Understanding Language: Phonetics, Morphology, and Syntax

Understanding Language Structure

Language: A system of signs and rules for combining signs, shared by speakers within a specific linguistic community. It is a social system with a general pattern common to all speakers, stable and fixed.

Speech: The individual use of language in a given circumstance. It is variable depending on the context. These terms were defined by Ferdinand de Saussure.

André Martinet introduced the concept of double articulation. The linguistic sign consists of monemes and phonemes.

Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics: Deals with the oral language level. Its units of study are the phoneme (an abstract minimum unit without meaning that differentiates words) and the sound (a concrete realization of a phoneme uttered by an individual). Phonemes are represented between bars, and sounds between brackets. Phonology studies sound, phonetically.

Morphology

Morphology studies the formal aspects of the units of the second articulation.

Syntax

Syntax considers the combination of words into phrases and sentences, and their roles within these structures.

PHONEMES > MORPHEMES > WORDS > SYNTAGMS > SENTENCES

Morphemes

1: Independent:

• Determiners: articles and adjectives
• Relational: prepositions, prepositional phrases, and conjunctions

2: Dependent:

• Inflectional endings: for nouns (gender and number), and verbs (tense, mood, number, and voice)
• Derivatives: interfijos, prefixes, suffixes

Types of words: articles, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Simple, compound, derivative, parasynthetic (formed from 2 or more tokens, or those that lose meaning when affixes are removed), acronyms (units comprising lexical shift), acronyms (formed by combining elements of two or more words), short forms (suppression of a sound at the end of a word, e.g., 'cinematographer' to 'films'), and apheresis (suppression of a sound at the beginning of a word).

Syntactic Level

Syntactic Level: Studies the function of words in a determined context.

Semantic and Lexical Level

Semantic and Lexical Level:

Lexicology: The discipline that deals with the formation of words in a language and their transformation.

Semantics: Analyzes the meaning of words and the semantic relationships between them.

Semes

Semes: Lexical features that help analyze meaning. The sememe set includes denotative (dictionary meanings) and connotative (meanings derived from context) aspects.

Space of Meaning

Space of Meaning: Lexical subsets consisting of words of the same grammatical category that share a seme, significantly differentiating them from other groups.

• Monosemy: Only one meaning
• Synonymy: Semantic relation between two words with different signifiers and the same meaning
• Polysemy: Multiple meanings
• Homonymy: Words that were different have evolved until their signifiers coincide (homophones and homographs)
• Antonymy: Opposition of meanings (pure, complementarity, and reciprocity)
• Hyperonymy: A word (hyperonym) includes others (hyponyms)