语言学术语

CHAPTER 1

Design features refers to the defining properties of human language, including arbitrariness, duality, creativity and displacement.

Function may be practical. For example, we use language to chat, to think, to buy and sell, to read and write, to greet, praise and condemn people, etc. But linguists talk about FUNCTIONS of language in an abstract sense and attempt some broad classifications of the basic functions of language like the following: informative, interpersonal function, performative function, emotive function, phatic function, recreational function, metalingual function.

Synchronic: Synchronic linguistics is the study of a language at one particular point in time

Diachronic: Diachronic linguistics studies how a language changes over a period of time

Descriptive: to describe the fact of linguistic usage as they are, and not how they ought to be, with reference to some real or imagined ideal state.

Prescriptive: a term used to characterize any approach which attempt to lay down rules of correctness as to how language should be used.

Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance, we can not explain why a book is called /buk/ and a pen /pen/.

Duality means the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization. It involves system of sounds and system of meaning. A small number of sounds can be grouped and regrouped into a larger unit of meaning, and the units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentence.

Displacement means human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of communication. That is, our language enables us to communicate about things that do not exist or do not yet exist.

Phatic communion: refers to language used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than for exchange information or ideas (e.g. comments on the weather, or enquiries about health).

Metalanguage: is the language that can be used to talk about itself.

Macrolinguistics: is linguistics which has interactive links with other sciences such as psychology, sociology, ethnography, the science of law and artificial intelligence. Competence: competence is a language user 's underlying knowledge about the

system of rules.

Performance: performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations. Langue---refers to the language system shared by a community of speakers.

Parole---is the concrete act of speaking in actual situations by an individual speaker.

Chapter 2

Phonetics---the science which studies the characteristics of human sound-making, especially those sounds used in speech, and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription.

Articulatory phonetics: the study of the way speech sounds are made by the vocal organs

Phonology: studies the sound systems of languages. The aim of phonology is to demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sound found in a language, and to make as general statements as possible about the nature of sound systems in the languages of the world.

Speech organs: are those part of the human body involved in the production of speech.

Voicing: pronouncing a sound(usu. A vowel or a voiced consonant) by vibrating the vocal cords.

International Phonetic Alphabet: A phonetic alphabet and diacritic modifiers sponsored by the International Phonetic Association to provide a uniform and

universally understood system for transcribing the speech sounds of all languages. Consonant: A speech sound produced by a partial or complete obstruction of the air steam by any various constrictions of the speech organs.

Vowel: A speech sound created by the relatively free passage of breath through the larynx and oral cavity, usually forming the most prominent and central sound of a syllable.

Manner of articulation: refers to the way in which articulation can be accomplished. Place of articulation: refers to the point where a consonant is made.

Cardinal Vowels: are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.

Semi-vowels: are those segments which are neither vowels nor consonants but midway between the two categories.

Vowel glide: vowels where there is an audible change of quality.

Co-articulation: a kind of phonetic process in which simultaneous or overlapping articulations are involved. Co-articulation can be further divided into anticipatory co-articulation and preservative co-articulation.

Phoneme: (phoneme refers to a unit of explicit sound contrast: the existence of a minimal pair automatically grants phonemic status to the sounds responsible for the contrasts.)

A class of sounds which are identified by a native speaker as the same sound. A phonological unit that is of distinctive value. It is an abstract unit. It is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. A term used to denote the smallest sound unit that can be segmented from the acoustic flow of speech and which can function as semantically distinctive units

Allophone: a positional or free variant of a phoneme

If a sound does not cause a meaning difference in a language, thus it’s

nondistinctive. The nondistinctive sounds are members of the same phoneme and are known as allophones.

Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.

Dissimilation refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment on the production of another, so that the two sounds in a sequence become less alike or different.

[Elsewhere condition: There are necessary and sufficient conditions for determining disjunctive ordering. There are necessary conditions which a pair of rules must meet in order to be disjunctive, but that disjunctive ordering is still unpredictable once those conditions are meet. ]

Distinctive feature: A feature that is able to signal a difference in meaning by changing its plus or minus value

Syllable: A unit of spoken language that is next bigger than a speech sound and consists of one or more vowel sounds alone or of a syllabic consonant alone or of either with one or more consonant sounds preceding or following

Maximal onset principle: a principle determining underlying syllable division. It states that intervocalic consonants are maximally assigned to the onsets of syllables in conformity with universal and language-specific conditions

Stress: stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable.

Intonation: intonation involves the occurrence of recurring fall-rise patterns ,each of which is used with a set of relatively consistent meanings, either on single words of on groups of words of varying length .

Tone : (linguistics) a pitch or change in pitch of the voice that serves to distinguish words in tonal languages.

Chapter 3

Morpheme: is the smallest meaningful unit of speech.

Compound: refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form

Inflection : It indicates grammatical relations by adding inflectional affixes, and when inflectional affixes are added, the grammatical class of the stems will not change.

Affix is a collective term for the type of morpheme that can be used only when added to another morpheme (the root or stem), so affix is naturally bound.

Derivation: It shows a relationship between roots and affixes. It can make the word class of the original word either changed or unchanged.

Root is the base form of a word that cannot be further be analyzed without destroying its meaning.

Allomorph: some morphemes have a single form in all contexts, while in other

instances there may be considerable variation, that is, a morpheme may have alternate shapes or phonetic forms.

The alternate shapes or phonetic forms are said to be allomorphs of the same morpheme.

Stem is any morpheme or combination of morpheme to which an inflection affix can be added.

Bound Morpheme: The morphemes which must appear with at least another morpheme, and are called bound morpheme.

