General Linguistics
I. The Nature of Language
1. Definition and characteristics
(1)Definition: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which the members of
a speech community communicate, interact, and transmit their culture
(2)Characteristics
arbitrariness
duality: sound/ meaning
productivity: (never heard before
displacement: refer to things not present
cultural transmission
interchangeability: any human being can be both producer and receiver
(3)Functions
Phatic: establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact--greetings, comments on weather.
Directive:: get hearer to do something—imperative sentences
Informative: tell what the speaker believes, give information about facts, reason things out—
Declarative sentences
Interrogative: get information from others—questions
Expressive: reveal something about the feelings and attitudes of the speaker—evaluate, appraise
and assert the speaker’s attitude
Performative: do things, perform actions—“I declare the meeting open”, “I declare war…”
(4)Origin of language: the divine-origin theory; the invention theory; the evolutionary theory
2. Some basic distinctions in linguistics
(1)Speech and writing—primacy of speech over writing in linguistic analysis
(2)Synchronic and diachronic—priority of synchronic
(3)Langue and parole(by Swiss linguist F. de Saussure1857-1913)
Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech
community— a set of conventions, generalized rules, abstract, not actually spoken by anyone,
relatively stable and systematic.
Parole refers to the actualized language, or realization of langue—concrete use of conventions or
application of rules, specific, naturally occurring event, subject to personal and situational
constraints.
(4)Competence and performance(Noam Chomsky 1950s)
Competence: ideal language user’s knowledge of the rule of his language
Performance: actual realization of this knowledge in utterances
(5)Linguistic potential and actual linguistic behavior(English linguist M. A. K. Halliday, 1960s)—
functional point of view, more concerned with what speakers do with language—many things,
many topics—what is actually said is what is selected from among the many possibilities
Linguistic potential: similar to langue and competence// langue –social property/ linguistic
potential—something available for the speaker to select from// competence—a form of “knowing”
/linguistic potential—a set of possibilities for “doing”// The competence and performance
distinction is one between what a person “knows” and what he “does”/ the linguistic potential and
actual linguistic behavior distinction is one between what a person “can do” and what a person
“does”.
Actual linguistic behavior, similar to parole and performance
3. Process of speaking
(1)Semantic encoding. (2)Grammatical encoding. (3)Phonological encoding. (4-8)Sending,
transmission, receiving. (9-11)Phonological, Grammatical, Semantic decoding
4. Major branches of linguistics
(1)Semantics: the study of the semantic code—meaning
(2)Lexicology: the study of the total stock of morphemes.(lexicography: the art of making
dictionaries of various sort)—words
(3)Syntax: the study of the grammatical code—grammar
(4)Phonology (AmE phonemics): the study of the phonological code—phoneme
(5)Articulatory phonetics: the study of the movements of the vocal organs in producing the sounds
of speech.// Acoustic phonetics: the study of the vibrations of air molecules.// Auditory phonetics:
the study of the way the sounds are perceived by the human ear.
(6) Morphology: study of the structure and form of words in language or a language, including
inflection, derivation, and the formation of compounds.
5. Use of linguistics—applied linguistics
(1)Linguistic geography: study of the way in which a language varies through geographical space.
(2)Socioliguistics: study of the variations in linguistic usage of different social classes.
(3)Synchronic linguistics: study of a given language at a given period of time.
(4)Diachronic linguistics: study of language change through time.--Two branches: Historical
linguistics: study of the historical development of a language.//Comparative linguistics: study of
the historical relationships among languages and attempts to group them into families,
subfamilies.
(5)Psycholinguistics: study of how language if acquired, understood and produced.
(6)Anthropological linguistics: study of how language fits into the larger context of sociocultural
behavior and how grammar is a part of culture.
(7)Neurolinguistics: study of a number of issues related to the neurological basis of language: the
brain's anatomy, the species specificity of language and the relationship between language and
consciousness.
(8)Stylistic linguistics—linguistics and literature
(9)Other branches: language teaching, machine translation, computer linguistics(computational
linguistics, mathematical linguistics, statistical linguistics, mechanolinguistics)
II. Phonetics
1. Vocal organs
2. Consonants: places of articulation; manners of articulation (obstruction)—classification
3. Vowels: height of tongue raising (high, mid, low); position of the highest part of tongue (front,
central, back); degree of lip rounding (rounded, unrounded)—classification
Additional factors: oral or nasal; long or short; pure or gliding
4. Phonetic transcription: method of writing down speech sounds in a systematic and consistent
way: International Phonetic Alphabet
5. Phoneme: sound capable of distinguishing one word from another: get/net, have/ gave
III. Phonology
1. Phonology: study of sound systems—distinctive sounds and their patterns—phoneme
2. Non-distinctive sounds: members of the same phonemes—allophones—“let, play, tell”
3. Phonology—language specific// phonetics—universal
4. Minimal pair: word forms which differ from each other only by one sound, pen/pin//pin//ping
5. Free variation: that boy/that—the same phoneme
6. Complementary distribution: two sounds never occur in the same environment, /h/--/g/
7. Distinctive features: phonological features of a phoneme which distinguish one phoneme from
another
8. Intonation: stress, length, pitch 音高—four grammatical functions: indicate different sentence
type; different pitch indicates connotative meaning(I can’t eat anything—fall/fall-rise); different
structure (John didn’t come because of Mary—John came, but it had nothing to do with Mary/
John didn’t come, because Mary); give prominence to one part of a sentence(John likes fish.)
