Vowels
Vowels are usually described by reference to five criteria, and these are adequate as a basic point of reference, although some vowel sounds require more specification:
1 the height reached by the highest point of the tongue (high, mid, low),
2 the part of the tongue which is raised (front, center, back),
3 the shape formed by the lips (unrounded or spread, rounded),
4 the position of the soft palate (raised for oral vowels, lowered for nasal vowels),
5 the duration of the vowel (short, long).
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are vowels in which the tongue starts in one position and moves to another.
Consonants
Consonant sounds have three basic features in their articulation: place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing.
Phonotactics
Just as languages have different phonemic inventories and different allophones, they also have different possibilities for combining sounds into syllables, or different phonotactics. Syllables are phonological units consisting of one or more sounds and are made up of a nucleus (the core of the syllable made up of a highly sonorous segment, usually a vowel), with possibly an onset (a less sonorous segment preceding the nucleus) and/or a coda (a less sonorous segment following the nucleus). The nucleus and coda together are known as the rhyme.
Morphology
Morphology deals with the way in which words are made up of morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language. If we take a word such as untied, it is clear that this word consists of three smaller meaningful pieces, three morphemes: the root tie, the prefix un- and the suffix -d. Morphemes can be divided up into various crosscutting categories. Morphemes can be lexical like tie, with full, complex meaningsMorphemes can also be talked about in terms of their productivity. Some morphemes are highly productive: the past tense morpheme in English can occur on any verb (although it may have different forms, see below).
Syntax
In English, the boy sees the girl means something different from the girl sees the boy, and Syntax deals with how to put words together to form sentences which mean what we wan.
Word classes
The basis of syntax is the fact that the words of a language come in different classes or parts of speech nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. Not all languages have the same classes (English has articles like a and the showing that a noun phrase is indefinite or definite respectively, Japanese does not), and the same basic meaning can be expressed in different classes in different languages (thus the most basic words corresponding to most kinship terms in the Yuma language of California are verbs; to say ‘I am his younger brother’, you say literally something like “he younger-brother-calls me,” where the equivalent of ‘younger-brother-call’ is a single verb morpheme).
Constituent structure
In most languages, words are not just strung together in any order. Given the sentence The tall plumber died, there is no other way of ordering the words to form an English sentence. Also, at an intuitive level, the tall plumber seems to go together as a unit, in a way that plumber died does not; then the unit the tall plumber goes together with the unit died to form the sentence. Constituent structure can be represented in different ways. Two common ways are through phrase structure trees and phrase structure rules. Phrase structure trees show the constituent structure of a particular sentence, with all the intermediate constituents.
Semantic roles and grammatical relations
In a sentence like The farmer is killing the ducklings, there is a difference in the relationship between the two noun phrases and the verb – we know that the farmer did the killing, and the ducklings ended up dead, and we could talk about them as the ‘killer’ and the ‘thing-killed’. Semantic roles are needed to talk about sentence construction. For example, in English, if a transitive verb has an agent and a patient, the agent comes before the verb and the patient after, which is how we know who does what in The farmer is killing the ducklings. If the sentence is made passive (The ducklings are being killed by the farmer), then as well as a change in the verb, the patient now comes before the verb, and the agent is either prepositional phrase with by, or omitted entirely.
Complex sentences
Complement clauses are those clauses which substitute for a noun phrase in a sentence. For example, in English we can say I saw the boy, with the boy the object of the verb saw. But we can also say I saw (that) the boy left, I saw the boy leave and I saw the boy leaving. In each case, where we might expect a noun phrase like the boy, we have a whole clause, with at least a subject and a verb.
Sentence types
There are three basic types of sentence: declarative, interrogative, and imperative. For example, in English we have a declarative sentence He opened the window, the interrogative Did he open the window?, and the imperative Open the window!
Information Structure
One of the functions of syntax is to structure the ways in which information is presented in sentences and this structure is dependent on the context in which the information is presented. As such, the study of language needs to go beyond the level of isolated sentences and treat sequences of sentences, or texts.
Lexical semantics
Theories of meaning also differ in terms of whether or not they distinguish between dictionary knowledge and encyclopedic knowledge (Haiman, 1980; Wierzbicka, 1995). For example, many people in our society know that salt is chemically sodium chloride. The question is whether this is part of the meaning of the word salt, to be included in a definition, or simply an additional fact about salt (defined in other ways) which many speakers happen to know.
Grammatical semantics
One way in which semanticists deal with this issue is through the concept of constructions (Goldberg, 1995). Essentially this approach says that, as speakers of English, we have a schema or template such as Noun Phrase – Verb – Noun Phrase, and we have a meaning assigned to this general schema – say, ‘the first noun phrase has the more active role, the second the more passive role’ – and by combining the meanings of the words with the meaning of the schema, we come up with the meaning of the overall sentence. A different schema would then be used to account for the passive sentence the girl was kissed by the boy
