1.0 INTRODUCTION
Language is extremely complex. As with geological formations, the visible mass of linguistic structure forms itself into layers. The four-part division we are going to follow is in current use; almost every textbook for teaching a foreign language is organized around it, and where parts of language are treated in separate books, they usually divide the field in the same way: phonetics manuals for sound, dictionaries for words, grammars for syntax and semantics for meaning. It is obvious that words are ‘made up of’ sounds (or at least that they contain sounds) and that sentences are ‘made of’ words, and sentences must be meaningful. Most linguistic business is that of defining the levels and determining their interrelationships, getting a more precise understanding of what ‘made up of’ signifies.
While linguists disagree radically about precisely what form a grammar of a human language may take, there is considerable agreement that the correct theory of grammar must allow for grammars that have the four- part division we shall discuss. One can choose among several descriptions of what the levels are and how they are related. iueists start with the syntactic level and work down; others start with
the bottom or phonetic (sound) level and work up. Since the levels are tied together and can only be understood as a whole, either approach is possible and picking one rather than the other is a more or less arbitrary decision.
3.1 The Lexicon
The lexicon (or the lexical level), in its most general sense, is synonymous with the ‘vocabulary’. It should be noted, however, that the word ‘lexicon’ is used in different senses by different linguistic theorists. For example, in Generative Grammar, it is used to refer to the ‘component’ containing all the information about the structural properties of the lexical items in a language. In some other grammatical models, these properties are formalized as ‘features’ and put in square brackets. We shall restrict our discussion here to its most general sense.
Every language contains a vocabulary or lexicon which is complementary to the grammar. The lexicon lists the lexemes of the language and provides along with each lexeme all the information that is required by the rules of the grammar. We cannot claim to know a language without knowing its vocabulary. The lexicon, therefore, must contain some information that will enable the speaker to reproduce correctly the utterances in a language.
Two kinds of information the lexicon should contain are syntactic information and morphological information (ignoring pronunciation which is equally necessary in mastering the vocabulary of a language).
In relation to syntax, knowing a word is not itself enough to ensure that it will always be used correctly in sentences. Take, for example, the word man which is a vocabulary of English. Apart from the fact that it is a ‘noun’, we also need to know that it may be preceded by a definite or an indefinite article ‘the/a’ (as in the man, a man); that it may be preceded by numerals (as in one man, four men); that it may be preceded by adjectives (as in serious man, dangerous man); and that it can be replaced by a pronoun like he, him, who or whom. Let us look at another word in English which is go. To specify this word, we shall need the in formation that it belongs to one or more subclasses of intransitive verbs and all the information needed for the selection and construction of its forms (e.g. goes, going, went, gone). Thus, the mastery of such information is part of linguistic knowledge, and a grammar designed to give a full account of linguistic knowledge will simply have to list in the lexicon for each word of the language the sum total of its syntactic properties. Such information appear to parallel that found in any dictionary.
The morphological information required from the lexicon will include the permissible combinations of prefixes, roots, and suffices which go to make up a word. Most English speakers, for example, would agree that the following words consist of a single root or stem, that is, they contain no prefixes or suffixes:.
a, the, man, kind, hate, school, house
while the following words are morphologically complex in the sense that they contain prefixes and suffixes:
houses (house-s)
manly (man-ly)
kindness (kind-ness)
hateful (hate-ful)
schooling (school-ing)
unkindly (un-kind-ly)
unmanly (un-man-ly)
dislike (dis-like)
We thus see that the lexicon is an important component of the grammar of a language. When we know a language we also know the vocabulary of the language as well as all the information associated with each of the lexemes of the language that is required by the rules of the grammar of the language.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
1. How many levels of language structure do you know?
2. What is lexicon?
3. Explain the two kinds of information that the lexicon should provide.
3.2 Phonology
Languages consist of several interrelated systems called components. These include the semantic component which determines the meanings of words and sentences, the syntactic component which specifies how sentences may be created or changed, and the phonological component.which contains the rules by which syntactic units are converted notuond units. Since sound is the primary vehicle for expressing language, the phonological system is of major importance in understanding the nature of language and the nature of our knowledge of language.
