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Grammar

Grammar

:This article is about grammar from a linguistic perspective. For English grammar rules, see English grammar or Disputed English grammar Grammar is the study of rules governing the use of language. The set of rules governing a particular language is also called the grammar of the language; thus, each language can be said to have its own distinct grammar. Grammar is part of the general study of language called linguistics. The subfields of modern grammar are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Traditional grammars include only morphology and syntax.

Types of grammar

- A prescriptive grammar presents authoritative norms for a particular language, and tends to deprecate non-standard constructions. Traditional grammars are typically prescriptive. Prescriptive grammars are usually based on the prestige dialects of a speech community, and often specifically condemn certain constructions which are common only among lower socioeconomic groups, such as the use of "ain't" and double negatives in English. Though prescriptive grammars remain common in pedagogy and foreign language teaching, they have fallen out of favor in modern academic linguistics, as they describe only a subset of actual language usage.
- A descriptive grammar attempts to describe actual usage, avoiding prescriptive judgements. Descriptive grammars are bound to a particular speech community, and attempt to provide rules for any utterance considered grammatically correct within that community. For example, in many dialects of English, the use of double negatives is very common, though ungrammatical from the point of view of a prescriptive English grammar. A descriptive grammar of a speech community where "I didn't do nothing" is acceptable will treat that sentence as grammatical, and provide rules that account for it. A descriptive grammar of formal English would rather provide rules for "I didn't do anything."
- Traditional grammar is the collection of ideas about grammar that Western societies have received from Greek and Roman sources. Prescriptive grammar is always formulated in terms of the descriptive concepts inherited from traditional grammar. Modern descriptive grammar aims to correct the errors of traditional grammar, and generalize them, so as to avoid shoehorning all languages to the model of Latin. Nearly all materials used in teaching language, however, are still based on traditional grammar.
- A formal grammar is a precisely defined grammar, typically used for computer programming languages.
- A generative grammar is a formal grammar that can in some sense "generate" the well-formed expressions of a natural language. An entire branch of linguistic theory is based on generative grammars. Generative grammars were popularized by Noam Chomsky.

Development of grammars

Grammars evolve through usage and human population separations. With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammars do not have any justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say "I didn't do nothing", some say "I didn't do anything", and some say one or the other depending on social context. The formal study of grammar is an important part of education from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not a "grammar" in the sense most linguists use the term, as they are often prescriptive rather than descriptive. Planned languages are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (such as Esperanto or the intercultural, highly logic-compatible artificial language Lojban) or created as part of a work of fiction (such as the Klingon language and Elvish languages). Each of these artificial languages has its own grammar. It is a myth that analytic languages have simpler grammar than synthetic languages. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language. Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic and meaning is therefore very context dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.) Latin, which is highly synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements placed in largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and a simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite. ----- In computer science, the syntax of each programming language is defined by a formal grammar. In theoretical computer science and mathematics, formal grammars define formal languages. The Chomsky hierarchy defines several important classes of formal grammars.

External links

- [http://www.krysstal.com/grammar.html Grammar Terms]
- [http://www.gramster.com/ English Grammar Software]
- [http://www.figarospeech.com/ It Figures-Figures of Speech]
- als:Grammatik ja:文法 simple:Grammar th:ไวยากรณ์

English grammar

English grammar is the study of rules governing the use of the English language. Grammars of English can be either prescriptive or descriptive. Prescription sets rules for language, while description simply describes the way a language is spoken; this article attempts to be primarily descriptive. It is important to understand that experts disagree about many parts of English grammar: what follows is just one analysis among many. The grammar of English is in some ways relatively simple, and in others quite complex. For example, word order is relatively fixed because English is an analytic language and this aspect of grammar is therefore relatively simple. The verbal system, on the other hand, is quite large and complex, like those of many other Indo-European languages. This article is organized in sections, addressing word order, nouns, verbs, and other areas as they become relevant in the course of discussion.

Word Order

English is a subject verb object (SVO) language: it prefers a sequence of subject–verb–object in its simplest, unmarked declarative statements. Thus "Tom [subject] eats [verb] cheese [object]" and "Mary sees the cat". However, beyond these simple examples, word order is a complicated matter in English. In particular, the speaker's or writer's point of departure in each clause is a key factor in the organisation of the message. Thus, the elements in a message can be ordered in a way that signals to the reader or listener what the message concerns. #The duke has given my aunt that teapot. (i.e., I'm going to tell you about the duke) #My aunt has been given that teapot by the duke. (i.e., I'm going to tell you about my aunt) #"That teapot the duke has given to my aunt. (i.e., I'm going to tell you about that teapot) The point of departure can also be set up as an equation, known as a thematic equative. In this way, virtually any element in a clause can be put first. #"What the duke gave my aunt was a teapot" (i.e., I'm going to tell you what the duke gave my aunt) #"What happened was that the duke gave my aunt a teapot" (i.e., I'm going to tell you what happened) Usually, the point of departure is the subject of a declarative clause; this is the unmarked form. A point of departure is marked when it is not the subject—thus, occasionally it is the object ("You I blame for this dilemma") and more often an adverbial phrase ("This morning I got up late"). In questions, point of departure is treated slightly differently. Unmarked questions start with the word that indicates what the speaker wants to know. #"Where is my little dog?" (I want you to tell me where) #"Is John Smith inside?" (I want you to tell me whether he is or isn't) Marked questions displace this key "what I want to know" word with some other element. #"After tea, will you tell me story?" (still "will you or won't you"?) #"In your house, who does the cooking?" (still "who"?) Imperative clauses are either of the type "I want you to do something" or "I want you and me to do something". The second type usually starts with let's; in the unmarked form of the first type, you is implied and not made explicit ("Improve your grammar!"), and included in the marked form ("You improve your grammar!"); another marked form is "Do improve your grammar". In the negative, "Don't argue with me" is unmarked, and "Don't you argue with me" is marked. In English, the point of departure is frequently marked off in speech by intonation. In general, English is a head-initial language, meaning that the "anchor" of a phrase (segment of a sentence) occurs at the beginning of the phrase. #ran quickly (verb phrase) #to the store (prepositional phrase) The main exception is in noun phrases, which are head-final. #blue house (adjective + noun) #Fred's cat (possessive + noun) This leads to a sentence like: "Fred's sister ran quickly to the store". As can be inferred from this example, the sequence of a basic sentence (ignoring articles and other determiners) is: Adjective1 - Subject - Verb - Adverb - Adjective2 - Direct Object - Adjective3 - Indirect Object. Changes in word order are used in interrogative sentences ("Did you go to the store?"), changes from active to passive voice ("The car was bought by John"), and lexical or grammatical emphasis (topicalization).

