语言学名词解释

Define the following terms:

1. Linguistics: Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language.

2. Phonology: The study of how sounds are put together and used in communication is called phonology.

3. Syntax: The study of how morphemes and words are combined to form sentences is called syntax. .

4. Pragmatics: The study of meaning in context of use is called pragmatics.

5. Psycholinguistics: The study of language with reference to the workings of mind is called psycholinguistics.

6. Language: Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication.

7. Phonetics: The study of sounds which are used in linguistic communication is called phonetics.

8. Morphology: The study of the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words is called morphology.

9. Semantics: The study of meaning in language is called semantics.

10. Sociolinguistics: The study of language with reference to society is called sociolinguistics.

11. Applied linguistics: In a narrow sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second languages. In a broad sense, it refers to the application of linguistic findings to the solution of practical problems such as the recovery of speech ability.

12. Arbitrariness: It is one of the design features of language. It means that there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds 13. Productivity: Language is productive or

creative in that it makes possible the construction and interpretation of new signals by its users.

14. Displacement: Displacement means that language can be used to refer to things which are present or not present, real or imagined matters in the past, present, or future, or in far-away places. In other words, language can be used to refer to contexts removed from the immediate situations of the speaker

15. Duality: The duality nature of language means that language is a system, which consists of two sets of structure, or two levels, one of sounds and the other of meanings.

16. Design features: Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any animal system of communication

17. Competence: Chomsky defines competence as the ideal user's knowledge of the rules of his language,

18. Performance: performance is the actual realization of the knowledge of the rules in linguistic communication.

19. Langue : Langue refers to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community; Langue is the set of conventions and rules which language users all have to follow; Langue is relatively stable, it does not change frequently

20. Parole: Parole refers to the realization of langue in actual use; parole is the concrete use of the conventions and the application of the rules; parole varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.45. phonology: Phonology studies the system of sounds of a particular language; it aims to discover how speech sounds in a language form patterns and how these sounds are used to convey meaning in linguistic communication.

21. phoneme: The basic unit in phonology is called phoneme; it is a unit of distinctive value. But

it is an abstract unit. To be exact, a phoneme is not a sound; it is a collection of distinctive phonetic features.

22. allophone: The different phones which can represent a phoneme in different phonetic environments are called the allophones of that phoneme.

23. international phonetic alphabet: It is a standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription.

24. intonation: When pitch, stress and sound length are tied to the sentence rather than the word in isolation, they are collectively known as intonation.

25. phonetics: Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world' s languages

26. auditory phonetics: It studies the speech sounds from the hearer's point of view. It studies

how the sounds are perceived by the hear-er. 27. acoustic phonetics: It studies the speech sounds by looking at the sound waves. It studies the physical means by which speech sounds are transmitted through the air from one person to another.

528. phone : Phones can be simply defined as the speech sounds we use when speaking a language. A phone is a phonetic unit or segment. It does not necessarily distinguish meaning.

529. phonemic contrast: Phonemic contrast refers to the relation between two phonemes. If two phonemes can occur in the same environment and distinguish meaning, they are in phonemic contrast.

30. tone: Tones are pitch variations, which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.

31. minimal pair: When two different forms are identical in every way except for one sound

segment which occurs in the same place in the strings, the two words are said to form a minimal pair.

33. Morphology: Morphology is a branch of grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed.

34. inflectional morphology: The inflectional morphology studies the inflections 35. derivational morphology: Derivational morphology is the study of word- formation. 36. Morpheme: It is the smallest meaningful unit of language.

37. free morpheme: Free morphemes are the morphemes which are independent units of meaning and can be used freely all by themselves or in combination with other morphemes.

38. Bound morpheme: Bound morphemes are the morphemes which cannot be used independently but have to be combined with other morphemes, either free or bound, to form a word.