Levels of language

Levels of language

1. Phonetics

   • Study of human sounds in general.
   • Studies speech as a physical process.
   • It can be divided in:
     • Articulatory phonetics
       • Emission of sounds
     • Acoustic phonetics
       • Transmission of sounds
     • Auditive phonetics
       • Reception of sounds
   • Basic units
     • Allophones
       • The realisation of a phone.
     • Phones
       • [p], [i:], [t].

2. Phonology

   • Studies the systems of linguistics sound structures.
   • Gives a functional classification of the sounds in a particular language.
     • And explains how the subset used in a particular language is utilised.
   • Studies the sounds according thier distinctive function.
     • And what distinctions in meaning can be made on the basis of what sounds.
   • Basic unit
     • Phoneme
       • /k/, /u:/, /l/

3. Morphology

   • Studies the words
     • Especially
       • Their internal structure.
       • The changes they need to form new words.
   • Can be divided into:
     • Inflectional
       • Ending of words
     • Derivational
       • Formation of new words
   • Basic unit
     • Morphemes
       • Smallest meaningful unit of the language.
       • Divisions
         • According to their status:
           • Free morpheme
             • Can stand alone as a word.
           • Bound morpheme
             • Requires a base word to stand as word.
         • According to their function:
           • Lexical morpheme
             • Has a specifiable independent meaning.
           • Grammatical morphemes
             • Carries meaning
             • Gives us grammatical information such as time or gender.

4. Syntax

   • Is concerned with the structure of sentences.
   • Describes:
     • Process and rules of
       • The combination of words form sentences.
     • The difference in meaning if we change the order of them.

5. Semantics

   • Study of the meaning in language.
   • There are four types of meaning:
     • Lexical meaning
       • The meaning of an individual word.
     • Grammatical meaning
       • Related to inflectional morphology.
     • Sentence meaning
       • The meaning of a sentence depending on the order of the words.
     • Utterance meaning
       • Related to pragmatics

6. Pragmatics

   • Studies the use of language in specific situations.
   • Describes:
     • The performance of the language in itself.
     • The effects of the language use on participants.
   • Three subgroups
     • Pragmalinguistics
       • Language structure according to the context.
     • Sociopragmatics
       • Social factors that determine the usage of the language.
     • Applied pragmatics
       • Problems of interaction.

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