Nouns

In English, nouns generally describe persons, places, things, and abstract ideas, and are treated as grammatically distinct from verbs. English nouns, in general, are not marked for case, nor for gender. Nouns are, however, marked for number and definiteness. English does not have dual or trial numbers for nouns.

Gender

A remnant of grammatical gender is also preserved in the third person pronouns. Gender is assigned to animate objects based on biological gender (where known), and to personified objects based on social conventions (ships, for example, are often regarded as feminine in English). He is used for masculine nouns; she is used for feminine nouns; and it is used for nouns of indeterminate gender and inanimate objects. It is generally considered both ungrammatical and/or impolite to refer to humans (other than babies) as it. Traditionally, the masculine he was used to refer to a person in the 3rd person when their gender was unknown or irrelevant to the context; recently, this usage has come under criticism for supporting gender-based stereotypes and is increasingly considered inappropriate (see Gender-neutral language). There is no consensus on a replacement. Some English speakers prefer to use the slightly cumbersome "he or she" or "s/he", others prefer the use of they (3rd plural) (see singular they). This situation rarely leads to confusion, since the intended meaning can be inferred from context, though it still is considered by most to be incorrect grammar. Spivak pronouns have also been proposed which are essentially formed by dropping the leading <th> from the plural counterpart, but their use is relatively rare compared to other solutions. For comparison, speakers of German distinguish between the homophonous sie ("she"), sie ("they"), and Sie ("you", polite) with little difficulty.

Number and Definiteness

- Nouns are described as being either singular or plural, the latter referring to two or more of the same type of thing. Plurals are often formed by adding an -s to the singular form, though there are plenty of irregular cases.
- #He is talking to the girl.
- #She is talking to the girls.
- A definite article such as "the" is used to refer to a specific noun. Definite articles should not be confused with demonstratives, which indicate the location of nouns with respect to the speaker and audience.
- #We were looking for the dog.
- #I am walking to the store.
- An indefinite article such as "a" or "an" is used to refer to a generic noun. Note that "a" is used when preceding a noun beginning with a consonant sound, whereas "an" is used when preceding a noun beginning with a vowel sound.
- #You should have a drink. That building is a university.
- #They are being an annoyance. He is an heir to the throne.

Case

Older versions of English did mark nouns for case, and the two remaining case markings are the pronominal system and the possessive clitic (which used to be called the saxon genitive). The possessive is marked by a clitic at the end of the possessing noun phrase. This can be illustrated in the following manner: :The king's daughter's house fell. The first <'s> clitic on king indicates that the daughter in question is the king's. The second <'s> clitic does not attach to "daughter", as many people mistakenly believe, but in fact to the entire noun phrase The king's daughter. English preserves the old Germanic noun case system in its pronouns. The full set of cases are listed below; note that modern use of the second person singular thou is rare, and is confined to dialects and religious and poetic functions. In modern standard English, the second person plural you is used instead.

Notes

#Some North American dialects use "y'all" and related forms for the second person plural pronoun: other forms include "you guys", "yu'uns", and "youse". These forms are generally regarded as colloquial and non-standard. #The pronoun thou was the former second person singular pronoun; it is considered an archaism in most contexts, although it is still used in some dialects in the north of England. #Mine (and thine) were also previously used before vowel sounds to avoid a glottal stop. e.g., Do mine eyes deceive me? Know thine enemy. This usage is now archaic.

Verbs

In English, verbs generally describe actions, and can also be used to describe certain states of being. In contrast to the relative simplicity of English nouns, verbs come in a large array of tenses, some moods, two voices, and are marked for person.

Person

Verbs in English are marked in limited fashion for person. Unlike some other European languages, person cannot generally be inferred from the conjugation attached to the verb. As a result, subject nouns and pronouns are generally required elements in English sentences for clarity's sake. Most regular verbs in English follow the paradigm exemplified below for the simple present of the verb "to listen": Note: an archaic version of the second person singular is "thou listenest".

Voice

English has two voices for verbs: the active and the passive. The basic form is the active verb, and follows the SVO pattern discussed above. The passive voice is derived from the active by changing the verb to its passive form, exchanging the subject and direct object, and marking the former subject with by. The former subject changes to objective case and becomes optional, e.g. #active: I heard the music. #passive: The music was heard (by me). (Note: me, not I) The passive form of the verb is formed by replacing the verb with to be in the same tense, and appending the past participle of the original verb. Thus: This pattern continues through all the composite tenses as well. The semantic effect of the change from active to passive is the depersonalization of an action. It is also occasionally used to topicalize (this word does not exist in the English language) the direct object of a sentence. Many writing style guides including Strunk and White recommend minimizing use of the passive voice in English.

Mood

English has five primary moods of verb. These are the declarative, the imperative, the conditional and subjunctive, and the interrogative.
- The declarative mood or [indicative mood] is the simplest and most basic mood. Simply put, it's a statement in the active voice of a verb presented as though it were factual. This mood, along with most cases of other moods (unless otherwise stated), is concluded with a period <.>.
- # I am walking home.
- # They are singing.
- # He isn't a dancer.
- # We are very happy.
- The imperative mood is used in issuing commands. It is formed by using the verb in its simplest, unconjugated form: "Listen!", "Sit!", "Eat!". The imperative mood in English occurs only in the second person, and the subject ("you") is generally not expressly stated, because it is implied. When the speaker gives a command regarding anyone else, it is still directed at the second person as though it were a request for permission, although it may be a rhetorical statement.
- # Let me do the talking.
- # Let us build a bridge.
- # Give him an allowance.
- # Let sleeping dogs lie. Sometimes a vocative is used for clarification, e.g. "Sit, John."
- The conditional mood is used to express if-then statements, or in response to counterfactual propositions (see subjunctive mood, below), denoting or implying an indeterminate future action. It is expressed through the use of the verbal auxiliaries could, would, should, may and might in combination with the stem form of the verb.
- #He could go to the store.
- #You should be more careful.
- #I may try something else.
- #He might be heading north. Note that for many speakers, "may" and "might" have merged into a single meaning (that of "might") that implies the outcome of the statement is contingent. The implication of permission in "may" seems to remain only in certain uses with the second person, e.g. "You may leave the dinner table."
- The subjunctive mood is used to express counterfactual (or conditional) statements, and is often found in if-then statements, and certain formulaic expressions. It is typically marked in the present tense by the auxiliary "were" plus the present participle (<-ing>) of the verb.
- #Were I eating, I should sit.
- #If they were eating, they would sit.
- #Truth be told...
- #If I were you... The conjugation of these moods becomes a significantly more complex matter when they are used with different tenses. However, casual spoken English rarely uses the subjunctive, and generally restricts the conditional mood to the simple present and simple past.
- The interrogative mood is used to pose questions, with or without an expected answer. It is formed by switching the order of the subject and helping verb in a declarative sentence. When spoken, an intonation change is often used so as to emphasize this switch, or can entirely reflect the interrogative mood in some cases eg John ran?. The interrogative mood can further be formed in this manner by moving the predicate of a declarative sentence in front of the helping verb and changing it to a demonstrative, relative pronoun, quantifier, etc. This mood is denoted by ending the sentence with a question mark .
- #Are you going to the party?
- #Is he supposed to do that?
- #How much do I owe you?
- #Where is the parking lot? Rhetorical questions can be formed by moving the helping verb-subject pair to the end of the question, e.g. "You wouldn't really do that, would you?"

