英语语言学介绍.pptVIP

Introduction to Linguistics Autumn 2010 Liu Xiaoling Requirements Class attendance Take notes carefully Final examination The examination will be based on the ppt slides and the textbook. At the end of the whole classes, I will let you copy this ppt material. Introduction I. Some interesting facts about language II. What is linguistics? III. Why study linguistics? IV. Distinctive features of language V. Basic attributes of language I. Some Interesting Facts About Language Number of languages: about 6,809 languages in the world (or about 4,000 ~ 8000 languages? because it’s hard to define what counts as a language), about 50% of these are dying out. Most of them do not have a written form. Ten most widely spoken languages: 1. Mandarin Chinese 2. Spanish 3. English 4. Bengali 5. Hindi/Urdu 6. Portuguese 7. Russian 8. Japanese 9. German 10. Chinese-Wu Ten Most Widely Spoken Languages According to David Crystal The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, p. 287)—mother tongue speakers 1. Chinese (Mandarin) 2. English 3. Spanish 4. Hindi 5. Arabic 6. Bengali 7. Russian 8. Portuguese 9. Japanese 10. German Reasons for the Uncertainty over Numbers of language New discoveries: new people (and therefore languages) continue to be discovered in the unexplored regions of the world (esp. in the Amazon basin, Central Africa, and New Guinea). Alive or dead language? Political decisions Economic reason Diseases others Language and dialect Language or dialect? Five types of relationship between dialect and language Type 1 community A community B e.g. British Eng. same language American Eng. Type 2 community A community B e.g. English different languages Hindi Type 3 community A community B e.g. Norwegian ? Danish Type 4 community A community B e.g. Cantonese Hakka (Chinese) ?