LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS: PART III

LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS: PART III

📙 Phonetics & Phonology 

🌪Phonetics

🔻 The production and perception of speech sounds as physical entities. 

🔻For example, the sound [v] is pronounced by bringing the lower lip into contact with upper teeth and forcing air out of the mouth while the vocal folds vibrate and nasal cavity is closed off. 

🌪Phonology

🔻The sound patterns which include the sound system of a particular language where sounds are viewed as abstract entities. 

🔻In Czech, a word never ends with a voiced obstruent (e.g., zubu [zubu] ‘toothgen’ but zub [zup] ‘toothnom’). 

🔻In English, a word never starts with [kn] (note that knife starts with [n] not [k]), while in German it is possible (e.g., Knabe ‘boy’).

🔻In Setswana (a language of southern Africa), a consonant is always followed by a vowel – 

when the speakers adopted the word Christmas from English, they pronounce as kirisimasi. 

📙 Morphology 

🔻The word structure and of systematic relations between words. 

📙 Morpheme

🔻The building-blocks of words, the smallest linguistic unit which has a meaning or grammatical function. 

🔻Words are composed of morphemes (one or more). 

For example, sing-er-s answer-ed un-kind-ly uˇc-i-tel-k-u she-teacheracc.

🔻In comparison with many other languages, English has rather simple morphology. 

📙 Syntax 

🔻Phrase and sentence structure- Syntacticians try to discover rules that govern word order.

🔻In linguistics, placing an asterisk (*) before a sentence marks the sentence as ungrammatical, 

i.e., not of the kind normally used by most speakers of that language. 

📙 Semantics 

🔻Semantics is the literal meaning of sentences, phrases, words and morphemes. 

🔻eg: What is the meaning of the word vegetable? 

📙 Pragmatics 

🔻Pragmatics studies language usage, especially how context influences the interpretation of 

utterances – the same sentence can be used to do different things in different situations. 

🔻For example, "Gee, it’s hot in here!" can be used either to state a fact or to get someone open a window. 

🔻So, in simple terms, 'semantics' is the literal meaning and pragmatics is the intended meaning.