语言学简答题
1.1.
What is language?
“Language is system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a system, since linguistic elements are arranged systematically, rather than randomly. Arbitrary, in the sense that there is usually no intrinsic connection between a work (like “book”) and the object it refers to. This explains and is explained by the fact that different languages have different “books”: “book” in English, “livre” in French, in Japanese, in Chinese, “check” in Korean. It is symbolic, because words are associated with objects, actions, ideas etc. by nothing but convention. Namely, people use the sounds or vocal forms to symbolize what they wish to refer to. It is vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages, developed or “new”. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak (and listen) before they write (and read) also indicates that language is primarily vocal, rather than written. The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific.
1.2.
What are design features of language?
“Design features” here refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication. They are arbitrariness, duality, productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and interchangeability
1.3.
What is arbitrariness?
By “arbitrariness”, we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds (see I .1). A dog might be a pig if only the first person or group of persons had used it for a pig. Language is therefore largely arbitrary. But language is not absolutely seem to be some sound-meaning association, if we think of echo words, like “bang”, “crash”, “roar”, which are motivated in a certain sense. Secondly, some compounds (words compounded to be one word ) are not entirely arbitrary either. “Type” and “write”are opaque or unmotivated words, while “type-writer” is less so, or more transparent or motivated than the words that make it. So we can say “arbitrariness” is a matter of degree.
1.4.What is duality?
Linguists refer “duality” (of structure) to the fact that in all languages so far investigated, one finds two levels of structure or patterning. At the first, higher level, language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units (such as morphemes, words etc.) ; at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which combine to form units of meaning. According to Hu Zhanglin et al. (p.6) , language is a system of two sets of structures, one of sounds and the other of meaning. This is important for the workings of language. A small number of semantic units (words), and these units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences (note that we have dictionaries of words, but no dictionary of sentences!). Duality makes it possible for a person to talk about anything within his knowledge. No animal communication system enjoys this duality, or even approaches this honour.
1.5.What is productivity?
Productivity refers to the ability to the ability to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences in one’s native language, including those that has never heard before, but that are appropriate to the speaking situation. No one has ever said or heard “A red-eyed elephant is dancing on the small hotel bed with an African gibbon”, but he can say it when necessary, and he can understand it in right register. Different from artistic creativity, though, productivity never goes outside the language, thus also called “rule-bound creativity” (by N.Chomsky).
1.6.What is displacement?
“Displacement”, as one of the design features of the human language, refers to the fact that one can talk about things that are not present, as easily as he does things present. In other words, one can refer to real and unreal things, things of the past, of the present, of the future. Language itself can be talked about too. When a man, for example, is crying to a woman, about something, it might be something that had occurred, or something that is occurring, or something that is to occur. When a dog is barking, however, you can decide it is barking for something or at someone that exists now and there. It couldn’t be bow-wowing sorrowfully for dome lost love or a bone to be lost. The bee’s system, nonetheless, has a small share of “displacement”, but it is an unspeakable tiny share.
1.7.What is cultural transmission?
This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation to generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. It is true that the capacity for language in human beings(N. Chomsky called it “language acquisition device”, or LAD) has a genetic basis, but the particular language a person learns to speak is a cultural one other than a genetic one like the dog’s barking system. If a human being is brought up in isolation he cannot acquire language. The Wolf Child reared by the pack of wolves turned out to speak the wolf’s roaring “tongue” when he was saved. He learned thereafter, with no small difficulty, the ABC of a certain human language.
1.9.Why do linguists say language is human specific?
First of all, human language has six “design features” which animal communication systems do not have, at least not in the true sense of them(see I .2-8). Let’s borrow C. F. Hocket’s Chart that compares human language with some animals’ systems, from Wang Gang(1998,p.8).
Secondly, linguists have done a lot trying to teach animals such as chimpanzees to speak a human language but have achieved nothing inspiring. Washoe, a female chimpanzee, was brought up like a human child by Beatnice and Alan Gardner. She was taught “American sign Language”, and learned a little that made the teachers happy but did mot make the linguistics circle happy, for few believed in teaching chimpanzees.
Thirdly, a human child reared among animals cannot speak a human language, not even when he is taken back and taught to lo to so
1.18.What is linguistics?
“Linguistics” is the scientific study of language. It studies not just one language of any one society, but the language of all human beings. A linguist, though, does not have to know and use a large number of languages, but to investigate how each language is constructed. He is also concerned with how a language varies from dialect to dialect, from class to class, how it changes from century to century, how children acquire their mother tongue, and perhaps how a person learns or should learn a foreign language. In short, linguistics studies the general principles whereupon all human languages are constructed and operate as systems of communication in their societies or communities
What makes linguistics a science?
Since linguistics is the scientific study of language, it ought to base itself upon the systematic, investigation of language data which aims at discovering the true nature of language and its underlying system. To make sense of the data, a linguist usually has conceived some hypotheses about the language structure, to be checked against the observed or observable facts. In order to make his analysis scientific, a linguist is usually guided by four principles: exhaustiveness, consistency, and objectivity. Exhaustiveness means he should gather all the materials relevant to the study and give them an adequate explanation, in spite of the complicatedness. He is to leave no linguistic “stone” unturned. Consistency means there should be no contradiction between different parts of the total statement. Economy means a linguist should pursue brevity in the analysis when it is possible. Objectivity implies that since some people may be subjective in the study, a linguist should be (or sound at least) objective, matter-of-face, faithful to reality, so that his work constitutes part of the linguistics research.
.What are synchronic and diachronic studies?
The description of a language at some point of time (as if it stopped developing) is a synchrony study (synchrony). The description of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study (diachronic). An essay entitled “On the Use of THE”, for example, may be synchronic, if the author does not recall the past of THE, and it may also be diachronic if he claims to cover a large range or period of time wherein THE has undergone tremendous alteration
.What are the differences between the descriptive and the prescriptive approaches?