Tense

intonation English has a wide variety of verb tenses, all of which convey only the time of an action; however, as in most Germanic languages, they can be whittled down to four: present and past indicative and subjunctive. Using the verbs "to be" and "to have", and the modals "will/would", "shall/should", and "to go", plus the present and past participles, it is possible to create the various compound tenses. The twelve major tenses in English result from combining each of three times (past, present, future) with each of four aspects (simple, continuous (also known as "progressive or "imperfect"), perfect, and continuous perfect). (Certain combinations are very rare in the passive voice, however, most notably the future continuous perfect.) The following are illustrative examples of the primary verb tenses encountered in English. Tenses in which the main verb is marked for person:

- Simple present: "I listen." For many verbs, this is used to express habit or ability ("I play the guitar").
Tenses in which the auxiliary is marked for person:
- Present progressive: "I am listening." This is used to express what most other languages use the simple present tense for. Note that this form in English can also be used to express future actions, such as in the phrase "We're going to the movies tonight".
- Past progressive: "I was listening." Used to express an ongoing action completed in the past.
- Present perfect: "I have listened." This is usually used to express that an event happened at an unspecified or unknown time on the past. It often has the sense of a past action with an ongoing present effect, as in sentences like I have finished the job; he has not arrived yet.
- Present perfect continuous: "I have been listening." This is used to express that an event started at some time in the past and continues to the present.
- Simple future: "I shall/will listen." This expresses that an event will occur in the future, or that the speaker intends to perform some action.
- Future progressive: "I shall/will be listening." Expresses an ongoing event that has not yet been initiated. Tenses in which neither the main verb nor the auxiliary is marked for person:
- Infinitive: "to listen" Used in combination with other verbs: "I was to listen to the story."
- Simple past: "I listened." In English (unlike some other languages with aorist tenses), this implies that the action took place in the past and that it is not taking place now.
- Past perfect (pluperfect): "I had listened." Expresses that an action was completed prior to some other event.
- Past perfect continuous: "I had been listening." Usually expressed with a duration, this indicates that an event was ongoing for a specific time, then completed before a specific event.
- Future perfect: "I shall/will have listened." Indicates that an action will occur after some other event.
- Future perfect continuous: "I shall/will have been listening." Expresses an ongoing action that occurs in the future, after some other event.

Usage and Auxiliaries

In addition, forms of "do" are used for some negatives, questions and emphasis of the simple present and simple past: #"Do I go?" "I do not go." "I do go!" #"Did I go?" "I did not go." "I did go!" The continuous form "going to" is used for some future based tenses: #"I am going to go." #"I was going to go." See Auxiliary verb for more examples and details.

Irregular verbs

While many verbs in English follow the relatively simple paradigm illustrated at the beginning of this section, there are many verbs that do not. There are two categories of such verbs: #strong verbs (the "transparently irregular") #true irregular verbs. The term "transparently irregular" is sometimes used to describe Jakob Grimm's "strong" verbs that appear irregular at first, but actually follow a common paradigm. This group of verbs are relics of the older Germanic ablaut system for conjugation. This is generally confined to atypical simple past verb forms, e.g. :I meet ~ I met ~ I have met :I read ~ I read ~ I have read :I lead ~ I led ~ I have led :I swim ~ I swam ~ I have swum :I sing ~ I sang ~ I have sung :I steal ~ I stole ~ I have stolen True irregular verbs have forms that are not predictable from ablaut rules. The most common of these in English is the verb "to be". A sampling of its verbal paradigm is listed below; the majority of other forms are predictable from the knowledge of these four. Irregular verbs include "eat", "sit", "loan", "keep", among many others. Some paradigms are based on obsolete root words, or roots that have changed meaning. Others are derived from old umlaut patterns that changes in phonemic structure and grammar have distorted (keep ~ kept is one such example). Some are unclear in origin, and may date back to Proto-Indo-European times.

Notes

#In English, a long-standing prescriptive rule holds that shall denotes simple futurity in the first person, and will denotes simple futurity in the second and third persons. In American English, this distinction has largely vanished; will is normally used for both cases, and shall is rare. In British English, adherence to the rule has declined during the 20th century (see Shall and will for a more detailed discussion), although use of shall remains for expressing the simple future in the first person. #The distinction between tense, aspect, and mood is not clear-cut or universally agreed-upon. For example, many analysts would not accept that English has twelve tenses. The six "continuous" (also called "progressive") forms in the list above are often treated under the heading of "aspect" rather than tense: the simple past and the past continuous are examples of the same tense, under this view. In addition, many modern grammars of English agree that English does not have a future tense (or a future perfect). These include the two largest and most sophisticated recent grammars: :#Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad & E. Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, Longman. :#Huddleston, R. & G. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge, CUP. The main argument given by Huddleston and Pullum (pp 209-10) that English does not have a future tense is that "will" is a modal verb, both in its grammar and in its meaning. Biber et al. go further and say that English has only two tenses, past and present: they treat the perfect forms with "have" under "aspect". Huddleston & Pullum, on the other hand, regard the forms with "have" as "secondary tenses".

Adjectives and adverbs

Adjectives are modifiers for nouns and adverbs are modifiers for verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Not all languages distinguish them, but English does in both grammar and word formation. Grammatically, adjectives precede the noun they modify, whereas adverbs might precede or follow the verb they modify, depending upon the specific adverb. English also has a means of converting adjectives into adverbs: the addition of the suffix <-ly> changes an adjective to an adverb (in addition to moving it to the appropriate place in a sentence). Occasionally, people use adverbs with verbs that require an adjective. #"I feel badly" - the speaker has an impaired sense of touch (likewise: "I hear badly") #"I feel bad" - the speaker is ill or upset (likewise: "I feel happy") The latter is, of course, the meaning most people try to convey. As well, confusion often occurs between good, well (adj.), and well (adv.). #"I feel good" - a good mood #"I feel well (adj.)" - good health #"I did well (adv.)" - success There are other ways of changing words from one lexical class to another. Nouns are easily transformed into verbs by moving them to the appropriate position in a sentence, and then conjugating them according to the default paradigm. Nouns can also be changed to other kinds of nouns (<-er>, <-ist>), into adverbs of state/condition (<-ness>), and into adjectives (<-ish>, as in "bullish"). Verbs can be turned into adjectives with <-ing> ("dancing school"), into adverbs with <-ly>, and sometimes even into nouns with <-er> ("dancer", "listener"). These processes provide the English language with greater flexibility in choosing words, expanding vocabulary, and re-shuffling words to add subtlety of meaning that might otherwise not be available in an analytic language.

