"The fanatic Pinker"

Dag Dig Dug....
My heart beat faster again when i remember i get the exam with Mrs.Pipim about the Descriptive Speech.. it looks like burden to me. such a challenge..

i took a deep breath,, and i try to practice it..
step by step i try to explain the speech... my title is Enjoy Vacation in Wakatobi Island.

Today is the special day for me to perform the speech,, everyone looking at me. in the beginning i feel so nervous and in the middle i feel enjoy.

but there is something not good enough for my speech because i spend short time and i have smooth voice, so the people in the back cannot hear my voice.

i deeply regrets this, but it's over.
next time i will give best performance...

Ouch....!!
My face............!!

i found the pimple again on my face.
Oh God, i'm tired with this.. (T_T)
I have done a thousand ways to combat acne.... but there is nothing result...

i've tried to apply many cosmetics like Citra, Ponds, Olay, KELLY and etc.. but the result is the same...
increasingly sprout...

sometimes i asked to my friend, am i ugly with the pimple on my face?
and they said.. no, it is the sweetener...
hahahaa... i just laugh,maybe they are right...



yea keep enjoy with the pimple... i do not want give a damn anymore...
:)

I know something in a hurry will give the bad result. but, everyone feel the same with me. i do not like waiting for something so long and i cannot be patient with something that cannot be mine yet.
need more time get what u want...
patient and patient.. sometime i feel i wanna be the blue sky,, i do not wanna be human. because be the blue sky like something interesting. i know that is crazy and impossible and i cannot be. hahahaha...

it's just my imagination...

okay,,
i need to realize... waiting for something with patiently is better than get something in hurry...

Experienced writers use a variety of sentences to make their writing interesting and lively. Too many simple sentences, for example, will sound choppy and immature while too many long sentences will be difficult to read and hard to understand.

This page contains definitions of simple, compound, and complex sentences with many simple examples. The purpose of these examples is to help the ESL/EFL learner to identify sentence basics including identification of sentences in the short quizzes that follow. After that, it will be possible to analyze more complex sentences varieties.

SIMPLE SENTENCE

A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, contains a subject and a verb, and it expresses a complete thought. In the following simple sentences, subjects are in yellow, and verbs are in green.


A. Some students like to study in the mornings.
B. Juan and Arturo play football every afternoon.
C. Alicia goes to the library and studies every day.

The three examples above are all simple sentences. Note that sentence B contains a compound subject, and sentence C contains a compound verb. Simple sentences, therefore, contain a subject and verb and express a complete thought, but they can also contain a compound subjects or verbs.

COMPOUND SENTENCE

A compound sentence contains two independent clauses joined by a coordinator. The coordinators are as follows: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. (Helpful hint: The first letter of each of the coordinators spells FANBOYS.) Except for very short sentences, coordinators are always preceded by a comma. In the following compound sentences, subjects are in yellow, verbs are in green, and the coordinators and the commas that precede them are in red.


A. I tried to speak Spanish, and my friend tried to speak English.
B. Alejandro played football, so Maria went shopping.
C. Alejandro played football, for Maria went shopping.

The above three sentences are compound sentences. Each sentence contains two independent clauses, and they are joined by a coordinator with a comma preceding it. Note how the conscious use of coordinators can change the relationship between the clauses. Sentences B and C, for example, are identical except for the coordinators. In sentence B, which action occurred first? Obviously, "Alejandro played football" first, and as a consequence, "Maria went shopping. In sentence C, "Maria went shopping" first. In sentence C, "Alejandro played football" because, possibly, he didn't have anything else to do, for or because "Maria went shopping." How can the use of other coordinators change the relationship between the two clauses? What implications would the use of "yet" or "but" have on the meaning of the sentence?

COMPLEX SENTENCE

A complex sentence has an independent clause joined by one or more dependent clauses. A complex sentence always has a subordinator such as because, since, after, although, or when or a relative pronoun such as that, who, or which. In the following complex sentences, subjects are in yellow, verbs are in green, and the subordinators and their commas (when required) are in red.


A. When he handed in his homework, he forgot to give the teacher the last page.
B. The teacher returned the homework after she noticed the error.
C. The students are studying because they have a test tomorrow.
D. After they finished studying, Juan and Maria went to the movies.
E. Juan and Maria went to the movies after they finished studying.

When a complex sentence begins with a subordinator such as sentences A and D, a comma is required at the end of the dependent clause. When the independent clause begins the sentence with subordinators in the middle as in sentences B, C, and E, no comma is required. If a comma is placed before the subordinators in sentences B, C, and E, it is wrong.

Note that sentences D and E are the same except sentence D begins with the dependent clause which is followed by a comma, and sentence E begins with the independent clause which contains no comma. The comma after the dependent clause in sentence D is required, and experienced listeners of English will often hear a slight pause there. In sentence E, however, there will be no pause when the independent clause begins the sentence.

COMPLEX SENTENCES / ADJECTIVE CLAUSES

Finally, sentences containing adjective clauses (or dependent clauses) are also complex because they contain an independent clause and a dependent clause. The subjects, verbs, and subordinators are marked the same as in the previous sentences, and in these sentences, the independent clauses are also underlined.


A. The woman who(m) my mom talked to sells cosmetics.
B. The book that Jonathan read is on the shelf.
C. The house which AbrahAM Lincoln was born in is still standing.
D. The town where I grew up is in the United States.

Adjective Clauses are studied in this site separately, but for now it is important to know that sentences containing adjective clauses are complex.

Verb Clusters
Verb clusters are made by crossing over the -ing form of the verb in a main clause of BSP-1 or BSP-2.

The man escaped from jail.
The man was escaping from jail.
Escaping from jail, the man chuckled.