At the level of phonology, the linguist is first of all concerned with the speech sounds of the language. This is within the realm of phonetics –the study of speech sounds. Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds that occur in language, phonology is the study of how these sounds are organized and how they function in language. In other words, phonology is the scientific study of speech sounds and speech patterns in language. The phonological systems of languages vary in the number of sounds they contain. The English system contains twenty-four consonants and twenty vowels and diphthongs. The study of the number of sounds contained in a language, their permissible combinations to form words and their semantic functioning is the task of phonology.
Every language of the world has its own sound system an oatnen. By a sound pattern we mean:
(i) the set of sounds that occur in a given language,
(ii) the permissible arrangements of these sounds in forming words, and
(iii) the process of adding, deleting or changing sounds in a language.
Phonology is also concerned with the ‘grammar’ of speech sounds: the patterns they enter into and the changes they undergo when juxtaposed with other sounds in the course of normal speech. For example, the grammar of English phonology allows a maximum of three consonants to cluster at the beginning of a word – but only a very few consonants are permitted in this position, and then only in a certain order. The first must be [s], the second must be one of [p], [t] or [k], and the third either
[l] or [r] (splint, string, spring, screen, etc). All other arrangements, such as *trs-, and *rst- are prohibited by the rules of English phonology.
Phonological rules also specify how sounds regularly change when spoken in a variety of contexts. Notice how the final [t] of words such as moist and script changes to [] (or [c]) when the suffix –ure is added (moisture, scripture), and how the final [k] of public and elastic changes to [s] before the suffix –ity (publicity, elasticity).
The object of phonology, and of other areas of language study as well, is to describe and ultimately to explain the knowledge speakers have which allows them to produce and to understand their language. This knowledge is called linguistic competence. In phonology, competence includes knowledge of the specific sounds that occur in a language and how these sounds may be strung together to form syllables, words, and longer utterances. Part of competence is knowing what is permissible in a language and what is not. Speakers of English ‘know’, since it is part of their competence, that the initial sequence str- is possible, but that other combinations, such as tri and stm- are not. By far the greatest part of linguistic competence is unconscious; that is, it is difficult if not impossible to state overtly what the principles of language are.
Phonology is an attempt to make explicit one aspect of this linguistic knowledge.
Another important thing to note about speech sounds is that when you speak, you do not produce one sound, and then another. For instance, if you want to say pen, you don’t utter each sound separately, instead, you move your organs of speech continuously and you produce a continuous sound. Despite the fact that the sounds we produce and the sounds that we hear and comprehend are continuous signals, everyone who has ever attempted to analyse language has accepted the notion that speech utterances can be segmented into individual pieces or segments.
Therefore, although our speech utterances are continuous, in analyzing a language we can segment speech utterances.
It is important to note that every speaker of a language, even without any linguistic training, is capable of segmenting the speech segments of that language. This is because when we learn a language, we also learn to segment utterances in the language into their basic discrete elements of sound. Thus, though no two speakers speak alike, we are still able to segment the discrete elements with our knowledge of the language.
Speakers understand each other because they know the same language and how to segment the discrete elements of the continuous teerce.
We have said earlier that when you know a language, you know honds in that language; and knowing the sounds implies knowing the sounds that distinguish words which comprise the vocabulary or lexicon of that language. These distinguishing sounds are responsible for the different meanings of words. Therefore, when you know a word, you know both its form (the sounds that make it up) and its meaning. Each word must differ from another either in form and meaning, or mineaning only. The difference in meaning may be signaled by one sound (i.e. the two words are identical in all respects except by the difference in one sound) as in: pill/kill; or the difference may be signaled by two sounds as in: pet/got. These discrete differentiating sounds are said to be distinctive sounds because they are responsible for the contrastive meanings of words. They are called phonemes. In English, words like pill, kill, till,fill, mill, nil and bill are distinguished only by their initial sounds. Therefore /p,k,t,f,m,n and b/are phonemes in English. Thus, when people speak the same language, they know the distinctive sounds (phonemes) that cause differences in the meanings of words and also know the sounds that don’t cause any differences in meanings.