External links

#[http://www.ego4u.com/en/cram-up/grammar English Grammar Online] - exercises, explanations and teaching materials on English as a foreign language #[http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/index.html Common Errors in English] - alphabetically indexed list of common errors with explanations #[http://www.EnglishTensesWithCartoons.com Short descriptions of the English Tenses] #[http://cctc2.commnet.edu/sensen/index.html Sentence Sense] - an online textbook in basic writing #[http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/inhalt_grammar.htm Learning English Online] - information for learners of English as a foreign language #[http://www.dianahacker.com/bedhandbook/subpages/language.html Language Debates] - a list of controversial topics in English grammar #[http://www.lbt-languages.de/english/lernhilfe/lernhilfe.html Free Grammar Tutorials] - a column overview of the English tenses #[http://www.gramster.com Gramster] - Free English grammar #[http://grammar.free-esl.com Free-ESL Grammar] - Basic comprehensive grammar of English with discussion
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Rule

Rule may mean:
- Norm
- Law
- Morality
- Monastic rule, the basis upon which a monastic order is run.
- Theorem, in mathematics, something which is always true.
- Mathematics, a determinate method for performing a mathematical operation and obtaining a certain result.
- Rule of thumb, Heuristic, a rule that doesn't always apply, but that shows a tendency or probability.
- Game mechanic, a rule to help govern a game.
- Military rule
- Ruler, a straight edge used for measurement. Rule may also be:
- To control a country, for example through a dictatorship or monarchy
- In the field of artificial intelligence, a database of rules can be used to govern the behavior of a system
- A computer project with the goal of compiling/adapting programs in order to make them use less resource (under linux) in order to get old computers (5 yesrs old or more) usable with up-to-date software (useful for scool, or where there are a large number of computers required (computers aren't cheap)). rule-project
- Rule engine
- The Rule, a soul/reggae band

Language

A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations. Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.

Properties of language

Languages are not just sets of symbols. They also contain a grammar, or system of rules, used to manipulate the symbols. While a set of symbols may be used for expression or communication, it is primitive and relatively unexpressive, because there are no clear or regular relationships between the symbols. Because a language also has a grammar, it can manipulate its symbols to express clear and regular relationships between them. For example, imagine going on a walk with a person who only knew individual symbols, or words. If you saw a dog, he might say, "Dog scare" or "Scare Dog". Although any English speaker would have some notion of what he was talking about, the relationship between the words is unclear. Is he scared of dogs? Or just that dog? Or does he want to scare the dog off? Does he think the dog is scared? But if you respond, "I’m not scared of dogs," the relationship between dog and scare is quite apparent and hence the meaning of the utterance. Another important property of language is the arbitrariness of the symbols. Any symbol can be mapped onto any concept (or even onto one of the rules of the grammar). For instance, there is nothing about the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to use it to mean nothing. That is the meaning all Spanish speakers have memorized for that sound pattern. But for Croatian speakers nada means hope. However, it must be understood that just because in principle the symbols are arbitrary does not mean that a language cannot have symbols that are iconic of what they stand for. Words such as meow sound similar to what they represent, but they could be replaced with words such as jarn, and as long as everyone memorized the new word, the same concepts could be expressed with it.

Human languages

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science studying them is linguistics. Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For example, the boundaries between named language groups are in effect arbitrary due to blending between populations (the dialect continuum). For instance, there are dialects of German very similar to Dutch which are not mutually intelligible with other dialects of (what Germans call) German. Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not always possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.) The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

Origins of human language

Scientists do not yet agree on when language was first used by humans (or their ancestors). Estimates range from about two million (2,000,000) years ago, during the time of Homo habilis, to as recently as forty thousand (40,000) years ago, during the time of Cro-Magnon man. The nature of speech means that there is almost no data on which to base conclusions on the subject.

Language taxonomy

The classification of natural languages can be performed on the basis of different underlying principles (different closeness notions, respecting different properties and relations between languages); important directions of present classifications are:
- paying attention to the historical evolution of languages results in a genetic classification of languages—which is based on genetic relatedness of languages,
- paying attention to the internal structure of languages (grammar) results in a typological classification of languages—which is based on similarity of one or more components of the language’s grammar across languages,
- and respecting geographical closeness and contacts between language-speaking communities results in areal groupings of languages. The different classifications do not match each other and are not expected to, but the correlation between them is an important point for many linguistic research works. (There is a parallel to the classification of species in biological phylogenetics here: consider monophyletic vs. polyphyletic groups of species.) The task of genetic classification belongs to the field of historical-comparative linguistics, of typological—to linguistic typology. See also: Taxonomy, Taxonomic classification—for the general idea of classification and taxonomies.

Genetic classification

The world’s languages have been grouped into families of languages that are believed to have common ancestors. Some of the major families are the Indo-European languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages, the Austronesian languages, and the Sino-Tibetan languages. The shared features of languages from one family can be due to shared ancestry. (Compare with homology in biology.)

Typological classification

An example of a typological classification is the classification of languages on the basis of the basic order of the verb, the subject and the object in a sentence into several types: SVO, SOV, VSO, and so on, languages. (, for instance, belongs to the SVO language type.) The shared features of languages of one type (= from one typological class) may have arisen completely independently. (Compare with analogy in biology.) Their cooccurence might be due to the universal laws governing the structure of natural languages—language universals.

