现代语言学名词解释.doc

1).Linguistics:It is generally defined as the scientific study of language. 2).General linguistics: The study of language as a whole is called general linguistics.3).Applied linguistics: In a narrow sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages. In a broad sense, it refers to the application of linguistic findings to the solution of practical problems such as the recovery of speech ability.4).Synchronic study: The study of a language at some point in time. e.g. A study of the features of the English used in Shakespeares time is a synchronic study.5).Diachronic study: The study of a language as it changes through time. A diachronic study of language is a historical study, which studies the historical development of language over a period of time. e.g. a study of the changes English has undergone since Shakespeares time is a diachronic study.6).Language competence: The ideal users knowledge of the rules of his language. A transformational-generative grammar（转化生成语法）is a model of language competence.7).Language performance: performance is the actual realization of the ideal language users knowledge of the rules in linguistic communication. 8).Langue : Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community; Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow; Langue is relatively stable, it does not change frequently.9).Parole: Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use; parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules; parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.10).Language: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.11).Arbitrariness: It is one of the design features of language. It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. A good example is the fact that different sounds are used to refer to the same object in different languages.12).Productivity: Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by its users.13).Duality: Language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds at the lower or basic level, and the other of meanings at the higher level.14).Displacement: language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker.15).Cultural transmission: While we are born with the ability to acquire language, the details of any language are not genetically transmitted, but instead have to be taught and learned.16).Design features: It refers to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication1.Define the terms: 1).phonetics: Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world s languages2).auditory phonetics: It studies the speech sounds from the hearers point of view. It studies how the sounds are perceived by the hearer. 3).acoustic phonetics: It studies the speech sounds by looking at the sound waves. It studies the physical means by which speech sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.4).international phonetic alphabet IPA: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription.5).Broad transcription: the transcription with letter-symbols only, i.e. one letter-symbol for one sound. This is the transcription normally used in dictionaries and teaching textbooks.6).Narrow transcription: is the transcription with letter-symbols together with the diacritics. This is the transcription used by the phoneticians in their study of speech sounds.7).diacritics: is a set of symbols which can be added to the letter-symbols to make finer distinctions than the letters alone make possible.8).Voiceless（清音）: when the vocal cords are drawn wide apart, letting air go through without causing vibration, the sounds produced in such a condition are called voiceless sounds.9).Voicing （浊音）: Sounds produced while the vocal cords are vibrating are called voiced sounds.10).Vowel: the sounds in production of which no articulators come very close together and the air stream passes through the vocal tract without obstruction are called vowels.11).Consonants: the sounds in the production of which there is an obstruction of the air stream at some point of the vocal tract are called consonants.12).phonology: Phonology studies the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.13).phone: Phones can be simply defined as the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.14).phoneme: a collection of abstract phonetic features, it is a basic unit in phonology. It is represented or realized as a certain phone by a certain phonetic context.15).allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme. For example l and l16).phonemic contrast: Phonemic contrast refers to the relation between two phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.17).Complementary distribution: refers to the relation between two similar phones which are allophones of the same phoneme, and they occur in different environments.18).minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair. For example: bin and pin.19).suprasegmental features: the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features. The main suprasegmental features include stress, tone and intonation.20).tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. Pitch variation can distinguish meaning just like phonemes. The meaning-distinctive function of the tone is especially important in tone languages, for example, in Chinese.21).intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation. For example, English has four basic types of intonation: the falling tone, the rising tone, the fall-rise tone and the rise-fall tone.4、 morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammer which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. 5、 inflectional morphology: Inflectional morphology studies the inflections of word-formation. 6、derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word-formation. 7、morpheme: Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. 8、free morpheme: Free morpheme are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselces or in combination with other morphemes. 9、bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word. 10、root: A root is often seen as part of a word; it can never stand by itself although it bears clear,definite meaning; it must be combined with another root or an affix to form a word. 11、affix: Affixes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. 