A Summary about Linguistics
教育三班 082726038
一、Linguistics
We have learned several chapters this term including the introduction of linguistics, the sounds of language, morphology, syntax and semantics. I will arrange this knowledge according to my understanding in order to learn it better.
I think it is very abstract and wide when I first touch the conception of linguistics. I reckon that linguistics is a course which refers to some knowledge about words, phrase, sentence and paragraph, as well as the relationship among them before I have linguistics class. Now I change my mind, in other words, the scope of linguistics is far more than what I know before. Exactly, linguistics as the scientific or systematic study of language is a system of arbitrary vocal system used for human communication.
Linguistics is very different from traditional grammar, it is not a new name for traditional grammar. Traditional grammar is usually based on earlier grammars of Latin or Greek and applied to some other languages often inappropriately. Traditional grammar is too mechanical devoid of flexibility among many aspects, Traditional grammar is too dependent on rules designed by formers or ancestors to limit the thought of learners, and what is more, traditional grammar can not keep pace with the times, many rules of traditional grammar which can not meet the modern learners are out of style. These are just my opinion, according to linguists , they hold the views below: firstly, linguistics describes languages and does not lay down rules of correctness, so linguists are often said to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Secondly, linguists among linguistics regard the spoken language as primary, not the written. Thirdly, traditional grammar is based on Latin and it tries to impose the Latin categories and structures on other languages, which linguistics describes each language on its merits.
Since linguistics is the development and complement of the traditional grammar, let alone its importance and usefulness, of course, it is very essential. And then I will say something about the use of studying linguistics .Firstly, for us, learning linguistics can widen our view and enlarge our knowledge, besides, it also can help us to learn English very well. As future teacher, linguistics will be importance of our English teaching.
Linguistics also has a scope, the major branches of linguistics include phonetics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. The branches of linguistics above are at the very center of its scope. However, language can be also studied in relation to something else, such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, stylistics and so on. The list of branches of linguistics above should have shown at least one thing: Linguistics is not only one thing about grammar, so is the words and sentences. It is certainly true that grammar is an important part of linguistics.
二、Language
(1) the origin of language
Language is one of the unique possessions of human beings. As we all know, language is a tool for human beings to express ideas and thoughts. In fact, language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.. Maybe sometimes we may think over one question; How and when does language occur. No one can answer this question clearly. When human beings exist in this world, something may happen, maybe some voices we can not understand today but they can know at that time. As time flies, these strange voices develop and are accepted gradually by more and more people. As for the origin of language, lots of linguists have talked many about it . The development of society and the human being’s cognitive ability, man’s stepping into social life are the major factors of the creation of lg. Society is both the creator and container of language. According to Plato, there was a “perfect” language which all human beings were striving to rediscover. Some thought that God said:” let there be language and there was language.” Socrates held that imitation of natural sounds was the basis for the origin of language. In spite of having so many theories, nothing can be definitely said about the origin of language, it is also a puzzling question.
(2) features of language
Design features of language have been identified by the eminent American linguist C.F Hockett (1985) : arbitrariness, duality, productivity, interchangeability, displacement, specialization and cultural transmission. I want to say something about each feature according to my own understanding: (1)Arbitrariness: It means there is no especial relationship between the object and sound. For example, dog, why we call that animal "dog", but not "pig" or others. I think this is a coincidence and then more and more people accept it.(2)Duality: They are meaningless when the sounds stand alone, but it will become meaningful when it is combined with others. (3)Productivity: We can change the forms of words and then gain more words.(4)Interchangeability: Human beings can produce and receive messages through language. (5)Displacement: That means human beings can describe the events without the limit of time and place. (6)Specialization: Language is the unique possessions of people.(7)Cultural transmission: Language can be handed down from people to people, and it also can be extended or expanded its scope. Besides, I think language possesses nationality, different languages have their own features among the system of pronunciation, semantic, vocabulary, grammar and so on. For example, Chinese lack the change of morphology, in other words, Chinese grammar mainly refers to sentence structure. While languages of other nations such as: Russian and French have many changes about tense, aspect, case, person and so forth, in other words, these languages use morphology to control sentence structure. And what is more, I think language is a special symbol, that is to say man use language to replace one object.