The man bribed the jailer.
The man was bribing the jailer.
Bribing the jailer, the man committed a felony.

How to identify verb clusters. To identify verb clusters, look for -ing words. When you find one, figure out if it is part of the kernel BSP. If it is, then it is NOT a verb cluster. See the following examples:

Running is good exercise. (Here "running" is a noun, the subject of the sentence.)

They were spending money like there was no tomorrow. (Here "spending" is part of the verb of the kernel sentence.)

If the -ing verb is not part of the main clause, it is probably a verb cluster. Verb clusters usually have some words attached to the -ing word, but sometimes the -ing word stands alone as a one-word cluster. All of the following are verb clusters:

Spending money like there was no tomorrow, the shoppers snapped up all the bargains by noon.

Flashing a smile, Kara walked away.

Redialing, we finally got through.

Finally, verb clusters can dangle. When they do, they are usually called "dangling participles." To recognize a dangling participle, first find a verb cluster and then uncross it to see if the original sentence makes sense, like this:

Driving through the park, three bears were seen. (A sentence with a verb cluster)

Bring the subject of the main clause forward:

Three bears

Put the verb cluster after the subject and add a helping verb:

Three bears (were) driving through the park.

Does this sentence make sense in the context of the rest of the text? Unless you are reading a fairy tale or watching a cartoon, this sentence probably contains a dangling participle. Fix it by changing the verb cluster to a subordinate clause or by changing the noun of the main clause:

Fix one: When the tour bus went through the park, three bears were seen. (awkward but correct)

Fix two: Driving through the park, we saw three bears. (much better)

Determiners are used in front of nouns to indicate whether you are referring to something specific or something of a particular type.

Determiners are different to pronouns in that a determiner is always followed by a noun. Therefore personal pronouns ( I , you , he , etc.) and possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, etc.) cannot be determiners.

The definite and indefinite articles a/an/the are all determiners.

You use a specific determiner when people know exactly which thing(s) or person/people you are talking about.

The specific determiners are:
the definite article : the
demonstratives : this, that, these, those
possessives : my, your, his, her, its, our, their

For example:-

"The dog barked at the boy."
"These apples are rotten."
"Their bus was late."

You use general determiners to talk about people or things without saying exactly who or what they are.

The general determiners are:
the indefinite articles : a, an

a few
a little
all
another
any
both
each
either
enough
every few
fewer
less
little
many
more
most
much
neither
no
other
several
some

For example:-

"A man sat under an umbrella."
"Have you got any English books that I could have?"
"There is enough food to feed everyone."
Either and Neither

Either and neither are used in sentences concerning a possible choice between two items.

Either can mean one or the other (of two) or each of two.

For example:-

I've got tea and coffee, so you can have either. (One or the other)
The room has a door at either end. (Both)

Neither means not the first one and not the second one.

For example:-

Neither of the students were listening.

Definition: Prepositions are a class of words that indicate relationships between nouns, pronouns and other words in a sentence. Most often they come before a noun. They never change their form, regardless of the case, gender etc. of the word they are referring to.

Some common prepositions are:

about
above
across
after
against
along
among
around
at
before
behind
below
beneath
beside
between
beyond
but
by
despite
down
during
except
for
from
in
inside
into
like
near
of
off
on
onto
out
outside
over
past
since
through
throughout
till
to
toward
under
underneath
until
up
upon
with
within
without.

Prepositions typically come before a noun:

For example:

after class
at home
before Tuesday
in London
on fire
with pleasure

A preposition usually indicates the temporal, spatial or logical relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence.

For example:

The book is on the table.
The book is beside the table.
She read the book during class.


In each of the preceding sentences, a preposition locates the noun "book" in space or in time.

Prepositions are classified as simple or compound.

Simple prepositions
Simple prepositions are single word prepositions. These are all showed above.

For example:

The book is on the table.

Compound prepositions
Compound prepositions are more than one word. in between and because of are prepositions made up of two words - in front of, on behalf of are prepositions made up of three words.

For example:

The book is in between War and Peace and The Lord of the Rings.
The book is in front of the clock.

Examples:

The children climbed the mountain without fear.
There was rejoicing throughout the land when the government was defeated.
The spider crawled slowly along the banister.

The following table contains rules for some of the most frequently used prepositions in English:

Prepositions of Time:
English Usage Example

on



days of the week



on Monday

in



months / seasons
time of day
year
after a certain period of time (when?)



in August / in winter
in the morning
in 2006
in an hour

at



for night
for weekend
a certain point of time (when?)



at night
at the weekend
at half past nine

since



from a certain point of time (past till now)



since 1980

for



over a certain period of time (past till now)



for 2 years

ago



a certain time in the past



2 years ago

before



earlier than a certain point of time



before 2004

to



telling the time



ten to six (5:50)

past



telling the time



ten past six (6:10)

to / till / until



marking the beginning and end of a period of time



from Monday to/till Friday

till / until



in the sense of how long something is going to last



He is on holiday until Friday.

by



in the sense of at the latest
up to a certain time



I will be back by 6 o’clock.
By 11 o'clock, I had read five pages.

