当代语言学导论复习要点(详细!含课后单词)

Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics

Chapter1

Human superiority lies in his unique endowment-----the ability to talk, or rather, to communicate by means of language.

Talmud: god created the world by a word, instantaneously, without toil or pains. Widdowson: the primacy of language in the way human beings conceive of the world.

Language is a vehicle of power, for control, for creation, and for change.

The study of human language is called linguistics.

Linguistics deals with human language as a whole or as particular languages.

1. As a whole: the system of human communication which consists of the structured arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) into larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences, utterances.

2. As particular language: like French language, they are particular systems of human communication used by people living in different parts of the world.

There is a continuum from one language to another.

Varieties of language: Any particular language is in essence a set of varieties. 1. local varieties区域变体–dialects and accents(the former differ from each other in pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar; the latter only in pronunciation ) 2. social varieties—sociolects社会方言(=social dialects , used by people of different classes, ages, or sexes ),

3. historical varieties—temporal variety.(e.g. the 17th century English)

4. stylistic or occupational varieties---registers语域(e.g. formal English, scientific English)

5. individual varieties—idiolects个人语言.

6. Usually a language has an officially declared or generally considered standard dialect(e.g. Putonghua in China, General American in the US)

From Prescriptivism to Descriptivism

Prescriptivism is the view that one variety of language has an inherently higher value than others.(try to impose rules from some high prestige language to some lower prestige language, like Latin and English)

Descriptivism is the policy of describing languages as they are bound to exist. Usages of different varieties should be observed and recorded instead of being judged with some imposed norms.

Endowed or conventional?

Plato’s problem: How can every human being develop a rich system of linguistic knowledge on the basis of limited and fragmentary empirical evidence? Side of endowment: nativists(天生论) or mentalists（心智说）

Plato:

1. Man’s knowledge came from universal truths.

2. There was a universally correct and acceptable logic of language for man to follow in expressing his ideas.

3. Knowledge of language was not learned but recalled. Chomsky:

There is a biological, physiological entity inside our brain which decides what we speak.

Chomsky has given a name to this entity----UG, or universal grammar. His epistemology of the knowledge of language foes as follows:

1. Every human being has the language competence能力, because he has the inborn UG which other species lack.

2. UG is the initial state of the human language faculty语言器官/机制 which alone cannot enable a human baby to speak. A baby needs to be exposed to the linguistic environment of a certain language and accumulate experience.

3. Due to the effect of later experience, the baby’s mind develops from the initial state into the steady state, which corresponds to the competence of speaking a specific human language.

Side of convention: behaviorist or empiricists

Aristotle: knowledge of language was arrived at by convention and agreement of the speakers of a given language.

Xun zi: a name was accepted through public agreement, and the appropriateness of naming a thing lay in convention.

The power of language exists in its countless varieties, not relying on any universal standard.

Connectionism

Diachronic(历经时间的): focus on the comparison between languages and the exploration of the historical change and variation of some ancient languages./ of, relating to, or dealing with phenomena (as of language or culture) as they occur or change over a period of time Synchronic（共时的）: research of the facts of language agreed upon or shared by his members of language community at a given point in time./ concerned with events existing in a limited time period and ignoring historical antecedents

Glossary

Endowments: (天赋) the natural quality that a person is made rich of from the birth.

Register: (语域) the words, style, and grammar used by speakers and writers in particular conditions, namely a socially defined variety of language. Idiolect: (个人语言) the linguistic system of an individual speaker.

Sociolect: (社会方言) also social dialect. Variety of a language defined by social factors such as age, religion, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Sociolects may

be classed as high or low (in status).

Prescriptivism :(规定主义) the imposition of arbitrary norms upon a language, often in defiance of normal usage. Descriptivism ：（描写主义）the policy of describing languages as they are bound to exist.

Nativism: (天生论) philosophical and psychological position which holds that cognitive development of humans arises from “innate ideas”. The nativist position has been used to explain how children are able to learn language and contrasts with the belief that all human knowledge comes from experience (empiricism).

Mentalism: （心智说）psychological and philosophical concept picked up and developed by Chomsky(1965), which attempts to describe the internal (innate) language mechanism that provides the basis for the creative aspect of language development and use.

Dualism: （二元论）a philosophical system that recognizes two ultimate and independent principles in the scheme of things, such as mind and matter.

Monism: (一元论) a general name for those philosophical theories which deny the duality of matter and mind.

Universal Grammar (UG): （普通语法）the genetically endowed information consisting of principles and parameters that enable the child to deduce a grammar from the primary linguistic data.

Language competence: (语言能力) knowledge of language; the linguistic capacity of a fluent speaker of a language.