A linguistic study is “descriptive” if it only describes and analyses the facts of language, and “prescriptive” if it tries to lay down rules for “correct” language behavior. Linguistic studies before this century were largely prescriptive because many early grammars were largely prescriptive because many early grammars were based on “high” (literary or religious) written records. Modern linguistics is mostly descriptive, however. It (the latter) believes that whatever occurs in natural speech (hesitation, incomplete utterance, misunderstanding, etc.) should be described in the analysis, and not be marked as incorrect, abnormal, corrupt, or lousy. These, with changes in vocabulary and structures, need to be explained also.
1.24.What is the difference between langue and parole?
F. de Saussure refers “langue”to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community and refers “parole” to the actual or actualized language, or the realization of langue. Langue is abstract, parole specific to the speaking situation; langue not actually spoken by an individual, parole always a naturally occurring event; langue relatively stable and systematic, parole is a mass of confused facts, thus not suitable for systematic investigation. What a linguist ought to do, according to Saussure, is to abstract langue from instances of parole, i. e. to discover the regularities governing all instances of parole and make than the subject of linguistics. The langue-parole distinction is of great importance, which casts great influence on later linguists.
1.25.What is the difference between competence and performance?
(1) According to N. Chomsky, “competence” is the ideal language user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, and “performance” is the actual realization of this knowledge in utterances. The former enables a speaker to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. A speaker’s competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. So a speaker’s performance does not always match or equal his supposed competence.
(2) Chomsky believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than performance. In other words, they should discover what an ideal speaker knows of his native language.
(3) Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction is not exactly the same as , though similar to , F. de Saussure’s langue-parole distinction. Langue is a social product, and a set of conventions for a community, while competence is deemed as a property of the mind of each individual. Sussure looks at language more from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of view than N. Chomsky since the latter deals with his issues psychologically or psycholinguistically.
1.28.What is phonetics?
“Phonetics” is 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 (see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp39-40), speech sounds may be studied in different ways, thus by three different branches of phonetics. (1)Articulatory phonetics; the branch of phonetics that examines the way in which a speech sound is produced to discover which vocal organs are involved and how they coordinate in the process. (2)Auditory phonetics, the branch of phonetic research from the hearer’s point of view, looking into the impression which a speech sound makes on the hearer as mediated by the ear , the auditory nerve and the brain. (3)Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear.
Most phoneticians, however, are interested in articulatory phonetics.
1.29.How are the vocal organs formed?
The vocal organs (see Figure1, Hu Zhuanglin et al.,p41), or speech organs, are organs of the human body whose secondary use is in the production of speech sounds. The vocal organs can be considered as consisting of three parts; the initiator of the air-stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.
1.30.What is place of articulation?
It refers to the place in the mouth where, for example, the obstruction occurs, resulting in the utterance of a consonant. Whatever sound is pronounced, at least some vocal organs will get involved,e. g. lips, hard palate etc., so a consonant may be one of the following (1 )bilabial:[p,b,m]; (2) labiodental:[f,v]; (3) dental:[,]; (4) alveolar:[t,d,l,n.s,z]; (5) retroflex; (6) palato-alveolar:[,]; (7) palatal:[j]; (8) velar[k,g,]; (9) uvular; (10)glottal:[h].
Some sounds involve the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English [w]has both an approximation of the two lips and that two lips and that of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed “labial-velar”.
1.31.What is the manner of articulation?
The “manner of articulation” literally means the way a sound is articulated. At a given place of articulation, the airstream may be obstructed in various ways, resulting in various manners of articulation, are the following : (1) plosive:[p,b,t,d,k,g]; (2) nasal:[m,n,]; (3) trill; (4) tap or flap; (5) lateral:[l]; (6) fricative:[f,v,s,z]; (7) approximant:[w,j]; (8) affricate:[].
1.32.How do phoneticians classify vowels?
Phoneticians, in spite of the difficulty, group vowels in 5 types: (1) long and short vowels, e.g.,[i:,]; (4) rounded and unround vowels,e.g.[,i]; (5) pure and gliding vowels, e.g.[I,].
1.33.What is IPA? When did it come into being ?
The IPA, abbreviation of “International Phonetic Alphabet”, is a compromise system making use of symbols of all sources, including diacritics indicating length, stress and intonation, indicating phonetic variation. Ever since it was developed in 1888, IPA has undergone a number of revisions.
1.34.What is narrow transcription and what is broad transcription?
In handbook of phonetics, Henry Sweet made a distinction between “narrow” and “broad” transcriptions, which he called “Narrow Romic”. The former was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the most minute shades of pronunciation while Broad Romic or transcription was intended to indicate only those sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language.
1.35.What is phonology? What is difference between phonetics and phonology?
(1) “Phonology” is the study of sound systems- the invention of distinctive speech sounds that occur in a language and the patterns wherein they fall. Minimal pair, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonologist.
(2) Phonetics, as discussed in I.28, is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. A phonetist is mainly interested in the physical properties of the speech sounds, whereas a phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their semantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which from meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to from plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in one’s language.
1.36.What is a phone? What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?
(1) A “phone” is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. When we hear the following words pronounced:[pit], [tip], [spit], etc., the similar phones we have heard are [p] for one thing, and three different[p]’s, readily making possible the “narrow transcription or diacritics”. Phones may and may not distinguish meaning. A “phoneme” is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. As an abstract unit, a phoneme is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. For example, the phoneme[p] is represented differently in [pit], [tip] and [spit].
(2) The phones representing a phoneme are called its “allophones”, i. e., the different (i.e., phones) but do not make one word so phonetically different as to create a new word or a new meaning thereof. So the different[p]’s in the above words are the allophones of the same phoneme[p]. How a phoneme is represented by a phone, or which allophone is to be used, is determined by the phonetic context in which it occurs. But the choice of an allophone is not random. In most cases it is rule-governed; these rules are to be found out by a phonologist.
1.37.What are minimal pairs?
When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string , the two forms(i. e., word) are supposed to form a “minimal pair”, e.g., “pill” and “bill”, “pill” and “till”, “till” and “dill”, “till” and “kill”, etc. All these words together constitute a minimal set. They are identical in form except for the initial consonants. There are many minimal pairs in English, which makes it relatively easy to know what are English phonemes. It is of great importance to find the minimal pairs when a phonologist is dealing with the sound system of an unknown language(see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp65-66).