12、prefix: Prefix occur at the beginning of a word. 13、suffix: Suffixes are added to the end of the stems; they modify the meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech. 14、 derivation: Derivation affixes are added to an existing form to creat a word.Derivation can be viewed as the adding of affixes to stem to form nes words. 15、compounding: Like derivation, compounding is another popular and important way of forming new words in English. Compounding can be viewed as the combination of two or sometimes more than two words to creat new words. 17、 linguistic competence: Comsky defines competence as the ideal users knowledge of the rules of his language,and performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguistic communication. 18、 sentence : A sentence is a structurally independent unit that usually comprises a number of words to form a complete statement question or command. 19、transformation rules: Syntactic movement is governed by transformational rules. The operation of the transformational rules may change the syntactic representation of a sentence. 20、D-structure : A sentence may have two levels of syntactic representation. One exists before movement take place, the other occurs after movement take place. In formal linguistic exploration, these two syntactic representation are commonly termed as D-structure. 21、 Move : Just as there is a general rule for all phrase structure rules,i,e. the X-bar schema, there is a general movement rule accounting for the syntactic behavior of any constituent movement. This movement rule is called Move 22、 syntax studies the sentence structure of language. 23、Types of sentences simple sentence, coordinate(compound) sentence复合句， complex sentence 第五章、 语义学Semantics 1 semantics: Semantics can be simply defined as the study of meaning in language. 2 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 decontextualized. 3 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. 4 synonymy : Synonymy refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning. Words that are close in meaning are called synonymy. 5 polysemy : Polysemy refers to the fact that the same one word may have more than one meaning.A word having more than one meaning is called a polysemic word. 6 antonymy : Antonymy refers to the oppositeness of meaning. Words that are opposite in meaning are called antonyms. 7 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. 8 hyponymy : Hyponymy refers to the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word. 9 componential analysis : Componential analysis is a way to analyze wprd meaning. It was proposed by structural semanticists. 10 grammatical meaning : The grammatical meaning of a sentence refers to its grammaticality,i.e. its grammatical well-formedness. The grammaticality of asentence is governed by the grammatical rules of the language. 11 semantic meaning : The semantic meaning of a sentence is governed by rules called selectional restrictions. 12 predication : In semantic analysis of a sentence, the basic unit is called predication. The predication is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.第六章 语用学Pragmatics 1 pragmatics: Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. 2 context: The notion of context is essential to the pragmatic study of language. Generally speaking, it consists of the knowledge that is shared by the speaker and the hearer. 3 utterance meaning: Utterance is based on sentence meaning; it is realization of the abstract meaning of a sentence in a real situation of communication, or simply in a context. 4 locutionary act: A locutionary act is the act of utterance words,phrases,clauses. It is the act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexion and phonology. 5 illocutionary act: An illocutionary act is the act expressing the speakers intention; It is the act performed in saying something. 6 perlocutionary act: A illocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something: it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance; it is the act performed by saying something. 第七章、 历史语言学 Historical linguistics 1、historical linguistics: Historical linguistics is the subfield of linguistics that studies language change. 2、 apocope: Another well-documented sound loss is the deletion of a word-final vowel segement, a phenomenon called apocope. 3、epenthesis: A change that involves the insertion of a consonant or vowel sound to the middle of a word is known as epenthesis. 4、metathesis: Sound change as a result of sound movement is known as metathesis. 5、compounding: Compounding is a process of combining two or more words into one lexical unit. 6、derivation: Derivation refers to the process by which new words are formed by the addition of affixes to the roots. 7、blending: Blending is a process of forming a new word by combining parts of other words. 8、back-formation: Back-formation is a process by which new words are formed by taking away the suffix of an existing word. 9、semantic broadening: Semantic broadening refers to the process in which the meaning of a word becomes general or inclusive than its historically earlier denotation. 10、semantic narrowing: Semantic narrowing is a process in which the meaning of a word becomes less general or inclusive than its historically earlier meaning. 11、semantic shift: Semantic shift is a process of semantic change in which a word loses its former meaning and acquire a new, sometimes related, meaning. 12、protolanguage: It refers to a family of a language. 13、sound shift: It refers to the systematic modification of a series of phonemes relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. 1、Sociolinguistics is the sub-field of linguistics that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live. 2、the speech community ：In sociolinguistic studies, speakers are regarded as members of social groups. The social group that is singled out for any special study is called the speech community. 3、 A pidgin is a special language variety that mixes or blends languages and it is used by people who speak different languages for restricted purposes such as trading. The term is believed to have originated from the pronunciation of the English word "business" in Chinese Pidgin English. When a pidgin has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquire