讨论题

conversational implicature: the extra meaning not contained in the literal utterances, underatandable to the listener only when he shares the speaker’s knowledge or knows why and how he violates intentionally one of the four maxims of the cooperative principle. Illocutionary act: The illocutionary act is the act performed in the performing of a locutionary act. When we speak we not only produce some units of language with certain meanings, but also make clear our purpose in producing them, the way we intend them to be understood, or they also have certain forces as Austin prefers to say. In the example of “Morning!” we can say it has the force of a greeting, or it ought to have been taken as a greeting. deep structure: the abstract representation of the syntactic properties of a construction, i.e.the underlying level of structural relations between its different constituents ,such as the relation between, the underlying subject and its verb, or a verb and its object. 1. Cite examples from English and Chinese to discuss the concept of the syllable.

English: a unit of speech sounds consisting of a vowel or a vowel with one or more than one consonant.

Chinese: word or part of word which contains a vowel sound or consonant acting as a vowel.

In English we can divide a syllable into two parts: the rhyme and the onset. As the vowel within the rhyme is the nucleus, the consonant after it will be termed the coda, for example clasp .All syllables must have a nucleus but not all syllables contain an onset and a coda. A syllable that has no coda is called an open syllable, for example: bar, tie. While a syllable with coda is known as closed syllable, forexample: hard, tied, dead.

English syllable can be represented as (((C)C)C)V((((C)C)C)C) , However ,the Chinese syllable allows at most one consonant in the onset position and only nasals in the coda for the Putonghua .Thus the Chinese syllable is represented as (C)V(C) e.g. “split”, “sixths” and “prompts”. “您好，请问河南工业大学在哪里？”

2. The sentence “John saw the police with binoculars” has two semantic interpretations. You are required to explain why the sentence is two-way ambiguous. Syntactic tree diagrams are necessary for your explanation.

3. What are the four maxims of the Cooperative Principle? Please give examples to show how the flouting of these maxims gives rise to conversational implicature (Give at least two examples, each flouting a different maxim).

4. Use structural approach and traditional approach to analyze the sentence “I bought a book yesterday”5. How do you understand the design features of language?

1) Arbitrariness, According to Saussure, it refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meaning. For instance,we cannot explain why a book is called a /buk/ and a pen a /pen/. 2) Duality.It refers to the property of having two levels of structures: units of the primary level being composed of elements of the secondary level and each level having its own principles of organization. At the lower or the basic level, there is the structure of sounds, which are meaningless, discrete, individual sounds. But the sounds of language can be combined according to rules into units of meaning such as morphemes and words, which, at the higher level, can be arranged into sentences. This duality of structure or double articulation of language enables its users to talk about anything within their knowledge. No animal communication system has duality or even comes near to possessing it. 3）Creativity. by creativity we mean language is resouceful owing to its duality and its recursiveness. Peculiar to human languages，users of language can understand and produce sentences they

have never heard before.For example,“ A red-eyed elephant is dancing on the hotel bed” 4) 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. Displacement enables people to handle generalizations and abstractions. For example, a dog cannot tell people that its master will be home in a few days. Our language enables us to communicate about things that do not exist or do not yet exist.6. Why Saussure is hailed as the father of modern linguistics?

Saussure occupies such an important place in the history of linguistics that he is often described as “father of modern linguistics”:

(1) The book Course in General Linguistics (1916), which is the most

important source of Saussure’s ideas, marked the beginning of modern linguistics.

(2) Saussure was the first to notice the complexities of language. He

believed that language is a system of signs, called conventions. He held that the sign is the union of the signifier and the signified. (3) By providing answers to questions concerning many aspects of language,

Saussure made clear the object of study for linguistics as a science. His ideas on the arbitrary nature of sign, on the relational nature of linguistic units, on the distinction of langue and parole and of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, etc. pushed linguistics into a branch new stage.