Design features: the defining properties of human language that distinguish it from any other systems of communication      Arbitrariness Productivity /Creativity Duality  Displacement  Cultural transmission

a,Arbitrariness there is no logical (motivated or intrinsic) connection between linguistic signs such as sound, word , sentence and their meaning.  

b,Duality/double articulation The system of language has two sets of structures or two levels of structures or patterning, the lower/secondary one of sounds and the higher/primary one of meaning. Sounds can be grouped into meaningful words, sentences, discourses.
 
c. Productivity/Creativity Language is productive or creative in the sense that users can understand and construct/produce meanings and/or sentences they have never heard before.  

d Displacement Language can be used to refer to things, which are not present: real or imagined matters in the past, present or future, or in far-away places.

e,Cultural transmission Language is culturally transmitted (through teaching and learning; rather than by instinct.
 
A linguistic study is descriptive if it describes and analyses facts observed to form rules.
 
A linguistic study is prescriptive if it tries to lay down rules for “correct” behavior. Do/don’t say X.   

Synchronic study---- description of a language at some point of time (modern linguistics) 

Diachronic study---- description of a language through time (historical development of language over a period of time) 

Langue: the abstract linguistic system shared by a speech community; a set of conventions abided by all the members of the speech community; the generalized rules of the language used by the people

Parole: the concrete use of the conventions or application of the rules.
 
第二单元
Competence: a language user’s underlying knowledge about the system of rules, or the ideal language user’s knowledge/ internalized set of rules of his language 

Performance: the actual use of language in specific situation, or language user’s actual realization of his knowledge/rules in his utterances in specific situation

Functions: (1) referential (to convey message and information),(2) poetic (to indulge in language for its own sake), (3) emotive (to express attitudes, feelings and emotions), (4) conative (to to persuade and influence others through commands and requests), (5) phatic (to establish communion with others) , and (6) metalingual function (to clear up intentions and meanings)
(1) Phatic function Language is used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than for exchanging information or ideas.

Phonetics studies how speech sounds are produced, transmitted, and perceived.  

Articulatory Phonetics (发音语音学) , which deals with the identification and classification of individual sounds, is the study of the production of speech sounds.  

Phonology is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages.  The phones that realize or represent a phoneme are called allophones.

A phoneme is a phonological unit. It is abstract. It is distinctive. It is not a particular sound, but rather it is represented or realized by a certain phone in a certain phonetic context. A phoneme can be analyzed into smaller components simultaneously, e.g. /p/ into -voiced, +bilabial, and +plosive. The elements that a phoneme can be analyzed or segmented into are called distinctive features.

 Stress: the degree of force used in producing a syllable. 
Tones are pitch variations,which are caused by the differing rates of vibration of the vocal cords.When pitch, stress and length variations are tied to the sentence rather than to the word, they are collectively known as intonation.

 Voicing is caused by the vibration of the vocal cords

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)--- A standardized and internationally accepted system of phonetic transcription. The basic principle of the IPA is using one letter to represent one speech sound.in the production of vowels
 the airstream meets no obstruction of any kind in the throat, the nose, or the mouth, while in that of consonants
 it is somehow obstructed.
manner of articulation —the degree of obstructions, complete, partial, or a mere narrowing
place of articulation —the different (parts) vocal organs where the obstruction occurs 

Cardinal vowels(基本音): a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging intended to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.

Vowel glides: there are audible changes in the quality in articulation. 

Coarticulation(协调发音): the process of articulation in which simultaneous or overlapping articulation is involved.  

assimilation rule (同化规则) (3-2)Assimilation may result in nasalization (e.g. tan, can ), dentalization (e.g. tenth, ninth), velarization (e.g. sink, mink), devoicing (e.g. has to), etc. Thus there exist nasalization rule, dentalization rule, velarization rule, devoicing rule, etc. 

第三单元
Morpheme: the smallest unit in terms of relationship between form and meaning, a unit which cannot be divided without destroying or drastically altering the meaning.  

Allomorphs(词/语素变体): alternative shapes or phonetic forms of a morpheme that are used in different situations,

  Free morphemes(自由词素): those morphemes that can occur alone or can constitute words,  

Bound morphemes(粘连词素): those morphemes that cannot occur alone but with another morpheme, e.g. un, ly, ful, ness, al  

Root(词根): the base form of a word that cannot further be analyzed without total loss of identity, e.g. reason in unreasonable. 

Stem(词干): any morpheme or combination of morphemes to which other morphemes can be added, e.g. reason and reasonable in unreasonable. 

Affix(词缀): morphemes that can be used only when added to another morpheme (a root or a stem) 

Lexeme: the smallest abstract unit underlying in the lexical system of a language, which appear in different forms in different grammatical contexts.  

derivational affixes(派生词缀): the affixes the addition of which to a root or a stem results in derivation of new words, e.g. mini-, un-, -tion, -fy   
inflectional affixes(曲折词缀): the affixes the addition of which to a root or a stem results in manifestation of finiteness, aspect, number, person, and case, e.g. -s, -’s, -ing, -ed. 