1.39.What is complementary distribution?
When two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in “complementary distribution”. For example, the aspirated English plosives never occur after[s], and the unsaturated ones never occur initially. Sounds in complementary distribution may be assigned to the same phoneme. The allophones of[l], for example, are also in complementary distribution. The clear[l] occurs only before a vowel, the voiceless equivalent of[l] occurs only after a voiceless consonant, such as in the words “please”, “butler”, “clear”, etc., and the dark[l] occurs only after a vowel or as a syllabic sound after a consonant, such as in the words “feel”, “help”, “middle”, etc.
1.40.What is the assimilation rule? What is the deletion rule?
(1) The “assimilation rule” assimilates one segment to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar. This rule accounts for the raring pronunciation of the nasal[n] that occurs within a word. The rule is that within a word the nasal consonant[n] assumes the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The negative prefix “in-“ serves as a good example. It may be pronounced as [in],or [im] when occurring in different phonetic contexts: e. g., indiscrete-[ ](alveolar)
inconceivable-[ ](velar)
input-[‘imput](bilabial)
(3) The “deletion rule” tells us when a sound is to be deleted although is orthographically represented. While the letter “g” is mute in “sign”, “design” and “paradigm”, it is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives: “signature”, “designation” and “paradigmatic”. The rule then can be stated as: delete a [g] when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. This accounts for some of the seeming irregularities of the English spelling (see Dai Weidong ,pp22-23).
1.41. What is suprasegmental phonology? What are suprasegmental features?
“Suprasegmental phonology” refers to the study of phonological properties of linguistic units larger than the segment called phoneme, such as syllable, word and sentence.
Hu Zhuanglin et al.,(p,73) includes stress, length and pitch as what they suppose to be “principal suprasegmental features”, calling the concurrent patterning of three “intonation”. Dai Weidong(pp23-25) lists three also, but they are stress, tone and intonation.
1.42.What is morphology?
“Morphology” is the branch of grammar that studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed. It is generally divided into two fields: inflectional morphology and lexical/derivational morphology.
1.43.What is inflection/inflexion?
“Inflection” is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which does not change the grammatical class of the items to which they are attached.
1.44.What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph?
(1) The “morpheme” is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. The word “boxes”, for example, has two morphemes: “box” and “-es”, neither of which permits further division or analysis if we don’t wish to sacrifice meaning. Therefore a morpheme is considered the minimal unit of meaning.
(2) Allomorphs, like allophones vs. phones, are the alternate shapes (and thus phonetic forms) of the same morphemes. Some morphemes, though, have no more than one invariable form in all contexts, such as “dog”, “cat”, etc. The variants of the plurality “-s” make the allomorphs thereof in the following examples: map-maps, mouse-mice, sheep-sheep etc.
1.45.What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?
A “free morpheme” is a morpheme that constitutes a word by itself, such as ‘bed”, “tree” ,etc. A “bound morpheme” is one that appears with at least another morpheme, such as “-s” in “beds” , “-al” in “national” and so on. All monomorphemic words are free morphemes. Those polymorphemic words are either compounds (combination of two or more free morphemes )or derivatives (word derived from free morphemes).
1.46.What is a root ? What is a stem? What is an affix?
A “root” is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. In other words, a “root” is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “Internationalism” is a four-morpheme derivative which keeps its free morpheme “nation” as its root when “ inter-”, “-al” and “-ism” are taken away.
A “stem” is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as , and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word “friends” , “friend” is both the root and the stem, but in the word “friendships”, “friendships” is its stem, “friend” is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e. g., “mailman” , “girlfriend” ,ect.
An “affix” is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used, only when added to another morpheme(the root or stem). Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes: prefix, suffix and infix, e. g. , “mini-”, “un-”, ect.(prefix); “-ise”, “-tion”, ect.(suffix).
1.47.What are open classes? What are closed classes?
In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. They are “open –class words”, since we can regularly add new lexical entries to these classes. The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, closed classes, or closed-class words. The number of them is hardly alterable, if they are changeable at all.
1.49.What is collocation?
“Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.
1.50.What is syntax?
“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.
1.51.What is a sentence?
L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.
1.52.What are syntactic relations?
“Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence.
(1) “Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”.
(2) “Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”.
(3) By “relations of co-occurrence”, one 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. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.
1.53.What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents(and ultimate constituents)?
“IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two(or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are . What remain of the first cut are called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”.
1.56.What is category?
The term “category” in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense, e.g., noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender, case and countability ;and of the verb, for example, tense, aspect, voice, etc.
1.57.What is number? What is gender? What is case?
(1) “Number” is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc. In English, number is mainly observed in nouns, and there are only two forms: singular and plural. Number is also reflected in the inflections of pronouns and verbs.
(2) “Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we natural gender(the opposite is grammatical gender).
(3) “Case” identifies the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence. In Latin grammar, cases are based on variations in the morphological forms of the word, and are given the terms “accusative”, “nominative”, “dative”,etc. In English, the case category is realized in three ways: by following a preposition and by word order.
1.62.What is semantics?
“Semantics” refers to the study of the communication of meaning through language. Or simply, it is the study of meaning.
1.65.What is the Semantic/Semiotic Triangle?
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.
1.66.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”. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatio-temporal situation, as the following factors are related to the situational context: (1) the speaker and the hearer; (2) the actions they are performing at the time; (3) various external objects and events; (4) deictic features.
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.
1.67.How many kinds of meaning did linguists find and study?
(1) C.C.Fries(1952) makes a traditional distinction between lexical meaning and structural meaning. The former is expressed by those “meaningful” parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and is given in the dictionary associated with grammar. The latter expresses the distinction between the subject and the object of a sentence, oppositions of definiteness, tense the number, and the difference between statements, questions and requests. In a word, “the total linguistic meaning of any utterance consists of the lexical meaning of the separate words plus such structural meaning…”
(2) G. Leech(1981) categorizes seven kinds of meaning, five of which are brought under the “associative meaning” (see the following chart).
