Language Structure

10 Key excerpts on "Language Structure"

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  Language in Education

  Social Implications

  • Rita Elaine Silver, Soe Marlar Lwin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  2 What Is the Structure of Language? Lubna Alsagoff and Ho Chee Lick INTRODUCTION Language is a semiotic system. By this we mean that it is a set of signs used to convey meaning. There are many semiotic systems that we encounter in our everyday lives, for example, traffic lights signal information to us through changes in lights. Language differs from these other semiotic systems in its complexity. In particular, the ‘design features’ of human language (see Chapter 1) enable it to serve as a highly versatile means of communication in a wide range of contexts. For example, language allows us to convey information about things that happened in the past, and the number of sentences that users of a language can produce, and comprehend, is vast if not infinite! Although the range of language signs is so vast, all of these signs, at the lowest level, are made up of combinations from an inventory of speech sounds (or if we think about writing, it can be seen as being composed of symbols that represent sound). These sounds combine to form words. For example, the word pits consists of four sounds: /p/, / ɪ /, /t/ and /s/. We study the sounds of a language in the branch of linguistics known as phonetics. LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION 20 If we examine the word pits more closely, we find that it is in fact composed of two different parts: pit and s . These parts are units of meaning known as morphemes, and we study the way in which morphemes combine to form words in a branch of linguistics known as morphology. A closely related field of study is syntax, which studies the way words combine to form sentences. Together, the sub-disciplines of morphology and syntax are referred to as grammar. Finally, in any study of the structure of language, we examine how words convey meaning either by themselves or when combined to form phrases and sentences – this is the branch of linguistics known as semantics.

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  Concise Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language and Linguistics

  • Alex Barber, Robert J Stainton(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  (syntactic) structure. The responsibility of linguistics is to describe the full range of such facts, not just for English, but for all human languages. Then, in virtue of its scientific pretensions, it has to (attempt to) explain why these facts rather than any others are the ones that occur – again both in English and in other languages. To do justice to the richness of what we know, it is necessary to distinguish not just the lexicon and the computational system, but to differ-entiate among syntax, semantics, morphology, pho-nology and phonetics, and to relate this knowledge to pragmatics – how we interpret utterances in context. Take our knowledge of morphology, the internal structure of words. We know that thick, thicker, thickest, and thicken are all words of English, but that there is no thinnen to accompany thin, thinner, thinnest . We know that thick relates to thicken and that rich relates to enrich , whereas richen is slightly odd, and enthick is impossible. This knowledge can’t just be a result of our never having heard thinnen or enthick before, you may never have heard texted before, as in ‘‘I’ve just texted an urgent message to Fred’’, but you know that that is possible. As linguists, we may also know that some languages, such as Vietnamese, have almost no morphology: words in this language have none of the internal structure characteristic of affix-rich items such as indecisive-ness or rearranged . On the other hand, some (poly-synthetic) languages, such as Inuktitut (Eskimo) or Mohawk pile one affix on top of another so that words are often strikingly complex, and correspond to whole sentences in English. Baker (2001: 87) gives the Mohawk example in (15) with the meaning ‘‘He made the thing that one puts on one’s body ugly for her’’: (15) Washakotya’tawitsherahetkvhta’se’ Our knowledge of phonology, the sound structure of language, is equally rich.

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  Structuralism And Structures

  A Mathematical Perspective

  • Charles E Rickart(Author)
  • 1995(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  A more general version of this phenomenon w i l l be considered in the next section. We turn now to the question of just what constitutes a language struc-ture. The answer is suggested by the preceding discussion and, inter-estingly enough, is stated precisely as we would have it in the following quotation from the Course. The first emphasis is ours. T h e signs that make up language are not abstractions but real objects; s i g n s a n d t h e i r r e l a t i o n s are what linguistics studies; they are the c o n c r e t e e n t i t i e s of our science, [p. 102] Saussure goes on to emphasize that the linguistic entity exists in neither the signifier nor the signified portions of a sign but only in their association. Thus, a succession of sounds is linguistic only if it supports an idea. Similarly, concepts become linguistic entities only when associated with 82 S T R U C T U R A L I S M A N D S T R U C T U R E S sound-images. The objects within a Language Structure are the signs, and the relations consist of (or at least include) those specified by the grammar and syntax. A s in the case of most systems, there are possibly other methods by which structure could be reasonably identified within the mass of language data, but the one suggested here is most natural for our purposes. There are, of course, many distinguished substructures i n any Language Structure that may be singled out and treated as objects in their own right. In other words, these substructures become objects in new structures that contain significant information about the language. T h i s is one of the features that make languages so very complex. Linguistics (that is, structural linguistics) is therefore a study of the general characteristics or properties common to these structures.

