Unit 1
Competence (语言能力): the ideal user’s knowledge of the rules of his language . Performance (语言运用): the actual use of language in concrete situations. Arbitrariness (符号特性): there is no intrinsic connection between the word and the thing.
Productivity(creativity): Language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. We can use it to create new meanings.
Duality: The structural organization of language into two abstract levels: meaningful units (e. g. words in written language) and meaningless segments (e.
g. sounds, letters in spoken language).
Displacement: Human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication.
Six basic functions of language:
Emotive:the addresser expressed his attitude to the topic of situation of communication.
Conative (意动功能): the addresser aims to influence the addressee’s course of action or ways of thinking.
Referential (所指功能): the addresser conveys a massage or information.
Poetic (诗/美学功能): the addresser uses language for the sole purpose of displaying the beauty of language itself.
Phatic communion (寒暄/交互功能): the addresser tries to establish or maintain good interpersonal relationships with the addressee.
Metalinguistic (元语言功能): the addresser uses language to make clear the meaning of language itself.
Unit 2
Broad transcription (宽式转写) : When we use a simple set of symbols in our transcription, it is called a broad transcription.
Narrow transcription (严式转写) : The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription.
Both are phonetic transcriptions (语音转写)so we put both forms in square brackets [ ].
Phone: A phone is a phonetic unit or segment.
Phoneme: A phoneme is a phonological unit; It is a unit that is of distinctive value; It is an abstract unit;
Allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.
Assimilation rule: assimilates one sound to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones similar.
Intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively keown as intonation.
Unit 3
Allomorphs: the variant forms of a morpheme are called its allomorphs. Morphemes: It is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.
Unit 4
Major lexical categories: Major lexical categories are often assumed to be the heads (中心语/中心成分) around which phrases are built: n., v., adj. and prep.
Minor lexical categories: Minor lexical categories include determiner (Det限定词), degree words (Deg程度词), qualifier (Qual修饰语) and so on.
Inversion:a transfomation known as inversion moves the auxiliary from the Infl position to a position to the left of the subject.
The XP rule: XP→(specifier) X (conplement)
Do insertion---- Insert interrogative do into an empty Infl position.
Wh Movement: move the wh phrase to the beginning of the sentence.
Unit 5
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-contextualized; It is the aspect of meaning dictionary compilers are interested in.
Reference: reference is 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.
Predication (述谓结构): Predication is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.
A predication consists of argument(s) (变元) and predicate (谓词).
Argument: An argument is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal elements in a sentence.
Predicate: A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.
Unit 6
Context: Context a basic concept in the study of pragmatics. It is generally considered as constituted knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer, such as cultural background, situation (time, place, manner, etc.), the relationship between the speaker and the hearer, etc.….
Sentence meaning: It is abstract and context-independent; it’s the literal meaning of
a sentence.
Utterance meaning: It is concrete and context-dependent; It’s the intended meaning of a speaker; It is the product of sentence meaning and context. Therefore, it is richer than the meaning of the sentence.
Locutionary act (言内行为): Locutionary act is the act of saying words, phrases, clauses…; it is an act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon and phonology.
Illocutionary act (言外行为): Illocutionary act is the act of expressing the speaker’s
intention; it is the act performed in saying something.
Perlocutionary act (言后行为): Perlocutionary act is the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it is the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance.
Unit 8
Speech variety: refers to any distinguishable form of speech used by a speaker or a group of speakers.
Sociolect: refers to the linguistic variety characteristic of a particular social class. Register: the type of language which is selected as appropriate to the type of situation is a register.
Creole (克里奥尔语) : when a pidgin (洋泾浜语) has become the primary language of a speech community, and is acquired by the children of that speech community as their native language, it is said to have become a creole.
其他概念：
Linguistics: Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. Phonetics: A branch of linguistics which studies the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. Phonology: Phonology is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages; It aims to ‘discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur’. Morphology: refers to the part of the grammar that is concerned with word formation and word structure.
Syntax: Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies the rules that govern the formatoin of sentences.
Semantics: The study of meaning is known as semantics.
Pragmatics:It is the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication.