传媒学院
王淼

• Module objective: The module is an introduction to linguistics. It aims to introduce some rudimentary knowledge of language and general linguistics to non
English major students so as to help them have a general idea about the branches of linguistics and the major schools in the development of language theories.

• The main topics are as follows: the nature of language; the branches, purposes, domain, characteristics of general linguistics; the relationship of linguistics with some other disciplines. Hopefully this course will broaden the students’ horizons and enhance their command of foreign language as well.

• 戚雨村主编 1985 《语言学引论》，上
海外语教育出版社。
伍铁平主编 1993 《普通语言学概要》，
高等教育出版社。
王德春 1997 《语言学概论》，上海外语
教育出版社。
胡壮麟主编 2001 《语言学教程》，北京
大学出版社。
戴炜栋 , 何兆熊主编 2002 《新编简明英语
语言学教程》，上海外语教育出版社。

• 1.1 Why linguistics?
• 1.2
The nature of language
• Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.
• 1.3 Design features ： It refers to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication.
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• 1.3. 1 Arbitrariness
1. 3. 2 Duality
1. 3. 3 Productivity
1. 3. 4 Displacement
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• 1. 3. 5 Cultural transmission
1. 3. 6 Interchangeability
• 1.4 Seven Functions of language: phatic, directive, informative, interrogative, expressive, evocative and performative

• 2. 1 What is linguistics
• It is the scientific study of language.
• 2.2 Basic distinctions in linguistics
• 2.2.1 Speech and writing
• 2.2.2 Descriptive or prescriptive linguistic study
• 2.2.3 Synchronic and diachronic studies
• 2. 2.4 Langue and parole
• 2. 2.5 Competence and performance
• 2.3
Linguistics potential and actual linguistic behavior

• The study of language as a whole is often called general linguistics.
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• Major branches of general linguistics:
• Phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics
• Phonetics studies the characteristics of speech sounds and provides methods for their description, classification and transcription.
• The study of phonetics can be discussed from three angles.

• Articulatory phonetics: the study of the speech organs and how they move to produce speech sound.
• Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of speech sound.
• Auditory phonetics: the study of the perception of sounds by the human ear.
• Phonology: is the branch of linguistics which studies the sound patterns of languages.
• Morphology: is the branch of linguistics which studies the form of words.
• Syntax: is the branch of linguistics which studies the rules governing the combination of words into sentences.
• Semantics: is the branch of linguistics which studies the meaning of language.

• Pragmatics: is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.

• Minimal pair: words forms differ from each other only by one sound. For example, “ring” and “spring”.
• Contrastive distribution: sounds should be assigned to different phonemes, which are transcribed as /p/, /b/, /j/,
/e/, /n/.
• Free variation: two sounds occurring in the same environment do not contrast, in other words, the substitution of one for the other does not produce a different word form, but merely a different pronunciation of the same word. Examples are the plosives in English, they may not be exploded when they occurring before another plosive or a nasal.

• Complementary distribution: when two sounds never occur in the same environment, they are said to be in complementary distribution. For instance, the aspirated plosives never occur after /s/, and the unaspirated ones never occur initially.
• Syllable: consists of three parts: the onset, the peak and the coda.
• Suprasegmental features: stress, length, pitch. Stress, length and pitch are collectively known as intonation.
• Stress consists of word stress and sentence stress.
• Intonation is tied to sentences rather than words.

• Morphology is divided into two fields: the study of inflections (inflectional morphology) and of word-formation (lexical or derivational morphology).
• inflection: is variation in the form of a word, typically by means of an affix, that expresses a grammatical contrast which is obligatory for the stem’s word class in some given grammatical context.

• Word-formation: is the creation of a new word. It can be classified into the compositional type (compound) and the derivational type.
• morpheme: is the smallest unit cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical.
• A single phoneme may represent a single morpheme, but they are not identical.
• Allomorph: is a linguistics term for a variant form of a morpheme.
The concept occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound
(phonologically) without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension of variations in sound for a specific morpheme.
• Free morpheme: a morpheme that may constitute a word (free form) by itself.

• Bound morpheme: a morpheme that may appear with themselves.
• Root: the basic form of a word which cannot be further analysed without total loss of identity. It is the part of the word left when all the affixes are removed. “nation” in “internationalism”
• Free root morphemes: can stand alone by themselves.