Free Morpheme: Those which may occur alone, that is, those which may constitute words by themselves, are free morphemes.

Lexeme is the smallest meaningful unit of words.

Lexicon: generally synonymous with vocabulary. In its technical sense here, lexicon deals with the analysis and creation of words, idioms and collocations. It should be noted that lexicon is to be distinguished from syntax, the association of the latter being purely syntactic. In this sense, morphology is partly related to lexicon, partly to syntax.

Grammatical words: grammatical words are words which mainly work for constructing group, phrase, clause, clause complex, or even text, such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns.

Lexical words: lexical words are words which mainly work for referring to substance,

action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

Closed-class: closed class is one whose membership is fixed or limited and cannot

easily add or deduce a new member, such as pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles and others.

Open-class: open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite and

unlimited, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs.

Blending: a form of compounding, in which two words are blended by joining

together the initial part of the second word, or by only joining the initial parts of the two words.

Acronym is made up from the first letters of the name an organization, which has a heavily modified headword.

Back formation: refers to an unusually abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language.

Loanwords: A process in which both form and meaning are borrowed with only slight change, in some cases, to the phonological system of the new language that they enter.

Loadblend: A process in which part of the form is native and the rest has been borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed.

Loadshift: A process in which part of the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native The loss of sound can first refer to the disappearance of the very sound as a phoneme in the phonological system. The loss of sounds may also occur in utterances at the expense of some unstressed words.

Assimilation refers to the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound, which is more specifically called “contact” or “contiguous” assimilation.

Dissimilation refers to the influence exercised by one sound segment on the

production of another, so that the two sounds in a sequence become less alike or different.

Folk etymology refers to a change in form of a word or phrase, resulting from an incorrect popular notion of the origin or meaning of the term or from the influence of more familiar terms mistakenly taken to be analogous.

Chapter 4

Syntax: is the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interelationship between elements in sentence structures.

Co-occurrence means that words of different sets of clauses may permit, or require, the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence.

Construction: it can be used to mean any syntactic construct which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contribution to the meaning or use the construct contains. Consituent: is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit.

Endocentric: Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents.

Exocentric: it refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable \"centre\" or \"head\" Inside the group.

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.

Coordination is a common syntactic pattern in English and other languages formed by grouping together two or more categories of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and, but, and or.

Category: (see p96)The term Category in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense. More specifically, it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun and of the verb.

Agreement: the requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another, shall also be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category.

Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence(main clause)in syntactic subordination.

Recursiveness mainly means that a phrasal constituent can be embedded within another constituent having the same category, and it has become an umbrella term, under which may be brought together several important linguistic phenomena such as coordination and subordination, conjoining and embedding, hypotactic and paratactic. Cohesion is a concept to do with discourse or text rather than with syntax, it refers to

relations of meaning that exist within the text, and defines it as a text. Grammatical subject: refers to the noun phrase which occupies the grammatical

space before a verb.

Logical subject: refers to the noun phrase which performs an action.

Chapter 5

Conceptual meaning, which makes up the central meaning, referring to logical, cognitive or denotative content.

Denotation is concerned with the relationship between a word and the thing it denotes, or refers to.

？Connotation means the properties of the entity a word denotes.

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

Sense: sense may be defined as the semantic reations betwwen one word and another, or more generally between one linguistic unit and another, which is concerned with the intra-linguistic relation

Synonymy: synonymy is established by a group of words with the same or similar meanings.

Gradable antonymy: It is the commonest type of antonymy. As the name

suggests,they are gradable. That is, the members of a pair differ in terms of degree. The denial of one is not necessarily the assertion of the other.

Complementary antonymy: It means that the members of a pair in this type 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.

Converse antonymy: It is a special type of antonymy in that the members of a pair do not constitute positive-negative opposition. They show the reversal of a relationship between two entities.

Relational opposites: Converse antonymy is also known as relational opposites which show reciprocal social role, kinship relations, temporal and spatial relations. Hyponomy: a sense relation between a pair of words, in which the meaning of a word is included in the meaning of the other. So it is sometimes refers to as a relationship of inclusion.

Superordinate: refers to the upper term in hyponomy.

Semantic component: semantic unit smaller than the meaning of a word.

Compositionality: refers to the fact that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of the constituent words and the way they are combined.

Propositional logic -----Propositional logic, also known as prepositional calculus or semantic calculus, is the study of the truth conditions for propositions: how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth of its constituent propositions and the connections between them

Proposition ----A proposition is what is expressed by a declarative sentence when that sentence is uttered to make a statement.

Predicate logic ---- studies the internal structure of simple propositions.

Logical connective ----In logic, a logical connective or propositional operator is a

syntactic operation on sentences, or the symbol for such an operation, that corresponds to a logical operation on the logical values of those sentences.

Chapter 8

Performatives: utterances that are not used to inform or describe things, but often are used to “do things”, to perform an act.

Constatives: utterances that are used to inform or describe things.

Locutionary act: the act of saying something; it is an act of conveying literal meaning by means of syntax, lexicon, and phonology. Namely, the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference.

Illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something; its force is identical with the speaker’s intention. Namely, the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it. Nowadays, the main interest is focused on illocutionary act.

Perlocutionary act: the act performed by or resulting from saying something; it’s the consequence of, or the change brought about by the utterance.

Cooperative Principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged”

Conversational implicature: the extra meaning not contained in the literal utterances, understandable to the listener only when he shares the speaker’s knowledge or knows why and how he violates intentionally one of the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle.

Entailment: is a logical relationship between two sentences in which the truth of the second necessarily follows from the truth of the first, while the falsity of the first follows from the falsity of the second.