Prepositions of Place:
English Usage Example

in



room, building, street, town, country
book, paper etc.
car, taxi
picture, world



in the kitchen, in London
in the book
in the car, in a taxi
in the picture, in the world

at



meaning next to, by an object
for table
for events
place where you are to do something typical (watch a film, study, work)



at the door, at the station
at the table
at a concert, at the party
at the cinema, at school, at work

on



attached
for a place with a river
being on a surface
for a certain side (left, right)
for a floor in a house
for public transport
for television, radio



the picture on the wall
London lies on the Thames.
on the table
on the left
on the first floor
on the bus, on a plane
on TV, on the radio

by, next to, beside



left or right of somebody or something



Jane is standing by / next to / beside the car.

under



on the ground, lower than (or covered by) something else



the bag is under the table

below



lower than something else but above ground



the fish are below the surface

over



covered by something else
meaning more than
getting to the other side (also across)
overcoming an obstacle



put a jacket over your shirt
over 16 years of age
walk over the bridge
climb over the wall

above



higher than something else, but not directly over it



a path above the lake

across



getting to the other side (also over)
getting to the other side



walk across the bridge
swim across the lake

through



something with limits on top, bottom and the sides



drive through the tunnel

to



movement to person or building
movement to a place or country
for bed



go to the cinema
go to London / Ireland
go to bed

into



enter a room / a building



go into the kitchen / the house

towards



movement in the direction of something (but not directly to it)



go 5 steps towards the house

onto



movement to the top of something



jump onto the table

from



in the sense of where from



a flower from the garden

Noun Phrases

Noun Phrases are groups of words that can function as subjects or objects in sentences. They may take on various forms:

Water is important for survival.


(Single words)

Mr. Jones spoke to Dr. James.


(Proper names)

The boy ate an apple.


(Nouns and articles)

My friend works with her father.


(Nouns and possessives)

The young girl wore a long, white dress.


(Nouns and adjectives)

Some of the kids ate all of the cake.


(Nouns and quantifiers)

The man with the gun frightened the people in the bank.


(Nouns and prep. phrases)

The woman who lives there is my aunt.


(Nouns and relative clauses)

The dogs sleeping on the deck should be left alone.


(Nouns and phrases)

Whoever wrote this is in trouble.


(Noun clauses)

Pronouns and similar words can also function as subjects and objects:

He gave the money to us.
Someone left this.
Give me one of each.

Verb Phrases

Verb phrases are groups of words that express action or state of being. They take on
various forms.

The men live in the dormitory.


(Single verbs)

He stayed at the Hi Hat Hotel.


(Past tense verbs)

I am learning many new things.


(Progressive verbs)

She has been there before.


(Perfect verbs)

They have been working here five years.


(Perfect progressive verbs)

I could use some assistance.


(Verbs and modals)

The trip was approved by the professor.


(Passive verbs)

Do you want some more pie?


(Verbs in questions)

Other words can be added to enhance verb phrases:

The mayor works here.


(adverbs)

Neil is not a candidate.


(negatives)

They live in the suburbs.


(prepositional phrases)

She'll leave whenever she wants.


(adverbial clauses)

Don't talk while eating.


(phrases)

May i removing my steam?
it is too much something that should be discarded...
my heart has been injured for the umpteenth time, i never thinking if i have a liar friend.

i have five years making friends with her, but suddenly she lie to me.
it's so hurt, i do know what to say, i can believe it!

tell me, is this true?
a friend who i give a trust has been lie to me!

oh God, i think it's not fair...


why this is happen to me?
i hate this!




where is her heart?
damn!




i know,, karma certainly true..
just wait!

I always asked my self, am i weird? it does not mean i'm weird but, it is related to my dislike with eating chocolate. i do not know why i can not like eating chocolate. the first impression when i tried to eat chocolate when i the first grade in elementary school. i try to eat the chocolate a little bit. but when the chocolate was on my tongue the chocolate so bitter.

the bitter make me want to throw up. i feel it is so disgust and i do not want eating the chocolate anymore.Imagine nearly 20 years I never eat chocolate again as was the coffee, milk chocolate and so on, that I do not want to try to eat it. maybe you would not believe. but that's reality. I really do not like food that smells of chocolate.

so, i wonder why i like that?
Am I weird??


(@_@)

I do not know why every night I always dream and the dream was always to have a real sense, actually I was very nervous, I do not know how can I not had another dream every night.

i have prayer before i sleep, but i still dream again and again..
i have told to my parent and my friends. They say this is the common something. but, according to me that is not common.

no day without dreaming..
i think that is so annoying.. i do not want dream again....

please tell me how the way to not dream again!!!!
T_T

Why i can't open my heart for people who want to represent to my life?
i can't answer the question! until now i was wondering why i like it,, many the man who wish to present to fill my heart but I'm not interested in any at all, I have not found someone who really accord with me,,

i can't believe with another anymore,, i just waiting for someone who's can open up my heart!!!

Friday, March 2,2012

Today i have entered my the age in 20 years old,this is the beautiful day in my life. i think there is something special in my old.
i don't know why, maybe i'm so happy .. i wish i can get something special in march and i want became mature than before....

at the age of 20 years I have changed, because I was not a child anymore. I have to think up about the future,,

there is no time for messing around again..

that is a beautiful day ever.. (>_<)

Dear Diary,,

Today i'm so nerveous because there is Morsyn percentages in the class,, i have not done any preparation. i don't understand with this subject. that's so difficult!!

ouchhh!!!
i hate this subject.. the lecturer is very killer,,
we must be on time, do many exercise and do all of percentage every week...

it's makes me dizzy and lazy to come her class.. but i should not like it,, actually she is a good lecturer but i can not with her rules in class...

maybe i must realize, if the rule give the useful for me in the future.. :)

Definition:

(1) In linguistics, the study of the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. Syntax is one of the major components of grammar.

(2) The arrangement of words in a sentence. Adjective: syntactic.

# Within traditional grammar, the syntax of a language is described in terms of a taxonomy (i.e. the classificatory list) of the range of different types of syntactic structures found in the language. The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis in traditional grammar is that phrases and sentences are built up of a series of constituents (i.e. syntactic units), each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. Given this assumption, the task of the linguist analysing the syntactic structure of any given type of sentence is to identify each of the constituents in the sentence, and (for each constituent) to say what category it belongs to and what function it serves. . . .

