Part One: Definitions
1. Language: Language is a means of verbal communication. It is (1) human speech;
(2) the ability to communicate by this means; (3) a system of vocal sounds and combinations of such sounds to which meaning is attributed, used for the expression or communication of thoughts and feelings; (4) the written representation of such a system.
2. Langue: the language system shared by a speech community.
Parole: the concrete utterances of a speaker.
3. Language competence: unconscious knowledge of the system of grammatical rules
in a language.
Language performance: the language actually used by people in speaking or writing.
4. Creativity: Language is resourceful because of its duality and recursiveness. 5. Phonology: 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.
6. Articulatory phonetics: the study of how speech sounds are produced.
7. Phoneme: a unit explicit sound contrast. If two sounds in a language make a
contrast between two different words, they are said to be different phonemes. 8. IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet is a set of standard phonetic symbols in
the form of a chart.
9. Morpheme: the smallest unit of language in terms of the relationship between
expression and content, a unit that cannot be divided into further smaller units without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
Lexical
Free Functional Morpheme
Derivational Bound
Inflectional 10. Inflection: is the manifestation of grammatical relationship through the
addition of inflectional affixes such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and cases to which they are attached.
11. Derivation: is the most common word-formation process to be found in the
production of new English words. It is accomplished by means of a large number of affixes of English language, and shows the relationship between roots and affixes.
12. Syntax: the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are
combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships
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between elements in sentence structures. 13. Constituent: Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every
linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit.
14. Subordination: Subordination refers to the process or result of linking
linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually a constituent of the other. Thus the subordinate constituents are words which modify the Head. Consequently, they can be called modifiers.
15. Reference: Reference is concerned with the relation between a word and the thing
it refers to, or more generally between a linguistic unit and a non-linguistic entity it refers to.
16. Complementary antonymy: Complementary antonomy is the sense relation between
two antonyms which are complementary to each other. That is, they divide up the whole of a semantic field completely. Not only the assertion of one means the denial of the other, the denial of one also means the assertion of the other. 17. Hyponymy: Hyponymy, the technical name for inclusiveness sense relation, is a
matter of class membership.
18. Context of Situation: is a framework put forward by Firth. This theory has the
following elements.
A. The relevant features of the participants, persons, personalities:
(1) The verbal action of the participants. (2) The non-verbal action of the participants. B. The relevant objects.
C. The effects of the verbal action.
19. Linguistic Relativity: This term has the same meaning with linguistic
determinism and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
20. 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.
II. Explanation
1. Describe the recursive nature of language. (1-7: Workbook: chapter-item number) The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the creativity of language. For instance, we can write a sentence like this:
Today I encountered an old friend who was my classmate when I was in elementary school where there was an apple orchard in which we slid to select ripe apples that…
2. Prescriptive and descriptive types of linguistic studies (1-1) Prescriptive: to make authoritarian statement about the correctness of a particular use of language.
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Descriptive: to make an objective and systematic account of the patterns and use of a language or variety.
3. Give the description of the following sound segments in English (2-2)
[d] [k] [l] [u:] [η] [θ] [p] [i]
[d]: voiced alveolar stop 带声齿龈塞音 [k]: voiceless velar stop 不带声软腭塞音
[l]: alveolar lateral 齿龈边音 [u:]: high back tense rounded vowel 高厚圆唇紧元音
[ŋ]: velar nasal 软腭鼻音 [Ɵ] voiceless dental fricative带声齿擦音
[p]: voiceless bilabial stop 不带声双唇塞音
[i]: high front lax unrounded vowel 高前展唇松元音
4. Explain \"words\" in three senses.(p55-56, course-book page number) (1) A physically definable unit
Language is produced as a continuous stretch of speech or writing, but one can still find pauses and blanks every now and then. Thus, word may be seen as a set of sound segments or writing letters between two pauses or blanks. (2) Word both as general term and as a specific term
Word may be used both as a general term (then boy and boys are just one word)and as specific words(boy and boys are two words.) (3) A grammatical unit
The grammar of a language contains a set of layers, and word is one of them. A word, in this sense, is then a grammatical unit, just like morpheme or clause complex. 5. Give an example to explain the meaning of a word in the four ways. (p106-107) Suppose you do not know the word desk, and ask what it means. One may point to the object the word stands for, and answer ”This is a desk”. Alternatively he may describe the object as “a piece of furniture with a flat top and four legs at which one reads and writes”. Or he may paraphrase it, saying that “a desk is a kind of table, which has drawers”. If he is a teacher of English, then he may more often than not give you its Chinese equivalent 书桌.