• Affix: a morpheme that is attached to a stem to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed . They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes.
• Stem: the base part of a word not including inflectional morphemes

• Conceptualism: linguistic sign is to consist of a signifier and signified.
Semantic triangle: Ogden and Richards
(1923)
Contextualism: the situational context and the linguistic context
Behaviorism: the meaning of a language form is the situation in which the speaker utters it and the responses it calls forth in the hearer. (Bloomfield, 1933)

• Types of meaning
• 1. The traditional approach
• Fries (1952) distinguished lexical meaning and structural meaning.
• 2. The functional approach
• Leech (1981)categorizes seven kinds of meaning, five of which are

• 3. The pragmatic approach
• Palmer (1976) and Lyons (1977) suggested that sentence meaning and utterance meaning are different. Sentence meaning can be predicted from the grammatical and lexical features of the sentence, however, utterance meaning includes all the various types of meaning that are not directly related to them.

• Reference: deals the relationship between the linguistic elements, such as words, sentences, etc., and the non-linguistic world of experience.
• Sense relates to the complex system of relationships that hold between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly words); it is concerned only with intra-linguistic relations.
• Synonymy means sameness or close similarity of meaning. Real synonyms are rare.

• Words that are opposite in meaning are antonyms.
• Complementarity is a special case of incompatibility holding over two-term sets.
It is characteristic of such pairs of lexical items that the denial of the one implies the assertion of the other and the assertion of one implies the denial of the other. E.g.,
“male” and “female”, “dead” and “alive”.

• Relational opposites refer to pairs of words exhibit the reversal of a relationship between items. e.g., “buy” and
“sell”, “teacher” and “student”.
• Hyponymy is a word or phrase whose semantic range is included within that of another word. For example, scarlet , vermilion , carmine , and crimson are all
Hyponyms of red (their superordinate), which is, in turn, a hyponym of color .
• If a word has a set of different but related meanings, the case is polysemy.
• Homonymy is different from polysemy.

• Pragmatics: the study of language in use and linguistic communication. In a sense, pragmatics studies how contextual features determine or influence the interpretation of utterances.

• Speech act theory is proposed by J. Austin in 1962 and J.
Searle in 1969. It is mainly about the view that language is not only used to inform or to describe things, it is often used to "do things", to perform acts.
• Locutionary act: the utterance of a sentence with determinate sense and reference
• Illocutionary act: the making of a statement, offer, promise, etc. in uttering a sentence, by virtue of the conventional force associated with it
• Perlocutionary act: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the sentence, such effects being special to the circumstanvces of utterance.

• Types of illocutionary acts:
• 1. assertives
• 2. directives
• 3. commissives
• 4. expressives
• 5. declaratives

• The cooperative principle:1. The maxim of quality
• 1) do not say what you believe to be false
• 2) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence
• 2 .The maxim of quantity
• 1) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange
• 2) do not make your contribution more informative than is required
• 3. The maxim of relevant
• Make your contribution relevant
• 4 .The maxim of manner
• 1) avoid obscurity
• 2) avoid ambiguity
• 3) be brief
• 4) be orderly

• Dialect: refers to the kind of language which shows variation in space.
• regional dialect
• temporal dialect
• social dialect
• sex
• age
• race
• class

• Standard dialect: a part of a language traditionally equated with the language itself, and seen as the product of such
‘refining’ forces as use at a royal court, by the middle classes, and in LITERATURE,
PRINTING, publishing, and education.
• Ideolect: the language variety of individual users.

• Register: refers to the patterns of communication used in particular settings and for specific purposes. Register is often an indicator of the formality or official nature of an occasion, or a mark of authority.
• Field of discourse:
• Mode of discourse:
• Tenor of discourse:

• 1. Comparative and historical linguistics: is the comparative study of various languages with a view to investigating their historical relationships, and the rules that govern the changes that have occurred in the historical development of these languages, and finally to reconstructing the protolanguage from which these languages were derived.

• 2. Grimm’s Law: one can make a distinction of Germanic languages and
Indo-European languages, and Highland
German and Lowland German as well.

• 3. Linguistic typology , as a branch of both synchronic linguistics, is the typological classification of languages through comparison on the basis of any significant general features of form, structure or meaning shared by a group of languages.

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis : one ‘s thinking is completely determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language. And the categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other systems.