language and settle the disputes over usage once and for all.
Synchronic vs. diachronic
A synchronic study takes a fixed instant (usually at present) as its point of observation.
Saussure’s diachronic description is the study of a language through the course of its history. E.g. a study of the features of the English used in Shakespeare’s time would be synchronic, and a study of the changes English has undergone since then would be a diachronic study.
Langue & parole（Saussure ）
Langue is relative stable and systematic, parole is subject to personal and situational constraints; langue is not spoken by an individual, parole is always a naturally occurring event.
Competence & performance（Chomsky）
A language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called the linguistic competence, and the actual use of language in concrete situations is called performance.
Chapter 2
Phonetics: studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived.
E.g. Phonetics studies the speech sounds and their patterns. (2009)
Phonology: studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables.
E.g. Phonology studies the description and classification of speech sounds. (2007) Speech production and perception
Articulatory phonetics: the study of the production of speech sounds
Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of the sounds produced in speech
Auditory phonetics: the study of perception of speech sounds
Consonants: A consonant is produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some places to divert, impede, or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity.
Vowels: A vowel is produced without obstruction so no turbulence or a total stopping of the air can be perceived.
E.g. Some vowels are simple vowels. There are vowels which may be described as a sequence of 2 sound, or the glide from one vowel position to another. Such sounds are called monophthongs. (2013)
Coarticulation: the simultaneous or overlapping articulation of two successive phonological units.
Broad and narrow transcriptions（区分）
The use of a simple set of symbols in our transcription is called a broad transcription.
The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription.
Minimal pairs: two words in a language which differ from each other by only one distinctive sound and which also differ in meaning.
Allophones: A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning. Any of the different forms of a phoneme is called its
allophones.
Assimilation: a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound.
Distinctive features: a particular characteristic which distinguishes one distinctive sound unit of a language from another or one group of sounds from another group.
Suprasegmental features: those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmental features are syllables, stress, tone, and intonation.
E.g. Supra-segmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principle Supra-segmental features are syllable, stress, tone and intonation. (2013)
Chapter 3
Morpheme: the smallest unit of language in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further small units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Allomorph: any of the different form of a morpheme. For example, in English the plural morpheme is but it is pronounced differently in different environments
Classification of words Variable and invariable words
Grammatical words and lexical words Closed-class words and open-class words
Morphology: studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.
Free morpheme: those which may occur alone, that is, those which may constitute words by themselves, are free morphemes.
Bound morpheme: those which must appear with at least another morpheme are called bound morphemes.
Root, affix and stem(区分 root & stem)
A root is the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed. An affix is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used only when added to another morpheme. A stem is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added.
Inflection: the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached.
Compound: refer to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form.
Derivation: shows the relation between roots and suffixes. In contrast with inflections, derivations can make the word class of the original word either changed or
unchanged.
Chapter 4
Syntactic relations: relation of location, relation of substitutability, relation of co-occurrence.
IC analysis: a system of grammatical analysis that divides sentences into successive layers, or constituents, until, in the final layer, each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word.
Endocentric construction: one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its constituents, which serves as the center, or head, of the whole.
Exocentric construction: a construction whose distribution is not functionally equivalent to any of its constituents.
Coordination: a common syntactic pattern in English and other languages formed by grouping together two or more categories of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and, but and or.
Subordination: the process or 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.
Category (2019): is used in the analysis of word classes to identify the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence.
Recursiveness: a phrasal constituent can be embedded within another constituent having the same category, but it has become an umbrella term such important linguistic phenomena as coordination and subordination, conjoining and embedding, hypotactic and paratactic.
Conjoining: coordination.
Embedding: subordination Cohesion: subordination
E.g. There are 4 kinds of cohesive resources in the English language: reference, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. (2013)
Chapter 5
Semantics: examines how meaning is encoded in a language.
Connotation: the additional meaning that a word or phrase has beyond its central meaning.
Denotation: that part of the meanings of a word or phrase that relates it to phenomena in the real world or in a fictional or possible word.
Sense & Reference
Synonymy: he technical name for the sameness relation.
Antonymy: the name for oppositeness relation.
gradable antonymy: the commonest type of antonymy.
complementary antonymy: the members of a pair in complementary antonymy are complementary to each other.
converse antonymy: a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute a positive-negative opposition.
Hyponymy: a matter of class membership.
Superordinate: when x is a kind of y, the lower term x is the hyponym, and the upper term y is the superordinate.
Hyponym: when x is a kind of y, the lower term x is the hyponym, and the upper term y is the superordinate.
co-hyponym: two or more hyponyms of the same one superordinate are called co-hyponyms.
