2019-2020年高中英语必修8Module4WhichEnglish-BackgroundReadings.doc

2019-2020年高中英语必修8Module4WhichEnglish-BackgroundReadings1. Historical Linguistics The modern field of linguistics dates from the beginning of the 19th century. While ancient India and Greece had a remarkable grammatical tradition, throughout most of history linguistics had been the province of philosophy, rhetoric, and literary analysis to try to figure out how human language works. But in 1786, an amazing discovery was made: There are regular sound correspondences among many of the languages spoken in Europe, India, and Persia. For example, the English f sound often corresponds to a p sound in, among others, Latin and Sanskrit, an important ancient language of India: ENGLISH LATIN SANSKRIT father pater pitar full plenus purnas for per pari Scholars realized that these correspondences-found in thousands of words- could not be due to chance or to mutual influence. The only reliable conclusion was that these languages are related to one another because they e from a mon ancestor. Much of 19th century linguistics was devoted to working out the nature of this parent language, spoken about 6,000 years ago, as well as the changes by which Proto-Indo-European, as we now call it, developed into English, Russian, Hindi, and its other modern descendants. This program of historical linguistics continues today. Linguists have succeeded in grouping the 5,000 or so languages of the world into a number of language families sharing a mon ancestor. 2. The Study of Language Structure At the beginning of the 20th century, attention shifted to the fact that not only language change, but language structure as well, is systematic and governed by regular rules and principles. The attention of the worlds linguists turned more and more to the study of grammar-in the technical sense of the term the organization of the sound system of a language and the internal structure of its words and sentences. By the 1920s, the program of structural linguistics, inspired in large part by the ideas of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was developing sophisticated methods of grammatical analysis. This period also saw an intensified scholarly study of languages that had never been written down. It had by then bee monplace, for example, for an American linguist to spend several years working out the intricacies of the grammars of Chippewa, Ojibwa, Apache, Mohawk, or some other indigenous language of North America. The last half-century has seen a deepening of understanding of these rules and principles and the growth of a widespread conviction that despite their seeming diversity, all the languages of the world are basically cut from the same cloth. As grammatical analysis has bee deeper, we have found more fundamental commonalities among the languages of the world. The program initiated by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957 sees this fact as a consequence of the human brain being prewired for particular properties of grammar, thereby drastically limiting the number of possible human languages. The claims of this program have been the basis for a great deal of recent linguistic research, and have been one of the most important centers of controversy in the field. Books and journal articles routinely present evidence for or against the idea that central properties of language are innate.3. Language Use: Studies of Meaning There is also a long tradition in the study of what it means to say that a word or sentence means a particular thing and how these meanings are conveyed when we municate with each other. Two popular ideas about what meanings are go back to the ancient Greeks: One is that meanings are mental representations of some sort; another is that the meaning of an expression is purely a function of how it is used. Both ideas have launched research programs that are active today. They have been joined by a third approach, building on work by philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, which applies formal methods derived from logic and attempts to equate the meaning of an expression with reference and the conditions under which it might be judged to be true or false. Other linguists have been looking at the cognitive principles underlying the organization of meaning, including the basic metaphoric processes that some claim to see at the heart of grammar. And still others have been examining the ways that sentences are tied together to form coherent discourse.4. linguistics 1) What is linguistics? 什么是语言学？Linguistics is generally defined as the scientific study of language. It studies not any particular language, but languages in general.2) The scope of linguistics语言学的研究范畴 The study of language as a whole is often called general linguistics. (普通语言学) The study of sounds, which are used in linguistic munication, is called phonetics. (语音学) The study of how sounds are put together and used in munication is called phonology. (音 系学) The study of the way in which morphemes are arranged to form words are called morphology. (形态学) The study of how morphemes and words are bined to form sentences is called syntax.(句法学) The study of meaning in language is called semantics. (语义学) The study of meaning in context of use is called pragmatics.(语用学) The study of language with reference to society is called socio-linguistics.(社会语言学) The study of language with reference to the working of mind is called psycho-linguistics. (心理语言学) The study of applications (as the recovery of speech ability) is generally known as applied linguistics. (应用语言学) But in a narrow sense, applied linguistics refers to the application of linguistic principles and theories to language teaching and learning, especially the teaching of foreign and second language. Other related branches include anthropological linguistics,(人类语言学)neurological linguistics,(神经语言学)mathematical linguistics,(数字语言学)and putational linguistics.(计算机语言学)