Areal classification

The following language groupings can serve as some linguistically significant examples of areal linguistic units, or sprachbunds: Balkan linguistic union, or the bigger group of European languages; Caucasian languages. Although the members of each group are not closely genetically related, there is a reason for them to share similar features, namely: their speakers have been in contact for a long time within a common community and the languages converged in the course of the history. These are called areal features. NB. One should be careful about the underlying classification principle for groups of languages which have apparently a geographical name: besides areal linguistic units, the taxa of the genetic classification (language families) are often given names which themselves or parts of which refer to geographical areas.
Constructed languages
One prominent artificial language, called Esperanto, was created by L. L. Zamenhof. It is a compilation of various elements of different languages, and it is intended to be an easy-to-learn language. Another prominent artificial language, called Ido, is intended to be reformed Esperanto. Other constructed languages strive to be more logical than natural languages; a prominent example of this is Lojban. Other writers, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, have created fantasy languages, for literary, artistic, or personal reasons. One of Tolkien’s languages is called Quenya, which is a form of Elvish. It has its own alphabet, and its phonology and syntax are modelled on Finnish. Linguist Mark Okrand has devised Klingon and Vulcan for Star Trek, which have since been developed into full languages.
The study of language
The oldest surviving written grammar for any language is believed to be the Tolkāppiyam (தொல்காப்பியம்), a book on the grammar of the Tamil language, written around 200 BCE by Tolkāppiyar. Its classification of the alphabet into consonants and vowel was a breakthrough. The historical record of the study of language begins in North India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BCE grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology, known as the (अष्टाध्यायी). grammar is highly systematized and technical. Inherent in its analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root; the phoneme was only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 CE in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi an-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology. Later in the West, the success of science, mathematics, and other formal systems in the 20th century led many to attempt a formalization of the study of language as a "semantic code". This resulted in the academic discipline of linguistics, the founding of which is attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure.
Animal (nonhuman) language
While the term animal languages is widely used, most researchers agree that they are not as complex or expressive as human language; a more accurate term is animal communication. Some researchers argue that there are significant differences separating human language from the communication of other animals, and that the underlying principles are not related. In several widely publicised instances, animals have been trained to mimic certain features of human language. For example, chimpanzees and gorillas have been taught hand signs based on American Sign Language; however, they have never been taught its grammar. There was also a case in 2003 of Kanzi, a captive bonobo chimpanzee allegedly independently creating some words to mean certain concepts. While animal communication has debated levels of semantics, it has not been shown to have syntax in the sense that human languages do. Some researchers argue that a continuum exists among the communication methods of all social animals, pointing to the fundamental requirements of group behaviour and the existence of "mirror cells" in primates. This, however, may not be a scientific question, but is perhaps more one of definition. What exactly is the definition of the word "language"? Most researchers agree that, although human and more primitive languages have analogous features, they are not homologous.
Formal languages
Mathematics and computer science use artificial entities called formal languages (including programming languages and markup languages, but also some that are far more theoretical in nature). These often take the form of character strings, produced by some combination of formal grammar and semantics of arbitrary complexity.
See also

- Common phrases in different languages
- Computer-assisted language learning (a historical perspective)
- Deception
- Ethnologue, which provides a fairly complete list of languages, locations, population and genetic affiliation
- Extinct language
- FOXP2 (Language gene)
- ILR scale (defines five levels of language proficiency)
- ISO 639 (2- and 3-letter codes for language names)
- Language education
- Language reform
- Language policy
- Language school
- Linguistic protectionism
- Linguistics basic topics
- List of language academies
- List of languages
- List of official languages
- Naming
- Non-verbal communication
- Non-sexist language
- Official language
- Orthography
- Philology and Historical linguistics
- Philosophy of language
- Profanity
- Psycholinguistics
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- Slang
- Symbolic communication
- Speech therapy
- Terminology
- Tongue-twister
- Translation
- Whistled language
References

- Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, David (2001). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
- Katzner, K. (1999). The Languages of the World. New York, Routledge.
- McArthur, T. (1996). The Concise Companion to the English Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Kandel, Jessel, and Schwartz (1991). Principles of Neural Science. McGraw Hill (esp. p. 1173).
External links

- [http://www.zompist.com/ Mark Rosenfelder’s Metaverse] provides a useful listing of 5000 languages and dialects (grouped by their relationships), where the numbers one to ten in each language may be found
- [http://www.geocities.com/agihard/mohl/mohl_languages.html Museum of Languages]
- The [http://www.ethnologue.com/ Ethnologue], a catalog of the world’s languages
- [http://www.language-capitals.com Language Capitals] Guide to 8 major languages of the world with facts, characteristics and varieties
- [http://www.vistawide.com/languages/ World Languages and Cultures] — Practical information and resources on languages and language learning
- [http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals/animals.html Animal sounds in different languages]
- [http://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html Distribution of languages on the Internet]
- [http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent/ Speech accent archive]
- [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/G_Kunkel/homepage.htm a collection of bird songs] provides many kinds of bird songs
- [http://acp.eugraph.com The Animal Communication Project]
- [http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/categories/lang.html Language Articles]
- [http://www.primitivism.com/language.htm Language: Origin and Meaning by John Zerzan] Category:Technology als:Sprache zh-min-nan:Gí-giân ko:언어 ms:Bahasa nb:Språk ja:言語 simple:Language th:ภาษา

Phonetics

:This article is about linguistics. For the voicemail transcription service, see Phonetic (service) Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) therefore do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis. While writing systems and alphabets are in many cases closely related to the sounds of speech, strictly speaking, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds of speech than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies. On the other hand, logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, but the information is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic refers to the portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical refers to the portion that serves as a semantic hint. Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic due to the fact that pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are. Phonetics has three main branches:
- articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech
- acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear
- auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives. There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, where there existed numerous phonetically extremely accurate treatises on the orthoepy of Sanskrit and a Tamil grammar book Tolkāppiyam (c. fifth century BCE) that described the place and manner of articulation of consonants. Most Indian languages group and order their consonants based on place and methods of articulation.

External links and references

- [http://www2.unil.ch/ling/english/phonetique/table-eng.html On-line phonetics course]
- [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2004/ling001/lecture2.html The sounds and sound patterns of language] U Penn
- [http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/ UCLA lab data]
- [http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/ UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive]
- [http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/phonetik/EGG/page1.htm EGG and Voice Quality] (electroglottography, phonation, etc.)
- [http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/handbook.htm IPA handbook]
- [http://www.ling.lu.se/research/speechtutorial/tutorial.html Speech Analysis Tutorial]

Bibliography

- Catford, J. C. (1977). Fundamental problems in phonetics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-32520-X.
- Clark, John; & Yallop, Colin. (1995). An introduction to phonetics and phonology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19452-5.
- Hardcastle, William J.; & Laver, John (Eds.). (1997). The handbook of phonetic sciences. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-6311-8848-7.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (2003). Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-23269-9 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-23270-2 (pbk).
- Ladefoged, Peter; & Maddieson, Ian. (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. ISBN 0-631-19814-8 (hbk); ISBN 0-631-19815-6 (pbk).
- Maddieson, Ian. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cambridge studies in speech science and communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Pike, Kenneth L. (1943). Phonetics: A critical analysis of phonetic theory and a technic for the practical description of sounds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Pisoni, David B.; & Remez, Robert E. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of speech perception. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-6312-2927-2.
- Rogers, Henry. (2000). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics. Harlow, Essex: Pearson. ISBN 0-582-38182-7.
- Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2621-9404-X.
- ko:음성학 ja:音声学

Phonology

Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function - within a given language or across languages. For example, /p/ and /b/ in English are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., phonemes.) We can tell this from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its placement relative to other sounds or its position within a word, yet these different pronunciations are still considered to be the same phoneme. The /p/ in "pin" is, for example, aspirated (a feature which differentiates phonemes in languages like Thai and Quechua) while the very same phoneme in "spin" is not. In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds—the phonemes—phonology is concerned with how sounds alternate, as well as issues like syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. One example of what a phonologist might study is how the /t/ sounds in the words tub, stub, but, and butter are all pronouced differently, yet are all perceived as "the same sound." The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of signed languages, with gestures and their relationships as the object of study.

