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 somethingimperative sentences
Informative: tell what the speaker believes, give information about facts,
reason things out Declarative sentences
Interrogative: get information from othersquestions
Expressive: reveal something about the feelings and attitudes of the
speakerevaluate, appraise and assert the speakers attitude
Performative: do things, perform actionsI 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 writingprimacy of speech over writing in linguistic analysis
(2)Synchronic and diachronicpriority 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 langueconcrete 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 users 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 languagemany 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 potentialsomething available for the speaker to
select from// competencea 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

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Process of speaking
(1)Semantic encoding. (2)Grammatical
encoding. (3)Phonological encoding. (48)Sending, transmission, receiving. (911)Phonological, Grammatical, Semantic
decoding

4. Major branches of linguistics

(1)Semantics: the study of the semantic codemeaning
(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 codegrammar
(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.

5. Use of linguisticsapplied 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 linguisticslinguistics 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 systemsdistinctive sounds
and their patternsphoneme
2. Non-distinctive sounds: members of the same phonemes
allophoneslet, play, tell
3. Phonologylanguage specific// phoneticsuniversal
4. Minimal pair: word forms which differ from each other
only by one sound, pen/pin//pin//ping
5. Free variation: that boy/thatthe 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 four grammatical
functions: indicate different sentence type; different pitch
indicates connotative meaning(I cant eat anything
fall/fall-rise); different structure (John didnt come because
of MaryJohn came, but it had nothing to do with Mary/
John didnt 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 formedtwo 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 wordsnoun 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 meaningphoneme/gouz/ for third-person

singular
7. Free morpheme: form a word by itselfbed, 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 : morpheme or combination of morphemefriends/
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 wordfunction wordform word(to be, preposition,
articles, possessives, demonstratives, qualifiers, conjunctions,
intensifiers, auxiliary verbs, pronouns)// Lexical wordcarry semantic
content
5. Closed-class word (articles, pron, prep, conj)// open class(n, v, adj,
adv)

6. Idiomsemantically and often syntactically

restricted(meaning unpredictable, special syntactical
restrictions)
7. Collocation: habitual co-occurrences of individual
lexical itemsFeatures(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 substitutabilityAssociative 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 wordsThe 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
(stimulusresponse), functionalism(meaning explained in use)
3. Kinds of meaning
traditional approachlexical meaning/ grammatical meaning
functional approachconceptual meaning (denotative), associative
meaning (connotative), social meaning, affective meaning, reflected
meaning, collocative meaning, thematic meaningwoman (female, human,
adult)(fragile, emotional)(register)(personal emotion)(The Comforter-comfort)(pretty handsome)(Mr. Smith donated the moneyThe money
was donated by Mr. Smith)
pragmatic approach (sentence meaning/utterance meaningimplicature)

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/studentpupil/ of the eye// flourflower)
5. Sense relations between sentences: entailment( );
presupposition(The girl he married //He married a girl); implicature;
sysnonymous; inconsistent; anomalous
6. Semantic analysis: componential analysis; predication analysis
; relational analysis (father); logical elements

VIII. Language change

A. Lexical change
1. Invention: Kodak
2. Compounding: moonwalk, earthrise , 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 nadderan adder, a napronan apron
7. Backformation: editoredit, peddlerpeddle, enthusiasmenthuse
8. Analogical creation: workwrought(old)worked
9. Borrowing: atom(Greek), tsunami(Japanese), wok(Chinese )

B. Grammatical change
1. Morphological change: didstdid, hathhas, comethcomes
2. Syntactical change: (15th c)more gladder, more lower// (Shakespeare)He saw you
not./ I love thee not
C. Semantic change
1. Broadening: offendstrike againstcreate anger// birdyoung birdany kind
of bird
2. Narrowing: campopen fieldplace// cattlepersonal propertyanimals// girl
young person of either sexyoung woman
3. Meaning shift: lustpleasuresexual craving// sillyhappy(O.E)nave(M.E)
4. Class shift: engineera person trained in a branch of engineering(n)to act as
an engineer
5. Folk etymology: change due to incorrect popular notion: sparrowgrass
asparagus(Greek) wiz wizard
D. Orthographic 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 thingsI hereby name
this ship Red Flag, I promise to be here at nine oclock, I apologize
performative sentencesThree kinds of acts are performed at the same time
(1)Locutionary act : the utterance of a sentence with determinate
sense and reference; (2)Illocutionary act : the making of a
statement, offer, promise, etc, in uttering a sentence; (3)Perlocutionary act
: the bringing about of effects on the audience by means of uttering the
sentence, such effects being special to the circumstances of utterance.Its
cold heresaying(1)request(2)shutting the window(3)

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Types of illocutionary acts: (1)Assertives: truth

of somethingI think the film is moving.
(2)Directives: get the hearer to do somethingI
order you to leave right now. (3)Commisives:
some future actionIf you do that again, Ill 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 anotherLets 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 utteranceMay 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)PresequenceWhat
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
implicatureI 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 featuressound patterns// prosody
onomatopoeic effect// chiming//expectation and surprise; (2)Lexical
featurestotal 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
3. Theory of foregrounding: unusual, attractive, unconventional
(1)deviation(he sang his didnt he danced his did) (2)parallelism(overregularityTo 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