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Linguistics


The study of human speech (language).

Definitions

Language - a spoken, symbolic, and learned system of communication among human beings. 

Phonological - sound change.

Phoneme - the smallest unit of sound in a language. 

Morphological - form change.

Morpheme - is the smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Allomorph - a phonemic variation of a morpheme.

  1. Bases - root words.
  2. Affixes - stuck on. 
    1. Prefixes - before the root.
    2. Suffixes - after the root.

Syntactical - arrangement change.

Grammar 0 - is the set of universals that all natural languages share.

Grammar I - is the set of rules that accounts for the way any given language works.

Grammar II - is one of a group of descriptions of those rules. 

Grammar III - is a study of one or more of these descriptions.

Grammar IV - is a set of etiquette rules for acceptable writing and speaking.

Semantics - the study of the meaning of words and forms.

Lexicon - is the inventory of morphemes (words) with their meanings.

Syntax - the system which joins morphs into sense-making units.

Dialect - a version of a language distinct from another version of the same language.

Isogloss - a term referring to the geographic boundary of a linguistic trait like a southern accent. 

History of Linguistics

Noam Chomsky wrote the book "Syntactic Structures" in 1957. In 1965 he wrote "Aspects of a Theory of Syntax." Chomsky asserts that rationalism is the bases of his grammar, and he assumes that there is a universal language. He is against American structuralism or Bloomfieldian which is based on empirical data. Chomsky defines grammar as a set of rules for generating all the grammatical sentences of a language. He is known for TG- Transformational Grammar. He saw deep structure, and surface structures in sentences.