Phonemes and spelling

The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written. (In practice, this ideal is never realized.) However in English, different phonemes can be spelled the same way (e.g., good and food have different vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can represent different sounds (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / " (but without the quotes). On the other hand, the actual sounds are enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] " (again, without quotes). While the letters between slashes may be based on spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system

Doing a phoneme inventory

Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be pronounced in many ways. Looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the phoneme inventory of a language. However, with this method it is often not possible to detect all phonemes, so other approaches are used as well. A minimal pair is a pair of words, both from the same language, that differ by only a single phoneme, and that are recognized by speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, then those two sounds constitute separate phonemes, otherwise they are called allophones of the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops () can be aspirated. In English, word initial voiceless stops are aspirated, whereas non word-initial voiceless stops are not aspirated (This can be seen by putting your fingers right in front of your lips and notice the difference in breathiness as you say 'pin' and 'spin'). There is no English word 'pin' that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English, aspirated (the means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of an underlying phoneme /p/. Another example: in English, the liquids and are two separate phonemes (minimal pair 'life', 'rife'); however, in Korean these two liquids are allophones of the same phoneme, and the general rule is that comes before a vowel, and doesn't (e.g. Seoul, Korea). A native speaker of Korean will tell you that the in Seoul and the in Korea are in fact the same letter. What happens is that a native Korean speaker's brain uses the underlying phoneme , and depending on the phonetic context (before a vowel or not) this phoneme gets expressed as either the sound or the sound. Another Korean speaker will hear both sounds as the underlying phoneme and think of them as the same sound. This is one reason why most people have an accent when they attempt to speak a language that they did not grow up hearing; their brains sort the sounds they hear in terms of the phonemes of their own native language.

Change of a phoneme inventory over time

The particular sounds between which a language distinguishes can change over time as new children learn the language. At one point, and were allophones in English, and these changed later into separate phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described in historical linguistics (another being fast change resulting from influence by another language, e.g. French influence on English after the Norman Conquest).

Other language features studied in phonology

Stress and intonation are also part of phonology. In some languages, stress is non-phonological. Some examples include Finnish and all ancient Germanic languages (Old Norse, Old English and Old High German) as well as some modern Germanic languages such as Icelandic. However, in most modern-day Germanic languages such as German or English, stress is indeed phonologically distinctive, although there are only few minimal pairs, e.g. the personal name August versus the month August in German. The distinction of stress is often seen in English words where the verb and noun forms have the same spelling. For example, consider 'rebel' the noun (which places the emphasis on the first syllable) contrasted with 'rebel' the verb (which instead puts the emphasis on the second syllable). Another example is the pair insight and incite , where in the former the stress lies on the first syllable and in the latter on the second syllable. In American English, the words Missouri and misery are also distinguished only by stress. In Missouri, the stress lies on the penultimate syllable, but in misery it lies on the first syllable.

Development of the field

The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay created the word phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He worked not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now called allophony and morphophonology). His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of Structuralism, was significant. Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy's posthumously published work, the Principles of Phonology (1939), is considered the foundation of the Prague School of phonology. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetskoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, though morphophonology was first recognized by Baudouin de Courtenay. Trubetzkoy split phonology into phonemics and archiphonemics; the former has had more influence than the latter. Another important figure in the Prague School was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the twentieth century. In 1968, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations (surface forms) are structures whose phonetic part is a sequence of phonemes which are made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion of earlier work by Halle and Roman Jakobson. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have the binary values + or -. Ordered phonological rules govern how this phonological representation (also called underlying representation) is transformed into the actual pronunciation (also called surface form.) An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. In the late 1960s, David Stampe introduced Natural Phonology. In this view, phonology is based on a set of universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active and which are surpressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance. Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The second-most prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such as Geoffrey Pullum. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by Wolfgang Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology. In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena are no longer seen as one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or feature combinations, but rather as some parallel sequences of features which reside on multiple tiers. Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others. In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky developed Optimality Theory—an overall architecture for phonology according to which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints which is ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become the dominant trend in phonology. Though usually unacknowledged, Optimality Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in terms of constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints are formalized in very different ways.

External links

- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPhonology.htm What is phonology?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAutosegmentalPhonology.htm What is autosegmental phonology?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsGenerativePhonology.htm What is generative phonology?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsLexicalPhonology.htm What is lexical phonology?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsMetricalPhonology.htm What is metrical phonology?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhonologicalDerivation.htm What is a phonological derivation?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPhonologicalHierarchy.htm What is phonological hierarchy?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsPhonologicalSymmetry.htm What is phonological symmetry?]
- SIL: [http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhonologicalUniversal.htm What is a phonological universal?]
- Lexicon of linguistics: [http://www2.let.uu.nl/UiL-OTS/Lexicon/zoek.pl?lemma=Metrical+phonology&lemmacode=540 Metrical phonology]
- [http://www.celt.stir.ac.uk/staff/HIGDOX/STEPHEN/PHONO/PHONOLG.HTM On-line phonology course] (of English)
- [http://davidbrett.uniss.it/index Another on-line phonology course dealing with English] using large amounts of Macromedia Flash interaction.
- [http://specgram.com/PsQ.XVI.4/06.pulju.indefinite.html Variation in the English Indefinite Article]: A humorous article demonstrating the importance of phonology (as opposed to merely syntax and semantics) in linguistic analysis.

