All About Linguistics

PHONOLOGY                 Phonology is t he study of speech sounds in language or a language with reference to their distribution and patterning and to tacit rules governing pronunciation , t he sound system of a language , and t he classification of linguistic sounds. PHONEMICS •        Phonemics is the study of the distribution of sound systems in human languages. •        Phoneme, the variety of phonemics, is the smallest unit of sound which can differentiate one word from another; abstract mental units that represent sounds; encased in /slashes/. •       There are 44* phonemes in English, each one representing a different sound a person can make. Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet, sometimes letter combinations need to be used to make a phoneme. A letter can also represent different phonemes. Here is an example: chef = /ʃef/; choir = /kwaɪə/; cheese = /tʃi:z/ The "ch" letter combination has three different pronunciations, which are repr

WHATS MORPHOLOGY?   Morphology is the study of word structure and word formation.     Words, though impossible to define in absolute terms, can be thought of as the units that are combined to form sentences in a language such as English.   Just as sentences can be broken down into smaller units (words), we can break words down into smaller, meaningful parts.   The smallest meaningful part of a word is called a morpheme. MORPHEME           Morpheme can be defined as the smallest meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided or analyzed. In other words, morpheme can be described as the minimal units of meaning. Note: In Linguistics, morphemes are indicated by “ brace marks ” ( { } ) . Examples: As we know that in English, the case of plurality is indicated by adding “s” to the singular nouns.           Singular:                                  Plural:   Bag                                           bag s   (consists of m