英语语言学A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English.pptVIP

Language Is Used for Communication Language is the result of our communicative needs. Its attractiveness comes from its social utility. Through language we can do things animals cannot. Language allows us to talk about anything to each other within their realm of knowledge and express our communicative purposes. We can use language to live, work, and play together. We can also use language to tell the truth or to tell a lie. Language enables us to communicate our general attitudes toward life and others, and create what the anthropologist Malinowski（马林诺夫斯基） called “a phatic（交流情感的） communion. Design features of language (语言的识别特征) Arbitrariness 任意性 Productivity 多产性 Duality 二重性 Displacement 不受时空限制性 Cultural transmission 文化传递性 Design features of language Definition Design features refer to the defining properties of human language that distinguishes it from any animal system of communication(p. 8). Five Features: 1.Arbitrariness It means that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. (1)?Arbitrary relationship between the sound of a morpheme and its meaning. E.g. onomatopoeic words (2)Arbitrariness at the syntactic level. Syntax is less arbitrary than words, especially in so far as order is concerned. (3)Arbitrariness and convention. Arbitrariness of language makes it potentially creative, and conventionality of language makes learning a language laborious (胡壮麟，2001:4-6). 2. Productivity/ Creativity: Speakers of a language can produce and understand an infinitely large number of sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. Productivity is unique to human language. 3.Duality language is simultaneously organized at two levels or layers, namely, the level of sounds and that of meaning. the higher level ----words which are meaningful; the lower or the basic level----sounds which are meaningless, but can be grouped and regrouped into words. The advantage of duality lies in the great productiv