"The fanatic Pinker"

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).