An Introduction to Linguistics : I wish you break a leg!
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. General (or theoretical) linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields, such as the study of language structure (grammar) and meaning (semantics). The study of grammar encompasses morphology (formation and alteration of words) and syntax (the rules that determine the way words combine into phrases and sentences). Also part of this field are phonology, the study of sound systems and abstract sound units, and phonetics, which is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.
Linguistics compares languages (comparative linguistics) and explores their histories to find universal properties of language and to account for its development and origins (historical linguistics). Applied linguistics puts linguistic theories into practice in areas such as foreign language teaching, speech therapy, translation, and speech pathology. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as journalist Russ Rymer put it:
| “ | Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.[1] | ” |
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[edit] Divisions, specialties, and subfields
General linguistics concerns itself with three major problems; how do we come to know languages, how can languages vary, and what is universal to language. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for conscious instruction. Non-humans do not. Therefore, linguists assume, the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consenus as to the extent of this innate potential, with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is however generally agreed that there is no discernible genetic process responsible for differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) they are exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form (i.e. speech or other externalization), such pairings known as Saussurean signs. Linguists may specialize in some subpart of the linguistic structure, which can be arranged in the following terms, from form to meaning:
- Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech production and perception
- Phonology, the study of sounds as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
- Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
- Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
- Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
- Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts
- Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
Many linguists would agree the divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.
Intersecting with these domains are fields arranged around the kind of external factors that are considered. For example
- Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
- Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.
- Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
- Historical linguistics or Diachronic linguistics, the study of language change.
- Language geography, the study of the spatial patterns of languages.
- Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language.
- Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
- Sociolinguistics, the study of social patterns and norms of linguistic variability.
- Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the area of Speech-Language Pathology.
- Neurolinguistics, the study of the brain networks that underlie grammar and communication.
- Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals compared to human language.
- Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
- Applied linguistics, the study of language related issues applied in everyday life, notably language. policies, planning, and education. Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.
Morpheme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language). The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs. English example: The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes: "un-" (meaning not x), a bound morpheme; "-break-", a free morpheme; and "-able", a free morpheme. "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes. The morpheme plural-s has the morph "-s", IPA: [s], in cats ([kæts]), but "-es", [ɪz], in dishes ([dɪʃɪz]), and even the voiced "-s", [z], in dogs ([dɒgz]). These are the allomorphs of "-s". It might even change entirely into -ren in children. Contents [hide] 1 Types of morphemes 1.1 Other variants 2 Morphological analysis 3 See also 4 References 5 External links Types of morphemes Free morphemes like town, and dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, i.e. "free". Bound morphemes (or affixes) like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Unproductive, non-affix morphemes that exist only in bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word. Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness." They carry semantic information. Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on (as in the "dog" morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme "-s" becomes "dogs"). They carry grammatical information. Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in English is sometimes realized as [-z], [-s] or [-ɪz].
Lexeme
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN.[1] A related concept is the lemma (or citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way.
A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme RUN has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person-singular form run (which also functions as the past participle and non-finite form), a past form ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners, runnable, etc.) The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar; in the case of English verbs such as RUN, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence.
A lexicon consists of lexemes.
In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements they occur with in sentences and other syntactic structures.
The notion of a lexeme is very central to morphology, and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes:
- Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.
- Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.
I wish you break a leg!