"In contrast to the taxonomic approach adopted in traditional grammar, [Noam] Chomsky takes a cognitive approach to the study of grammar. For Chomsky, the goal of the linguist is to determine what it is that native speakers know about their native language which enables them to speak and understand the language fluently: hence, the study of language is part of the wider study of cognition (i.e. what human beings know). In a fairly obvious sense, any native speaker of a language can be said to know the grammar of his or her native language."
(Andrew Radford, English Syntax: An Introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004)


# "Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."
(Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1971)


# Syntactic Changes in English
"Syntactic change--change in the form and order of words--is . . . sometimes described as 'an elusive process as compared to sound change.' Its apparently puzzling nature is partly due to its variety. Word endings can be modified. Chaucer's line And smale foweles maken melodye shows that English has changed several of them in the last 600 years. The behaviour of verbs can alter. Middle English I kan a noble tale 'I know a fine story' reveals that can could once be used as a main verb with a direct object. And word order may switch. The proverb Whoever loved that loved not at first sight? indicates that English negatives could once be placed after main verbs. These are just a random sample of syntactic changes which have occurred in English in the last half-millennium or so."
(Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)


# William Cobbett on Syntax (1818)
"Syntax is a word which comes from the Greek. It means, in that language, the joining of several things together; and, as used by grammarians, it means those principles and rules which teach us how to put words together so as to form sentences. It means, in short, sentence-making. Having been taught by the rules of Etymology what are the relationships of words, how words grow out of each other, how they are varied in their letters in order to correspond with the variation in the circumstances to which they apply, Syntax will teach you how to give all your words their proper situations or places, when you come to put them together into sentences."
(William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but More Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys, 1818)

Definition:

A letter or group of letters added to the end of a word or root (i.e., a base form), serving to form a new word or functioning as an inflectional ending. Adjective: suffixal.

There are two types of suffix in English:

* A derivational suffix (such as the addition of -ly to an adjective to form an adverb) indicates what type of word it is.
* An inflectional suffix (such as the addition of -s to a noun to form a plural) tells something about the word's grammatical behavior.

See also:

* Common Suffixes in English
* Affix
* Infix
* Morpheme
* Prefix
* Splinter

Etymology:

Definition:

A letter or group of letters attached to the beginning of a word that partly indicates its meaning. Common prefixes include anti- (against), co- (with), mis- (wrong, bad), and trans- (across).

# "Prefixes are generally set solid with the rest of the word. Hyphens appear only when the word attached begins with (1) a capital letter, as with anti-Stalin, or (2) the same vowel as the prefix ends in, as with: anti-inflationary, de-escalate, micro-organism. Yet in well-established cases of this type, the hyphen becomes optional, as with cooperate."
(Pam Peters, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004)


# "Lately the prefix trend has been shrinking. During the 1980s, 'mini-' gave way to 'micro-,' which has yielded to 'nano-.' In the new millennium, companies such as Nanometrics, Nanogen and NanoPierce Technologies have all embraced the prefix, despite complaints their products were hardly nano-scale (a billionth of a meter or smaller). Even Eddie Bauer sells stain-resistant nano-pants. (They're available in 'extra-large' for the retailer's not-so-nano customers.)"
(Alex Boese, "Electrocybertronics." Smithsonian, March 2008)


# "We're talking prefixes today. By my inaccurate and utterly unreliable count, contemporary lexicographers list 152 'dis' words and 161 'mis' words. The 'dis' list begins with the verb 'to dis' (or diss), meaning 'to treat with contempt or disrespect." It ends with 'disvalue,' i.e., to depreciate, consider of little value. The 'mis' list begins with 'misact,' which no one has ever seen in print or heard in speech. It runs on to 'misuse,' which happens to writers every day."
(James Kilpatrick, "To 'dis,' or not to 'dis,'" June 4, 2007)

# "Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."
(Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1971)


# Syntactic Changes in English
"Syntactic change--change in the form and order of words--is . . . sometimes described as 'an elusive process as compared to sound change.' Its apparently puzzling nature is partly due to its variety. Word endings can be modified. Chaucer's line And smale foweles maken melodye shows that English has changed several of them in the last 600 years. The behaviour of verbs can alter. Middle English I kan a noble tale 'I know a fine story' reveals that can could once be used as a main verb with a direct object. And word order may switch. The proverb Whoever loved that loved not at first sight? indicates that English negatives could once be placed after main verbs. These are just a random sample of syntactic changes which have occurred in English in the last half-millennium or so."
(Jean Aitchison, Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)


# William Cobbett on Syntax (1818)
"Syntax is a word which comes from the Greek. It means, in that language, the joining of several things together; and, as used by grammarians, it means those principles and rules which teach us how to put words together so as to form sentences. It means, in short, sentence-making. Having been taught by the rules of Etymology what are the relationships of words, how words grow out of each other, how they are varied in their letters in order to correspond with the variation in the circumstances to which they apply, Syntax will teach you how to give all your words their proper situations or places, when you come to put them together into sentences."
(William Cobbett, A Grammar of the English Language in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General, but More Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys, 1818)

"For English, [morphology] means devising ways of describing the properties of such disparate items as a, horse, took, indescribable, washing machine, and antidisestablishmentarianism. A widely recognized approach divides the field into two domains: lexical or derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast (as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality)."
(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)

The distinction between words and lexemes provides the basis for the division of morphology into two branches: inflectional morphology and lexical word-formation.

