Discovering Language

The Structure of Modern English
*

The Levels of Language
Phonetics The physical properties of speech
Phonology The study of linguistic sounds
Morphology The study of word structure
Syntax
The study of utterance/sentence
structure
Text/discourse
The study of higher-level
structures
Context
The influence of situation,
participants and functions

*The Hierarchy of Linguistic Levels

*
is concerned with the production and
reception of speech sounds, and in
some ways is closer to the natural
sciences (biology and physics) than to
linguistics.
Note also that although a great deal of phonetics is concerned
with small speech sounds, there are other aspects of the
physical production of language that are not made up of such
small units. These include stress, including word-stress, and
intonation

*is the study of the sounds that
human beings use to communicate
through language, and it is mostly
concerned with individual speech
sounds that follow each other in a
linear fashion.
*

*
Acoustic Phonetics
*is concerned with investigating how
the sounds of speech are transmitted
through the air between speaker and
hearer.

*
Auditory Phonetics
*is concerned with how hearers
receive the sounds of speech and
decode (that is, understand) them.

*
Articulatory Phonetics
*Is the production end of the process –
how the speaker creates the sounds.
Unlike the other subfields it is closer
to the biological than to the physical
sciences.

The production of human speech
originates in the lungs as most
human speech sounds are
articulated on an outgoing breath.
This process is known as the
egressive pulmonary airstream
mechanism.
The speech sounds of most human
languages are made as we breathe
out. Once the air has left the lungs
it travels up the trachea and leaves
the body through the mouth, and
sometimes also through the nose.
On the way it may be modified by a
number of the vocal organs. These
modifications are responsible for
making the EAS differently,
depending on where the airflow is
restricted and by how much.

Before the expelled gases leave the
body through the mouth and nose
they pass through the larynx. This is
a ‘box’ made of cartilage that
contains two folds of flesh known as
the vocal folds.
The latter are joined together at
the front of the larynx, at the point
where the cartilage walls meet.
Towards the rear of the larynx, the
vocal folds are attached by muscles
to the arytenoid cartilage, and this
mechanism can pull them close
together or keep them apart, as in
quiet breathing. The vocal folds also
have more specialized linguistic
and musical functions, such as
voicing and, related to this, the
ability to change pitch when singing
and to add intonation to speech.

Above the larynx there is a muscular tube known as the
pharynx, which leads to the back of the mouth. The
pharynx is able to contract, thus ‘squeezing’ the airflow
and causing a class of sounds. Once past the pharynx, the
egressive airstream has a choice of direction. From here
the air can escape through the mouth or the nasal cavity.
When the sounds to be made are not nasal in tone the
velum or soft palate is pulled back to make contact with
the back of the pharynx, thus cutting off the nasal cavity
route.
A number of parts of the mouth are used to modify the
sound of the passage of air: the uvulum, velum, palate,
alveolum, teeth, lips and tongue.

*
is the study of the sound system of
particular human languages, including
dialects and other language varieties.
At this level of study it may seem to
be similar to the study of phonetics
because the transcription systems
used are quite similar.

*
*The difference between phonetics and
phonology is that phonetics tries to get as close
as possible to describing exactly what is going
on in the mouth, whereas phonology is only
interested in the extent to which sounds are
contrastive in the language; that is, cause
meaning change. This difference is analogous to
the difference between studying an alphabet
system and analyzing handwriting styles or
fonts.

*
(from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound
uttered")
is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed
to form meaningful contrasts between
utterances.

*
*Minimal pairs are sets of words (often,
but not only, pairs) that differ
phonetically, but only in one way at a
time. For example the following English
words differ in only their initial
consonant:
pot, tot, cot, hot

*
pot, tot, cot, hot
*This set of words provides evidence that the sounds /p/,
/t/, /k/ and /h/ are phonemes of English, because it
makes a difference which one you say in the identical
context of the vowel /ɒ/ followed by a /t/. The
similarity in their pronunciation is evident in the spelling
as well as the transcription, but more complex words do
not have straightforward spellings in English and
transcriptions are needed to show that the words are
indeed minimally different.