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  Language Acquisition and the Functional Category System

  • Peter Jordens(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  2 Lexical vs. functional elements 2.1 Structure in language Communication among human beings occurs by means of spoken or written lan-guage, sign language or pictures, gesture or body language. Communication is mutual understanding. It can only be achieved if the means of communication within a community are the same for all its members. The means of communica-tion within a linguistic community are the utterances of a particular language. Both the production of an utterance and its perception are processes of creative construction that are based on a shared knowledge system of linguistic compe-tence. It is this knowledge system of linguistic competence that enables speakers of a particular language to understand and create utterances that have neither been heard nor produced before. The knowledge system that the processes of language perception and pro-duction are based on is a system of entities and rules which serves the purpose of linguistic structure building. Linguistic structure building leads to an utter-ance structure that is hierarchically organized. That is, utterances are organized in terms of phrasal constituents (phrases), phrasal constituents are organized in terms of word forms, word forms are organized in terms of meaningful entities (morphemes), and, finally, meaningful entities are organized in terms of units of sound (phonemes) that are used to produce meaningful contrasts. For example, an utterance such as de koek is op (the cake is all gone) is a linguistic entity that consists of two phrases de koek (the cake) and is op (is all gone). Both phrases are related by the fact that one constituent ( is op ) qualifies the other ( de koek ). At this highest level of syntactic structure, utterances can be analysed in terms of constituents with either of these functions. The constituent that serves the function of a qualification is termed the ‘predicate’, the constitu-ent that is qualified is termed the ‘external argument’ or ‘the subject’.

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  Powerful Book Introductions

  Leading with Meaning for Deeper Thinking

  • Kathleen Fay, Chrisie Moritz, Suzanne Whaley(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Readers use knowledge of how English works and what they’ve heard spoken and read to search for information in their reading and monitor whether their reading sounds right. All readers are language learners to some degree. Even adults stumble when they encounter something their ear hasn’t been attuned to yet. To empower readers to access the meaning of unfamiliar Language Structures and complex sentences, we analyze texts with the students’ oral language abilities in mind so that we may anticipate what might be new or unusual for them. Then, we can consider how to support readers with those Language Structures that fall outside of their oral language use. This chapter will help you do just that as we explore

  • what syntax is and how readers use it,
  • a process for analyzing Language Structure complexity when planning a book introduction, and
  • suggestions for supporting readers in noticing and using Language Structure.

  Even though this chapter is specifically about Language Structure, notice—as always—how meaning connects to each section and remains at the forefront of our interactions with children.

  SYNTAX: HOW LANGUAGE WORKS AND SOUNDS

  We use the term Language Structure to refer to grammar, sentence structure, or syntax: the way words are put together in rule-governed ways. The concept of syntax, or Language Structure, connects directly to the work many of us do when analyzing running records. To make sense of texts, readers use any combination of three main sources of information while reading: meaning, structure, and visual. Errors and self-corrections during a running record are coded M, S, or V to give us a clear view of the sources of information used or neglected to make attempts and problem-solve while reading:

  • M—meaning or semantics. The reader uses pictures, context, and background knowledge to consider a sensible possibility.
  • S—structure. The reader uses syntax or what sounds grammatically correct in the English language.
  • V—visual or graphophonemic information. The reader uses the print on the page: the letters and the sounds they make, parts of words, and whole-word units.

