3.2 Phonology, Morphology and Syntax
Phonology: It studies what phonemes are, and how they’re put together to construct words.
Morphology: It studies morphemes, issues of meaning.
The arbitrariness of the sign. by French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit.
- You can’t infer the meaning of a morpheme, it’s arbitrary and you have to learn it.
- This is different from a word because you can combine morphemes to make words.
- You can understand certain words even if you’ve never heard them before.
- Syntax is generative, allowing us to understand sentences and phrases we never heard before.
- Words are also generative, and that morphemes can combine together to create words we’ve never heard before.
- Syntax: What we have in language is a set of distinct symbols, words or phrases or categories that words and phrases belong to, and rules that order these symbols, and then other rules that call upon these rules giving rise to the possibility of infinite production of symbol strings, what’s called a recursion.
Infinite use of finite media. by Wilhelm von Humboldt