(3) Different from the traditional and the functional approach, F.R.Palmer(1981) and J.Lyons(1977) suggest we draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, the former being directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, while the latter includes all the various types of meaning not necessarily associated thereto.
1.68.What is synonymy?
“Synonymy” is used to mean sameness or close similarity of meaning. Dictionary makers (lexicographers) rely on the existence of synonymy for their definitions. Some semanticians maintain, however, that there are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects:
(1) In shades of meaning (e.g., finish, complete, close, conclude, terminate, finalize, end, etc.);
(2) In stylistic meaning(see 1.67);
(3) In emotive meaning(or affective meaning, see 1.67);
(4) In range of use (or collocative meaning, see 1.67);
(5) In British and American English usages [e.g., autumn (BrE), fall (AmE)].
Simeon Potter said,“ Language is like dress. We vary our dress to suit the occasion. We do not appear at a friend’s silver-wedding anniversary in gardening clothes, nor do we go punting on the river in a dinner-jacket.” This means the learning lf synonyms is important to anyone that wishes to use his language freely and well.
1.69.What is Antonymy? How many kinds of antonyms are there?
The term “antonymy” is used for oppositions of meaning; words that stand opposite in meaning are called “antonyms”, or opposites, which fall in there categories
1)gradable antonyms(e.g, good-bad); (2)complementary antonyms(e.g., single-mar-ried); (3)relational antonyms(e.g., buy-sell).
1.70.What is hyponymy? What is a hyponym? What is superordinate?
“Hyponymy” involves us in the notion of meaning inclusion. It is a matter of class membership. That is to say, when X id a kind of Y, the lower term X is the “hyponym”, and the upper term Y is the “superordinate”. Two or more hyponyms sharing the same one superordinate are called “co-hyponyms”. For example, “flower” is the superordinate of “tulip”, “violet” and “rose”, which are the co-hyponyms of “flower”.
1.71.What is polysemy? What is homonymy?
“Polysemy” refers to the semantic phenomenon that a word may have than one meaning. For example, “negative”, means(1)a statement saying or meaning “no”, (2)a refusal or denial, (3)one of the following words and expressions: no, not, nothing, never, not at all, etc. ,(4) a negative photograph or film. But we can sometimes hardly tell if a form has several meanings or it is a different word taking this form; hence the difference between polysemy and homonymy.
1.74.What is componential analysis?
“Componential analysis” defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. For example, we may “clip” the following words “Man”, “Woman”, “Boy” and “Girl” so that we have only separate parts of them.
Man: +Human+Adult+Male
Woman:+Human+Adult-Male
Boy:+Human-Adult+Male
Girl:+Huamn-Adult-Male
1.75.What is predication analysis? What is a one-place predicate? What is a two-place predicate? What is a no-place predicate? What are down-graded predications?
“Predication analysis” is a new approach for sentential meaning analysis. “Predication” is usually considered an important common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Predication is to break down the sentence into their smaller constituents: argument (logical participant) and predicate (relation element). The “predicate” is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. We may now distinguish a “two-place predicate” (which governs two arguments, e.g., subject and object), a “one-place predicate” (which governs one argument, i.e., subject) and a “no-place predicate” that has simply no argument(no real subject or object).
1.85.What is analogical creation? What is borrowing?
The process of “analogical creation”, as one of the English tendencies in English word-formation, refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, “marathon” appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modern English created such words as “telethon”, “talkthon”, etc. Analogy may create single words(e.g., sunrise-moonrise, earthrise, etc.; earthquake-starquake, youthquake, etc.) and phrases( e.g., environmental pollution-sound pollution, air pollution, cultural pollution,etc.).
“Borrowing” means the English language borrowed words from foreign languages, which fall in four categories: aliens, denizens, translation-loans and semantic borrowings.
“Aliens” are foreign loans that still keep their alien shapes, i. e., morphological and phonological features, e.g., “elite”, “coup détat”, “coupé”, etc.(from French). “Deniens” , also foreign words, have transformed their foreign appearance, i.e., they have been Angolcized (or Americanized), e. g., “get” (a Scandinavian borrowing), “theater” (a French loan), etc. “Hybrids” are also denizens, because they are words made up of two parts both from foreign soil, such as “sociology” (“socio-” from French and –logy from Greek).
“Translation-loans” are words imported by way of translation, e. g., “black humor” from French(“humor noir”), “found object” form French ,too (“object trouve”), etc. Finally, semantic borrowings have acquired new meaning under the influence of language or languages other than the source tongue. For example, “gift” mean “the price of a wife ” in Old English (450-1150AD), and after the semantic borrowing of the meaning of “gift or present” of the Scandinavian term “gipt”, it meant and still means “gift” in the modern sense of it.
What is language?
“Language is system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a system, since linguistic elements are arranged systematically, rather than randomly. Arbitrary, in the sense that there is usually no intrinsic connection between a work (like “book”) and the object it refers to. This explains and is explained by the fact that different languages have different “books”: “book” in English, “livre” in French, in Japanese, in Chinese, “check” in Korean. It is symbolic, because words are associated with objects, actions, ideas etc. by nothing but convention. Namely, people use the sounds or vocal forms to symbolize what they wish to refer to. It is vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages, developed or “new”. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak (and listen) before they write (and read) also indicates that language is primarily vocal, rather than written. The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific.
1.2.
What are design features of language?
“Design features” here refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication. They are arbitrariness, duality, productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and interchangeability
1.3.
What is arbitrariness?
By “arbitrariness”, we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds (see I .1). A dog might be a pig if only the first person or group of persons had used it for a pig. Language is therefore largely arbitrary. But language is not absolutely seem to be some sound-meaning association, if we think of echo words, like “bang”, “crash”, “roar”, which are motivated in a certain sense. Secondly, some compounds (words compounded to be one word ) are not entirely arbitrary either. “Type” and “write”are opaque or unmotivated words, while “type-writer” is less so, or more transparent or motivated than the words that make it. So we can say “arbitrariness” is a matter of degree.
