1. Language: language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols.
2. Phonetics语音学: is the field of language study concerning the physical properties of sounds.
3. Minimal pairs: two different phonetic forms are identical in every way except one sound segment which occurs in the same place in the string.
4. Allophones音位变体：variations of a phoneme in different sound environment because the stress of air.
5. Morphemes词素：a morpheme is a minimal significant element, it is also the smallest unit of grammatical analysis.
6. theme主位：the point of departure in a sentence.
7. Semantics语义学：the study of the linguistic meaning conveyed by words, phrases and sentences.
8. Pragmatics语用学：a study of the intended meaning of speakers in
a particular context.
9. CP( the cooperative principle): refers to the “co-operation”between speakers in using the maxims during the conversation.
1.design features
Arbitrariness: means that the relationship between sound and meaning has no rational basis.
Duality, productivity or creativity, cultural transmission, displacement, interchangeability.
2.main distinctions: prescriptive and descriptive; synchronic and
diachronic; langue and parole; competence and performance.
3.lexicon characteristics:
meaningful; a grammatical unit; can be used independently;
relatively stable and uninterruptible.
4.classification: word class; meaning—grammatical words and
lexical words; extendability—closed class words and opened class words; variability/inflectional affixes---variable and invariable words.
5.the difference between inflectional morphemes and derivational
morphemes：
IM expresses grammatical meaning, DM expresses lexical meaning; IM may change the word class or word meaning of the original word; In English, inflectional affixes are mostly suffixes.
6.Antonymy: gradable antonyms---long and short;
complementary---dead and alive; relational opposites---buy and sell; reversive---pack and unpack.
7.sentence relations: equivalent---synonyms;
contradictory---antonyms; entailment---hyponymy/inclusion.
8.four conversational maxims:
the maxim of quantity---make your contribution as informative as required, don’t make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality---don’t say what you believe to be false, don’t say that for which you lack adequate evidence; relation---say things that are relevant; manner---avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, be orderly.
9.the development of writing:
pictogram age/ hieroglyph
ideogram age
logo-syllabic
alphabetic writing
10.the writing systems；
morphemic writing system; syllabic; alphabetic.。