*
is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds
(or phones) used to pronounce a
single phoneme. For example, [pʰ] (as in pin)
and [p] (as in spin) are allophones for the
phoneme /p/ in the English language.
Although a phoneme's allophones are all
alternative pronunciations for a phoneme, the
specific allophone selected in a given situation is
often predictable.

*
is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds
or forms appearing in the same
environment without a change in meaning
and without being considered incorrect
by native speakers.
Ex. Economics Finance

*
*One consequence of putting phonemes
together in close proximity is that they
sometimes become more like each other
than they would be in isolation.

*
*One consequence of putting phonemes
together in close proximity is that they
sometimes become more like each other
than they would be in isolation.
*It is either anticipatory (also called regressive) or
retrospective (also called progressive).

*
*Anticipatory
It is when the end of the first word
anticipates some aspect of the beginning of
the second one.

*
Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Assimilation
Bad Man bædmæn bæbmæn
Good times GυdtaImz Gυttaimz
Give me gIvmi: gImmi:
Anticipatory

*
Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Assimilation
Who’s this? hu:zðis huzzis
In that car Inðækɑ: Innækkɑ
Save them seIvðəm seIvvəm
Retrospective

*
*Another process that takes place in
connected speech is elision, which
involves the loss of a sound that would be
articulated in a careful pronunciation.
*The most frequently elided consonants in
English are /t/ and /d/, particularly when
they occur between other consonants,

*
Orthographic Version Careful Pronunciation Elided Version
Handsome /hændsəm/ /hænsəm/
Windmill /wIndmIl/ /wInmIl/
Mostly /moυstlI:/ /moυsli/
Kindness /kaIndnεs/ /kaInnəs/
Retrospective

*
*To aid the flow of speech, consonants and
vowels are sometimes added to words in a
casual style when they would not be
pronounced if the word was said on its
own. This is known as insertion. The most
common examples occur when the first
word ends in a vowel and the second
begins with a vowel.

*
*The inserted consonants are usually
approximants, /r/, /j/ and /w/,
because they are less consonant-like
than the other consonants and
detract less obviously from the
vowels in the two words.

*
*morphology is the study of the
structure of words in a language and
it considers the individual parts of
the word, commonly called
morphemes, as the smallest unit of
meaning in the language.

*
*Though it is not a familiar term outside
linguistics, the morpheme is one of the
most useful concepts introduced in
twentieth-century linguistic theory, as it
gives a generic name to those units of
language that fall between phonology and
syntax and were previously known only by
different names (prefix, suffix, base, and
so on) according to their behavior.

*
*Free morphemes are essentially the
words of the language with no
additions, whereas bound morphemes
are the affixes that are added to free
morphemes to alter their
grammatical effect in various ways.

*
*Derivation is the process by
which words have a morpheme
added that changes their meaning
and often their class.
*Mature – maturation
*motivate – motivation
*create – creation

*
*Note that maturation is a process (of becoming mature),
whilst motivation is usually more of a product than a
process, and creation can be either a product or a
process:
*The maturation of the cheese takes place
over a few weeks.
*My motivation was the result of your
encouragement.

*
*The inflectional morphemes in English are all
suffixes, that is, they are all bound morphemes
added to the end of the base word. What
characterizes them is that they are fairly
regular, in both form and meaning, and apply to
all the members of a word class. It is also
important to note that the inflectional
morphemes do not change the class of the word,
but alter the grammatical form in ways that are
relevant to the word class concerned.

*
*The principle of compounding is that the
meaning of the resulting word is not simply the
sum of its parts, but has a further meaning that
could not immediately be predicted by someone
who knew the meaning of the free morphemes
individually.
*Thus blackboard is more than simply any board that happens to be
black; it has a specific function in educational settings and
incidentally is not always black.

*
*The grammatical category of a compound
word in English is always the same as the
category of the second (or last) free
morpheme. Thus a noun plus noun
combination will be a noun overall (for
example sledgehammer), as will an adjective
plus noun combination (for example high
school), whereas a noun plus verb combination
will be a verb (for example water-ski) and a
noun plus adjective combination will be an
adjective (for example fire-retardant).