Therefore, a grammar of any language must include the knowledge of the phonology of the language.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
1. What is phonology?
2. What are the things you know when you know a language?
3. What is the importance of distinctive sounds in a language?
3.3 Syntax
It is evident that a language is not simply an inventory of words. Words combine to form larger units called phrases, which, in turn, combine to form sentences. It is the task of syntax to describe the various ways by which words of the language may be combined to form phrases and sentences. The word syntax is derived from a Greek word that means “arrangement’ . Syntax, therefore, concerns itself with the meaningful organization of words into larger units such as phrases, clauses ntences, and the analysis of such units. The sentence is usually taken as the largest unit amenable to meaningful linguistic analysis. This is why most linguistic analyses are limited to the sentence and constituents.
Before going into the discussion of word groups, let us first consider individual words. You will notice that words are structured too. Most words can be divided into meaningful units. For example, the word unconditionally can be divided into several meaningful units: un- condition-al-ly. Thus, un-, -al and –ly are meaningful in English (though they are not words) because they signal some grammatical meanings. These meaningful units are called morphemes, which may be defined as the smallest meaningful units of grammatical description. The description and analysis of the smallest meaningful units of grammar is called morphology. Thus, morphology studies the internal structure of words, that is, the ways in which morphemes function as constituents of word structure. You will notice that from our example above, un-, -al and –ly, although they are grammatically meaningful in English, they cannot occur alone in phrases or sentences. In other words, they must be hooked onto other units or words. However, condition can occur alone because it can be combined with other words and phrases without the support of other meaningful units. We call the morphemes like condition free morphemes because they can occur alone, but morphemes like un-, -al and –ly that cannot occur alone we call bound morphemes since they always occur with free morphemes. The bound morphemes like un- that are attached at the beginning of free morphemes are referred to as prefixes while those that are attached at the end of free morphemes are referred to as suffixes.
Having established the structure of words, we can now go on to examine how words can be strung together to form larger grammatical units. The syntax of a language describes the various ways in which words of a language may be strung together to form sentences. It has to be mentioned at the outset that native speakers of a language can produce not only sentences they have heard before but also those they haven’t heard uttered before. In other words, they can make up and understand new sentences in the language. For an illustration, consider these examples:
1. (a) My teacher slept in the moon last night
(b) Slept my teacher in the moon last night
It is possible that 1(a) may not have been uttered by anybody since it is not usual for people to go to the moon to sleep. In spite of this, speakers of English will certainly recognize 1(a) as an English sentence.
However, although 1(b) contains English words, native speakers of English will reject it as an English sentence. The ability to take these decisions must be explained on the basis of the properties of the words in these examples and the order in which they are strung together. In the case of 1(b), for example, the verb slept must be positioned in the right place between my teacher and in the moon. This shows that speakers have knowledge of the structure of sentences, and it is this knowledge that the linguist seeks to describe in formulating an account of tactic component.
The notion that we are attempting to characterize precisely in the case of English is that of grammatical sentence of English. Intuitively, the grammatical sentences are the sentences that sound good to the native speaker; formally, they are the string of words that can be formed by the rules of syntactic component. The syntactic component, therefore, produces all and only the sentences that native speakers judge to grammatical. Note that the grammaticality of a string of words is quite independent of whether it makes sense or not. For example, 1(a) is odd to the extent that it asserts something that is not easy to imagine. The reason for this has nothing to do with English grammar since it is not a property of English that it is not usual to walk over to the moon and sleep for the night. On the other hand, 1(b) is ungrammatical, and this is
independent of whatever we might understand by this string of words. If
we substitute hotel for moon in sentence 1(a) it will be less odd but the same substitution will not improve 1(b).
