英语专业-语言学考点汇总.docVIP

Chapter 1 三、问答题 1.what are major branches of linguistics? what does each study? Phonetics----it’s defined as the study of the phonic medium of language, it’s concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s languages. Phonology---the study of sounds systems—the inventory of distinctive sounds that occur in a language and the patterns into which they fall. Morphology---It’s a branch of a grammar which studies the internal structure of words and the rules by which words are formed. Syntax-------its a subfield of linguistics that studies the sentence structure of a language. Semantics---It’s simply defined as the study of meaning in abstraction. Pragmatics---the study of meaning in context of words. Sociolinguistics—the study of language with reference to society. Psycholinguistics---the study of language with reference to the working of the mind. Applied linguistics---the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning. 2.why do we say language is arbitrary? Language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between the sounds that people use and the objects to which these sounds refer. The fact that different languages have different words for the same object is a good illustration of the arbitrary nature of language, it’s only our tacit agreement of utterance and concept at work and not any innate relationship bound up in the utterance. A typical example to illustrate the ‘arbitrariness’ of language is ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. 3.what makes modern linguistics different from traditional grammar? Modern linguistics is descriptive, its investigations are based on authentic and mainly spoken language date.现代语言学是描述性的，其研究以确实可靠的、主要以口语形式的资料为基础。 traditional grammar is prescriptive. it is based on’ high’ written language. 传统语法是规定性的，研究‘高级’书面语。 4.Is modern linguistics mainly synchronic or diachronic? why Modern linguistics is mainly syn