THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

SEMANTICS Not only does the grammatical structure of our language provide the needed clues for understanding, we also have a wealth of figurative language and rich description that adds color and nuance to our communication. Semantics refers to the ways in which a language conveys meaning.i It is our understanding of semantics that allows us to recognize that someone who is green with envy has not changed hue, or that having cold feet has less to do with the appendage at the end of our legs and more to do with our anxiety about a new experience. Because semantics moves beyond the literal meaning of words and is culture-dependent, this is among the most difficult aspects of language for individuals who are not native speakers and even those who speak the same language but come from different cultures and convey meaning using words in unique ways. Anyone who has attempted to converse with a teenager in his own vernacular can appreciate the importance of sharing a semantic base for communicating clearly.
Word fields As has already been discussed, semantics is concerned with meaning. One way of defining meaning is by looking at the relationship of a group of terms in unison. Do they go together or not? Have a look at the following examples: eyes, hands, nose, feet green, red, purple, yellow dog, log, hog, fog While the terms in the first two sets are all related to one another (they form a word field), the words in the third set make up an arbitrary mix. This is likely to be the impression of most native speakers dog and log simply have nothing in common in terms of meaning -, but it underscores a point we made very early in this course: the arbitrariness of the sign. The words in the third set share an identical sound pattern (save for the initial phoneme), but their meaning does not reflect this in any way.
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 1

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

Synonymy Synonomy is the degree of sameness (in regards to meaning) that two terms share. Natural languages afford fairly little space for complete synonyms (that would not be economical) and accordingly, small meaning differences exist. Buy and purchase are an example for two near-complete synonyms. In purely semantic terms, both words mean the same thing, but their use depends on the context they are used in. Purchase is likely to be used in slightly more high-brow language, whereas buy is the more common (in both senses of the word) variant. English has a fairly high number of (near) synonyms because of the influx of French words into the lexicon. Antonomy Antonyms are binary opposition pairs such as happy unhappy, tall short,young old, war peace. Their decisive quality is that the meaning of one term automatically excludes the other someone who is tall is not short and someone who is unhappy is not happy. Antonyms can be gradable or non-gradable, depending on whether or not we can attach inflectional morphemes to them to indicate a comparison (happy happier happiest vs beautiful *beautifuller *beautifullest) Hyponyms

A more specific term; a subordinate grouping word or phrase. For example, spoon is a hyponym of cutlery.
Homonyms Homonyms are terms that are superficially identical (in speech and writing) but etymologically unrelated:

match = thing that you light a cigarette with match = thing that a soccer team loses

PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE

Page 2

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

date =a sweet kind of fruit date = an appointment
Note that homonyms are characterized by the fact that they look the same superficially, but are actually unrelated. Usually the etymology of a word is key in determining whether it is a homonym. Polysemy In contrast to homonymity, which describes separate words with different meanings that only happen to look similar, polysemy describes individual word with multiple and distinct senses (polysemes). The term bank, for example, can denote either the institution or the building in which the institution resides. Both meanings are associated with the same word, making bank polysemous. By contrast, a river bank is not a different meaning of the same term, but a different word entirely.

PHONOLOGY

The definition of Phonology is the science of speech sounds including especially the history and theory of sound changes in a language or in two or more related languages. Phonology is that branch of linguistics which studies the sound system of languages. The sound system involves

the actual pronunciation of words, which can be broken up into the smallest units of pronunciation, known as a segment or a phoneme. (The words pat, chat and fat have different phonemes at the beginning, and so phonemes contrast with each other to produce different words.)

prosody pitch, loudness, tempo and rhythm the music of speech. (Other terms used are non-segmental phonology or supra-segmental phonology.)

Human speech, like many animal vocalizations, tends to involve repetitive cycles of opening and closing the vocal tract. In human speech, we call these cycles syllables. A
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 3

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

syllable typically begins with the vocal tract in a relatively closed position -- the syllableonset -- and procedes through a relatively open nucleus. The degree of vocal tract openness correlates with the loudness of the sound that can be made. Speech sounds differ on a scale of sonority, with vowels at one end (the most sonorous end!) and stop consonants at the other end. In between are fricatives, nasal consonants like [m] and [n], and so on. Languages tend to arrange their syllables so that the least sonorous sounds are restricted to the margins of the syllable -- the onset in the simplest case -- and the most sonorous sounds occur in the center of the syllable. Phonology aims describe sounds (phonemes) that are distinctive in a language. Example : Identifying minimal pairs such as tin and bin ; tab and tap. Another examples, for American English speaker, the /t/ in such words as little, butter, battle and writer is a sound called flap. Flap is manner of consonant articulation similar to a stop, but with no air pressure build-up and therefore no air release. This sound occurs between vowels when the second vowels is unstressed. If we indicate the phonetic detail, little would be pronounced [ll]. Phonological areas include : Phonemes pronounceable sound. The simplest speech sound elements that are used to differentiate between one word and another are known as phonemes. A phoneme is considered to be the basic unit of speech in much the same way that a morpheme is considered to be the basic unit of language. Speech sounds are considered to be phonemes if they can be substituted in words with another speech sound which then alters the meaning of the word. Intonation The use of pitch or tone in a sentence to convey meaning or emotion. Although the term when strictly used applies only to the pitch of speech, it is sometimes used loosely to indicate also the emphasis and pacing used in the spoken language. Stress intensity given to a syllable of speech by special effort in utterance, resulting in relative loudness. This emphasis in
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 4

