张晗——语言学读书笔记一.docVIP

English linguistics 1 Chapter 1 What is linguistics DefinItion of linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Main branches: 2.1 Phonetics: It is the scientific study of speech sounds. 2.2 Phonology: It analyses how sounds are organized in a language and attempts to discover the principles that govern sound systems in language in general. 2.3 Morphology: It examines the structure or form of words, and how they are constructured of smaller unIts which have meaning. 2.4 Syntax: It investigates how words are combined to form sentences, what speakers know about the grammatical structure of their language, how sentences are interrelated and what are the general grammatical and cognItive principle which explain these arrangements, relationships and knowledge. 2.5 Semantics: It is the study of the abstract or inherent meaning in isolation, not in context. 2.6 Pragmatics: It is concerned wIth how the meaning of linguistics acts depends on the context in which they are performed. 2.7 Sociolinguistics: It probes into the relationship between language and society. 2.8 Applied linguistics: It is the application of linguistic methods and findings to a number of areas. 2.9 Historical linguistics: It studies how and why languages change. 2.10 Discourse analysis: It examines how language is structured beyond the sentence and thus involves topic and comment. 2.11 Psycho linguistics: It investigates the interrelationship between language and human cognItion and the effects of psychological constraints on language. 2.12 Anthropological linguistics: It deals wIth the relationship between the language and the culture. 2.13 Computational linguistics: It is the branch of linguistics which looks at languages essentially as formal systems , and applies computational techniques and concepts to understanding issues such as automatic machine translation and parsing. DefinItion of language: Language is a system of arbItrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Design fe