IV. Morphology
1. Morphology: the internal structure of words and rules by which words are formed—two
branches: inflections// word-formation
2. Inflection: addition of affixes such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not
change the grammatical class of the stems
3. Word-formation: compound//derivation
4. Compound: relationships between lexical words—noun compounds (daybreak); verb
compounds(brainwash); adjective compounds (carefree); preposition compounds (into/
throughout)
5. Derivation: relationships between stems and affixes (word class changed// word class
unchanged)
6. Morpheme: minimal unit of meaning—phoneme/gouz/ for third-person singular
7. Free morpheme: form a word by itself—bed, tree
8. Bound morpheme: with at least one other morpheme, ‘-al’ in ‘national’
9. Root: polymorphemic words other than compounds may divide into roots and affixes
10. Free root morpheme (most, stand by themselves as words)—bound root morpheme (relatively
few, such as ‘-ceive’ in ‘receive’, ‘perceive’, ‘conceive’)
11. Stem 词干: morpheme or combination of morpheme—friends/ friendships
12. Affix: prefix (mini-), suffix (-tion), infix (foot/ feet)—inflectional (walked) & derivational
(sleepy)
V. Lexicon
1. Lexicon: similar to vocabulary, deal with the analysis and creation of words, idioms, collocation
2. Word: grammatical unit(sentence, clause, word group, word, morpheme); most stable of all
linguistic units; smallest unit which can constitute a complete sentence
3. Variable words (changeable)// invariable words(unchangeable)
4. Grammatical word—function word—form word(to be, preposition, articles, possessives,
demonstratives, qualifiers, conjunctions, intensifiers, auxiliary verbs, pronouns)// Lexical
word—carry semantic content
5. Closed-class word (articles, pron, prep, conj)// open class(n, v, adj, adv)
6. Idiom—semantically and often syntactically restricted(meaning unpredictable, special
syntactical restrictions)
7. Collocation: habitual co-occurrences of individual lexical items—Features(1) Mutual
expectancy, (2)Fixed syntactical-lexical relations (3)Inexplicability
VI. Syntax
1. Syntax: study of rules governing the ways to form sentences, or the interrelationships between
elements in sentence structures
2. Syntactical relations(1)Positional relation(word order)—Syntagmatic Relations (2)Relation of
substitutability—Associative relations (de Saussure)// Paradigmatic Relations (Hjemslev)
(3)Relation of co-occurrence
3. Immediate constituent: small units of constructing a sentence, such as single words, groups of
words—The boy ate the apple. (S=NP+VP)
4. Coordinate and subordinate constructions
5. Syntactic function: subject, predicate, object…
6. Category: number, gender, case, concord, government
7. Extension of sentence: conjoining//embedding// recursive// Hypotactic/Paratactic
8. Cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis, logical connection, lexical collocation
VII. Semantics
1. Semantics: study of meaning
2. Meaning: conceptualism(symbol, referent, thought), mechanism, contextualism (linguistic
context/ situational context), behaviorism(stimulus—response), functionalism(meaning
explained in use)
3. Kinds of meaning: traditional approach—lexical meaning/ grammatical meaning// functional
approach—conceptual meaning (denotative), associative meaning (connotative), social meaning,
affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, thematic meaning—woman (female,
human, adult)(fragile, emotional)(register)(personal emotion)(The Comforter--comfort)(pretty
—handsome)(Mr. Smith donated the money—The money was donated by Mr.
