Phonology - The Sound Patterns of Language
Phonology of language - the way in which speech sounds form patterns.
- Phonemes - the sounds that make up language
- Pitch - varied intonation which modify sentence meaning (highs, lows, falling, rising)
- Stress - emphasis or accent on specific syllables
Morphology - The Words of Language
- Morphemes - small, indivisible units which give meaning to word
- Single sound (amoral or asexual)
- Syllable (amendment)
- Two or more syllables (tiger or artichoke)
- Two different morphemes may have same sound (dancer and fancier)
- A morpheme may have alternative phonetic forms (s can be pronounced bags, cats, or bushes)
- Some morphemes may change meaning (clear/unclear)
- Some morphemes may change part of speech (ripe/ripen from adjective to verb)
- Free morphemes can stand alone (envelop)
- Bound morphemes occur only in conjunction with other (-ing, -est).
- Bound morphemes occur as affixes (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes)
Syntax - The Sentence Patterns of Language
Syntax - the structure of sentences and the rules that govern the correctness of a sentence.
Rules of grammar determine how morphemes and words must be combined to express a specific meaning (syntactic rules of the language).
Syntax refers to the rules that make sentences. Grammar determines whether or not a sentence conforms to a standard.
Semantics - The Meanings of Language
Semantics - the study of meanings of individual words and of larger units such as phrases and sentences. The meaning of words may be derived from context, previous knowledge, intonation of the speaker, or connotation.
Semantic Properties of Words
- Ambiguity - having more than one sense
- Anomaly - incongruous in context
- Contradiction - opposite in nature
- Redundancy - using surplus words
- Related meaning - sharing one or more elements
- Specificity - narrowing the meaning
- Entailment - logically related to previous meanings
- Connotation - implying suggested meanings
- Association - frequently connected meanings
Pragmatics - The Influence of Context
Pragmatics - the study of how context affects the user's interpretation of language, the knowledge needed to obtain meaning from a situation, and the fundamental patterns of cultural interaction.
- Scripts - expected interaction or predictable interchange in a social situation.
- Cultural context - expected cultural or situational conventions
Discourse - Oral Interaction
- Turn-taking (not dominating the discourse)
- Topic focus and relevance (the ability to explore and maintain each other's interest in topics of conversation)
- Conversational Repair (techniques of clearing up misunderstandings and maintaining conversation)
- Appropriateness (factors of gender, status, age, and culture need to be considered)
Discourse - the Written Genre
- Reference - devices in the text that signal the need to retrieve information outside the text, preceding or following text)
- Substitution - avoided repeated elements in a text
- Ellipsis - allows writer to assume certain information without making it explicit
- Conjunction - additive, expository, comparison, contrastive, causal, temporal devices
- Lexical cohesion - vocabulary use, incorporating synonyms
Resource:
The Cross-cultural, Language, and Academic Development Handbook - A Complete K-12 Reference Guide, by Lynne T. Diaz-Rico and Kathryn Z. Weed, Allyn and Bacon, 1995, Needham Heights, Massachusetts 02194 (pages 56 - 66).
(Halliday (1978) page 65 in CLAD Handbook) Halliday, M. (1978). Language as a social semiotic. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.
- Instrumental - to manipulate the environment to cause certain events to happen.
- Regulatory - to enable one to control events or the behavior of others (including approval, disapproval, and setting rules and laws)
- Representational - to allow an individual to communicate information to the world, to convey facts and knowledge.
- Interactional - to get along with others and maintain social communication
- Personal - to allow a speaker to express the personality in feelings and emotions
- Heuristic - to use language to acquire knowledge, to explore and find out about the world
- Imaginative - to allow the individual to create a personal world, freed from the boundaries of the everyday, using language for sheer pleasure.