关键词: 语言, 言语, 话语, 划分, 厘定

Abstract: Due to the fact that language, speech and discourse are three important concepts in linguistics and the confusion exists in their everyday usage and scientific statements, the paper, from the perspectives of linguistic contrast, corpus, vulgarism, variant and special use respectively, makes a detailed exploration about the three concepts in terms of fact, motivation and effect, and presents their definitions accordingly based on the analysis.

Key words: language, speech, discourse, distinction, definition