"Inflectional morphology deals with the inflectional forms of various lexemes. It has something of the character of an appendix to the syntax, the major component of the grammar. Syntax tells us when a lexeme may or must carry a certain inflectional property, while inflectional morphology tells us what form it takes when it carries that inflectional property.

"Lexical word-formation, by contrast, is related to the dictionary. It describes the processes by which new lexical bases are formed and the structure of complex lexical bases, those composed of more than one morphological element. The traditional term is simply 'word-formation.'"

…it is requisite that each word contain in it so many distinct characters as there are variations in the sound it stands for. Thus the single letter a is proper to mark one simple uniform sound; and the word adultery is accomodated to represent the sound annexed to it in the formation whereof there being eight different collisions or modifications of the air by the organs of speech, each of which produces a difference of sound, it was fit the word representing it should consists of as many distinct characters thereby to mark each particular difference or part of the whole sound.

Bishop Berkeley

Chapter 1: alternations

Phonology is the study of the sound systems in language; studies, being what they are, aim to provide us with methods of analysis -- in this case, analysis of spoken utterances which will allow us to represent them on paper in a way that provides us with a deeper insight into how our language works.

The reader who comes to this book with no knowledge of phonology has a double handicap: not only the handicap of knowing nothing of phonology (a problem that we hope to do something about quite soon), but the potential handicap of already knowing rather well an old and not very systematic method of analyzing the sounds of English and representing them on paper: standard, written English, which we call English orthography.

It would be pointless for me to ask of you to turn off your knowledge of English orthography as you enter into the arena of phonology, for we can no sooner turn off that knowledge than we could turn off our ability to maintain our balance as we walk down the sidewalk. All we can do is take our knowledge of written English and try to step back from it; we can try to open our ears and really listen to what it is that we say and what it is that we hear all around us.

I will assume that you are a speaker of English, and that you can produce various sounds out loud, and that you will do your best to hear them as you say them -- or in some cases, that you imagine as best you can how other speakers of English pronounce words. As you do that, you will find that you need to make different and often finer distinctions than the standard spelling system of English permits. That awareness will be a sign of increasing phonological sophistication. [FN: We can do better than that, actually. If you have access to a computer linked to the Internet and the World Wide Web, you can listen to the actual sounds of the pronunciations I discuss in this book. Find this information at this URL: xxxx]

I daresay we all have some recollections, dim as they may be, of being taught to read. The teacher taught us the connections between sounds and letters, and soon we came to see the connections between sequences of letters and whole words. Now we must go back and think about the sounds themselves, and not presume that our letters do a complete and an accurate job of representing what we way and what we hear.

Let's begin with a rather tricky case. I will suppose that you speak a standard and familiar dialect of American English. You notice one day that in your pronunciation of a word such as lettuce, the sound that you utter when you expect to produce a t is quite different from the t that you produce in tea or telephone. Do say these words out loud, and attend to how you pronounce them. Something is odd about the sound in lettuce, it sounds a bit like a d, and as you think about it some more and make a few observations, you notice that when you say the word potato out loud, the two t's sound quite different. The first is a real t -- whatever that might mean; at least, it's much the same as the t in tea. But the second t in potato is that odd little sound, the same as the one you make in lettuce. Why do you speak this way, you might just ask yourself?

Phonologists, the people who study phonologies, have given a name to the sound which we shall explore: they refer to it as a flap, and it differs from the sound that begins the word in tea, which is a stop, for it truly stops the flow of air through the mouth for a brief period. There is a symbol used to represent the sound of the flap: it is a capital D, and to emphasize that when we speak of the flap we are referring to the sound, we often put square brackets around the D: [D]. The stop "t" is symbolized by the letter "t", but in order to avoid unfortunate ambiguities, when we mean to refer to the sound, we will explicitly put the "t" between brackets: [t]. So: the letter that we write as t is sometimes pronounced as a stop [t] and sometimes as a flap [D]. Why is that?

It would likely occur to us rather quickly that we should at least consider the possibility that English has a poor spelling system, and inexplicably uses the same letter ("t") to represent two different sounds. This sort of thing can happen. We can find many cases where English orthography (that is, the spelling system) turn out to be confusing, certainly, and perhaps confused. The letter s often represents both the sound of the s in sink, but also the similar z-sound in zinc, as it does frequently when surrounded in the spelling by vowels (as in wise) or at the end of a word (as in lies). We refer to the difference between the s-sound and the z-sound as one of voicing: z is voiced, while s is not. English is consistent in its spelling at least to the point where all written z's in true English words are pronounced as zs (that is, as voiced sounds), but s's are an often unpredictable bunch: the written s can represent either the sound s or the sound z, depending on quite a few things.

If English had no letter z, and we used s (let's ignore c in this) both in words with the s-sound and the z-sound, then we would have a case where the language just ignored in its spelling system a distinction that is found in the sounds. Could the pronunciation of our t sometimes as a [t] and sometimes as a [D] be something like that?

It's tempting to think so, though eventually we will see that this is not the case. We'll see, in fact, that the question about the relationship between the sounds [t] and [D] has nothing to do with spelling at all. But it's important to pursue the question of orthography for a while, because as we get started in this business of phonological analysis, spelling and pronunciation is pretty much all that we have to hold on to.

There is another case that we might look at where one written form stands for two quite different sounds. The one I have in mind involves not a single letter, however, but the pair of letters (the term often used for that is "digraph") th. The pair of letters th rarely is used to represent the sequence of sounds represented individually by t and by h (though sometimes it does, as in the word cathouse); it usually is used to represent one of two sounds. One is the sound found in thin, thing, math, catharsis, and many other words; the other is the sound found in words such as thy, the, those, writhe, either, bother, and many others. These two sounds are quite different, and phonologists have different names for the two. The sound in thin or math is said to be voiceless, just as the sound [s] is; the symbol [ ] is often used for this sound, but for simplicity's sake I will use the digraph th in brackets [th] to refer to this sound. The sound in thy or either is voiced, and the symbol [] is generally used for that sound; but I will use the digraph [dh] to refer to this sound.