E.g.“fruit”is the hyponym of “orange”.(2007)
Hyponymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form. (2011)
Hyponymy is a relation of inclusion, as in the case of the word “meat”, which includes more specific words such as beef, pork, mutton and so on. (2016)
Componential analysis: defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. That is, the meaning of a word is not an unanalyzable whole.
E.g. Componential analysis often refers to an approach to analyzing the elements of a sentence and their syntactic relations. (2014)
Chapter 6-8
Cognitive linguistics: being concerned above all with making inferences about the content of human mind
Psycholinguistics: is concerned primarily with investigating the psychological reality of linguistic structure.
Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses: our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express our unique ways of understanding the world.
linguistic determinism/linguistic relativity
E.g. Different language offer people different ways of expressing the world around, they think and speak differently, this is known as linguistic relativity. (2010/2011) Speech act theory
Performative: in speech act theory an utterance which performs an act, such as Watch out (= a warning).
Constative: an utterance which asserts something that is either true or force.
Locutionary act: the basic literal meaning of the utterance which is conveyed by the particular words and structures which the utterance contains.
Illocutionary act: the effect the utterance or written text has on the reader or listener.
Perlocutionary act: a perlocutionary act is the results or effects that are produced by means of saying something.
Cooperative principle: refers to the “co-operation” between speakers in using the maxims during the conversation. There are four conversational maxims.
E.g. According to Paul Grice, participants observe strictly the maxims under the Cooperative Principle; otherwise, the participants in conversation are not able to achieve successful communication. (2011)
In natural and everyday conversation, much of the meanings are expressed indirectly.
We communicate more than we say implicitly. (2013)
Chapter 11
Focus on form: although language learning should generally be meaning-focused and communication-oriented, it is still necessary and beneficial to focus on form occasionally.
Universal Grammar: a theory which claims to account for the grammatical competence of every adult no matter what language he or she speaks. It claims that every speaker knows a set of principles which apply to all languages and also a set of parameters that can vary from one language to another, but only within certain limits.
Input hypothesis*: a theory proposed by Krashen (1985) to deal with the relationship between language input and learners’ acquiring language. According to this hypothesis, learners acquire a language as a result of comprehending input addressed to them.
Constructivism: the conception of language output as a way to promote language acquisition is to some extent in line with the so-called constructivism.
Interlanguage: a language system between the target language and the learner’s native language.
E.g. Interlanguage is learners’ independent system of the second language and a continuum or approximation from his native language to the target language. (2009) Communicative language teaching & Task-based language teaching
Real-word tasks & pedagogical tasks: very close to something we do in daily life or work & those activities that students do in the classroom but that may not take place in real life.
Curriculum: the substance of a programme of studies of an educational institution or system
Syllabus: prescribe the content to be covered by a given course, form only a small part of the total school program.
Contrastive analysis: the comparison of the linguistic systems of two languages. E.g.
the comparison of the sound or the grammatical system.
Error analysis: the study and analysis of error and is confined to the language learner.
Error & Mistake
Error: Error is the grammatically incorrect form.
Mistake: Mistake appears when the language is correct grammatically but improper in a communicational context.
E.g. In contrast with mistakes, errors are defined as intentionally deviant from the target language and self-corrigible by the learner. (2016 )
Overgeneralization: a process common in both first and second language learning, in which a learner extends the use of a grammatical rule of linguistic item beyond its accepted uses, generally by making words or structures follow a more regular pattern.
E. g. Overgeneralization in language learning refers to the strategies of transferring what has been learnt about mother tongue into second language learning, which result in wrong or unidiomatic linguistic expressions. (2017)
Chapter 12
Signifier & Signified: Saussure argues that the linguistic unit is a sign. The linguistic sign unites, not a sign and a name, but a concept and a sound image. He called the concept signified and the sound image signifier.
E.g. In the theory of Saussure, the 2 aspects of Sign is signifier and signified. Their relationship is conventional. (2014)
Systemic-functional grammar: considers function and semantics as the basis of human language and communicative activity.
Behaviourism: a principle of scientific method, based on the belief that human beings cannot know anything they have not experienced. They hold that children learn language through a chain of “STIMULUS-RESPONSE reinforcement”.
E.g. According to the behaviorist view of language acquisition, language learning is simply a matter of imitation and habit formation. (2014)
Language acquisition device: a unique kind of knowledge that fits them for language learning.
Innateness hypothesis: according to Chomsky, there are aspects of linguistic organization that are basic to the human brain and that make it possible for children to acquire linguistic competence in all its complexity with little instruction from family or friends.
E.g. According to the innatist view of language learning, children are able to acquire their mother tongue because they are exposed to the language environment which contains all the examples for them to imitate. (2017)