Bibliography

- Anderson, John M.; & Ewen, Colin J. (1987). Principles of dependency phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bloch, Bernard. (1941). Phonemic overlapping. American Speech, 16, 278-284.
- Bloomfield, Leonard. (1933). Language. New York: H. Holt and Company. (Revised version of Bloomfield's 1914 An introduction to the study of language).
- Chomsky, Noam. (1964). Current issues in linguistic theory. In J. A. Fodor & J. J. Katz (Eds.), The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy language (pp. 91-112). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
- Chomsky, Noam; & Halle, Morris. (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
- Clements, George N. (1985). The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook, 2, 225-252.
- Clements, George N.; & Samuel J. Keyser. (1983). CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable. Linguistic inquiry monographs (No. 9). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-2625-3047-3 (pbk); ISBN 0-2620-3098-5 (hbk).
- Firth, J. R. (1948). Sounds and prosodies. Transactions of the Philological Society 1948, 127-152.
- Gilbers, Dicky; & de Hoop, Helen. (1998). Conflicting constraints: An introduction to optimality theory. Lingua, 104, 1-12.
- Goldsmith, John A. (1979). The aims of autosegmental phonology. In D. A. Dinnsen (Ed.), Current approaches to phonological theory (pp. 202-222). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- Goldsmith, John A. (1989). Autosegmental and metrical phonology: A new synthesis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Halle, Morris. (1954). The strategy of phonemics. Word, 10, 197-209.
- Halle, Morris. (1959). The sound pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
- Harris, Zellig. (1951). Methods in structural linguistics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
- Hockett, Charles F. (1955). A manual of phonology. Indiana University publications in anthropology and linguistics, memoirs II. Baltimore: Waverley Press.
- Hooper, Joan B. (1976). An introduction to natural generative phonology. New York: Academic Press.
- Jakobson, Roman. (1949). On the identification of phonemic entities. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 5, 205-213.
- Jakobson, Roman; Fant, Gunnar; & Halle, Morris. (1952). Preliminaries to speech analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Kaisse, Ellen M.; & Shaw, Patricia A. (1985). On the theory of lexical phonology. In E. Colin & J. Anderson (Eds.), Phonology Yearbook 2 (pp. 1-30).
- Kenstowicz, Michael. Phonology in generative grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- Ladefoged, Peter. (1982). A course in phonetics (2nd ed.). London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
- Martinet, André. (1949). Phonology as functional phonetics. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Martinet, André. (1955). Économie des changements phonétiques: Traité de phonologie diachronique. Berne: A. Francke S.A.
- Pike, Kenneth. (1947). Phonemics: A technique for reducing languages to writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Sapir, Edward. (1925). Sound patterns in language. Language, 1, 37-51.
- Sapir, Edward. (1933). La réalité psychologique des phonémes. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique, 30, 247-265.
- de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.
- Stampe, David. (1979). A dissertation on natural phonology. New York: Garland.
- Swadesh, Morris. (1934). The phonemic principle. Language, 10, 117-129.
- Trager, George L.; & Bloch, Bernard. (1941). The syllabic phonemes of English. Language, 17, 223-246.
- Trubetzkoy, Nikolai. (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 7.
- Twaddell, William F. (1935). On defining the phoneme. Language monograph no. 16. Language.
- ko:음운론 ja:音韻論

Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, any English speaker can see that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers can also recognize that these relations can be formulated as rules that can apply to many, many other pairs of words. Dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopedia is to encyclopedias; dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rule in the first case is plural formation; in the second case, a transitive verb and a noun playing the role of its object can form a word. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such rules across and within languages. The term was coined by August Schleicher in 1859: Für die Lehre von der Wortform wähle ich das Wort "Morphologie" ("for the science of word formation, I choose the term 'morphology'", Mémoires Acad. Impériale 7/1/7, 35).

Important concepts

Lexemes and word forms

The word "word" is ambiguous in common usage. To take up again the example of dog vs. dogs, there is one sense in which these two are the same "word" (they are both nouns that refer to the same kind of animal, differing only in number), and another sense in which they are different words (they can't generally be used in the same sentences without altering other words to fit; for example, the verbs is and are in The dog is happy and The dogs are happy). The distinction between these two senses of "word" is probably the most important one in morphology. The first sense of "word," the one in which dog and dogs are "the same word," is called lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog-catcher, on the other hand, are different lexemes; for example, they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma or citation form.

Inflection vs. word-formation

Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological rule. Some morphological rules relate different forms of the same lexeme; while other rules relate two different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while those of the second kind are called word-formation. The English plural, as illustrated by dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog-catcher or dishwasher are an example of a word-formation rule. Informally, word-formation forms "new words" (that is, lexemes), while inflection gives you more forms of the "same" word (lexeme). There is a further distinction between two kinds of word-formation: derivation and compounding. Compounding is a kind of word-formation which involves combining complete word forms into a compound; dog-catcher is a compound, because both dog and catcher are words. Derivation involves suffixes or prefixes that are not independent words; the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing it with the derivational prefix in-, and dependent itself is derived from the verb depend. The distinction between inflection and word-formation is not at all clear-cut. There are many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word-formation. However, the next section will clarify this distinction further.

Paradigms and morphosyntax

The notion of a paradigm is closely related to that of inflection. The paradigm of a lexeme is the set of all of its word forms, organized by their grammatical categories. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. The word forms of a lexeme can usually be arranged into tables, by classifying them by shared features such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person, number, gender and case. The categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because it determines which form of the verb must be used; but in contrast, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog-catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves. The major difference between inflection and word formation is that inflectional forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and paradigms, but not with word-formation or compounding.

Allomorphy and morphophonology

In the exposition above, we've described morphological rules as analogies between word forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy applies both to the meaning of the words and to their forms: in each pair, the word in the left always means "one of X" and the one on the right "many of X", and at the distinction is always signaled by having the plural form have an -s at the end, which the singular does not have. One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this sort of one-to-one correspondence between meaning and form hardly ever holds. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a different way from the regular pattern, or not signalled at all. Even the case we consider "regular", with the final -s, is not quite that simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, we have an "extra" vowel before the -s. These cases, where the same distinction is effected by different changes of form for different lexemes, are called allomorphy. There are several kinds of allomorphy. One is pure allomorphy, where the allomorphs are just arbitrary. The most extreme cases here are called suppletion, where two forms related by a morphological rule are just arbitrarily different: for example, the past of go is went, which is a suppletive form. On the other hand, other kinds of allomorphy are due to interaction between morphology and phonology. Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language, and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules, by resulting in impossible sound sequences. For example, if we were to try to form the plural of dish by just putting a -s at the end, we'd get
- dishs, which is not permitted by the phonology; to "rescue" the word, we put an e in between, and get dishes. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the preceding phoneme. The study of allomorphy that results from the interaction of morphology and phonology is called morphophonology. Many morphophonological rules fall under the category of sandhi.

Lexical morphology

Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which, morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it concerns itself primarily with word-formation: derivation and compounding.

Models of morphology

There are three major families of approaches to morphology, which try to capture the distinctions above in different ways. These are:
- Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement approach.
- Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process approach.
- Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Word-and-Paradigm approach. Please note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is very strong, it is not absolute.

