语言学必考名词解释

1. Langue: refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members

of a speech community

Langue: the linguistic competence of the speaker.

2. Design feature: are features that define our human languages, such as

arbitrariness, duality, creativity, displacement, cultural transmission, etc.

3. Synchronic: a kind of description which takes a fixed instant (usually, but

not necessarily, the present), as its point of observation. Most grammars are of this

kind

4. Arbitrariness: one design feature of human language, which refers to the

face that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning.

5. Duality: one design feature of human language, which refers to the

property of having two levels of are composed of elements of the secondary. Level

and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization.

6. Displacement: one design feature of human language, which means human

language enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are

not present c in time and space, at the moment of communication.

7. Competence: language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of

rules.

8. Prescriptive: the study of a language is carried through the course of its

history.

9. Prescriptive: a kind of linguistic study in which things are prescribed how

ought to be, i.e. laying down rules for language use.

10. Phoneme: the abstract element of sound, identified as being distinctive

in a particular language.

11. Assimilation: the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an

adjacent sound, which is more specifically

called.”contact”or”contiguous”assimilation.

12. Connotation: a term in a contrast with denotation, meaning the

properties of the entity a word denotes.

13. Reference: the use of language to express a proposition, meaning the

properties of the entity a word denotes.

Reference: the use of language to express a to talk about

things in context.

14. Sense: the literal meaning of a word or an expression, independent of

situational context.

15. Linguistic determinism: one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf

hypothesis, i.e. language determines thought.

16. Parole: the actual phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances).

17. Interlinguage:the type of language constructed by second or foreign

language learners who are still in the process of learning a language,

language system between the target language and the learner’s native language.

18. Transfer: the influence of mother tongue upon the second language.

When structures of the two languages are similar, we can get positive transfer of

facilitation; when the two languages are different in structures, negative transfer of

inference occurs and results in errors.

19. Perlocutionary act: the act performed by or resulting from saying

something, it’s the consequence of, or the change brought about by the

utterance.

20. Hyponymy: a relation between tow words, in which the meaning of one

word (the superordinate) is included in the meaning of another word(the

hyponym)

21. Allophone: any of the different forms of a phoneme (eg. is an

allophone of /t/in English. When /t/occurs in words like step, it is

unaspirated.Bothand are allophones of the phoneme/t/.

22. Error analysis: is the process of determining the incidence, nature, cause

and consequence of unsuccessful language

23. Utterance: 1.A spoken word, statement, or vocal sound action of

saying or expressing something aloud the simple utterance of a few platitudes

uninterrupted chain of spoken or written language

24. Interference: a process more commonly known as negative transfer,

which occurs when an L1 patter is different from the counterpart pattern of the

target language.

25. Predication analysis: is a way to analyze the meaning of sentences. A

sentence, composed of a subject and predicate, is a basic unit for meaning analysis

is called predication, which is the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence

26. Cohesion: refers to the way in which text “hang together”; to the

resources within language that help relate ideas and information and make links

between different parts of a text

27. Polysemy: words have two or more than two senses

28. Speech act: refers to an action performed by the use of an utterance.

29. Linguistics: generally, it is defined as the scientific study of the language

30. Phonetics: is the study of production of speech sounds

31. Semantics: is generally defined as the study of the meaning of linguistic

units. to be more specific, the meaning with which linguistists are concerned is

defined as linguistic semantics

语言学考试范围

1. Does the traffic light have duality? Explain the reasons.

2. IC analyzes the sentence structure with brackets or a tree diagram.

Lovely Jane ran away.

3. What are Leech’s seven types of meaning?

Conceptual meaning. Connotative meaning. Social meaning.

Affective meaning. Reflected meaning. Collocative meaning.

Thematic meaning

4. What are the differences between modern linguistics and traditional

grammar?

5. Explain surface structure and deep structure.

6. What are the major views concerning the study of meaning?

7. What are the four maxims of the CP?

8. Analyze the structure of a syllable. Give one example to illustrate.

9. Explain the two terms “sense” and “reference” and what is their

relationship?

10. What are the differences between errors and mistakes?

What are the major views concerning the study of meaning

What are the major views concerning the study of meaning?

