Essential Terminology for Language Structure Study

Language Fundamentals

Language: The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.

Word: It is the smallest independent unit of language, the minimal constituent of a phrase or sentence.

Linguistics and Structure

Linguistics: The scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.

Branches of Linguistics

• Phonology: The branch of linguistics that deals with systems of sounds.
• Semantics: The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.
• Syntax: The set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order.
• Morphology: The branch of linguistics concerned with the study of word structure and word formation.

Vocabulary and Meaning

Lexicon: It is the vocabulary of a person. A lexicon is the knowledge that a native speaker has about a language.

Lexeme: The basic unit of meaning in the lexicon, or vocabulary of a specific language or culture.

Verbs

• Transitive verb: It needs a direct object.
• Intransitive verb: It doesn’t take a direct object.

To coin: Invent a new word or phrase.

Morphemes and Word Components

Morpheme: It is the smallest unit of language that combines both a form and a meaning; the minimal constituent of a word.

• Free morpheme: A morpheme that can stand alone as a word.
• Bound morpheme: A word element that cannot stand alone as a word.

Morpheme Types and Variations

Allomorph: A variant form of a morpheme, a unit of meaning that varies in sound without changing the meaning.

Grammatical morphemes: Morphemes that contribute mainly grammatical information or indicate relationships between the lexemes.

Affix: A grammatical morpheme which must be bound to a root or to another affix.

Suffixes: Affixes attached to the right, or end, of a base.

Root change: The change or replacement of some part of a root.

Suprasegmental change: A shift in tone or stress to signal a grammatical function.

Word Formation Categories

Simple word: A word that consists of a single morpheme.

Compound words: Words that contain two or more words combined to create a separate meaning.

Complex words: Words that contain multiple morphemes (more than one morpheme).

Word Bases

Root: The root is the core of the word, once all affixes are removed. There should just be one root morpheme, with the rest as identifiable affixes.

Stem: Essentially the base form for a lexeme, to which inflectional affixes are added (plurals, past tense, etc.). Derivational affixes are part of the stem, and just the final contextual/paradigmatic inflectional information remains. For example, undo is a stem that can be inflected for word forms such as undoes or undid. Any form an affix attaches to, whether simple or complex (base or stem).