语言学必考名词解释

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1. Langue: refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the
members of a speech community
Langue: the linguistic competence of the speaker.

2. Design feature: are features that define our human languages, such as
arbitrariness, duality, creativity, displacement, cultural
transmission, etc.

3. Synchronic: a kind of description which takes a fixed instant (usually,
but not necessarily, the present), as its point of observation. Most
grammars are of this kind
4. Arbitrariness: one design feature of human language, which refers to
the face that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural
relationship to their meaning.

5. Duality: one design feature of human language, which refers to the
property of having two levels of are composed of elements of the
secondary. Level and each of the two levels has its own principles of
organization.

6. Displacement: one design feature of human language, which means human
language enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts
which are not present c in time and space, at the moment of
communication.

7. Competence: language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of
rules.

8. Prescriptive: the study of a language is carried through the course
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of its history.
9. Prescriptive: a kind of linguistic study in which things are prescribed
how ought to be, . laying down rules for language use.
10. Phoneme: the abstract element of sound, identified as being
distinctive in a particular language.
11. Assimilation: the change of a sound as a result of the influence of
an adjacent sound, which is more specifically
called.”contact”or”contiguous”assimilation.

12. Connotation: a term in a contrast with denotation, meaning the
properties of the entity a word denotes.
13. Reference: the use of language to express a proposition, meaning the
properties of the entity a word denotes.
Reference: the use of language to express a proposition,. to talk about
things in context.
14. Sense: the literal meaning of a word or an expression, independent
of situational context.
15. Linguistic determinism: one of the two points in Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, . language determines thought.

16. Parole: the actual phenomena or data of linguistics (utterances).


17. Interlinguage:the type of language constructed by second or foreign
language learners who are still in the process of learning a language,
language system between the target language and the learner’s native
language.
18. Transfer: the influence of mother tongue upon the second language.
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When structures of the two languages are similar, we can get positive
transfer of facilitation; when the two languages are different in
structures, negative transfer of inference occurs and results in
errors.

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

20. Hyponymy: a relation between tow words, in which the meaning of one
word (the superordinate) is included in the meaning of another word(the
hyponym)

21. Allophone: any of the different forms of a phoneme (eg. is an
allophone of tin English. When toccurs in words like step, it is
unaspirated.Bothand are allophones of the phonemet.
22. Error analysis: is the process of determining the incidence, nature,
cause and consequence of unsuccessful language

23. Utterance: spoken word, statement, or vocal sound action of saying
or expressing something aloud the simple utterance of a few platitudes
uninterrupted chain of spoken or written language
24. Interference: a process more commonly known as negative transfer,
which occurs when an L1 patter is different from the counterpart
pattern of the target language.
25. Predication analysis: is a way to analyze the meaning of sentences.
A sentence, composed of a subject and predicate, is a basic unit for
meaning analysis is called predication, which is the abstraction of
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the meaning of a sentence
26. Cohesion: refers to the way in which text “hang together”; to the
resources within language that help relate ideas and information and
make links between different parts of a text
27. Polysemy: words have two or more than two senses

28. Speech act: refers to an action performed by the use of an utterance.

29. Linguistics: generally, it is defined as the scientific study of the
language

30. Phonetics: is the study of production of speech sounds

31. Semantics: is generally defined as the study of the meaning of
linguistic units. to be more specific, the meaning with which
linguistists are concerned is defined as linguistic semantics
语言学考试范围
1. Does the traffic light have duality Explain the reasons.
2. IC analyzes the sentence structure with brackets or a tree
diagram.
Lovely Jane ran away.

3. What are Leech’s seven types of meaning
Conceptual meaning. Connotative meaning. Social
meaning.
Affective meaning. Reflected meaning. Collocative
meaning.
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Thematic meaning
4. What are the differences between modern linguistics and
traditional grammar
5. Explain surface structure and deep structure.
6. What are the major views concerning the study of meaning
7. What are the four maxims of the CP
8. Analyze the structure of a syllable. Give one example to
illustrate.
9. Explain the two terms “sense” and “reference” and what
is their relationship
10.



