语言学
I. Directions: Explain the following terms.
1. 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.
2. Broad transcription is the transcription with letter symbols only. It is the transcription normally used in dictionaries and teaching textbooks.
3. International phonetic alphabet: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription.
4. Historical linguistics studies language change ( or historical development of language).
5. 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.
6. 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
7. Suprasegmental features: the phonemic features that occur above the level of the segments are called suprasegmental features. The main suprasegmental features include stress, intonation and tone.
8. language: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.
9. Minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string, the two words are said to form a minimal pair, such as /pig/ and /dig.
10. Phonetics: the linguistic study of how speech sounds are produced and classified.
11. Arbitrariness: It is one of the design features of language. It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds
12. Duality: Duality means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structures, or two levels. At the lower or the basic level there is a structure of sounds, which are meaningless. But the sounds of language can be grouped and regrouped into a large number of units of meaning at the higher level of the system.
13. Syntax: Syntax is a subfield of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of language.
14. Pragmatics: Pragmatics can be defined as the study of how speakers of a language use sentences to effect successful communication. It is a discipline of studying meaning not in isolation, but in context
15. Competence: Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user's knowledge of the rules of his language. It is a set of rules internalized in the mind of a language user which enables him to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences and recognize sentences that are ungrammatical and ambiguous.
16. Tones are pitch variations caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords. As a suprasegmental feature, it can distinguish meaning. For example, in Chinese, the same sound combination “ma” can have four different tones: maª (妈) má（麻）mǎ （马）mà（骂）. 17. A phone is a speech sound people use when speaking a language. For example, [p], [ⅰ] and [t] are phones; they are the phonetic realizations of the phonemes in [pit]. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.