Smith)—pragmatic approach (sentence meaning/utterance meaning—implicature)
4. Sense relationships of words: synonymy (sameness or close similarity of meaning); antonymy
(oppositeness of meaning); complementarity (single/married); gradability (hot/warm/cool/cold);
relational opposites (buy/sell); hyponymy (meaning inclusion—flower/rose); polysemy(more
than one meaning); homonymy(pupil/student—pupil/ of the eye// flour—flower)
5. Sense relations between sentences: entailment(蕴涵); presupposition(The girl he married //He
married a girl); implicature; sysnonymous; inconsistent; anomalous 反常
6. Semantic analysis: componential analysis; predication analysis 述谓分析; relational analysis
(father); logical elements
VIII. Language change
A. Lexical change
1. Invention: Kodak
2. Compounding: moonwalk, earthrise 地球从月球的地平线上升起, black hole
3. Blending: smog=smoke+fog, transistor=transfer+resister
4. Abbreviation: math=mathematics, prof=professor, telly=television
5. Acronym: WB(World Bank), PLO(Palestine Liberation Organization)
6. Metanalysis: a nadder—an adder, a napron—an apron
7. Backformation: editor—edit, peddler—peddle, enthusiasm—enthuse 热心
8. Analogical creation: work—wrought(old)—worked
9. Borrowing: atom(Greek), tsunami(Japanese), wok(Chinese 锅)
B. Grammatical change
1. Morphological change: didst—did, hath—has, cometh—comes
2. Syntactical change: (15th c)more gladder, more lower// (Shakespeare)He saw you not./ I love
thee not
C. Semantic change
1. Broadening: offend—strike against—create anger// bird—young bird—any kind of bird
2. Narrowing: camp—open field—place// cattle—personal property—animals// girl—young
person of either sex—young woman
3. Meaning shift: lust—pleasure—sexual craving// silly—happy(O.E)—naïve(M.E)
4. Class shift: engineer—a person trained in a branch of engineering(n)—to act as an engineer
5. Folk etymology: change due to incorrect popular notion: sparrowgrass 芦笋—asparagus(Greek)
芦笋 wiz 奇才—wizard 奇才
D. Orthographic 拼写 change
IX. Pragmatics
1. Pragmatics: study of language in use and linguistic communication; meaning that is not
accounted for by semantics
2. Context and meaning: John is like a fish.(swim well// drink a lot of wine// as cold as fish)
3. Speech act theory(J. Austin in 1962, J. Searle in 1969): language used not only to inform and
describe things, often used to “do things”—“I hereby name this ship Red Flag”, “I promise to
be here at nine o’clock, “I apologize”—performative sentences—Three kinds of acts are
performed at the same time (1)Locutionary act 言中行为: the utterance of a sentence with
determinate sense and reference; (2)Illocutionary act 言外行为: the making of a statement, offer,
promise, etc, in uttering a sentence; (3)Perlocutionary act 言后行为: the bringing about of
effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the
circumstances of utterance.—“It’s cold here”—saying(1)—request(2)—shutting the window(3)
4. Types of illocutionary acts: (1)Assertives: truth of something—I think the film is moving.
(2)Directives: get the hearer to do something—I order you to leave right now. (3)Commisives:
some future action—If you do that again, I’ll beat you to death. (4)Declarations: bringing about
immediate change in the existing state of things
5. Indirect speech act: perform one illocutionary act indirectly by performing another—Let’s go to
the movies tonight/ I have to study for an exam.
6. Conversational analysis(1) Adjacency pair: one type of utterance is typically followed by a
special type of utterance—May I have a bottle of whisky?/Are you twenty-one?/ No/ No.
(2)Preferred second parts: responses to question which are not answers but which count as
second parts, some preferred and some dispreferred. (3)Presequence—What are you doing
tonight?/ Nothing important. Why?/Come to my place for dinner, then.
7. The Cooperative principle(P. Grice): (1)Maxim of quality (2)Maxim of quantity (3)Maxim of
relevance (4)Maxim of Manner (avoid obscurity and ambiguity, be brief and orderly)
8. Conversational implicature: a kind of extra meaning not contained in the utterance. If speaker
follows or violates the maxims, he produces implicature—“I have 3 children.//I have only 3
children, not more”
X. Linguistics and literature
1. Stylistics: study of literature from a linguistic orientation. (H. D. Widdowson, 1975)
2. Linguistic analysis: (1)Phonological features—sound patterns// prosody 韵律学—onomatopoeic
effect// chiming//expectation and surprise; (2)Lexical features—total lexical choices; patterns of
lexical choices; evaluation of lexical choices; (3)Grammatical features (4)Semantic features:
redundancy, absurdity(a living death), figurative meaning, honest deception(Belinda smiled,
and all the world was gay)(5) Graphological features 笔迹
3. Theory of foregrounding: unusual, attractive, unconventional—(1)deviation(he sang his didn’t
he danced his did) (2)parallelism(over-regularity—To err is human, to forgive divine// If you
prick us, do we not bleed?/ if you tickle us, do we not laugh?/ if you poison us, do we not die?/
and if you wrong us, shall we no revenge?) (3) patterning