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  Cognition

  The Thinking Animal

  • Daniel T. Willingham, Cedar Riener(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In essence, Chomsky was saying that Skinner’ s theory was bound to miss the mark because Skinner failed to appreciate all of what language is. Thus, defining language properly is important, and the five criteria we’ ve listed are a good consensus statement. The example of your linguistic dog highlights one way that the definition is used. Psychologists use the definition to help us classify animal communication – for example, “Is communication between dolphins really a language?” Just as often, however, psychologists use the definition as a reminder of what a theory of language must explain. If, for example, you develop a theory of language and the theory makes no provision for how language might change over time, then you have omitted one of the defining properties of language and you would know that your theory is either incorrect or incomplete. The definition of language is a description of what a complete theory must account for. Levels of Language Defining language is still more complicated because it is most usefully described at different levels; simple building blocks combine to build more complex structures, which in turn combine to create 252 Language Structure still more complex structures. Spoken and written language differ in some of their fundamental building blocks so in some places we’ ll describe them separately. We’ ll begin our discussion with letters (the smallest unit of written language), then phonemes (the smallest unit of spoken language), then move on to levels where written and spoken language use similar processes: words, sentences, and texts. In each subsection below, we’ll describe the units of language at that level, and some of the rules by which those units combine to make up the next level. letters Every written language has a set of basic units (letters, in alphabetic writing systems like ours) that can be combined and recombined into different words.

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  Form and formalism in linguistics

  • James McElvenny(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Language Science Press

    (Publisher)

  180 7 Linguistics as a science of structure ture system in order to bridge this gap in explanation. Transformation rules op-erate on the output of the phrase structure rules and create a derived structure, as in (3) below for passivization. (3) NP 1 V NP 2 → NP 2 be-en (aux) V NP 1 Te combined expressive power of phrase structure and transformations pro-ved very productive in characterizing myriad linguistic structures. Tis produc-tivity, with its increased complexity, however, came at a cost to learnability. “[I]f a linguistic theory is to be explanatorily adequate it must not merely describe the facts, but must do so in a way that explains how humans are able to learn languages” (Ludlow 2011: 15). Te move to more generality led in part to the Ex-tended Standard Teory and the X-bar schema. Since the continued proliferation of transformations and phrase structure rules was considered to be cognitively unrealistic, linguistic structures needed more sparse mathematical representation. Although, as Bickerton (2014: 24) states, “rule proliferation and ‘ordering paradoxes’ were only two of a number of prob-lems that led to the eventual replacement of the Standard Teory”. 10 Tere was also a theoretical push for more general structure from the Univer-sal Grammar (ug) post ulate assumed to be the natural linguistic endowment of every language user. ug needed to contain more general rule schemata in or-der to account for the diversity of constructions across the world’s languages. Tis structural agenda dovetailed well with the Principles and Parameters ( p&p) framework, which posited that the architecture of the language faculty consti-tuted a limited number of universal principles constrained by individual para-metric se tings, where “parame ters” were roughly the set of possible variations of a given structure.

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  The Stories of Linguistics

  An Introduction to Language Study Past and Present

  • Kim Ballard(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  We have seen in previous sections how grammarians were interested in morphology, but less so in syntax. That is to say, words were given more attention as structural units than sentences. (Of course, we have so far not dealt with phonology, but this will be covered in the next section.) Only with the arrival of Syntactic Structures was syntax elevated to a position of much greater importance. The majority of papers in Joos’s Readings in Linguistics , then, are concerned with phonology and morphology. But syntax is clearly exercising the minds of some of the contributors and Bloomfield’s idea of constituent structure is the framework for this thinking. One of the papers in the collection (by Rulon Wells) grapples with a crucial question in syntactic analysis: when you divide units into their immediate constituents, how do you ensure your procedure is correct and that incorrect analyses are excluded? Wells discusses the example of The King of England opened parliament (Wells, 1947/1957 , pp. 187ff ). What strategy would guarantee that this was divided into [ The King of England ] and [ opened parliament ], and not [ The King ] and [ of England opened parliament ]? Wells’s solution is to think in terms of expansion from a comparable but more basic structure, and he demonstrates how this example can be correctly analysed if THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE 121 seen as an expansion of a ‘fundamental’ sentence type such as John worked . The collection also contains a paper by Charles Hockett (the anthropologist whose design features we explored in Chapter 2 ), who considers the hierar-chical structures revealed by immediate constituent analysis as a useful means of explaining ambiguity, thus accounting for the two possible interpretations of The old men and women stayed at home . (Are the women old, or is it just the men?) (Hockett, 1954/1957 , p. 391.) Examples such as these illustrate the growing interest in syntactic analy-sis by 1957.