(1) The naming theory命名论----

One of the oldest notions converning meanings, and also a very primitive one,

was the naming theory proposed by the ancient Greek scholar Plato. According to

this theory, the linguistic forms or symbols, in other words, the words used in a

language are taken to be labels of the objects they stand for. So words are just

names or label for things.命名论是最原始的语义理论，该理论是把词看作所指事物的名

称。

The limitations of the naming theory:

First of all, the naming theory seems applicable to nouns only. Nouns can be

considered as names or labels, but verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, such as

“think” “hard” “slowly” are definitely not labels of objects.

b. Besides, within the category of nouns, there are nouns which denote things

that do not exist in the real world at all such as “ghost” “dragon” “unicorn”

and also nouns that do not denote concrete things, but abstract notions such as

“joy” “impulse”.命名论只能适用于名词，对于动词、形容词、副词就无法解释了。

即使是在爱名词范围内也无法解释世界上本不存在的东西，例如“ghost” “dragon”

“unicorn”之类和一些抽象的概念，例如“高兴joy”“冲动impulse”等。

(2) the conceptualist view 意念论------

The conceptualist view holds that there is no direct link between a linguistic

form and what it refers to (i.e., between language and the real world); rather, in the

interpretation of meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in the

mind.意念论认为词汇与该词汇所指的事物之间的关系不是直接的，而是间接的，是靠人

脑中的意念来连接的。词汇是通过意念来指称事物，意念便是词汇的意义。

The conceptualist view is best illustrated by the classic semantic triangle or

triangle of significance suggested by Odgen and Richards.意念论可由著名的语义三

角形来表述。语义三角形是论述和解释语义现象的一种经典理论。Semantic triangle

Proposed by Ogden & Richards in their “The Meaning of Meaning”. They

saw the relationship between the word and the thing it refers to is not direct. It’s

mediated by concept. thought or reference symbol referent

In this diagram, the symbol or form refers to linguistic elements (words,

phrases), the referent refers to the things in the real world, and thought or

reference refers to “concept”.

e.g. The dog over there looks unfriendly.

The word “dog” is directly associated with a certain concept in our mind, i.e.

what a “dog” is like, but it is not directly linked to the referent (the particular dog)

in this particular case. Thus, the symbol of a word signifies thing by virtue of the

concept associated with the form of the word in the mind of the speaker of a

language, and the concept looked at from this point of view is the meaning of the

word.

Ogden and Richards presented the classic “Semantic Triangle” as

manifested in the following diagram, in which the “symbol” or “form” refers to

the linguistic elements (word, sentence, etc.), the “referent” refers to the object

in the world of experience, and “thought” or “reference” refers to concept or

notion. Thus, the symbol a word signifies “things” by virtue of the “concept”,

associated with the form of the word in the mind of the speaker of the language.

The “concept” thus considered is meaning of the word.语义三角形最大的问题在于

词语与所指事物没有必然的联系。同一个事物可能或者可以用不同的词来表示。

(3) contextualism 语境论

What is contextualism? “Contextualism” is based on the presumption that

one can derive meaning from, or reduce it to, observable context: the “situational

context” and the “linguistic context”. 语境论认为语言的意义离不开使用语言的语

境，语义存在与语境之中。语义不是抽象的，它是由语境所决定的。

Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal situation, as the

following factors are related to the situational context:它的前提是假设人们可以从语

境中推知词义的意义，四个核心因素：

(1) the speaker and the hearer; 讲话人和听话人

(2) the actions they are performing at the time; 当时双方在做的事情

(3) various external objects and events; 其他外在的事件或事物

(4) Deictic features. 指示成分 （语境中的代词）

The “linguistic context” is another aspect of contextualism. It considers the

probability of one word’s co-occurrence or collocation with another, which forms

part of the meaning, and an important factor in communication. Fox example: the

meaning of the word “black” differ in the two collocations of “black hair” and

“black coffee”

(4) Behaviorism 行为主义论

The behaviorism view is illustrated by Bloomfield.

Behaviorism refers to the attempt to define the meaning of a language form

as the “situation in which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in

the hearer”. Behaviorism somewhat close to contextualism emphasizes on the

psychological response.行为主义论和语境论的相似之处，行为主义论也把语义放到语境

中去研究，但它更注重人的心理活动，认为语言的意义存在于语言使用者在交际过程中对

所接受的话语的反应。