当代语言学导论复习要点(详细含课后单词).doc

Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics Chapter1 Human superiority lies in his unique endowment-----the ability to talk, or rather, to communicate by means of language. Talmud: god created the world by a word, instantaneously, without toil or pains. Widdowson: the primacy of language in the way human beings conceive of the world. Language is a vehicle of power, for control, for creation, and for change. The study of human language is called linguistics. Linguistics deals with human language as a whole or as particular languages. As a whole: the system of human communication which consists of the structured arrangement of sounds (or their written representation) into larger units, e.g. morphemes, words, sentences, utterances. As particular language: like French language, they are particular systems of human communication used by people living in different parts of the world. There is a continuum from one language to another. Varieties of language: Any particular language is in essence a set of varieties. local varieties区域变体–dialects and accents(the former differ from each other in pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar; the latter only in pronunciation ) social varieties—sociolects社会方言(=social dialects , used by people of different classes, ages, or sexes ), historical varieties—temporal variety.(e.g. the 17th century English) stylistic or occupational varieties---registers语域(e.g. formal English, scientific English) individual varieties—idiolects个人语言. Usually a language has an officially declared or generally considered standard dialect(e.g. Putonghua in China, General American in the US) From Prescriptivism to Descriptivism Prescriptivism is the view that one variety of language has an inherently higher value than others.(try to impose rules from some high prestige language to some lower prestige language, like Latin and English) Descriptivism is the policy of describing languages as they are bound to exist. Usages of different varieties should be observed a