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  Language and Reality

  Selected Writings of Sydney Lamb

  • Sydney Lamb, Jonathan J. Webster(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The use you make of the notion of syntactic is very different from that in traditional grammar. Yes, that is probably the next thing I need to explain. Part of what I was Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 LANGUAGE AS A NETWORK OF RELATIONSHIPS Figure 8.3 criticizing earlier in other linguistic theories is their mono-stratal or single-level conception. One aspect of that is that they only have one syntax. From my point of view we see that a language has several syntaxes, in particular every stratum has its own. This idea is not original with me. It goes back to the neo-Bloomfieldian days where in some branches, including that of Hockett and that of Bloch, it was recognized that there is a syntax of the phonemic level in addition to the traditional syntax. At this point Hockett decided to use the term tactics, which has the same Greek root as the term syntax, referring to arrangements; he said that we could use the term tactics to refer to that part of the structure which is concerned with arrangements at whatever level. To be more specific we can use the term phonotactics for the syntax of phonemes and morphotactics for the syntax of morphemes. In stratificational linguistics, after I realized that it doesn't suffice to recognize only one stratum of content, I recognized another level above the morphemic, namely the sememic, and it appeared that that level too has a syntax; so we called it semotactics. Later as it became apparent that these levels were also not sufficient, there was another added in 1963, the lexemic; this lexemic level intervenes 147 THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE between the morphemic and sememic level. So this gives us phonotactics, morphotactics, lexotactics and semotactics. Recently, however, it has become apparent that the lower portions of morphotactics and lexotactics merge, somewhat like branches of a river.

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  Punctuation as a Means of Medium-Dependent Presentation Structure in English

  Exploring the Guide Functions of Punctuation

  • Sebastian Patt(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Narr Francke Attempto

    (Publisher)

  He is interest-ed in types, not tokens[.] […] When we say that two utterances are tokens of the same type, we are implying that they have some structural or functional identity by virtue of which native speakers will recognize their sameness. At the medium-independent level, one tries to grasp this ‘sameness’ through the description of formal patterns. As to the relations within these medium-independent arrangements, Halliday/McIntosh/Strevens (1966 [1964]: 28f.) point out that [t]he category of ‘structure’ […] is the category that accounts for the various ways in which an occurrence of one unit may be made up out of occurrences of the unit next below it […]. The category of ‘structure’ applies to all units in the grammar of a language except the smallest, which by definition has no structure, since it is not made up of anything smaller that can be identified at the level of grammar . So English has sentence structures, clause structures, group [phrase, SP] structures and word structures, whose elements have as their exponents re-spectively clauses, groups [phrases, SP], words and morphemes. The morpheme itself has no structure since there is nothing below it in the grammar. Thus the word ‘gladness’ has a structure consisting of two elements whose exponents are the morphemes ‘glad’ and ‘ness’, but these morphemes cannot be further ana-lysed grammatically . The quotation mentions five grammatical units at the medium-independent level of form. These are also included in Figure 2.6 above. A discussion of the semantic concept ‘lexical item’ – commonly conceived of as “[…] the union of a single sense with a lexical form […]” (Cruse [1997] 1986: 80) – is desist-ed from at this point. – Grammatical units: sentence ↔ clause ↔ phrase (or group) ↔ word ↔ morpheme. The sentence is considered the highest-ranking structural unit at the gram-matical level, whereas the morpheme is ranked lowest, cf.

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