语言学复习资料

Definition

1.Phatic:or phatic communion, said of talk used for establish atmosphere or

maintain social contact.

2.Coarticulation:simultaneous or overlapping articulations, as when the nasal

quality of a nasal sound affects the preceding or following sound so that the latter becomes nasalized. If the affected sound becomes more like the following sound, it is known as anticipatory “coarticulation”; if the sound shows the influence of the preceding sound, it is perseverative(持续的) “ coarticulation”.

3.Manner of articulation:ways in which articulation of consonants can be

accomplished-a)the articulators may close off the oral tract for an instant or a relatively long period; b)they may narrow the space considerably; or c)they may simply modify the shape of the tract by approaching each other.

4.Back-formation: refers to an abnormal type of word –formation where a shorter

word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in a language. For example, the word “television” appeared before “televise”. The first part of the word “television” was pulled out and analyzed as a root, even though no such root occurs elsewhere in the English language.

5.Dissimilation: refers to the influence of one sound segment upon the articulation

of another, so that the sounds become less alike, or different. For example:

grammar (O.E.)- glamor (M.E.)

peregrius (Latin)-pilgrim

marbre (French)-marble

In all these examples, one of the phonemes,/r/,dissimilates to /l/ in the course of time, which has changed the morpheme in question.

6.Affix: the collective term for the type of formative that can be used when added to

another morpheme. Affixes in a language are limited in number, and are generally classified into three subtypes, namely, prefix, suffix, and infix, depending on their position around the root or stem of a word. Prefixes are these affixes that have been added to the beginning of a word (e.g. un- in unhappy);suffixes are those

added to the end of a word(e.g. –ish in foolish); infixes, as a third type of affix, is not normally found in English but fairly common in some other languages. As the term suggests, it is an affix that is incorporated inside another word. It is possible to see the general principle at work in certain expressions, occasionally used in fortuitous or aggravating circumstances by emotionally aroused English speakers: Absogoddamlutely!And Unfuckingbelievable!In fact, all affixes are bound morphemes.

7.Endocentric constituent: Endocentric construction(向心结构) is one whose

distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e.,

a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable Centre or Head. In the

phrase two pretty girls, girls is the Centre or Head of the phrase or word group. 8.Embedding: Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in

another clause in syntactic subordination. E.g., I saw the man who had visited you last year.

9.Agreement: Agreement (or concord) may be defined as the requirement that the

forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall also, be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category (or categories). For instance, the syntactic relationship between this pen and it in the following dialogue:

--Whose is this pen?

--Oh, it’s the pen I lost.

10.Hyponymy: Hyponymy, the technical name for inclusiveness sense relation, is a

matter of class membership. For example, the meaning of desk is included in that of furniture, and the meaning of rose is included in that of flower.

11.Connotation: in the philosophers’ usage, connotation, opposite to denotation,

means the properties of entity a word denotes. For example, the connotation of “human” is “biped”, “featherless”, “rational”, etc.

12.Conceptual meaning: This is the first type of meaning recognized by Leech,

which he defined as the logical, cognitive, or denotative content. In other words, it overlaps to a large extent with the notion of conceptual meaning. But Leech also

uses “sense” as a briefer term for his conceptual meaning. As a result, Leech’s conceptual meaning have two sides: sense and reference

13.Psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of

language; it usually studies the psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. As an interdisciplinary academic field based on psychology and linguistics, psycholinguistics investigates the six following subjects: language acquisition, language comprehension, language production, language disorders, language and thought, and cognitive architecture of language.

The most important research subjects are acquisition, comprehension and production.

14.Nida’s classification of culture: According to Nida(1964),there are five types of

sub-culture we should be fully aware of when engaged in translation:1) ecological culture;2)linguistic culture;3)religious culture;4)material culture;5)social culture 15.Sapir Whorf Hypothesis: is a theoretic assumption which suggests that our

language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speakers’ unique ways of understanding the world. In a loose sense, this term can be interchangeably used with linguistic relativity and linguistic determinism.

Question

1. How do you understand the distinction between a synchronic (共时的) study and a diachronic(历时的) study?

The description of a language at some point in time is a Synchronic study; the description of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study. A synchronic study of language describes a language as it is at some particular point in time, while a diachronic study of language is the study of the historical development of language over a period of time.

2Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole seems similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance. What do you think are their major differences?

Although Saussure’s distinction and Chomsky’s are very similar, they differ at least in that Saussure took a sociological view of language and his notion of langue is a matter of social conventions, and Chomsky looks at language from a psychological point of view and to him, competence is a property of the mind of each individual.

3Do you think human language is entirely arbitrary? Why?

Language is arbitrary in nature; it is not entirely arbitrary, because there are a limited number of words whose connections between forms and meanings can be logically explained to a certain extent, for example, the onomatopoeia, words which are coined on the basis of imitation of sounds by sounds such as bang, crash, etc. Take compounds for another example. The two elements “photo” and “copy” in “photocopy” are non-motivated, but the compound is not arbitrary.

4What are the criteria that a linguist uses in classifying vowels?

1) Vowels may be distinguished as front, central and back in terms of the position of the tongue in the mouth.

2) According to how wide our mouth is opened, we classify the vowels into four groups: close vowels, semi-close vowels, semi-open vowels, and open vowels.

3) According to the shape of the lips, vowels are divided into rounded vowels and unrounded vowels.

4) The English vowels can also be classified into long vowels and short vowels according to the length of the sound.

5Illustrate with examples how supersegmental(超音段) features can affect meaning.

1) The location of stress in English distinguishes meaning, such as `import and

im`port. The similar alternation of stress also occurs between a compound noun and a phrase consisting of the same elements. A phonological feature of the English compounds, is that the stress of the word always falls on the first element and the second element receives secondary stress, for example: `blackbird is a particular kind of bird, which is not necessarily black, but a black `bird is a bird that is black.

2) The more important words such as nouns, verbs adjectives , adverbs,etc are pronounced with greater force and made more prominent. But to give special emphasis to a certain notion, a word in sentence that is usually unstressed can be stressed to achieve different effect. Take the sentence “He is driving my car.”for example. To emphasize the fact that the car he is driving is not his, or yours, but mine,

the speaker can stress the possessive pronoun my, which under normal circumstances is not stressed.

3) English has four basic types of intonation, known as the four tones: When spoken in different tones, the same sequence of words may have different meanings. Generally speaking, the falling tone indicates that what is said is a straight-forward, matter-of-fact statement, the rising tone often makes a question of what is said, and the fall-rise tone often indicates that there is an implied message in what is said.

6Discuss the types of morphemes with examples.

Free morphemes: They are the independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves, for example, “book-” in the word “bookish”.

Bound morphemes: They are those that cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word such as “-ish” in “bookish”. Bound morphemes can be subdivided into roots and affixes. A root is seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it has a clear and definite meaning, such as “gene-” in the word “generate”. Aff ixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflectional morphemes manifest various grammatical relations or grammatical categories such as “-s” in the word “books” to indicate plurality of nouns. Derivational affixes are added to an existing form to create a word such as “mis-” in the word “misinform”. Derivational affixes can also be divided into prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes occur at the beginning of a word such as “dis-” in the word “dislike”, while suffixes occur at the end of a word such as “-less” in the word “friendless”.

7 Are the elements in a sentence linearly structured? Why?

No. Language is both linearly and hierarchically structured. When a sentence is uttered or written down, the words of the sentence are produced one after another in a sequence. A closer examination of a sentence shows that a sentence is not composed of sequence of words arranged in a simple linear order with one adding onto another following a simple arithmetic logic. In fact, sentences are also hierarchically structured. They are organized by grouping together words of the same syntactic category, such as noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP), as can be seen from the

following tree diagram:

8 Why do we say that a meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components?

The meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meanings of all its components because it cannot be worked out by adding up all the meanings of its constituent words. For example;

(A) The dog bit the man.

(B) The man bit the dog.

If the meaning of a sentence were the sum total of the meanings of all its components, then the above two sentences would have the same meaning. In fact they are different in meanings.

As we know, there are two aspects to sentence meaning: grammatical meaning and semantic meaning. The grammatical meanings of “the dog” and “the man” in (A) are different from the grammatical meanings of “the dog” and “the man” in (B). The meaning of a sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning. It is the product of the meaning of the constituent words and of the grammatical constructions that relate one word syntagmatically to another.