COMPONENT OF LANGUAGE

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COMPONENT OF LANGUGAE Linguistic study involves a search for patterns in the way speakers use language; linguists aim to describe these patterns by reducing them to a set of rules called a grammar. As Edward Sapir once commented, however, "All grammars leak" !"#!, $%&. 'ver time linguists came to recogni(e a growing number of language components; each new component was an attempt to plug the "leaks" in an earlier grammar, to e)plain what had previously resisted e)planation. *he following discussion pinpoints the various leaks linguists have recogni(ed as well as their attempts to plug the leaks& and demonstrates how culture and language influence each other. According to +homsky !",-&, mental& grammar can be divided into three basic components. synta), semantics, and phonology. Each component or module& has its own categories and rules that are in principle independent of each other. !. /orphology 0 the internal structure of words *he term morphology is 1reek and is a makeup of morph2 meaning 3shape, form3, and 2ology which means 3the study of something3. 4n sum, it can be concluded that morphology is the scientific study of forms and structure of words in a language. As a sub2discipline of linguistics, it was named for the first time in !%-" by the 1erman linguist August Schleicher who used the term for the study of the form of words. 2h t is 3o#d4

4f morphology is the study of the internal structure of words, it is needed to define the word word before. *hat might sound easy 2 surely we all know what a word is. 4n te)ts they are particularly easy to spot since they are divided by white spaces. 5ut how do we identify words in speech6 A reliable definition of words is that they are the smallest independent units of language. *hey are independent in that they do not depend on other words which means that they can be separated from other units and can change position.7$8 +onsider the sentence. The man looked at the horses. *he plural ending s in horses is dependent on the noun horse to receive meaning and can therefore not be a word. Horses however, is a word, as it can occur in other positions in the sentence or stand on its own.

The horses looked at the man. - What is the man looking at? - Horses. 9ords are thus both independent since they can be separated from other words and move around in sentences, and the smallest units of language since they are the only units of language for which this is possible. Mo#"hemes 5 the building bloc!s of mo#"hology Although words are the smallest independent units of language, they have an internal structure and are built up by even smaller pieces. *here are sim"le words that don:t have an internal structure and only consist of one piece, like work. *here is no way we can divide work wo2rk6& into smaller parts that carry meaning or function. Com"le6 words however, do have an internal structure and consist of two or more pieces. +onsider worker, where the ending er is added to the #oot work to make it into a noun meaning someone who works. *hese pieces are called mo#"hemes and are the smallest meaning-bearing units of language.7;8 9e said that words are independent forms, and a simple word only consisting of one single morpheme is therefore a f#ee morpheme, that is, it is a word itself. E)amples are house, work, high, us and to. /orphemes that must be attached to another morpheme to receive meaning are bound morphemes. 4f we break the word unkindness into its three morphemes un-, kind and ness, we get two e)amples of bound morphemes. un2 and 2ness, as they re<uire the root kind to make up a word. *hese are also called ffi6es as they are attached to the stem. *he affi) un2 that go to the front of a word is a "#efi6 and 2ness that goes to the end is a suffi6. *here are also infi6es and ci#cumfi6es, although they are not very common in English. 9e mostly see infi)es as curse words integrated in morphemes like the ones you can see below 7-8, or like the e)ample from the American sitcom you can see below. A circumfi) is a morpheme that attaches to the front and the back of a word, as you can see in the e)amples of =utch past tense below.

,# 3ing Mo#"hology T#ees 4n order to show the internal structure of a word, we draw morphology trees. *he following video demonstrates how to draw a simple morphology tree and a comple) morphology tree. 5elow are the completed morphology trees from the video.

The "u#"oses of studying mo#"hology *he internal structure of words and the segmentation into different kinds of morphemes is essential to the two basic purposes or morphology. !. the creation of new words and #. the modification of e)isting words.7,8 *hink about it, we create new words out of old ones all the time. #. Synta)
*he study of how individual words and their most basic meaningful units are combined to create sentences is known as synta). As words are grouped together when we communicate, we must follow the rules of grammar for our language, in other words, its synta). 4t is the knowledge of synta) that allows us to recogni(e that the following two sentences, while containing different word order and levels of comple)ity, have the same meaning. *he boy hit the ball. *he ball was hit by the boy.

Synta) also allows us to accept >4 went to the store? as a meaningful grammatical& sentence while >*o store went 4? would not be acceptable English. Synta) is most related to grammar. 4t has to do with sentences and their structure. *he English language has a certain word order we have to follow if we want to create useful language. *he basic sentence in English consists of sub@ect, verb, and ob@ect SA'& as is represented in this simple sentence. 4 eat breakfast. *his sentence is grammatically correct because the words are presented in the right order. 9e could add to the previous sentence and make it more comple) 0 Bor 4nstance, !& Every morning, 4 eat breakfast at C o:clock and then 4 go to school. *he sentence follows an acceptable word order in the English language. 4f we said. 5reakfast 4 eat. *he listener will immediately reali(e that the sentence does not follow the correct word order. #& *he boy ate a sandwich vs. A sandwich ate the boy. 'ne sentence is correct because it follows the right word order but although the second one followed the right word order it did not make sense because it was not semantically correct.

The Pu#"ose of Synt 6 Linguists and grammarians who study synta) are not necessarily prescriptivist, which means they do not attempt to tell people how to "correctly" form a sentence. Dather, they are descriptivist, in that they look at how people actually speak and then create rules that describe what a language community considers grammatical or non2grammatical. Synta) deals with a number of elements, all of which help to facilitate being understood through language. 9ithout rules, there would be no foundation from which to discern meaning from a bunch of words strung together; whereas these rules allow for a virtually infinite number of sentences. *here are many reasons for studying synta), from general humanistic or behavioral motivations to much more specific goals such as those in the following. 2 2 *o help us to illustrate the patterns of English more effectively and clearly. *o enable us to analy(e the structure of English sentences in a systematic and e)plicit way.

2o#d O#de# in L ngu ge Const#uction Eerhaps the most important aspect of synta) is how the various parts of speech connect together. Every language has rules that dictate where certain types of words can be used in a sentence, and how to interpret the resulting sentence. A new language learner has to understand how this word order is structured, which can be difficult for someone used to a different language.
4n English, there are nouns, verbs, ad@ective, and adverbs, articles determiners, the, a, an&, prepositions in, on, up, near, at, F&, con@unctions and, but, or, etc.&, and pronouns . All of them are called part of speech. 5esides, there are phrasal categories which include noun phrases the smart girlF&, verb phrases, and prepositional phrases F in the park&.