CategoryIntroduction to Linguistics I

Morphological Systems

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Not all languages have inflectional morphology. Some languages have little or no morphology. Still other languages have relatively complex words with distinct parts, each representing a morpheme. Traditionally these 3 types of languages have been identified as : Inflectional Isolating Agglutinating Inflectional Morphology In such languages: each word tends to be a single isolated morpheme lack...

Syntax

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All languages have rules. These rules together form the grammarof that language. These rules are what enables a person to produce an infinite number of phrases/sentences from a finite number of possibilities, that is understood by both the speaker and the listener. It would be rather difficult to learn any language if each sentence had to be learnt separately! Syntax is the areas of linguistics...

Morphology (continued …)

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Word structure In morphology, word structure is described in terms of roots and affixes Simple words consist one morpheme – the root fun, go, danger Complex words consist more that one morpheme – the root + affix(es) funny, goes, endanger Languages have three principal ways of extending their vocabulary: invention of entirely new words borrowing from other languages formation of new...

Morphology – the structure of words

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Technically, a word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. It is...

Mental Lexicon

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Lexicon is a word of Greek origin meaning vocabulary. It is a list of words together with additional word-specific information (i.e. a dictionary) In linguistics the definition of lexicon is slightly more specialized – it includes lexemes used to form words A lexeme is a unit of linguistic analysis that: belongs to a particular syntactic category has particular meaning. Lexemes may be:...

Fields of Linguistics

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Linguistics is the scientific study of language The main questions addressed in linguistics are: What is language? How is it represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language, neither are they required to know many languages nor are they interpreters The underlying goal of the linguist is to try to...

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