语言学复习要点全解.doc

?1. Linguistics The study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. 2. design features They are a series of features which are uniquely a part of human language and unlikely to be found in the communication system of other creatures. They are displacement, productivity, cultural transmission, arbitrariness, discreteness and duality. 3. Displacement Language can be used to refer to things which are in the past, present or future, real or imagined, or in far-away places. 4. Duality It is generally the case that language is organized at two levels or layers which is known as the physical level and meaningful level simultaneously. ?5. Arbitrariness It is generally the case that there is no ?natural? connection between a linguistic form and its meaning. ? 6. Manner of articulation It is the case that we describe the consonant sounds in terms of how they are articulated. 7. Place of articulation It focuses on describing consonant sounds in terms of where they are articulated. 8. articulator phonetics The general study of the characteristics of speech sounds is called phonetics. And the study of how speech sounds are made, or ?articulated? is articulatory phonetics. 9. Phonology The description of the systems and patterns of the speech sounds in a language. 10. Assimilation It is the process when two phonemes occur in sequence and some aspect of one phoneme is taken or ?copied? by the other. For example, the word ?can? in the sentence ?I can go.?may pronounce as [k??] instead of [k?n] because of the influence of the following sound [g]. 11. Back-formation A word of one type is reduced to form another word of different type. For example, the word ?donation? first came into use and then the verb ?donate? was created from it. 12. Morpheme It is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function. For example, the word tourists contains three morphemes tour, -ist, and -s. 13. Immedia