Morpheme-based morphology

In morpheme-based morphology, we analyze word forms as sequences of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement. The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology; and many five-minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five-minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so; the fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means absolutely dominant. Applying a morpheme-based model strictly quickly leads to complications when one tries to analyze many forms of allomorphy. For example, it's easy to think that in dogs, we have the root dog, followed by the plural morpheme -s; the same sort of analysis is also straightforward for oxen, with the stem ox, and a suppletive plural morpheme -en. But then, how do we "split up" the word geese into root + plural morpheme? How do we do so for sheep? Theorists who wish to maintain a strict morpheme-based approach often preserve the idea in cases like these by saying that geese is goose followed by a null morpheme (a morpheme that has no phonological content), and that the vowel change in the stem is a morphophonological rule. It is also common for morpheme-based analyses to posit null morphemes even in the absence of any allomorphy. For example, if the plural noun dogs is analyzed as a root dog followed by a plural morpheme -s, then one might analyze the singular dog as the root dog followed by a null morpheme for the singular.

Lexeme-based morphology

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, we think of a word form as the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stems, to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, does some changes to it, and outputs a word-form; a derivational rule takes a stem, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word-forms, and outputs a compound stem. The Item-and-Process approach bypasses the difficulty described above for Item-and-Arrangement approaches. Faced with a plural like geese, we don't have to assume there is a zero-morph; all we say is that while the plural of dog is formed by adding an -s to the end, the plural of goose is formed by changing the vowel in the stem.

Word-based morphology

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-Paradigm approach. This kind of theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word-forms from stems, word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial.

Morphological typology

See the main article, morphological typology In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages in terms of their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating, and have little or no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have lots of easily-separable morphemes; while yet others are fusional, because their inflectional morphemes are said to be "fused" together. The classic example of an isolating language is Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and Greek are classic examples of fusional languages. When one considers the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this classification is not at all clear-cut, and many languages don't neatly fit any one of these types. However, examined against the light of the three general models of morphology described above, it is also clear that the classification is very much biased towards a morpheme-based conception of morphology. It makes direct use of the notion of morpheme in the definition of agglutinative and fusional languages. It describes the latter as having separate morphemes "fused" together (which often does correspond to the history of the language, but not to its synchronic reality). The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages. The reader should also note that the classical typology also mostly applies to inflectional morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word-formation. Languages may be classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word-formation (synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).

Footnotes

# The existence of words like appendix and pending in English does not mean that the English word depend is analyzed into a derivational prefix de- and a root pend. While all those were indeed once related to each other by morphological rules, this was so only in Latin, not in English. English borrowed the words from French and Latin, but not the morphological rules that allowed Latin speakers to combine de- and the verb pendere 'hang' into the derivative dependere.

Bibliography

- Bauer, Laurie. (2003). Introducing linguistic morphology (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. ISBN 0-878-40343-4.
- Bauer, Laurie. (2004). A glossary of morphology. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
- Bubenik, Vit. (1999). An introduction to the study of morphology. LINCON coursebooks in linguistics, 07. Muenchen: LINCOM Europa. ISBN 3-89586-570-2.
- Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-76025-7 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk).
- Katamba, Francis. (1993). Morphology. Modern linguistics series. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10101-5 (hb); ISBN 0-312-10356-5 (pbk).
- Matthews, Peter. (1991). Morphology (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-41043-6 (hb); ISBN 0-521-42256-6 (pbk).
- Spencer, Andrew, & Zwicky, Arnold M. (Eds.) (1998). The handbook of morphology. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-18544-5. Category:Grammar
- ja:形態論

Syntax

Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning "co-" or "together") and τάξις (táxis, meaning "sequence, order, arrangement"), can be described as the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. It concerns how different words (which, going back to Dionysios Thrax, are categorized as nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) are combined into clauses, which, in turn, are combined into sentences. There exist innumerable theories of formal syntax — theories that have in time risen or fallen in influence. All theories of syntax at least share two commonalities: First, they hierarchically group subunits into constituent units (phrases). Second, they provide some system of rules to explain patterns of acceptability/grammaticality and unacceptability/ungrammaticality. Most formal theories of syntax offer explanations of the systematic relationships between syntactic form and semantic meaning. The earliest framework of semiotics was established by Charles W. Morris in his 1938 book Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Syntax is defined, within the study of signs, as the first of its three subfields (the study of the interrelation of the signs). The second subfield is semantics (the study of the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply), and the third is pragmatics (the relationship between the sign system and the user). In the framework of transformational-generative grammar (of which Government and Binding Theory and Minimalism are recent developments), the structure of a sentence is represented by phrase structure trees, otherwise known as phrase markers or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences they represent by showing how, starting from an initial category S (or, for ID/LP grammar, Z), the various syntactic categories (e.g. noun phrase, verb phrase, etc.) are formed. There are various theories as to how best to make grammars such that by systematic application of the rules, one can arrive at every phrase marker in a language (and hence every sentence in the language). The most common are Phrase structure grammars and ID/LP grammars, the latter having a slight explanatory advantage over the former. Dependency grammar is a class of syntactic theories separate from generative grammar in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does not have phrasal categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency grammar. A modern approach to combining accurate descriptions of the grammatical patterns of language with their function in context is that of systemic functional grammar, an approach originally developed by Michael A.K. Halliday in the 1960s and now pursued actively in all continents. Systemic-functional grammar is related both to feature-based approaches such as Head-driven phrase structure grammar and to the older functional traditions of European schools of linguistics such as British Contextualism and the Prague School. Tree adjoining grammar is a

Grammar

Types of grammar

Development of grammars

See also

Grammatical devices

Grammatical terms

Related topics

References

External links

English grammar

Word Order

Nouns

Gender

Number and Definiteness

Case

Notes

Verbs

Person

Voice

Mood

Tense

Usage and Auxiliaries

Irregular verbs

Notes

Adjectives and adverbs

Other topics

Paradoxes

Slang

External links

See also

Rule

Language

Properties of language

Human languages

Origins of human language

Language taxonomy

Genetic classification

Typological classification

Areal classification

Constructed languages

The study of language

Animal (nonhuman) language

Formal languages

See also

References

External links

Phonetics

See also

External links and references

Bibliography

Phonology

Phonemes and spelling

Doing a phoneme inventory

Change of a phoneme inventory over time

Other language features studied in phonology

Development of the field

See also

External links

Bibliography

Morphology (linguistics)

Important concepts

Lexemes and word forms

Inflection vs. word-formation

Paradigms and morphosyntax

Allomorphy and morphophonology

Lexical morphology

Models of morphology

Morpheme-based morphology

Lexeme-based morphology

Word-based morphology

Morphological typology

Footnotes

See also

Bibliography

Syntax