1. Explain what a morpheme is, and identify the morphemes in both "unbeliever" and "antibacterial."
a. A morpheme is a term used by descriptive linguists (scientists who study spoken languages), who specifically study morphology which studies how words consist of their meaningful parts (morphemes) and are formed through the combination of sounds (Kottak 65). An example of this type of study is seen in the word “unbeliever”, where there are three morphemes present, followed by their individual and collective meanings as follows: un- “not”, believe- “to accept something as true”, er- “a person or thing that is currently” or “is”. Each individual morpheme has a clear and separate meaning, and when combined, making the word unbeliever, creates the meaning of “a person who is not accepting something as true”. Another example of morphology can be seen in the world antibacterial, where the individual morphemes are as follows: anti- “to go against/fight” and bacteria- “unicellular organism that can cause disease”. If the morphemes are put together, then, antibacterial means, “to fight against unicellular organisms that can cause disease”.
Descriptive linguists combine morphology with other linguistic emphasis areas such as phonology to obtain a better understanding of how cultures have formed the grammatical and usage rules within their language structure, or in other words the culture’s semantics and syntax.
2. What is meant by the term "sociolinguistics"?
a. Sociolinguists are
In the field of Modern Languages and Linguistics, words are of great importance. A language’s phonology (study of how sounds are organized and used), morphology (study of the form and structure of words), syntax (study of the rules that govern sentence structure), semantics (study of meaning of words, sentences, and expressions), pragmatics (study of aspects of meaning and language use and context), and phonetics (study of human speech sounds) all play an important part in everyday life. These have a major impact in understanding the intent of what is spoken or heard. Due to the importance of communication, literary elements such as metaphors (which are defined as a figure of speech in which a word or phrase
The first concept I am going to talk about is language borrowing. Language borrowing is basically when you loan a word that is imported into a certain language called loan form. These forms now function in the grammatical processes, with nouns taking plural or possessive forms of the new language receiving native morphemes. An example would be the English word alligator. Alligator came from the Spanish which is el largato. El largato in Spanish means lizard. Loanshift another process that occurs also known as calque is when adapting native words to the new meanings. "The verb bad mouth . . . is a calque or loan translation: it seems to come from Vai day ngatmay (a curse; literally, 'a bad mouth ').
Linguistic: the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.
Linguistics has been broken down into several sub-categories including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
b) with forms and the structure of words (morphology) and with their customary arrangement in phrases and sentences (syntax )
The descriptive language
On completing the EDRD 600 course, the following are the critical elements that I will apply from the National Reading Panel’s Five Domains of reading and from Dr. Flynn’s 1st Edition of “I teach reading. Why do I need to know linguistics?”. They are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension with an added element, writing. This course also covers the topic of Linguistics. Linguistics is defined as the study of human language and its structure, including phonology, orthography, morphology/semantics, and syntax. Each of these areas of linguistics will be discussed as well. Finally, researched-based strategies that could be integrated in the classroom will also be shared.
Linguistics appears in everyday life. It is applied to speech, the different language varieties, and even social groups. Linguistics is the scientific study of the language. When we make judgments and analyze our language or other’s language, we are practicing linguistic. In an effort to learn more about the language in Louisiana, I developed a Real-World-Ready project to explore people’s reactions and initial thoughts to different dialects in Louisiana.
Key features of language include its words and their sub structures such as morphemes, graphemes and syllables at the writing level as well as reading or speaking, words, their meanings and contexts in which the words get spoken or read. Language has to be interpreted as a whole, and not just as the specific word. There must be an explicit pattern or structure. In order for language to be understood correctly, the meaning of words must be arranged in a given context. This is what constructs language; even though words are arbitrary themselves, in order to integrate as a language, they must be used in the appropriate context. This pre-established cultural context is what will enable effective communication. (Daniel Willingham, 2007, p. 1).
Among the most important concepts to emerge are those relating to dialects and language standards. Sociolinguists have documented the presence of dialects in every language. These dialects, all of which are legitimate, are associated with educational, economic, social and historical conditions. Hence, even if an individual scrupulously studies all the possible dictionaries of a random language, he would still be somewhat of a stranger to that language since he is unaware of all the dialectal changes.
One goal of anthropological linguistics is to determine the number of phonemes (phoneticstructure) that exist in different languages. This goal is accomplished by employing the use of:
Therefore, the role of discourse must be taken into account for comprehending lexical chunks. The study of language beyond the level of sentence refers to discourse analysis (Yule, 2006). Any discourse is heavily based on formulaic sequences and recurrent word combinations (Schmitt, 2004). Erman and Warren (2000) reported that 58.3% of spoken register and 52.3% of written register employ different sorts of word combinations. Learning how to use fixed phrases helps students learn the conventions of a particular discipline (Cortes, 2004). Consequently, Hyland (2009) posits that specificity is a significant factor in discourse analysis especially in the last twenty years. Each discipline has its own specific communicative conventions to look at the world (Hyland &Hamp-Lyons, 2002). Functional and cognitive linguistics together with usage-based theories of language believe that constructions are the fundamental units of language representation which are conventionalized in the speech community and established as language knowledge in the user’s mind (Goldberg, 2006; Langacker, 1987; Tomasello, 2003).For instance, Halliday's (1989) study showed that written register employs greater nominalization, impersonalization, and lexical diversity in contrast to spoken one. In the same way, Hyland and Tse (2007) in their research demonstrated that terminology differs across disciplines and the same words have
Specialists in descriptive grammar (linguists) examine the principles and patterns that underlie the use of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. In contrast, prescriptive
He seeks to find underlying similarities across these “distinct” languages, to construct a general theory of a singular language. However, it seems as though he cannot be scientifically vindicated without the groundwork being laid down by many of the authors that he is critical of. Thus, it is particularly interesting that Chomsky seems to be so at odds with the idea of descriptivism. When Chomsky says, “Grammar should not be merely a record of the data of usage, but, rather, should offer an explanation for such data,” (587) he is acknowledging the usefulness, presumably to his own theories, of descriptive linguistics. He in fact recognizes the debt he owes when he says, “To me, it seems that [structural linguistics'] major achievement is to have provided a factual and a methodological basis that makes it possible to return to the problems that occupied the traditional universal grammarians...” (590) But he goes on to say, “On the other hand, it seems to me that the substantive contributions to the theory of language structure are few, and that, to a large extent, the concepts of modern linguistics constitute a retrogression as compared with universal grammar.” (590) Where the descriptivists see an end, Chomsky sees only the means, and is somewhat dismissive of them.
It has been noted that while considering changing word meanings is vital to the diachronic study of language, the notion and practice of studying them has been historically belittled as an intellectual pursuit. Semantic change is often irregular and arbitrary as a concept, as its causes are wide-ranging and multi-faceted. However, critics such as Willem B. Hollmann now give weight and notoriety to studying semantics synchronically . By considering individual cases, one can explain some word changes and apply common rules. These often occur intra-linguistically or through common social or political changes, especially surrounding class conflict. However, although we can catalogue the semantic change of similar or groups of words, word