(3) Function of language
Firstly, phatic function is one of the most important functions, language is the most important phatic method. Many activities and actions can not achieve smoothly without language. Secondly, language can record and disseminate culture through language works and language itself. So exotic culture can exchange from each other and then develop further more. Thirdly, language can regulate the emotion, action, attention of people, for example, the person who is very angry will calm down if you say some thing like “do not be stir”, “calm down” to him. Fourth, language is the most important tool for thinking. since the majority of human knowledge is precipitated in language, so language plays an important role in cognitive, for example, language has many different systems, people are confined by some language system and observe world in this field, so the way of cognitive is affected by language. Fifth, language is one of the most important symbols of nation, different nations have different languages ,even the same nation have different languages in different locations. In conclusion, from these we can know that language possesses symbolize function. Language has many other functions which are produced through its main function.
(4) several groups of relationship among language
Descriptive and prescriptive grammars; Descriptive grammar: a kind of linguistic study in which things are just described objectively. Prescriptive grammar: a kind of linguistic study in which things are prescribed how ought to be, i.e. laying down rules for language use
Synchronic and diachronic linguistics: We study language at one particular time, it is called synchronic linguistics. We study language developments through time, it is called diachronic linguistics.
Langue and parole: langue: the linguistic competence of the speaker. Langue refers to abstract linguistics and it is the code , while parole refers to particular realizations of langue and it is the message. parole: the actual phenomena or data of linguistics
Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations: the arrangement of words and phrases into sentences, this is syntagmatic, whereas, paradigmatic relations are relations of substitution.
Functionalism and formalism: the former tends to explain the forms of language by attributing a determining role of its function. The latter is the study of the abstract forms of language and their internal relations.
Competence: A language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules.
Performance: the actual use of language in concrete situation.
三、the structure of language
(1) the sounds of language: phonetics and phonology
Phonetics is the study of speech sounds that occur in all human languages which can be divided into three main branches: articulatory phonetics, accustic phonetics and auditory phonetics.
Phoneme: simply refers to a “unit of explicit sound contrast”
Allophone：any of the different forms of a same phoneme.
Assimilation: a process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighbouring sound.
I think we’d better know the articulators and how to produce sounds so that we can improve our pronunciation, and then we should know the four classes of all speech sounds definitely: voiced, voiceless, nasal and oral. Besides, English speech sounds can be divided into vowels and consonants. Vowels are sounds in which there is no abstraction to the flow of air as it passes from the larynx to the lips. Consonants are sounds in which there is abstraction to the flow of air when we make a sound like [p] and [b]. Some phenomenon such as liaison, elision and assimilation occur in order to meet the intonation, convenient and speed of speech. Liaison is to link two words especially the second word begins with a vowel. Some letter we can not pronounce is called elision. Assimilation is that sounds belonging to one word or one syllable can cause changes in sounds belonging to neihboring words or syllables.
Phonology is the description of the system and patterns of speech sounds in a language. Among this field, we should know and understand some concepts: minimal pairs is that words which differ from each other only by one sound phoneme is the place where we can make a sound. There are various different ways of making a sound because of dialect, habit, but do not change the meaning, this phenomenon is called free variation. The principle of suprasegmental features are syllable, stress, tone and intonation.
(2) morphology
Morphology is also one of the main branches of linguistic, morphology is the study of the internal structure of words and rules which words are formed.
Morphemes is the smallest linguistic units in terms of the relations between the expression and content.
Morphemes can be divided into two parts: free morphemes and bound morphemes, some morphemes can stand alone as words are called free morphemes, lexical morphemes and functional morphemes belong it. Root is the base form of a word that can not be further analyzed without total loss of identity. Affix refers to the morpheme which can only be used to add to other morphemes. It falls into prefix, suffix and infix. Stem: any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which an inflectional affix can be added.
On the other hand, some morphemes can not stand alone are called bound morphemes, including derivational morphemes and inflectional morphemes. The most important ways of word formation are compounding and derivation, other ways of word formation are conversion, backformation, clipping, blending, acronym and initialism.
Morphs and allomorphs
Morphs are the smallest meaningful phonetic segments of an utterance on the level of parole.Or rather they are the phonological (spoken) or orthographic (written) forms which realize morphemes. Some morphemes are realized by more than one morphs, the morphs of the same morpheme are called allomorphs.