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

pronunciation may be merely phonetic (i.e., noticeable to the listener, but not meaningful), as it is in French, where it occurs regularly at the end of a word or phrase; or it may serve to distinguish meanings, as in English, in which, for example, stress differentiates the noun from the verb in the word permit. Accent - A person's accent is the way he or she speaks, with differences in the sounds that can show the place a person comes from, or their social class. Some languages use accents to change the sound of a letter, represented in writing by a symbol over the letter. English has no accents, except in some foreign words.The accent on a word is the greater stress put onto a syllable. 'Photographer' has the stress on the second Syllable, whereas 'photographic' has the stress on the third Syllable.

Examples of Phonemes The word "sun" has three phonemes: /s/ /u/ /n/. The table below shows different linguistic units from largest (sentence) to smallest (phoneme). Sentence Word Syllable Onset-Rime Phoneme The sun shone brightly. sun sun, sun-shine, sun-ny s-un, s-unshine, s-unny s-u-n

The word "shut" also has three phonemes: /sh/ /u/ /t/.

PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE

Page 5

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

MORPHOLOGY Morphology is the set of rules governing how phonemes are combined into syllables and words to convey meaning, and morphemes are the smallest grammatical units that carry meaning. The word sun is an example of a free morpheme which means it can stand alone as a word. English and other languages also have bound morphemes, which are grammatical tags or markers, such as the plural s, as in suns or dogs. Other examples of bound morphemes include the past tense marker, -ed, as in fainted, the present progressive tense marker, -ing, as in runing, and the un- place at the beginning of a word to indicate not as in uninteresting. Morphemes are used for such functions as indicating tense, person, and number in verbs and for forming adjectives and adverbs from root words. All languages are really mixed systems -- it's all a matter of proportions. English, for example, uses all three methods: To make the future tense of a verb, we use the particle will (I will see you); to make the past tense, we usually use the affix -ed (I changed it); but in many words, we change the word for the past (I see it becomes I saw it). Looking at nouns, sometimes we make the plural with a particle (three head of cattle), sometimes with an affix (three cats), and sometimes by changing the word (three men). But, because we still use a lot of non-syllable affixes (such as ed, usually pronounced as d or t, and -s, usually pronounced as s or z, dependeing on context), English is still considered an inflexional language by most linguists.

SYNTAX In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for instance, for the following sentence: "The boy kicked the ball" The syntax can be described, by the following methods:
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 6

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

1. A statement of the correct sequence of the parts of speech (or Syntactic Categories): Subject is followed by verb is followed by object. In the above example, subject = "The boy" (article followed by noun) verb = "kicked" object = "The ball" (article followed by noun)

2. by a series of transformational rules For example:

Where in the above example,

3. By parsing diagrams

PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE

Page 7

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

Here, the parts of a sentence are shown in a graphical way that emphasises the hierarchical relationships between the components of a sentence. For example:

. Where: Subject = the boy (article + noun) Verb = kicked Object = the ball (article + noun) The above structure is the basic syntactic structure for a sentence in the English language. As more complex sentences are considered, it is easy, by this method, to see how these different structures relate to each other, by further breaking down the branches of the structure. The syntax of the language contains the rules which govern the structure of phrases and how these can be joined together. The structures and associated rules vary from one language to another. Parsing diagrams are capable of representing not just one particular languages grammar but are capable of representing any kind of grammar. For instance, they can be used to represent the rules of invented languages such as computer programming languages.
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 8

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

PRAGMATICS Definition A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation. Focus and content Some of the aspects of language studied in pragmatics include: Deixis: meaning 'pointing to' something. In verbal communication however, deixis in its narrow sense refers to the contextual meaning of pronouns, and in its broad sense, what the speaker means by a particular utterance in a given speech context. Presupposition: referring to the logical meaning of a sentence or meanings logically associated with or entailed by a sentence. Performative: implying that by each utterance a speaker not only says something but also does certain things: giving information, stating a fact or hinting an attitude. The study of performatives led to the hypothesis of Speech Act Theory that holds that a speech event embodies three acts: a locutionary act, an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary act (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from context that is not present from its conventional use.

Pragmatics involve three major communication skills: Using language for different purposes, such as
PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE Page 9

THE COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE

o o o o o

greeting (e.g., hello, goodbye) informing (e.g., I'm going to get a cookie) demanding (e.g., Give me a cookie) promising (e.g., I'm going to get you a cookie) requesting (e.g., I would like a cookie, please)

Changing language according to the needs of a listener or situation, such as o talking differently to a baby than to an adult o giving background information to an unfamiliar listener o speaking differently in a classroom than on a playground Following rules for conversations and storytelling, such as o taking turns in conversation o introducing topics of conversation o staying on topic o rephrasing when misunderstood o how to use verbal and nonverbal signals o how close to stand to someone when speaking o how to use facial expressions and eye contact

An individual with pragmatic problems may:

o o o

say inappropriate or unrelated things during conversations tell stories in a disorganized way have little variety in language use

PKB 3105 TOPICS 1- UNDERSTANDING LANGUAGE

Page 10