6. As students of linguistics, how should we understand the relationships between
functionalism and formalism? (7-4)
A healthier understanding of the relationships between functionalism and formalism is to regard them as two sides of a coin rather than two contrasting theories or concepts. Meanwhile, we must also admit that each of them has something rather unique in terms of the selection of theoretical frameworks, perspective, research concerns, and methods. For instance, when we want to study grammatical
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issues from a typological perspective, a formal description of the differences in languages structure proves to be a more economic and feasible approach. On the other hand, if we attempt to examine issues related to language use, a functional perspective will be a better choice. In either case, there is no absolute contrast between the two, if we want to have a holistic study of linguistic problems.
III. Questions
1. How is the description of consonants different from that of vowels? (2-5[3]) The sound segments (speech sounds) are classified into consonants辅音/子音 and vowels元音/母音. Consonants are produced by obstructing the airstream at some point of the vocal tract(声道). Vowels are produced with the airstream passing through the vocal tract without obstruction. The distinction between vowels and consonants lies in the obstruction of airstream.
2. To what extent is phonology related to phonetics and how do they differ? (2-5[4]) Both phonetics and phonology study human speech sounds but they differ in the levels of analysis. Phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived. 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.
3. Is morpheme a grammatical concept or a semantic one? What is its relation to phoneme? (3-3)
(1)Morpheme is both a grammatical concept and a semantic one. Since morpheme is the smallest unit in terms of expression and content, it at the same time covers the grammatical and the semantic aspect of linguistic unit.
(2) The relation between morpheme and phoneme is also of twofold feature, viz. one-to-one one-to-more. As with the former type, one-to-one, re- is the kind of morpheme that always consists of two phonemes /ri:/; as for the latter type, one-to-more relation, a typical example would be the plural morpheme that follows a noun or a verb. {s} after a noun can be pronounced in three ways viz. /s/, /z/,and /iz/, as in locks, bags, and watches; {z} after a verb can also be pronounced in three ways, viz. /s/, /z/, and /iz/, as in stops, drags, and catches.
4. What is IC? Give a sentence, indicate the category of each word and draw a Tree Diagram to show IC.(4-2; p87-88)
IC means Immediate Constitutes. In the sentence The boy ate the apple, S(A),the boy (B),ate the apple (C),each part is a constituent. If two constituents, in the example above, (B) the boy, (C) ate the apple, are joined to form a hierarchically higher constituent A (“S”, here a sentence), then B and C are said to be the immediate constituents of A.
Take the construction The boy ate the apple for example again, one can analyze it
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by means of a Tree Diagram
S
NP VP Det N V NP Det N The boy ate the apple The boy ate the apple
5. How do you understand the Referential Theory? (p107)
The theory of meaning which relates the meaning of a word to the thing it refers to, or stands for, is known as the Referential Theory.
However, there are also problems with this theory. One is that when we explain the meaning of desk by pointing to the thing it refers to, we do not just mean the concrete thing we can see with our eyes. There is something abstract behind, which has no existence in the material world and can only be sensed in our minds. This abstract thing is usually called Concept. The other is that there is a difference between sense and reference. To some extent, we can say every word has a sense, i.e. some conceptual content. But not every word has a reference. Grammatical words like but, if, and do not refer to anything. And words like God, ghost and dragon refer to imaginary things.
6. Why do we need to teach culture in our language classroom? (7-3)
Language not only reflects culture but also is part of culture. When it comes to language teaching and learning, the influence of cultural knowledge on the linguistic performance of language learners has been identified and highlighted. It has repeatedly been found that learners who lack sufficient knowledge about the target culture can hardly become active ad appropriate language users in their target language. For these reasons, the information concerning cultural differences has rightly been introduced in language classrooms of different kinds of enhancing learners’ cultural consciousness and improving their performance in cross-cultural contexts of communication.
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