Parameter: (参数) a dimension of grammatical variation between different languages or different varieties of the same language.

Empiricism: (经验论) philosophical and psychological position which holds that the psychological development of humans arise primarily from experience and learning.

Connectionism: (连通主义) a theory of cognition which draws inspiration from the way the billions of neurons in the brain are interconnected in complex ways to produce a network of associations. It holds that the complexity of language emerges from associative learning processes being exposed to a massive and complex environment.

Chapter2

Speculations: origin of language Plato----legislator Herder----god

Universal harmony is embraced as the foundation of modern linguistics as a science. Galilean thesis----nature is perfect Observation Research

Every person’s lexical knowledge of his first language is tacit and natural, with a tendency to influence, often unknowingly, his second language learning. This

influence is called transfer. Three adequacies: 1. Observational adequacy 2. Descriptive adequacy

3. Explanatory adequacy (providing a descriptively adequate grammar for every natural language, and does so in terms of maximally constrained set of universal principles which represent psychologically plausible natural principles of mental computation.) Testing

A theory in science must not be pure speculation but testable at observational, descriptive, and explanatory levels.

Science tells us that nature is a physical continuum连续体, which does not break itself into physics, chemistry, psychology, linguistics…; these disciplines学科are not facts but our decisions.

Glossary

L1: (第一语言) a person’s first language

L2: (第二语言) a person’s second language. To be more specific, one could refer to a person’s L3, L4, and so on. However, the general term L2 is frequently used to refer to any language learning or used after the first language has been learned. Fossilization: (僵化) incomplete L2 acquisition featured by the fact that progress in a certain aspect of the target language stops and the learner’s language becomes fixed at an intermediate state. It can take a number of forms, such as fossilized accent or syntax. Fossilization can be a permanent feature of the learner’s language.

Chapter3 phonetics

Phonetics: the science of speech sounds. It aims to provide the set of features or properties that can be used to describe and distinguish all the sounds used in human language.

In accordance with the three phases just mentioned, phonetics is divided into three sub-fields.

1. Articulatory phonetics发音语音学 studies speech production by the speech

organs;

2. Acoustic phonetics声学语音学 studies physical properties of speech sounds, the

way sounds travel from the speaker to the hearer;

3. Auditory phonetics听觉语音学 studies the perception of speech sounds in the

human auditory and cognitive system. IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet

The design principles of IPA were that there should be a separate letter for each distinctive sound, and that the same symbol should be used for that sound in any language in which it appears.

A “sound” people say they produce is actually a combination of sounds called a syllable, which is often related to a chest pulse.(syllable>=sound)

The properties of these separate sounds, or segments in phonetician’s jargon, can be described in several dimensions, the place of articulation and the manner of articulation.

1. The place of articulation refers to the point in the vocal tract at which the main

closure or narrowing is made so as to modify the flow of air from the chest to the mouth in producing a sound.

2. The manner of articulation refers to the type of constriction收缩 or movement

that occurs at any place of articulation. Articulation

The production of different speech sounds through the use of these organs is known as articulation. Speech organs:

the vocal cords(声带) the lungs

the windpipe(trachea) the pharynx(咽) the nose the mouth

A main source of vibration is provided by the vocal cords. The vibration of the vocal cords also gives us pitch. Consonants

Consonants are sounds made by a closure in the vocal tract, or by a narrowing from which air cannot escape without producing audible friction.摩擦

Two reference points are involved in defining consonantal places of articulation. One is the active articulator which moves; the other is the passive articulator with which the active one makes contact.

Classified according to the places of articulation: eleven possible places of articulation for consonants

1. Bilabial双唇音, formed by bringing the lips together , e. g. [ p ] , [ m] . Here the

function of lips is somewhat complicated: they both can be regarded as the active and passive articulators simultaneously.

2. Labio-dental唇齿音 , formed by the lower lip against the upper teeth, e . g. [ f] . 3. Dental齿音, formed by placing the tip of the tongue against the upper teeth, e . g.

[e].

4. Alveolar齿龈音, formed by placing the tip or blade of the tongue against the

alveolar ridge, e. g. [ t ] .

5. Palatal腭音, formed by the front of the tongue against the hard palate, namely,

the roof of the mouth, e . g. [ j] .

6. Palato- alveolar腭龈音, formed midway between the places of articulation for

palatals and alveolars: the blade ( and sometimes the tip) of the tongue articulates with the alveolar ridge, with a simultaneous raising of the front of the tongue towards the hard palate , e. g. [?] .

7. Velar软腭音, formed by the back of the tongue against the soft palate, e. g. [ k] . 8. Glottal声门音, formed by the vocal cords coming together to cause a closure or