As morphemes are pairings of sounds with meaning, there are many complexities involved, forming a new field by the name morphophonology.
= Syntax
Syntax is about principles of forming and understanding correct English sentences. The form or structure of a sentence is governed by rules of syntax. These rules specify word order, sentence organization, and the relationships between words, word classes and other sentence elements.
= Semantics
Semantics examines how meaning is encoded in a language. It is not only concerned with meanings of words as lexical items, but also with levels of language below the word and above it, e.g. meanings of morphemes and sentences.
= Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in context. In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate rather than with the way language is internally structured. It regarded speech performance as primarily a social act ruled by various social conventions.
« Macrolinguistics
= Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind, in processing and producing utterances and in language acquisition for example.
= Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is an umbrella term which covers a variety of different interests in language and society, including the social functions of language and the social characteristics of its users. Sociolinguistic is the study of the characteristics of language varieties, the characteristics of their functions, and the characteristics of their speakers as these three constantly interact and change within a speech community. It seeks to discover the social rules and norms that explain and constrain language behavior and the attitudes toward language in speech communities.
= Anthropological Linguistics
Anthropological linguists are interested primarily in the history and structure of formerly unwritten languages. They are concerned with the emergence of language and also with the divergence差异 of languages over thousands of years.
= Computational Linguistics
It is an interdisciplinary field which centers around the use of computers to process or produce human language.
« Important Distinctions in Linguistics
= Descriptive vs. Prescriptive
A linguistic study is descriptive if it only describes and analyzes the facts of language, and it is prescriptive if it tries to lay down rules for “control” language behavior.
Linguistic studies before 20th century were largely prescriptive because many early grammars were based on “high” (literary or religious) written records. Modern linguistics is mostly descriptive, which tries to discover and record the rules to which the members of a language community actually conform.
= Synchronic vs. Diachronic
A synchronic description takes a fixed instant as its point of observation. Most grammars are of this kind.
And diachronic linguistics is the study of a language through the course of its history.
= Langue & Parole
Saussure refers “langue” to the abstract linguistic system shared by all the members of a speech community and refers “parole” to the actual or actualized language, or the realization of language.
Langue is abstract, parole is specific; langue is not spoken actually by an individual, parole is always a naturally occurring event; langue relatively stable and systematic, parole subject to personal and situational constraints. What a linguist ought to do, according to Saussure, is to abstract langue from instances of parole.
= Competence and Performance
Chomsky suggested that a language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules is called his linguistic competence. And performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations.
As a language user we all have intuitive grasp of the rules of language, and though we may not be able to state the rules explicitly, our performance demonstrates our adherence to them. According to Chomsky, the task of a linguist is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the language user.
P Chapter 9 Language and Literature
« Style & Stylistics
= Style has been recognized since the days of ancient rhetoric, whereas Stylistics is perhaps the creation of bibliographers.
= Stylistic Variety: It refers to differences in the speech or writing of a person or group of people according to the situation, the topic, and addressees and the location. Stylistic variety can be observed in the use of different speech sounds, different words or expressions, or different sentence structures.
«Literal Language & Figurative language
The first meaning for a word that a dictionary definition gives is usually its Literal meaning. Another word for the figurative use of language is Trope.
=Simile
A Simile is a way of comparing one thing with another, of explaining what one thing is like by showing how it is similar to another thing, and it explicitly signals itself in a text, with the words as or like.
=Metaphor
A metaphor, like a simile, also makes a comparison between two unlike elements; but unlike a simile, this comparison is implied rather than stated, such as: All the world’s a stage.
= Metonymy
Metonymy means a change of name. For example, Sceptre节杖 and Crown represent lings and queens.
=Synecdoche
It is usually classed as a type of metonymy. Synecdoche refers to using the name of part of an object to talk about the whole thing, and vice versa. For example, hands in They were short of hands at harvest time means workers, labourers or helpers.
«The Language in Poetry
=Different forms of sounds patterning
Rhyme : (cVC)
Alliteration: (Cvc) When in a rhyme, the initial consonants are identical, and we call it Alliteration.
Assonance : (cVc)
Consonance: (cvC)
Reverse rhyme: (CVc)
Pararhyme : (CvC)
Repetition
=Metrical Patterning
When stress is organized to form regular rhythms, the term used for it is Metre 韵律.
Ÿ Iamb 抑扬格 : an Iambic foot contains two syllables, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one.
Trochee 扬抑格 :
Anapest 抑抑扬格
Dactyl 扬抑抑格
Spondee 扬扬格
Pyrrhic 抑抑格
ŸDimetre : lines that contain two feet are described as Dimetre.
Trimetre: three
Tetrametre: four
Pentametre : five
Hexametre: six
Heptametre: senven
Octametre: eight
=Conventional forms of Metre and Sound
Ÿ Couplets
Couplets are two lines of verse, usually connected by a rhyme.
Ÿ Quatrains
Stanzas of four lines.
Ÿ Blank verse
It consists of lines in iambic pentameter which do not rhyme.
= The Poetic Functions of Sound and Metre
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= How to Analyze Poetry?
« The language in Fiction
1. I-narrators
The person who tells the story may also be a character in the fictional world of the story, relating the story after the event. In this case the critics call the narrator a First-person Narrator or I-Narrator because I is used. First-person narrators are often said to be “limited” because they don’t all the facts or “unreliable” because they trick the reader by withholding 保留information or telling untruths.
2. Third-person narrators
If the narrator is not a character in the fictional world, he or she is usually called a Third-person narrator, because reference to all the characters in the fictional world of the story will involve the use of the third-person pronouns, he, she, it or they. This type of narrator is arguably the dominant narrator type.
3. Direct thought
It tends to be used for presenting conscious, deliberative thought. E.g. “He will be late”, she thought.
4. Free indirect thought
It usually occurs in a form which appears at first sight to be indirect speech but also has direct speech features. One example of free indirect speech is The child asked how he was and hoped he was better. The first half of the sentence The child asked how he was …is clearly indirect speech, giving the propositional content of the utterance but not the words used.
5. Stream of consciousness writing
« Prose Style
1. Authorial style
This refers to the “world view” kind of authorial style. In other words, it is a way of writing which recognisably belongs to a particular writer, say, Jane Austen or Earnest Hemingway.
2. Text style
Text style looks closely at how linguistic choices help to construct textual meaning. Just as authors can be said to have style, so can text. Critics can talk of the style of Middlemarch, or even parts of it. The areas examined can be areas like lexical and grammatical patterning. Even the positioning of something as apparently insignificant as a comma, for example, can sometimes be very important in interpretative解释的 terms.
« An Example of Cognitive Analysis
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