In my reading of the following chapters I learned about the linguistic organization of the speech chain in more detail. As I mentioned in my previous post that the book “The Speech Chain” is very closely related to our course I learned about phonemes from the book too. Phonemes are the smallest unit of a language, which distinguish the meaning of different words. Phonemes are consonants and vowels and these units form syllables which finally form words. Words are the symbols to denote the objects around us and concept and ideas of ours. Languages are the series and sequences of these words, which are also known as sentences. When forming sentences, words are put in order by following a set of rules. The set of rules is known as Grammar. It consists of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
Phonology is concerned with the formation of phonemes and rules regarding their combinations in building words. Phonology is also concerned about stress and Intonation. These characteristics of language play very important role in adding or distinguishing meaning of it. For example, although “John is responsible for that” and “John is responsible for that” are same sentences due to stresses on two different words, the meaning of these sentences are completely different.
Morphology deals with combination of small meaningful units in words. For instances we add a phoneme ‘s’ on the word ‘book’ to make it plural i.e. ‘books’.
Syntax deals with the rules that are to be followed to make sequence of words which gives meaningful sentences. Sentences forming without a proper syntax are meaningless. In English, for instance, “English is easy to learn” makes sense whereas if we put the same words in different ways such as “easy English is learn to” is weird.
Another important element of grammar is semantics which deals with the meaningfulness of sentences. Sentences can be meaningless sometimes even if it is formed by using proper syntax. The sentence “the books are walking on the street” is correct but it is meaningless because books are non-living things and cannot walk.
arent you lucky! your book goes into detail about topics we are learing in class like phonology, its an extra study guide!! you should include in your presentation how Yule and the author of your book explain the same topics similarly and differently.
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