1.4.What is duality?
Linguists refer “duality” (of structure) to the fact that in all languages so far investigated, one finds two levels of structure or patterning. At the first, higher level, language is analyzed in terms of combinations of meaningful units (such as morphemes, words etc.) ; at the second, lower level, it is seen as a sequence of segments which lack any meaning in themselves, but which combine to form units of meaning. According to Hu Zhanglin et al. (p.6) , language is a system of two sets of structures, one of sounds and the other of meaning. This is important for the workings of language. A small number of semantic units (words), and these units of meaning can be arranged and rearranged into an infinite number of sentences (note that we have dictionaries of words, but no dictionary of sentences!). Duality makes it possible for a person to talk about anything within his knowledge. No animal communication system enjoys this duality, or even approaches this honour.
1.5.What is productivity?
Productivity refers to the ability to the ability to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences in one’s native language, including those that has never heard before, but that are appropriate to the speaking situation. No one has ever said or heard “A red-eyed elephant is dancing on the small hotel bed with an African gibbon”, but he can say it when necessary, and he can understand it in right register. Different from artistic creativity, though, productivity never goes outside the language, thus also called “rule-bound creativity” (by N.Chomsky).
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1.6.What is displacement?
“Displacement”, as one of the design features of the human language, refers to the fact that one can talk about things that are not present, as easily as he does things present. In other words, one can refer to real and unreal things, things of the past, of the present, of the future. Language itself can be talked about too. When a man, for example, is crying to a woman, about something, it might be something that had occurred, or something that is occurring, or something that is to occur. When a dog is barking, however, you can decide it is barking for something or at someone that exists now and there. It couldn’t be bow-wowing sorrowfully for dome lost love or a bone to be lost. The bee’s system, nonetheless, has a small share of “displacement”, but it is an unspeakable tiny share.
1.7.What is cultural transmission?
This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation to generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. It is true that the capacity for language in human beings(N. Chomsky called it “language acquisition device”, or LAD) has a genetic basis, but the particular language a person learns to speak is a cultural one other than a genetic one like the dog’s barking system. If a human being is brought up in isolation he cannot acquire language. The Wolf Child reared by the pack of wolves turned out to speak the wolf’s roaring “tongue” when he was saved. He learned thereafter, with no small difficulty, the ABC of a certain human language.
1.9.Why do linguists say language is human specific?
First of all, human language has six “design features” which animal communication systems do not have, at least not in the true sense of them(see I .2-8). Let’s borrow C. F. Hocket’s Chart that compares human language with some animals’ systems, from Wang Gang(1998,p.8).
Secondly, linguists have done a lot trying to teach animals such as chimpanzees to speak a human language but have achieved nothing inspiring. Washoe, a female chimpanzee, was brought up like a human child by Beatnice and Alan Gardner. She was taught “American sign Language”, and learned a little that made the teachers happy but did mot make the linguistics circle happy, for few believed in teaching chimpanzees.
Thirdly, a human child reared among animals cannot speak a human language, not even when he is taken back and taught to lo to so
1.18.What is linguistics?
“Linguistics” is the scientific study of language. It studies not just one language of any one society, but the language of all human beings. A linguist, though, does not have to know and use a large number of languages, but to investigate how each language is constructed. He is also concerned with how a language varies from dialect to dialect, from class to class, how it changes from century to century, how children acquire their mother tongue, and perhaps how a person learns or should learn a foreign language. In short, linguistics studies the general principles whereupon all human languages are constructed and operate as systems of communication in their societies or communities
What makes linguistics a science?
Since linguistics is the scientific study of language, it ought to base itself upon the systematic, investigation of language data which aims at discovering the true nature of language and its underlying system. To make sense of the data, a linguist usually has conceived some hypotheses about the language structure, to be checked against the observed or observable facts. In order to make his analysis scientific, a linguist is usually guided by four principles: exhaustiveness, consistency, and objectivity. Exhaustiveness means he should gather all the materials relevant to the study and give them an adequate explanation, in spite of the complicatedness. He is to leave no linguistic “stone” unturned. Consistency means there should be no contradiction between different parts of the total statement. Economy means a linguist should pursue brevity in the analysis when it is possible. Objectivity implies that since some people may be subjective in the study, a linguist should be (or sound at least) objective, matter-of-face, faithful to reality, so that his work constitutes part of the linguistics research.
.What are synchronic and diachronic studies?
The description of a language at some point of time (as if it stopped developing) is a synchrony study (synchrony). The description of a language as it changes through time is a diachronic study (diachronic). An essay entitled “On the Use of THE”, for example, may be synchronic, if the author does not recall the past of THE, and it may also be diachronic if he claims to cover a large range or period of time wherein THE has undergone tremendous alteration
.What are the differences between the descriptive and the prescriptive approaches?
A linguistic study is “descriptive” if it only describes and analyses the facts of language, and “prescriptive” if it tries to lay down rules for “correct” language behavior. Linguistic studies before this century were largely prescriptive because many early grammars were largely prescriptive because many early grammars were based on “high” (literary or religious) written records. Modern linguistics is mostly descriptive, however. It (the latter) believes that whatever occurs in natural speech (hesitation, incomplete utterance, misunderstanding, etc.) should be described in the analysis, and not be marked as incorrect, abnormal, corrupt, or lousy. These, with changes in vocabulary and structures, need to be explained also.
1.24.What is the difference between langue and parole?
F. de Saussure refers “langue”to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community and refers “parole” to the actual or actualized language, or the realization of langue. Langue is abstract, parole specific to the speaking situation; langue not actually spoken by an individual, parole always a naturally occurring event; langue relatively stable and systematic, parole is a mass of confused facts, thus not suitable for systematic investigation. What a linguist ought to do, according to Saussure, is to abstract langue from instances of parole, i. e. to discover the regularities governing all instances of parole and make than the subject of linguistics. The langue-parole distinction is of great importance, which casts great influence on later linguists.
