第一章 绪论Because there are words in every language that imitate natural sounds, such as crash, bang in English .besides, some compound words are also not entirely arbitrary .these words cannot be made freely .Because the details of any language are not genetically transmitted ,but instead have to be taught and learned anew . it is passed on from one generation to another through teachingand learning rather than by instinct . in contrast ,animals are born with the capacity to produce the set of calls peculiar to their species, so animals call system are genetically transmitted. The duality nature of language means that language is system ,which consists off two sets of structures ,or two levels ,one of sounds and the other of meanings . at the lower or thebasic level ,there is the structure of sounds , which are meaningless. At the higherlevel ,the units can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences .Language is productive or creative in that it makes possible the construction and interpretationof new signal by its users. The users can send message which no one else has ever sent before. Displacement means that 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-awayplaces . in other words language can be used to refer context removed from the immediate situation of the speakers. Modern linguistics differs from traditional grammar . traditional grammar is prescriptive, it is based on high written language . it sets models for language users to follow . but modern linguistics is descriptive ,its investigation are based on authentic ,and mainly spoken language data. It is supposed to be scientific andobjective and the task of linguistics is supposed to describe the language people actually use, whether it is correct or not. Language exists in time and changes trough time. The description of a language at some point in time is a synchronic study, the description of a language as it changes though time is a diachronic study. A synchronic study of language describe a language as it is at some particular point in time ,while a diachronic study language is a historical stud ; it studies the historical development of language over a period.speech and writing are the two major media of communication . modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary , but not the written form ,because thespoken form is prior to the written form and most writing systems are derived from spoken form of language. Langue and parole are French words, langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech communication ,and parole refers to the realization of langue in actural use. Langue is the set ofconventions and rules which language users all have to follow while parole is the concrete use of the conversation and the application of the rules. Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user ’s knowledge of the rules of his language,and performance the actual realization of this knowledge in linguisticscommunication. 第二章 音系学1. speech and writing are the two major media of communication. Modern linguistics regards the spoken form of language as primary ,but not the written form ,because the spoken for id prior to the written form and most writing systems are derived from the spoken form of language.the basic difference between a vowel and a consonant is that the pronunciation of a vowel,the air stream from the lung meets no obstruction of any kind in the throat, the nose, or the mouth, while in the pronunciation of a consonant , the air stream from the lungs is obstructed in one way or another.Which allophone is to be used is determined by the phonetic context in which it occurs. But the choice of an allophone is not random or haphazard in most cases; it is rule-governed . one of the tasks of the phonologist is to find out these rules.The phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental phonemes; these are the phonological properties of such units as the syllable , the word ,and the sentence. The main suprasegmental featuresinclude stress, tone, and intonation.第三章 形态学Morphology is divided into sub-branches : inflectional morphology and lexical or derivational morphology. Free morphemes are themorphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves or in combination with other morphemes .bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used independently but have to be combinedwith other morphemes, either free or bound ,to form a word.derivational affixes are added to an exciting form to create a word . prefixes occur at the beginning of a word and. Prefixes modify the meaning of he stem .suffixes are added to the end of the stems ;they modifythe meaning of the original word and in many cases change its part of speech.Syntactically, the part of speech of the compound is generally determined by the part of speech o the second element, e.g. icy-cold adj. head —strong adv. Greenhouse n. but there are many exception ,especially with hose compounds ending with a verb or an adverb or a preposition . for example,follow up , crackdown ,kickoff are allnouns instead of adverbs.and toothpick, snowfall,and facelift arenoun instead of verbs.semantically, the meaning of a compound is often idiomatic, not always being the sum total of the meaning of its components. For example ,a greenhouse is not a house that is green .in order to find out the meaning of a compound, one sometimes hasto consult the dictionary instead of doing some guess work.第四章 句法学 As a major component of grammar, syntax consists of a set o abstract rules that allow words to be combined with other words to form grammatical sentences. A sentences is considered grammatical when it is in agreement with thegrammatical knowledge in the mind of native speakers. Universally found in the grammars of all human language ,syntactic rules comprise the system of internalized linguistic knowledge of a language speaker known as linguistic competence.Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. The word language in this definition implies that linguistics studies not any particular language ,but investigate or examine. And the word scientific refers to the way in which language is studied.Chomsky thinks that linguistics should study the ideal speaker ’s competence, but not his performance. For any natural language ,a set of syntactic rules are capable of yielding an endless number of sentences in that language .that is ,the syntactic rules of any language are finite in number, and yet there is no limit to the number of sentences native speakers of that language are able to produce and comprehend.Traditionally, there are three major types of sentences. They are simple sentence,coordinate sentence,and complex sentences.When a sentence is uttered or written down ,the words of the sentences are produced one after another in a sequence. Meanwhile,they are heard or read as arranged one after another in a sequence.therfore, the structure of a sentence is linear.major lexical categories are open categories in the sense that new words are constantly added. Minor lexical categories are closed categories becausethe number of lexical items in this categories is fixed and no new members are allowed for.The combinational pattern in a linear formula may be called a phrase structural rule. Syntactic movement is governed by transformational rules. The operation of the transformational rules may chang the syntactic representation of a sentence.parameters are syntactic options of UG that allow general principles to operate in one way or another and contribute to significant linguistics variation between and among natural language. Another parameter, the one that involves word order, concerns the directionality of case assignment ,i.e the directionality parameter. This parameter offers a neat and consist account forthe typological difference in the word order within the VP category between English and Japanese第五章 语义学Contextualism is based on the presumption that one can derive meaning from or reduce meaning to observable contexts. Two kinds of contest are recognized :the situational context and the Linguistic context.Obviously, linguistic forms with the same sense may have different references in different situation. For example, in the following exchange, the two speakers are surely talking about two different references, i.e. two different gogs.But because of their differentorigin ,there are often subtle differences between thesesynonyms .synonyms that are mutually substitutable under all circumstances are called complete synonyms . however, complete synonyms are rare.Dialectal synonyms which are used in different regional dialects .stylistic synonyms which differ in style. Synonyms hat siffer in their emotive or evaluation meaning collocational synonymssemantically different synonyms.A polysemic word i.e. a word with several meanings, is the result of the evolution of the primary meaning o the word ,the various meaning of the word are related to some degree ,as is discussed in the previous section.There is one advantage of componential analysis . by specifying the semantic features of certain words I will be possible to show how these words are related in meaning.there are three kinds. they are gradable antonyms,complementary antonyms and relational opposites. 第六章语用学Without this shared knowledge, linguistics communication would be impossible, and without considering this knowledge , linguistics communication cannot satisfactorily accounted for in apragmatic sense.If we regard a sentence as what people actually utter in the course of communication , it becomes an utterance ,and it should be considered in the situation in which it is actually uttered.Therefore ,while themeaning of a sentence is abstract ,and decontextualized, the meaning of an utterance is concrete ,and context-dependent. the act theory is the act of uttering words, phrases ,clauses. It is the ac of conveying literal meaning by meaning of syntax, lexicon and phonology.第七章 历史语言学Researches in historical linguistics shed light on prehistoric development in the evolution of language and the connections of earlier and later variants ofthe same language ,andprovide valuable insights into the kinship patterns of difference languages.it is generally accepted that the history of the English language is divided into the period of old English ,middle English and modern English.3.The most vigorous and no-going change in the historical development of a language is the change in its vocabulary.They are the Indo-European Family, The Sino-Tibetan Family, the Austronesian Family ,and the Afroasiatic Family.Grimm ’s major contribution to historical is his explanation of the relationships among cognates in terms of a sound shift, the systematic modification of a series of phonemes.Language do not change without reasons . a linguistics change is caused either by the inherent nature of language , or by external contacts of speakers of one language with the speakers of the other language.第八章 社会语言学Sociolinguistics is the study of language in social contexts. Sociolinguistics are also concern with the influence of extralinguistic factors on language use, such as age, gender, profession, and social statue.Sociolinguistics is the study of language in social contexts . in view of language as a primary means of communication among individual speakers of a society , sociolinguists are concerned with he social significance of language variation and languageuse indifferent speech communities including regional ,ethnic and social groups . sociolinguists are also concerned with the influence of extralinguistic factors on language use, such as age, gender,profession ,and social statue.The important characteristic of a speech community is that the members of the group must ,in some reasonable way, interact linguistically with other members of the community .they may share closely related language varieties, as wellas attitudes towards linguistic norms.they are regional dialects ,sociolects or social dialects ,and registers.第九章 心理语言学psycholinguistics is the study of language in relation to the mind. As the term suggests, psycholinguistics is viewed as the intersection of psychology and linguistics, drawing equally upon the language we acquire, produce and comprehend.By mean of dichotic listening tests, we can analyze the characteristic of incoming stimuli processed by the individual hemispheres.3. I has been proposed that the brain activity involved in hearing , understanding andthen saying a word would follow a definite pattern. 4.A safe conclusion from Genie ’s case for the moment is that the labguage faculty of an average human degenerates after the critical period and consequently ,most linguistic skills cannot develop.The most provocative position to date on the relationship between language and thought has been what is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.第十章 语言习得the study of language acquisition enables linguistics ,psychologists and applied linguists to better understand the nature of human language and the developmental processes oflanguage acquisition.The biological, ornativist, view of language acquisition means that human are equipped with the neural prerequisites for language and language use. 3.In principle ,no human brain can store all the words and expressions of a language . what happens is that when processing the language the hear ,children construct the grammar and make sense of the expression according to the grammar . when producing utterances, they follow the internalizedgrammatical rules.Starting from the prelinguistic cooing and babbling stage ,children move through the one-word ,two-word and multiword stage ,gradually acquiringphonology ,morphology, syntax, vocabulary, semantics, and discourse skills of the adult language system as they grow.Although SLA is not entirely different from FLA.some problems experienced in L2development by teenage or adult learners simply donot exist in children ’s L1. According toKrashen ,acquisition refersto the gradual and subconscious development of ability in the first language by using it naturally in daily communicativesituation .learning ,however,is defined as a conscous process of accumulating knowledge of a second language usually obtained in school settings.It has been claimed that the optimum age for SLA is early teenage.。