[th] and [dh] are quite different sounds, even though they are both represented in our writing system by "th". That these two sounds are quite different is supported by the observation that it is not hard to find words that we know are different that differ only by having [th] in one and [dh] in the other. Thy and thigh differ (despite what the spelling seems to suggest) solely in the voicing of the first sound: thy begins with [dh], while thigh begins with [th], and similarly, either and ether differ not in their vowels (as the orthography, again deceiving us, seems to suggest) but in their middle consonant. Either sports a [dh], but ether has a [th]. How do we know which sound to use -- [th] or [dh] -- in any given word? There are some rules of thumb that might be helpful, like verbs that end in -the all end in the sound [dh]. But when all is said and done, the spelling system that we have in English simply makes no serious effort to represent the difference between these two sounds, [th] and [dh]. And that might give us some reason to take seriously the possibility that the sounds [t] and [D] are likewise two distinct sounds not represented by our standard orthography.

But even if that were so (and it's not), it would not put an end to the question that began our account: why is there a flap in lettuce? The sounds of lettuce are no different from the sounds of the phrase let us ..., as in let us begin! If we wanted to mark the sound there, we would have to write le[D] us begin. We have another case of a [D] that's being represented orthographicallly by a t. Fine; but a sticky question arises here, for while we say the word lettuce with a flap every time (at least we Americans do -- of course the British don't, but they don't ever have a flap represented by a t), the same can't be said of the word let. If we say that word alone (phonologists say, "say the word in isolation"), we find two pronunciations used by speakers of English, but neither of them contain a flap [D]; they both end on a different sound.

The word let, when said in isolation, can end with either a glottalized [t] (that is the more common American pronunciation), or a released [t]. What are these sounds, and how do they differ? A released [t] (which is often used by speakers from New York, for example, for a [t] that comes at the end of a sentence) has a burst of air that is released after the complete closure of air flow that is created by the tongue to make the sound [t]. After that closure has been held for a brief period, the tip of the tongue comes down a bit from the top of the mouth, and a brief burst of air flows over the top of the tongue. The alternative pronunciation of the [t] is as a glottalized sound. Here too the tip of the tongue comes up to the roof of the mouth, but the flow of air up from the lungs is closed at the vocal cords -- in the throat -- and so even if the tip of the tongue comes down from the roof of the mouth, the outward flow of air has been checked down in the throat, and so there is a complete silence following the closure made by the [t].

We will need a symbol for these t-sounds. The more common glottalized t is represented thusly: [t?], while the released t is represented by the symbol [th]. For now, we will focus on the more common pronunciation of t as [t?].

We can use these terms to summarize our observations regarding the pronunciation of the word let. When the t of let comes at the end of a sentence (or more generally, a phrase), it is pronounced as a glottalized t [t?]. When let is followed by us, the t is pronounced as a flap [D].

Is the t of let pronounced as a flap regardless of what word follows let? The answer is No. Let's consider a range of words that might follow let, and observe how the t of let is pronounced in these cases.

1. glottalized [t?]

let go

let Mary go

let Paul go

let Tom go

2. Flap [D]

let a man go free

let a boy go home

let him in the house

let Amy do it

There appears to be a principle lying behind the decision to use the glottalized t and the flap (though you may object to my calling that a decision). No matter how long we extend this list, we will find that the principle at work is this: when let is followed by a word starting with a vowel, its t is pronounced as a flap, and when let is followed by a consonant (that is, anything else), the t of let is pronounced as a glottalized t. This is a correct generalization, but a few additional points must be borne in mind.

First of all, why is there a flap in let him in the house, if him starts with a consonant ("h")? It's not hard to see that the h of him is not pronounced in speech at a normal conversational style -- and this is true regardless of whether ts or flaps are at issue. In a phrase like help him do it, the h of him is not present at normal speech rates. Only if we slow down considerably, pronouncing each word as a separate mini-phrase does the h of him reappear. So when we say that the t of let becomes a flap before a vowel, we really mean in front of a vowel, regardless of whether there is a consonant in the orthography or not.

Second, it is always possible to put some emphasis on the word let (which in the cases we are looking at is the main verb of the sentence), and the result of that stress is that for the purposes at hand, let is treated as a separate phrase, with a bit of the lengthening which is the telltale sign of the word in question being treated as if it were at the end of a phrase. We will come back and talk about this at length.

Definition


An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments.
Discussion


The allomorphs of a morpheme are derived from phonological rules and any morphophonemic rules that may apply to that morpheme.
Examples (English)


The plural morpheme in English, usually written as '-s', has at least three allomorphs:


* [-s] as in [hQts] 'hats'
* [-z] as in [d&u0254;gz] 'dogs'
* [«z] as in [bŒks«z] 'boxes'

Phonetics is a discipline of linguistics that focuses on the study of the sounds used in speech. Phonetics is not concerned with the meaning of these sounds, the order in which they are placed, or any other factor outside of how they are produced and heard, and their various properties. Phonetics is closely related to phonology, which focuses on how sounds are understood in a given language, and semiotics, which looks at symbols themselves.

There are three major subfields of phonetics, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the sounds used in speech and communication. Auditory phonetics looks at how people perceive the sounds they hear, acoustic phonetics looks at the waves involved in speech sounds and how they are interpreted by the human ear, and articulatory phonetics looks at how sounds are produced by the human vocal apparatus. Articulatory phonetics is where the majority of people begin their study of phonetics, and it has uses for many people outside of the field of linguistics. These include speech therapists, computer speech synthesizers, and people who are simply interested in learning how they make the sounds they do.

The International Phonetic Association has a special alphabet for describing all of the different sounds, or phones, currently thought to be used in human speech. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has more than 100 distinct phones listed and given distinct notation. Sounds can be separated into a number of different groups, based on whether they use air from the lungs or not, whether they are voiced or not, the position of the tongue in the mouth, and how the sound is altered. While the bulk of sounds made by the speakers of the world fall into a somewhat narrow band of this spectrum, there are other sounds that are quite different, such as the clicks and smacking sounds made in some African languages.

Most consonants, called pulmonic consonants, use air from the lungs and can be placed on a grid depending on which parts of the vocal tract are used to articulate the speech sound and how air is obstructed as it passes through the mouth. For example, the sound /p/ uses both lips to articulate air, and is therefore known as a bilabial. It also consists of a full stop of air, known as a plosive. The /p/ sound, therefore, as well as the /b/ sound, can be described as a bilabial plosive. The /b/ sound, since the vocal fold is vibrating as it is said, is called a voiced bilabial plosive, while the /p/ sound, which has no such vibration, is called an unvoiced bilabial plosive.

All the consonant sounds used in speech can be described in this manner, from the /r/ sound in English, which we can call an alveolar trill, for example, to the sound at the beginning of the word ‘yet’, transcribed in IPA with the symbol j and described as a palatal approximant, to the deep-throated Arabic sounds of the pharyngeal fricatives.

Morphology is interested in the internal structure of words, much in the same way that phonology is interested in meaning-distinguishing speech sounds (phonemes). We can break down words into smaller units by analyzing their structure and identify systematic processes that allow speakers to add new words to the lexicon and indicate grammatical information such as tense and number.

An example illustrates the point. Think about what information is contained in the word girls. Is it possible to break this word down into smaller structural units?

girls = girl + -s

It seems that girls can be broken down into two parts, the first of which refers to something in the world (a young female human being) and the second indicating a grammatical category – in this case number – and specifying plural.

The same approach can easily be applied to other kinds of words.

kicked = kick + -ed

While girls is a noun kicked is a verb, yet the same rules apply. Kicked can be segmented into the first part that describes a kind of action (kick) and the second part that adds the information past tense (-ed). Tense is another grammatical category that can be encoded morphologically in English.

Think about what kinds of words take which endings for a moment. Only verbs (talked, laughed, pushed, loved) allow us to add information about tense, whereas only nouns (girls, boys, zebras, chairs) permit marking number.

Let’s compare this with the another kind of example. The word coolness consists of two parts, giving us the same kind of formula as in the previous two examples.

coolness = cool + ness

However, things look different when we analyze the segments. Cool can have a whole range of meanings, but most commonly it is an adjective that describes a person or thing. But what about -ness? It does not indicate number or tense – in fact it contains no information about any grammatical category whatsoever. -Ness also does not indicate a specific thing, action or state. So what is it good for? Look at these example sentences:

Mike is a cool guy

Coolness is a good trait to have

The -ness in words such as coolness, hipness, sadness or vagueness seems to mean “having the attribute X” and adding it to an adjective apparently changes that adjective into a noun. There are many more endings of this type that affect word class (for example, by transforming an adjective into a noun) and that may change a word’s meaning to different degrees.

teach – teacher

insane – insanity

happy – happily

A teacher (noun) is someone who teaches (verb), insanity (noun) is the state of being insane (adjective) and happily (adverb) is the way in which you do something you are happy (adjective) with or about. We can also extend or even reverse the meaning of a word by appending something like re- or un-.

fill – refill

introduce – reintroduce

happy – unhappy

fair – unfair

Morphemes

In linguistic terminology the minimal parts of words that we have analyzed above are called morphemes. Morphemes come in different varieties, depending on whether they are

* free or bound and
* inflectional or derivational

Free morphemes

Free morphemes can stand by themselves (i.e. they are what what we conventionally call words) and either tell us something about the world (free lexical morphemes) or play a role in grammar (free grammatical morphemes). Man, pizza, run and happy are instances of free lexical morphemes, while and, but, the and to are examples for free grammatical morphemes. It is important to note the difference between morphemes and phonemes: morphemes are the minimal meaning-bearing elements that a word consists of and are principally independent from sound. For example, the word zebra (ˈziːbrə) consists of six phones and two syllables, but it contains only a single morpheme. Ze- and -bra are not independent meaning-bearing components of the word zebra, making it monomorphemic. (Bra as a free morpheme does in fact mean something in English, but this meaning is entirely unrelated to the -bra in zebra.)

Bound morphemes

Not all morphemes can be used independently, however. Some need to be bound to a free morpheme. In English the information “plural number” is attached to a word that refers to some person, creature, concept or other nameable entity (in other words, to a noun) when encoded in a morpheme and cannot stand alone. Similarly the morpheme -er, used to describe “someone who performs a certain activity” (e.g. a dancer, a teacher or a baker) cannot stand on its own, but needs to be attached to a free morpheme (a verb in this case). Bound morphemes come in two varieties, derivational and inflectional, the core difference between the two being that the addition of derivational morphemes creates new words while the addition of inflectional words merely changes word form.

Derivational morphemes

The signature quality of derivational morphemes is that they derive new words. In the following examples, derivational morphemes are added to produce new words which are derived from the parent word.

happy – happiness – unhappiness

frost – defrost – defroster

examine – examination – reexamination

In all cases the derived word means something different than the parent and the word class may change with each derivation. As demonstrated in the examples above, sometimes derivation will not cause the world class to change, but in such a case the meaning will usually be significantly different from that of the parent word, often expressing opposition or reversal.

probable – improbable

visible – invisible

tie – untie

create – recreate

Independently of whether or not word class changes and how significantly meaning is affected, derivation always creates (derives) new words from existing ones, while inflection is limited to changing word form.

