This document discusses several key grammatical aspects of language including grammar, lexicon, components of grammar, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It defines each area and provides examples to illustrate important concepts within each grammatical aspect of language.

1. Grammatical Aspects of
Language

2. Grammar
Because all language obeys a set of combinatory rules,
we can communicate an infinite number of concepts.
While every language has a different set of rules, all
languages do obey rules. These rules are known as
grammar.
There are rules for every level of language—word
formation (for example, native speakers of English have
internalized the general rule that -ed is the ending for
past-tense verbs, so even when they encounter a
brand-new verb, they automatically know how to put it
into past tense); phrase formation (for example,
knowing that when you use the verb “buy,” it needs a
subject and an object; “She buys” is wrong, but “She
buys a gift” is okay); and sentence formation.

3. Lexicon
Every language has its rules, which act as a
framework for meaningful communication.
But what do people fill that framework up
with? The answer is, of course, words. Every
human language has a lexicon—the sum total
of all of the words in that language. By using
grammatical rules to combine words into
logical sentences, humans can convey an
infinite number of concepts.

4. Components of Grammar
This diagram outlines
the relationship
between types of
linguistic units. Speech
sounds make up
phonemes, which
make up words. Words
make up sentences,
which have literal
meanings and
contextual meanings.

5. Phonetics and Phonology
Phonetics is the study of individual speech
sounds;
phonology is the study of phonemes, which are
the speech sounds of an individual language.
These two heavily overlapping subfields cover
all the sounds that humans can make, as well as
which sounds make up different languages. A
phonologist could answer the question, “Why
do BAT and TAB have different meanings even
though they are made of the
same three sounds, A, B and T?”

6. Terms associated with sounds
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that may cause a
change of meaning within a language but that doesn’t have
meaning by itself.
Phonemes correspond to the sounds of the alphabet, although
there is not always a one-to-one relationship between a letter
and a phoneme (the sound made when you say the word). For
example, the word “dog” has three phonemes: /d/, /o/, and / g
/. However, the word “shape,” despite having five letters, has
only three phonemes: /sh/, /long-a/, and /p/. The English
language has approximately 45 different phonemes, which
correspond to letters or combinations of letters. Through the
process of segmentation, a phoneme can have a particular
pronunciation in one word and a slightly different pronunciation
in another.

7. Morphology
Origin: Greek Morph+ology
morphe-meaning 'shape,
form‘ology-meaning 'the study of something‘-
• named for the first time in 1859 by the
German linguist August Schleicher who
used the term for the study of the form of
words
•

8. Morphology
Morphology is the study of word formation in
a particular language and their alteration
through the combination of morphemes. It
focuses especially on the internal structure of
the words and their alteration through the
addition of prefixes and suffixes.
A morphologist would be interested in the
relationship between words like “dog” and
“dogs” or “walk” and “walking,” and how
people figure out the differences between
those words.

9. The purposes of studying morphology
The internal structure of words and
the segmentation into different kinds
of morphemes is essential to the two
basic purposes of morphology:
1. the creation of new words and
2. the modification of existing words.
•

10. What is a word?
If morphology is the study of the internal structure
of words, we need to define the word “word”
before we can continue. That might sound easy-
surely we all know what a word is. In texts they are
particularly easy to spot since they are divided by
white spaces. But how do we identify words in
speech? A reliable definition of words is that they
are the smallest independent units of language.
They 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.

11. Let’s take for example the sentence below.
• The man looked at the horses.
The 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.
Words 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.

12. 2 types of words:
1.Variable words-words whose structure can
be modified
2. Invariable words-words that cannot be
changed at all
E.g. Identify where each word belongs.
sweet about but walk if dog
•

13. What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest element in a language
capable of creating a distinction in meaning.
***Morphemes are distinct from syllables.
E.g. The word alligator consists of one morpheme but
has four syllables.
Cats has 2 morphemes but has 1 syllable.
•

14. Morphemes & phonemes
Morphemes, the basic unit of morphology,
are the smallest meaningful unit of
language.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound
that may cause a change of meaning
within a language but that doesn’t have
meaning by itself.
Thus, a morpheme is a series of phonemes
that has a special meaning

15. Types of morpheme:
There are two main types of morpheme:
1. free morphemes - morphemes that can exist on
their own; Words are independent forms, and a simple
word only consisting of one single morpheme is
therefore a free morpheme, that is, it is a word itself.
e.g. water, eat,
2. bound morphemes - are prefixes, suffixes, or other
linguistic pieces that aren’t full words on their own
but do affect meaning
these morphemes must be attached to another word
to have meaning
e.g.
“-s” at the end of “cats” or the “re-” at the beginning
of “redo.”)

16. There are 2 ways by which we can form new words:
1.derivation–the process of forming a new word
on the basis of an existing word by means of
affixation(derived words may be of a different
grammatical class than the original word)
E.g. happy(adj)happiness(n)unhappy
(adj)determine (v)determination(n)social
(n)socialize(v)
** Nominalization is a common kind of
derivation in English which involves forming
new nouns from verbs or adjectives by adding
suffixes.E.g. employ +ee sing +er predict + ion

17. ***Affixation is the most common
morphological operation of forming words in
present day English.
Affixes can be grouped into 3 groups:
1.According to their position
mis+lead(prefix)standard +ize(suffix)
2. According to meaning
un + happy im+ possible
non + syntactic
(un-,im-and non-are examples of negative
prefixes with the same meaning)

18. 3. According to phonological contribution
(they may evoke stress change or vocalic
change or both)
Generate generation (stress change)
Nation national (vocalic change)

19. 2. Inflection–a process of word formation in which
items are added to the base form of a word to express
grammatical meanings-
do not change the word class
Inflections in English include the following:
-s third person singular present
-ed past tense
-ing progressive
-en past participle
-s plural
-’spossessive
-er comparative
-estsuperlative

20. Syntax
The word syntax is derived from the
Greek word syntaxis, which means
arrangement. Morphology deals with
word formation out of morphemes;
syntax deals with phrase and sentence
formation out of words.

21. Syntax
Syntax is the study of sentences and phrases, or
how people put words into the right order so that
they can communicate meaningfully.
All languages have underlying rules of syntax,
which, along with morphological rules, make up
every language’s grammar.
Word order matters in English, although in some languages,
order is of less importance.
An example of syntax coming into play in language is “The baby
ate the carrot” and “The carrot ate the baby.” They do not mean
the same thing, even though they contain the exact same words.
In order for the sentence to convey the intended meaning, the
words must be in a certain order.

22. Semantics
Semantics, most generally, is the study of
the meaning of sentences in language.
Someone who studies semantics is
interested in words and what real-world
object or concept those words denote, or
point to. –

23. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is an even broader field that
studies how the context of a sentence
contributes to meaning
-the study of what people mean by the
language they use
—for example, someone shouting “Fire!” has a
very different meaning if they are in charge of
a seven-gun salute than it does if they are
sitting in a crowded movie theater.