(3) syntax
Another important part of linguistics which is the study of the rules and principles of the formation of sentences, One of the essential approaches is prescriptive, The prescriptive approach is the way of studying the sentence structure by laying down rules for the correct or proper use of language mainly. This approach can be understood to teach people how to speech and write. The other is descriptive approach, leading people to research and study ,which is the main way of this approach. The descriptive approach to describe the regular structure of the language as it is used objectively, not according to the “correct rules”. And linguists divided it into structural analysis and immediate constituent analysis.
Theme: refers to that which is known or at least obvious in the given situation and from which the speaker proceeds.
Rheme: What the speaker states about, or in regard to, the starting point of the utterance.
Besides, we have learned constituent structure grammar, transformational grammar and systemic functional grammar.
Constituent structure is to analyze sentences using only the ideal of constituency, which reveals a hierarchy of structural levels.
Transformational grammar holds that syntax consists of two parts: phrase structure rules and transformational rules. So a construction can be analyzed into phrase structure components. Deep structure refers to the abstract representation of syntactic properties of a construction. Surface structure refers to the final stage in the syntactic derivation of a construction, which people actually produces and receives.
Systemic functional grammar aims to explain the internal relations in language as a system network, this network consists of subsystems from which the users make choices.
Deational function: Language servers for the expression of ‘content’: that is, of the speaker’s experience of the real world, including the inner world of his own consciousness
Interpersonal function: Language servers to establish and maintain social relations: for the expression of itself, and also for getting things done, by means of the interaction between one person and another.
Textual function: Language has to provide for making links with itself and with features of the situation in which it is used.
As a matter of fact, I can not understand these theories very well, and just can catch some points. The main purpose of these theories is to help us analyse the sentences from many perspectives by many ways. Tit is very useful for English learners to analyse the constituent of the sentences. We can take the most advantage of these theories and apply them to our reading comprehension and reading, and then we can understand the meaning of the sentences better.
(4) semantics
Semantics, in a short, refers to the meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In other words, semantic is the meaning of language, and is also the context expressed by language forms. Semantic has the closed relationship with objective world, subjective world and language world.
Property of semantic: Semantic objectivity, because the origin of semantic comes from the objective world. Semantic subjectivity, the cognitive of the objective things can not equal objective things themselves but belongs to subjective world. Generality of the semantic, the meaning of the words generalize the common features of each specific objects. Specificity of semantic, during the communication, semantic is specific. The stability of semantic, Semantic should be stable in order to make sure that the communication can be developed smoothly. The change of semantic, because every thing is developing , in order to achieve the effect of communication we should change the semantic.
Approaches to meaning: the meaning of an expressions what it refers to, or names, is called referential theory or naming theory. Mental representational theory refers to the meaning is a concept or an image in speaker’s mind. Use theory claims that the meaning is its use in language activities. The truth-conditional theory says that the meaning of an expression equals its contribution to the truth-conditions. Behaviorist theory holds that meaning of an expression is either the stimulus that evoke it or the response that it evokes it or the combination of both.
According to linguists, in order to introduce the relationships of reference, symbol and referent, they designed semantic triangle which can be drawn in a tree diagram. The key point of this diagram is that people do not actually try to see the image of something in their eye every time they come across a linguistic symbol. Contextualism is another view, in my opinion, we should choose the meaning of sentences or context according to the detail language circumstances.
To study semantic, of course, we can not lack of the study of lexical meaning. Lexical meaning also has several types: conceptual meaning, reflective meaning, connotative meaning and thematic meaning. In my opinion, there are many other meanings such as: image meaning, cultural meaning and stylistic meaning.
Conceptual meaning is that people’s general understanding for the distinctive features of object. Connotative meaning refers to that meaning extends from the main meaning of the words. Thematic meaning is mainly a matter of choice between alternative grammatical constructions. Collocative meaning is that the associations a word gets because of the meanings of words which tend to occur in its linguistic context. Affective/emotive meaning what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker. Reflective meaning—what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression. Social meaning—what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use. Image meaning is to use some meaning of the words to produce some imagine about Visual and auditory. Cultural meaning is that some meaning of the words refer to the history or background of social or nation. The style of semantic refers to the style when we write papers.
We can develop our ability if we can master these well. These are various semantic relationships between words such as homonymy, polysemy, homophony, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and meronymy.