*
* A noun is a word used to refer to people,
animals, objects, substances, states,
events and feelings. Nouns can be a
subject or an object of a verb, can be
modified by an adjective and can take an
article or determiner.

*
*Nouns make up one of the largest word
classes in English and were traditionally
taught in primary school as ‘naming’
words.
*The word comes from
the Latin nomen meaning "name".

Ask a partner to provide the nouns for “A Noun
Poem.” Use the list below. When the list is
complete, write the nouns in the poem. Do
not let your partner see the poem until you
are through!
NOUN LIST
1. Noun/Thing _____________________________
2. Noun/Person (classmate) __________________
3. Noun/Place ______________________________
4. Noun/Place ______________________________
5. Noun/Person _____________________________
6. Noun/Person _____________________________
7. Noun/Thing ______________________________

*
My, 1._____________ my, 1._____________ I love it! It’s
cool.
I’d like to buy one for 2._____________ at school.
I bring mine with me wherever I go, from
3._____________ to 4._____________ to Baguio.
My friends 5._____________ and 6._____________ say a
7._____________ is more useful.
But I feel that I must remain truthful: I will hold my
1._____________ close to my heart and hope that we
never, ever must part!

*
*Verbs are the other very large lexical
word class in English, and were
traditionally called ‘doing’ words when
taught to young children. Like the noun
class, the lexical verb class is more
inclusive than the label implies as there
are verbs (for example have, be) which do
not describe doing, but being, or states,
rather than processes.

*
*The adjective word class is smaller
than the noun and verb classes, and
has both a more restricted set of
forms than the verb and a more
limited set of functions than the
noun.

*
Adjectives are words that describe or
modify another person or thing in the
sentence.
The Articles — a, an, and the — are
adjectives.

*
Positive
Comparative
Superlative

*
Used in comparing two
persons or things.

*
Used in comparing three or
more persons or things.

*
The word than frequently
accompanies the
comparative.
The word the precedes the
superlative.

*
The inflected suffixes -er and -est
suffice to form most comparatives
and superlatives, although we need
-ier and -iest when a two-syllable
adjective ends in y (happier and
happiest); otherwise we use more
and most when an adjective has
more than two syllables.

*
Positive Comparative Superlative
rich richer richest
lovely lovelier loveliest
beautiful more beautiful most beautiful

*
Certain adjectives have irregular forms in the comparative and
superlative degrees.
Irregular Comparative and Superlative Forms
good better best
bad worse worst
little less least
much
many
some
more most
far further furthest

*
*The final lexical word class is the adverb
class. In many ways this is the least class-
like of all as it consists of a number of
subclasses that have relatively little in
common, except that they do not perform
the most central roles in the clause and
are often not essential to the grammatical
completeness of the utterance in which
they occur.

*
*An adverb is a part of speech that
describes or modifies a verb, an
adjective, another adverb, clause, or
sentence.
*Adverbs answer the questions "How?",
"When?", "Where?", "Why?", "In what way?",
"How much?", "How often?", "Under what
condition", "To what degree?"

*
*Pronouns, although a grammatical class,
function syntactically in similar ways to
the noun class because they can be
subjects, objects and complements. This
makes sense because their role is to
substitute for more complex nouns and
noun phrases in order to make the
language more efficient and avoid
repetition.

The late President Corazon Aquino is
the first Filipino female president.
President Corazon Aquino is the wife
of the late Senator Benigno “Ninoy”
Aquino, Senator Benigno “Ninoy”
Aquino was assassinated in the
Tarmac of the Manila International
Airport.

The late President Corazon Aquino is
the first Filipino female president.
She is the wife of the late Senator
Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who was
assassinated in the Tarmac of the
Manila International Airport.

The late President Corazon
Aquino was an icon of
Philippine democracy. She
will always be loved and
remembered.
Antecedent
Pronoun

A word, phrase or clause
referred to by a pronoun.

*
*Sentence, Phrases and Clauses
*Semantics
*Theories, Text and Contexts

*
*Prepositions
*Conjunctions
*Determiners

Discovering Language

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked (20)

Similar to Discovering Language (20)

More from Ezekiel Rodriguez (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Discovering Language