词汇学01 Introduction.ppt

01 Introduction汪立荣email: lirone@126.com QQ：752256232tel:First of all, let’s discuss the following questions: 1. How do you explain “快” as in the Chinese expressions 快请进, 快请坐, 快喝杯水, 快喝杯茶, 快吃个苹果? And how about “慢” as in 慢走, 慢慢吃, 慢慢喝, 慢慢聊, 慢慢倾? These expressions are specific to Chinese. In English there are no such expressions, so we cannot say “*Come in quickly”, “*Sit down quickly”, or “*Walk slowly”. 2. Is there anything wrong with the following two sentences? “My father is a worker” “Let’s go to eat rice”? Why? 3. There are many grammatical rules in language. For example, in English “I” is followed by “am”, and “you” by “are”, and “he” by “is”. Are such grammatical rules formed gradually through everyday use or prescribed by linguists? 4. People speak their mother tongue correctly, fluently and appropriately. An illiterate woman in Guangzhou, for example, speaks Cantonese correctly, fluently and appropriately. Do you think she knows Cantonese grammar? Why or why not? 1. Linguistics 1.1 Definition You may find it hard to answer people who ask you, What exactly is linguistics, and what do linguists do? They might assume that it means that you are multilingual. And you may, in fact, be a polyglot, but thats not what linguistics major is about. Linguistics is the scientific or systemic study of language (p.1). At the heart of linguistics is the search for the unconscious knowledge that humans have about language(s), an understanding of the structure of language, and knowledge about how languages differ from each other. What exactly do we mean by this? When you were born, you were not able to communicate with the adults around you using their language. But by the time you were five or six, you were able to produce sentences, understand jokes, make rhymes, and so on. In short, you became a fluent native speaker. All of this happened before you entered first grade! (If you studied a foreign language in high school, you know that learning a lang