1.25.What is the difference between competence and performance?
(1) According to N. Chomsky, “competence” is the ideal language user’s knowledge of the rules of his language, and “performance” is the actual realization of this knowledge in utterances. The former enables a speaker to produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences and to recognize grammatical mistakes and ambiguities. A speaker’s competence is stable while his performance is often influenced by psychological and social factors. So a speaker’s performance does not always match or equal his supposed competence.
(2) Chomsky believes that linguists ought to study competence, rather than performance. In other words, they should discover what an ideal speaker knows of his native language.
(3) Chomsky’s competence-performance distinction is not exactly the same as , though similar to , F. de Saussure’s langue-parole distinction. Langue is a social product, and a set of conventions for a community, while competence is deemed as a property of the mind of each individual. Sussure looks at language more from a sociological or sociolinguistic point of view than N. Chomsky since the latter deals with his issues psychologically or psycholinguistically.
1.28.What is phonetics?
“Phonetics” is 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 (see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp39-40), speech sounds may be studied in different ways, thus by three different branches of phonetics. (1)Articulatory phonetics; the branch of phonetics that examines the way in which a speech sound is produced to discover which vocal organs are involved and how they coordinate in the process. (2)Auditory phonetics, the branch of phonetic research from the hearer’s point of view, looking into the impression which a speech sound makes on the hearer as mediated by the ear , the auditory nerve and the brain. (3)Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sounds, as transmitted between mouth and ear.
Most phoneticians, however, are interested in articulatory phonetics.
1.29.How are the vocal organs formed?
The vocal organs (see Figure1, Hu Zhuanglin et al.,p41), or speech organs, are organs of the human body whose secondary use is in the production of speech sounds. The vocal organs can be considered as consisting of three parts; the initiator of the air-stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.
1.30.What is place of articulation?
It refers to the place in the mouth where, for example, the obstruction occurs, resulting in the utterance of a consonant. Whatever sound is pronounced, at least some vocal organs will get involved,e. g. lips, hard palate etc., so a consonant may be one of the following (1 )bilabial:[p,b,m]; (2) labiodental:[f,v]; (3) dental:[,]; (4) alveolar:[t,d,l,n.s,z]; (5) retroflex; (6) palato-alveolar:[,]; (7) palatal:[j]; (8) velar[k,g,]; (9) uvular; (10)glottal:[h].
Some sounds involve the simultaneous use of two places of articulation. For example, the English [w]has both an approximation of the two lips and that two lips and that of the tongue and the soft palate, and may be termed “labial-velar”.
1.31.What is the manner of articulation?
The “manner of articulation” literally means the way a sound is articulated. At a given place of articulation, the airstream may be obstructed in various ways, resulting in various manners of articulation, are the following : (1) plosive:[p,b,t,d,k,g]; (2) nasal:[m,n,]; (3) trill; (4) tap or flap; (5) lateral:[l]; (6) fricative:[f,v,s,z]; (7) approximant:[w,j]; (8) affricate:[].
1.32.How do phoneticians classify vowels?
Phoneticians, in spite of the difficulty, group vowels in 5 types: (1) long and short vowels, e.g.,[i:,]; (4) rounded and unround vowels,e.g.[,i]; (5) pure and gliding vowels, e.g.[I,].
1.33.What is IPA? When did it come into being ?
The IPA, abbreviation of “International Phonetic Alphabet”, is a compromise system making use of symbols of all sources, including diacritics indicating length, stress and intonation, indicating phonetic variation. Ever since it was developed in 1888, IPA has undergone a number of revisions.
1.34.What is narrow transcription and what is broad transcription?
In handbook of phonetics, Henry Sweet made a distinction between “narrow” and “broad” transcriptions, which he called “Narrow Romic”. The former was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the most minute shades of pronunciation while Broad Romic or transcription was intended to indicate only those sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language.
1.35.What is phonology? What is difference between phonetics and phonology?
(1) “Phonology” is the study of sound systems- the invention of distinctive speech sounds that occur in a language and the patterns wherein they fall. Minimal pair, phonemes, allophones, free variation, complementary distribution, etc., are all to be investigated by a phonologist.
(2) Phonetics, as discussed in I.28, is the branch of linguistics studying the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription. A phonetist is mainly interested in the physical properties of the speech sounds, whereas a phonologist studies what he believes are meaningful sounds related with their semantic features, morphological features, and the way they are conceived and printed in the depth of the mind phonological knowledge permits a speaker to produce sounds which from meaningful utterances, to recognize a foreign “accent”, to make up new words, to add the appropriate phonetic segments to from plurals and past tenses, to know what is and what is not a sound in one’s language.
1.36.What is a phone? What is a phoneme? What is an allophone?
(1) A “phone” is a phonetic unit or segment. The speech sounds we hear and produce during linguistic communication are all phones. When we hear the following words pronounced:[pit], [tip], [spit], etc., the similar phones we have heard are [p] for one thing, and three different[p]’s, readily making possible the “narrow transcription or diacritics”. Phones may and may not distinguish meaning. A “phoneme” is a phonological unit; it is a unit that is of distinctive value. As an abstract unit, a phoneme is not any particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. For example, the phoneme[p] is represented differently in [pit], [tip] and [spit].
(2) The phones representing a phoneme are called its “allophones”, i. e., the different (i.e., phones) but do not make one word so phonetically different as to create a new word or a new meaning thereof. So the different[p]’s in the above words are the allophones of the same phoneme[p]. How a phoneme is represented by a phone, or which allophone is to be used, is determined by the phonetic context in which it occurs. But the choice of an allophone is not random. In most cases it is rule-governed; these rules are to be found out by a phonologist.
1.37.What are minimal pairs?
When two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except for one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string , the two forms(i. e., word) are supposed to form a “minimal pair”, e.g., “pill” and “bill”, “pill” and “till”, “till” and “dill”, “till” and “kill”, etc. All these words together constitute a minimal set. They are identical in form except for the initial consonants. There are many minimal pairs in English, which makes it relatively easy to know what are English phonemes. It is of great importance to find the minimal pairs when a phonologist is dealing with the sound system of an unknown language(see Hu Zhuanglin et al., pp65-66).