Inflectional morphemes

Inflection (the process by which inflectional morphemes are attached to words) allows speakers to morphologically encode grammatical information. That may sound much more complicated than it really is – recall the example we started out with.

The word girls consists of two morphemes

* the free lexical morpheme girl that describes a young female human being and
* the bound inflectional morpheme -s that denotes plural number

Examples for the morphological encoding of other grammatical categories are tense (past tense -ed as in walked), aspect (progressive aspect as in walking), case (genitive case as in Mike‘s car) and person (third person -s as in Mike drives a Toyota).

You are likely to notice that

* overall, English grammar has fairly few inflections and
* some inflectional endings can signify different things and more than one piece of grammatical information at once

The first point can easily be demonstrated by comparing English with German, which makes more use of inflection. Compare the following two pairs of sentences.

Der Mann sah den Hund

Den Hund sah der Mann

vs.

The man saw the dog

The dog saw the man

If you focus on the meaning of the two German sentences you’ll see that it does not change, even though we’ve changed the word order. The man is still the one who sees the dog, not the other way around. By contrast, the English expression changes its meaning from the first to the second sentence.

Why is this the case? In the German example the definite article is inflected for accusative case (den Hund), telling us who exactly did what to whom. This allows us to play around with the word order without changing the meaning of the sentence. English gives us no way of doing the same. We are forced to stick to a fixed word order due to a lack of case inflection (except for personal pronouns). Languages such as Latin that indicate a high degree of grammatical information via inflection (so-called synthetic languages) generally have a freer word order than analytic languages like English which have only reasonably very few inflections and rely on word order to signal syntactic relations (another popular example for a strongly analytic language is Chinese).

Affixes

Linguists use the term affix to describe where exactly a bound morpheme is attached to a word. Prefixes are attached at the onset of a free morpheme, while suffixes are attached to the end. Infixes – affixes that occur in the middle of a word – are very rare in English, a well-known exception being expletive infixation. While in English suffixes can be either derivational or inflectional (teacher, slowly vs. apples, kicked), prefixes are always derivational (untie, recover, defrost).

Morphs, morphemes, allomorphs

When you look at certain inflectional endings that occur in English, you’ll notice that they are often but not always predictable. Here are a few examples for the plural morpheme.

one car – two cars; one rose – two roses…

but

one mouse – two mice

one man – two men

one ox – two oxen

one sheep – two sheep

A vowel change (also called an umlaut plural) instead of a suffix marks the plural in mice and men, in oxen the suffix we encounter is rather exotic (meaning this word is virtually the only one that takes the -en ending) and in the last example there is no visible plural marking at all.

The fact that plural number in English can be marked with several different inflectional suffixes (-s, -en), by vowel change or by no (visible) change at all points to a distinction you already know from phonology:

morphs
a concrete part of a word that cannot be divided into smaller parts

morphemes
the meaning-distinguishing, abstract dimension of morphs, e.g. something like the plural morpheme

allomorphs
different realizations of the the same morpheme, e.g. -s, -en and nothing for the plural morpheme in dogs, oxen and fish_

When linguists talk about the allomorphs of the plural morpheme they are referring to variants of the same functional element which do not impact meaning in any way. A plural is still a plural, whether encoded by -s or something else.

Base, stem and root

Finally, in order to make the segmentation of words into smaller parts a little clearer, we differentiate between the base, the stem and the root of a word in morphological terms.

base: reactions

stem: reaction (s)

root: (re) act (ion) (s)

The stem is the base with all inflectional suffixes removed, whereas the root is what remains after all affixes have been taken off. When doing computational text analysis stemming (i.e. removing all inflectional endings) is frequently undertaken in order to avoid counting different word forms (e.g. house and houses) as separate words.

Key Terms

* morphemes
o free morphemes
+ lexical
+ grammatical
o bound morphemes
+ derivational
+ inflectional
* affixes
o prefix
o suffix
o infix
* morph – morpheme – allomorph
* base – stem – root
* synthetic language – analytic language

Definition


A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
Discussion


Phonologists have differing views of the phoneme. Following are the two major views considered here:


* In the American structuralist tradition, a phoneme is defined according to its allophones and environments.
* In the generative tradition, a phoneme is defined as a set of distinctive features.

Comparison


Here is a chart that compares phones and phonemes:


A phone is …


A phoneme is …

One of many possible sounds in the languages of the world.


A contrastive unit in the sound system of a particular language.

The smallest identifiable unit found in a stream of speech.


A minimal unit that serves to distinguish between meanings of words.

Pronounced in a defined way.


Pronounced in one or more ways, depending on the number of allophones.

Represented between brackets by convention.
Example:

[b], [j], [o]


Represented between slashes by convention.
Example:

/b/, /j/, /o/
Examples (English): Minimal pair


Here are examples of the phonemes /r/ and /l/ occurring in a minimal pair:


* rip
* lip



The phones [r] and [l] contrast in identical environments and are considered to be separate phonemes. The phonemes /r/ and /l/ serve to distinguish the word rip from the word lip.
Examples (English): Distinctive features


Here are examples of the English phonemes /p/ and /i/ specified as sets of distinctive features:


/p/ /i/


-syllabic +consonantal -sonorant +anterior -coronal -voice -continuant -nasal+syllabic -consonantal +sonorant +high -low -back -round +ATR -nasal

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context.The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with the analysis of Sanskrit.[citation needed]

The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).