Inflection is the manifestation of grammatical relationships through the addition of inflectional affixes, such as number, person, finiteness, aspect and case, which do not change the grammatical class of the stems to which they are attached. 

Grammatical words: words that express grammatical meaning, e.g. conjunction, preposition, article, and pronoun

Lexical words: words that refer to substance, action, and quality, e.g. nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.

 Closed-class: a class  whose membership is in principle fixed or limited, e.g. conjunctions, preposition, articles.

Open-class: a class whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

CompoundThe term compound covers a wide range of different relations between lexical words. On the whole, it refers to those words that consist of more than one lexical morpheme, or the way to join two separate words to produce a single form. 

Derivation(衍生) refers to the way by adding affixes to roots or stems to create new words. To be simple, derivation is the way by which words are created by adding derivational affixes. 

Blending: a complex form of compounding in which two words are blended by joining the initial part of one word and the last part of another, or the initial parts of two words. 

Acronyms: words formed from the initial letters of the name of an organization or a scientific term, etc. pronounced as words rather as sequences of letters; 

Back-formation(逆构词法): an abnormal type of word-formation where a shorter word is derived by deleting an imagined affix from a longer form already in the language.

 Loanwords (借词) : a process in which both form and meaning are borrowed with only a slight adaptation to the phonological system of the new language they enter, e.g. tsunami 

Loanblend (混合借词): a process in which part of the form is native and part is borrowed, but the meaning is fully borrowed, e.g. coconut. 
Loanshift (转移借词): a process in which the meaning is borrowed, but the form is native. One of the meaning of “bridge” is borrowed from Italian.

Loss The loss of sound can first refer to the disappearance of the very sound as a phoneme in the phonological system. The sound /x/ in old English has been lost. 

Assimilation the change of a sound as a result of the influence of an adjacent sound.

第四单元
Syntax refers to the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language or simply, the study of the formation of sentences. 

Category(范畴): the defining properties of units like nouns and verbs. Concord/agreement (一致): the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. 

Construction(结构): any syntactic string of words ranging from sentences over phrasal structures to certain complex lexemes. 

Constituent(成分): any linguistic form or group of linguistic forms in a construction.Constituent: any linguistic form or group of linguistic forms in a construction.

Recursiveness refers to extension of sentences by such means as coordination and subordination, conjoining and embedding, hypotactic and paratactic 

Coordination refers to the linguistic phenomenon that two or more categories of the same type are grouped together with the help of a conjunction such as and, but and or.

Subordination refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other and usually a constituent of the other. 

Embedding refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination. 

Cohesion: relations of meaning that exist within the text.)

第五单元
Conceptual meaning(概念意义): logical, cognitive, denotative meaning  cup
Sense(意义)/sense relationship: the relationship between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly the words), intra-linguistic relationships, e.g. big—small.

 Reference (所指): the relationship between the linguistic elements (words, sentence, etc.) and the non-linguistic world of experience. 

Synonymy (同义关系) : a technical term for the sameness relation between words. 

Gradable antonymy (可分等级的反义关系Characteristics of gradable antonyms1 They are gradable, different in terms of degree. The assertion of one is not necessarily the denial of the other. There may be intermediate degrees(2) They are graded against deferent norms. The criterion varies with the object described.(3) In a pair, the one for the higher degree serves as the cover term called “unmarked” and the covered term is called “marked”. It is the cover term that is usually used. If the covered term is used, there is something odd or unusual.

2)Complementary opposite(互补性反义词) Characteristics: These antonyms are ungradable. The assertion of one means the denial of the other and the denial of one means the assertion of the other. There is not intermediate term. (2) The norm in this type is absolute. The same norm is used for all the things it is applicable. E.g. the norms used to separate the male from the female are the same with both human beings and animals. (3) There is no cover term for the two members of a pair.

3)Relational/ converse opposites(关系反义词)Characteristics: (1)There is no positive-negative relationship between the words of a pair but reversal relationship between them. ‘if A sells to B, B buys from A; if A is B’s husband, B is A’s wife.’ (2) One word of the pair presupposes the other.*He is a son. *He is a husband. He is a child--adult. 

Hyponymy(上下义关系) refers to a paradigmatic relation between a more specific lexeme and a more general lexeme.The upper term like flower or animal is called the 

 superordinate (上义词). The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combined is usually known as the principle of compositionality (复合性).

Propositional logic /propositional calculus/ sentential calculus: the study of the truth conditions for propositions: how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions and the connections between them. 

A proposition (命题)is what is expressed by a declarative sentence when that sentence is uttered to make a statement. 

Predicate logic/predicate calculus studies the internal structure of simple proposition.