1.39.What is complementary distribution?
When two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are in “complementary distribution”. For example, the aspirated English plosives never occur after[s], and the unsaturated ones never occur initially. Sounds in complementary distribution may be assigned to the same phoneme. The allophones of[l], for example, are also in complementary distribution. The clear[l] occurs only before a vowel, the voiceless equivalent of[l] occurs only after a voiceless consonant, such as in the words “please”, “butler”, “clear”, etc., and the dark[l] occurs only after a vowel or as a syllabic sound after a consonant, such as in the words “feel”, “help”, “middle”, etc.
1.40.What is the assimilation rule? What is the deletion rule?
(1) The “assimilation rule” assimilates one segment to another by “copying” a feature of a sequential phoneme, thus making the two phones more similar. This rule accounts for the raring pronunciation of the nasal[n] that occurs within a word. The rule is that within a word the nasal consonant[n] assumes the same place of articulation as the following consonant. The negative prefix “in-“ serves as a good example. It may be pronounced as [in],or [im] when occurring in different phonetic contexts: e. g., indiscrete-[ ](alveolar)
inconceivable-[ ](velar)
input-[‘imput](bilabial)
(3) The “deletion rule” tells us when a sound is to be deleted although is orthographically represented. While the letter “g” is mute in “sign”, “design” and “paradigm”, it is pronounced in their corresponding derivatives: “signature”, “designation” and “paradigmatic”. The rule then can be stated as: delete a [g] when it occurs before a final nasal consonant. This accounts for some of the seeming irregularities of the English spelling (see Dai Weidong ,pp22-23).
1.41. What is suprasegmental phonology? What are suprasegmental features?
“Suprasegmental phonology” refers to the study of phonological properties of linguistic units larger than the segment called phoneme, such as syllable, word and sentence.
Hu Zhuanglin et al.,(p,73) includes stress, length and pitch as what they suppose to be “principal suprasegmental features”, calling the concurrent patterning of three “intonation”. Dai Weidong(pp23-25) lists three also, but they are stress, tone and intonation.
1.42.What is morphology?
“Morphology” is the branch of grammar that studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed. It is generally divided into two fields: inflectional morphology and lexical/derivational morphology.
1.43.What is inflection/inflexion?
“Inflection” is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect, and case, which does not change the grammatical class of the items to which they are attached.
1.44.What is a morpheme? What is an allomorph?
(1) The “morpheme” is the smallest unit in terms of relationship between expression and content, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. The word “boxes”, for example, has two morphemes: “box” and “-es”, neither of which permits further division or analysis if we don’t wish to sacrifice meaning. Therefore a morpheme is considered the minimal unit of meaning.
(2) Allomorphs, like allophones vs. phones, are the alternate shapes (and thus phonetic forms) of the same morphemes. Some morphemes, though, have no more than one invariable form in all contexts, such as “dog”, “cat”, etc. The variants of the plurality “-s” make the allomorphs thereof in the following examples: map-maps, mouse-mice, sheep-sheep etc.
1.45.What is a free morpheme? What is a bound morpheme?
A “free morpheme” is a morpheme that constitutes a word by itself, such as ‘bed”, “tree” ,etc. A “bound morpheme” is one that appears with at least another morpheme, such as “-s” in “beds” , “-al” in “national” and so on. All monomorphemic words are free morphemes. Those polymorphemic words are either compounds (combination of two or more free morphemes )or derivatives (word derived from free morphemes).
1.46.What is a root ? What is a stem? What is an affix?
A “root” is the base form of a word that cannot be further analyzed without total loss of identity. In other words, a “root” is that part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “Internationalism” is a four-morpheme derivative which keeps its free morpheme “nation” as its root when “ inter-”, “-al” and “-ism” are taken away.
A “stem” is any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an affix can be added. It may be the same as , and in other cases, different from, a root. For example, in the word “friends” , “friend” is both the root and the stem, but in the word “friendships”, “friendships” is its stem, “friend” is its root. Some words (i. e., compounds ) have more than one root ,e. g., “mailman” , “girlfriend” ,ect.
An “affix” is the collective term for the type of formative that can be used, only when added to another morpheme(the root or stem). Affixes are limited in number in a language, and are generally classified into three subtypes: prefix, suffix and infix, e. g. , “mini-”, “un-”, ect.(prefix); “-ise”, “-tion”, ect.(suffix).
1.47.What are open classes? What are closed classes?
In English, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs make up the largest part of the vocabulary. They are “open –class words”, since we can regularly add new lexical entries to these classes. The other syntactic categories are, for the most part, closed classes, or closed-class words. The number of them is hardly alterable, if they are changeable at all.
1.49.What is collocation?
“Collocation” is a term used in lexicology by some linguists to refer to the habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items. For example, we can “read” a “book”; “correct” can narrowly occur with “book” which is supposed to have faults, but no one can “read” a “mistake” because with regard to co-occurrence these two words are not collocates.
1.50.What is syntax?
“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.
1.51.What is a sentence?
L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.
1.52.What are syntactic relations?
“Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence.
(1) “Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”.
(2) “Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”.
(3) By “relations of co-occurrence”, one 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. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.
1.53.What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents(and ultimate constituents)?
“IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two(or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are . What remain of the first cut are called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”.
1.56.What is category?
The term “category” in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense, e.g., noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender, case and countability ;and of the verb, for example, tense, aspect, voice, etc.
1.57.What is number? What is gender? What is case?
(1) “Number” is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc. In English, number is mainly observed in nouns, and there are only two forms: singular and plural. Number is also reflected in the inflections of pronouns and verbs.
(2) “Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we natural gender(the opposite is grammatical gender).
(3) “Case” identifies the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence. In Latin grammar, cases are based on variations in the morphological forms of the word, and are given the terms “accusative”, “nominative”, “dative”,etc. In English, the case category is realized in three ways: by following a preposition and by word order.
