语言学导论 全套英文教案.doc

1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 What is linguistics? 1.1.1 Definition Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. It tries to answer the basic questions What is language? and How does language work? It probes into various problems related to language such as What do all languages have in common?, What range of variation is found among languages?, What makes language change?, To what extent are social class differences reflected in language?, How does a child acquire his mother tongue?, and many others. Linguistics studies not any particular language, e.g. English, Chinese, Arabic, and Latin, but it studies languages in general. It is a scientific study because it is based on the systematic investigation of linguistic data, conducted with reference to some general theory of language structure. In order to discover the nature and rules of the underlying language system, what the linguist has to do first is to collect and observe language facts, which are found to display some similarities, and generalizations are made about them; then he formulates some hypotheses about the language structure. But the hypotheses thus formed have to be checked repeatedly against the observed facts to fully prove their validity. In linguistics, as in any other discipline, data and theory stand in a dialectical complementation; that is, a theory without the support of data can hardly claim validity, and data without being explained by some theory remain a muddled mass of things. 1.1.2 The scope of linguistics The study of language as a whole is often called general linguistics. This deals with the basic concepts, theories, descriptions, models and methods applicable in any linguistic study, in contrast to those branches of study which relate linguistics to the research of other areas. Language is a complicated entity with multiple layers and facets, so it is hardly possible for the linguists to deal with it all at once. They have to concentrate on one aspect of