What are the major views concerning the study of meaning
What are the major views concerning the study of meaning
(1) The naming theory命名论----
One of the oldest notions converning meanings, and also a very
primitive one, was the naming theory proposed by the ancient
Greek scholar Plato. According to this theory, the linguistic
What are the differences between errors and mistakes
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forms or symbols, in other words, the words used in a language
are taken to be labels of the objects they stand for. So words
are just names or label for things.命名论是最原始的语义理论，
该理论是把词看作所指事物的名称。
The limitations of the naming theory:
First of all, the naming theory seems applicable to nouns only.
Nouns can be considered as names or labels, but verbs,
adjectives, and adverbs, such as “think” “hard”
“slowly” are definitely not labels of objects.
b. Besides, within the category of nouns, there are nouns which
denote things that do not exist in the real world at all such
as “ghost” “dragon” “unicorn” and also nouns that do not
denote concrete things, but abstract notions such as “joy”
“impulse”.命名论只能 适用于名词，对于动词、形容词、副词就无
法解释了。即使是在爱名词范围内也无法解释世界上本不存在 的东
西，例如“ghost” “dragon” “unicorn”之类和一些抽象的概念，
例如“高兴joy”“冲动impulse”等。
(2) the conceptualist view 意念论------
The conceptualist view holds that there is no direct link
between a linguistic form and what it refers to ., between
language and the real world); rather, in the interpretation of
meaning they are linked through the mediation of concepts in
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the mind.意念论认为词汇与该词汇所指的事物之间的关系不是直接
的，而是间接的， 是靠人脑中的意念来连接的。词汇是通过意念来指
称事物，意念便是词汇的意义。

The conceptualist view is best illustrated by the classic
semantic triangle or triangle of significance suggested by
Odgen and Richards.意 念论可由著名的语义三角形来表述。语义三
角形是论述和解释语义现象的一种经典理论。Semanti c triangle
Proposed by Ogden & Richards in their “The Meaning of Meaning”.
They saw the relationship between the word and the thing it
refers to is not direct. It’s mediated by concept. thought or
reference symbol referent
In this diagram, the symbol or form refers to linguistic
elements (words, phrases), the referent refers to the things
in the real world, and thought or reference refers to
“concept”.
. The dog over there looks unfriendly.
The word “dog” is directly associated with a certain concept
in our mind, . what a “dog” is like, but it is not directly
linked to the referent (the particular dog) in this particular
case. Thus, the symbol of a word signifies thing by virtue of
the concept associated with the form of the word in the mind
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of the speaker of a language, and the concept looked at from
this point of view is the meaning of the word.
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.语义三角形最大的问题在于 词
语与所指事物没有必然的联系。同一个事物可能或者可以用不同的词
来表示。
(3) contextualism 语境论
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”. 语境论认为语言的意义离不开使用语言
的语境，语义存在与语境之中。语义不是抽 象的，它是由语境所决定
的。
Every utterance occurs in a particular spatial-temporal
situation, as the following factors are related to the
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situational context:它的前提是假设人们可以从语境中推知词义
的意义，四个核心因素：
(1) the speaker and the hearer; 讲话人和听话人
(2) the actions they are performing at the time; 当时双方在
做的事情
(3) various external objects and events; 其他外在的事件或事
物
(4) Deictic features. 指示成分 （语境中的代词）
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. Fox example: the meaning
of the word “black” differ in the two collocations of “black
hair” and “black coffee”
(4) Behaviorism 行为主义论
The behaviorism view is illustrated by Bloomfield.
Behaviorism refers to the attempt to define the meaning of a
language form as the “situation in which the speaker utters
it and the response it calls forth in the hearer”. Behaviorism
somewhat close to contextualism emphasizes on the
psychological response.行为主义论和语境论的相似之处，行为主
义 论也把语义放到语境中去研究，但它更注重人的心理活动，认为语
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言的意义存在于语言使用者在交际过程中对所接受的话语的反应。


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