1.62.What is semantics?
“Semantics” refers to the study of the communication of meaning through language. Or simply, it is the study of meaning.
1.65.What is the Semantic/Semiotic Triangle?
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.
1.66.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”. Every utterance occurs in a particular spatio-temporal situation, as the following factors are related to the situational context: (1) the speaker and the hearer; (2) the actions they are performing at the time; (3) various external objects and events; (4) deictic features.
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.
1.67.How many kinds of meaning did linguists find and study?
(1) C.C.Fries(1952) makes a traditional distinction between lexical meaning and structural meaning. The former is expressed by those “meaningful” parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and is given in the dictionary associated with grammar. The latter expresses the distinction between the subject and the object of a sentence, oppositions of definiteness, tense the number, and the difference between statements, questions and requests. In a word, “the total linguistic meaning of any utterance consists of the lexical meaning of the separate words plus such structural meaning…”
(2) G. Leech(1981) categorizes seven kinds of meaning, five of which are brought under the “associative meaning” (see the following chart).
(3) Different from the traditional and the functional approach, F.R.Palmer(1981) and J.Lyons(1977) suggest we draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning, the former being directly predictable from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, while the latter includes all the various types of meaning not necessarily associated thereto.
1.68.What is synonymy?
“Synonymy” is used to mean sameness or close similarity of meaning. Dictionary makers (lexicographers) rely on the existence of synonymy for their definitions. Some semanticians maintain, however, that there are no real synonyms, because two or more words named synonyms are expected without exception to differ from one another in one of the following aspects:
(1) In shades of meaning (e.g., finish, complete, close, conclude, terminate, finalize, end, etc.);
(2) In stylistic meaning(see 1.67);
(3) In emotive meaning(or affective meaning, see 1.67);
(4) In range of use (or collocative meaning, see 1.67);
(5) In British and American English usages [e.g., autumn (BrE), fall (AmE)].
Simeon Potter said,“ Language is like dress. We vary our dress to suit the occasion. We do not appear at a friend’s silver-wedding anniversary in gardening clothes, nor do we go punting on the river in a dinner-jacket.” This means the learning lf synonyms is important to anyone that wishes to use his language freely and well.
1.69.What is Antonymy? How many kinds of antonyms are there?
The term “antonymy” is used for oppositions of meaning; words that stand opposite in meaning are called “antonyms”, or opposites, which fall in there categories
1)gradable antonyms(e.g, good-bad); (2)complementary antonyms(e.g., single-mar-ried); (3)relational antonyms(e.g., buy-sell).1.70.What is hyponymy? What is a hyponym? What is superordinate?
“Hyponymy” involves us in the notion of meaning inclusion. It is a matter of class membership. That is to say, when X id a kind of Y, the lower term X is the “hyponym”, and the upper term Y is the “superordinate”. Two or more hyponyms sharing the same one superordinate are called “co-hyponyms”. For example, “flower” is the superordinate of “tulip”, “violet” and “rose”, which are the co-hyponyms of “flower”.
1.71.What is polysemy? What is homonymy?
“Polysemy” refers to the semantic phenomenon that a word may have than one meaning. For example, “negative”, means(1)a statement saying or meaning “no”, (2)a refusal or denial, (3)one of the following words and expressions: no, not, nothing, never, not at all, etc. ,(4) a negative photograph or film. But we can sometimes hardly tell if a form has several meanings or it is a different word taking this form; hence the difference between polysemy and homonymy.
1.74.What is componential analysis?
“Componential analysis” defines the meaning of a lexical element in terms of semantic components. For example, we may “clip” the following words “Man”, “Woman”, “Boy” and “Girl” so that we have only separate parts of them.
Man: +Human+Adult+Male
Woman:+Human+Adult-Male
Boy:+Human-Adult+Male
Girl:+Huamn-Adult-Male
1.75.What is predication analysis? What is a one-place predicate? What is a two-place predicate? What is a no-place predicate? What are down-graded predications?
“Predication analysis” is a new approach for sentential meaning analysis. “Predication” is usually considered an important common category shared by propositions, questions, commands, etc. Predication is to break down the sentence into their smaller constituents: argument (logical participant) and predicate (relation element). The “predicate” is the major or pivotal element governing the argument. We may now distinguish a “two-place predicate” (which governs two arguments, e.g., subject and object), a “one-place predicate” (which governs one argument, i.e., subject) and a “no-place predicate” that has simply no argument(no real subject or object).
1.85.What is analogical creation? What is borrowing?
The process of “analogical creation”, as one of the English tendencies in English word-formation, refers to the phenomenon that a new word or a new phrase is coined by analogy between a newly created one and an existing one. For example, “marathon” appeared at the First Olympic Games and by analogy modern English created such words as “telethon”, “talkthon”, etc. Analogy may create single words(e.g., sunrise-moonrise, earthrise, etc.; earthquake-starquake, youthquake, etc.) and phrases( e.g., environmental pollution-sound pollution, air pollution, cultural pollution,etc.).
“Borrowing” means the English language borrowed words from foreign languages, which fall in four categories: aliens, denizens, translation-loans and semantic borrowings.
“Aliens” are foreign loans that still keep their alien shapes, i. e., morphological and phonological features, e.g., “elite”, “coup détat”, “coupé”, etc.(from French). “Deniens” , also foreign words, have transformed their foreign appearance, i.e., they have been Angolcized (or Americanized), e. g., “get” (a Scandinavian borrowing), “theater” (a French loan), etc. “Hybrids” are also denizens, because they are words made up of two parts both from foreign soil, such as “sociology” (“socio-” from French and –logy from Greek).
“Translation-loans” are words imported by way of translation, e. g., “black humor” from French(“humor noir”), “found object” form French ,too (“object trouve”), etc. Finally, semantic borrowings have acquired new meaning under the influence of language or languages other than the source tongue. For example, “gift” mean “the price of a wife ” in Old English (450-1150AD), and after the semantic borrowing of the meaning of “gift or present” of the Scandinavian term “gipt”, it meant and still means “gift” in the modern sense of it.
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