So far we have established that the syntax of a language makes use of:
(i) meaningful elements or morphemes, and (ii) their arrangement. When
we create an expression such as light blue, we select the
eosehdeme from a possible set: light, dark, bright, etc., on the one hand,
and red, yellow, green, etc., on the other. Besides their inherent
meaning, such morphemes have additional meaning from their order in a sequence: blue light has a different meaning from light blue. One may,
therefore, think of language as a horizontal string with each position
filled from a vertical store.
A large number of sentences may be made from a few elements, as you can see by using a few possibilities such as the following:
the car drove slowly
this boy went well
that girl stopped frequently
their driver performed yesterday
From these few words you can make many sentences. Try that out and
be overwhelmed by the number of sentences you can come up with.
Because of the large number of morphemes and words in any language and because of the many possibilities for arranging them, speakers can convey an infinite variety of meanings.
The syntactic component of a language, then, is the set of rules by which words and groups of words may be strung together to form grammatical sentences of a language. The question of whether a string of words is a
grammatical sentence of a particular language is completely independent
of whether or not that string of words makes a true statement,
gically consistent, or makes much sense at all.
The existence of this distinction does not preclude the existence of a relationship between the syntactic structure of a linguistic expression and its semantic content. It is obvious from what we said above that
when the order of words in a sentence is changed the result may be a
non-synonymous sentence:
2 (a) Samuel killed Jane
(b) Jane killed Samuel
Thus, apart from their phonological make up, morphological units and
their syntactic structure, sentences have a meaning aspect: they convey
messages. A linguistic description which ignores meaning is obviously incomplete.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
1. What is the main function of the syntactic component of a language?
2. How is a word structured?
3. Why are native speakers able to differentiate acceptable
sentences from the non-acceptable ones in a language?
3.4 Semantics
Some decades ago, linguists considered semantics outside their field of
interest. Now, however, most linguists believe that an adequate theory
of grammar must deal with semantics, as well as with phonology,
morphology, and syntax. In spite of this, semantics still remains an area
of major controversies as well as active research among linguists and
philosophers. A linguistic description which ignores meaning is
obviously incomplete.
The study of meaning is the concern of the semantic level of analysis.
For practical purposes, meaning is described on the one hand in
dictionaries, on the other hand, in grammars. By classifying light as an
adjective as well as a noun, and by discussing differences of meaning in
sequences, such as that between blue light and light blue, grammars deal
with some of the meanings of language. The more specific meanings of
words, such as blue, light, boy, and so on, are given in dictionaries. (It
should be noted, however, that dictionaries do not give the meaning of
words; they simply indicate the ways in which words are used).
In their treatment of meaning, dictionaries describe relationships
between linguistic elements and the world outside language. The simplest relationships to treat are those of words referring to concrete
entities, for example, dog, cat, horse. But even these raise problems. We
do also run into expressions where dog means, ‘person’ as in: ‘You
can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. And if we hear someone refer to a car as a dog, the relationship has shifted to an inanimate object. As these
last two expressions suggest, dog has both a favourable and
aovno-urable connotation. If someone ‘puts on the dog’ the chances are great that that person is not ‘living a dog’s life’ . The meaning of even a
straightforward word like dog is accordingly by no means simple, nor is it simple to describe.
In order to deal with meaning, we distinguish between the referent of a
word or morpheme and its reference. Referent is its literal meaning, for
example, dog is the four-legged animal. Reference is the user’s concept.
For some, a dog is highly favoured, for others it is strongly disfavoured.
Such attitudes may be culturally determined; in the Middle East, the dog
is despised, and when used for a person the term is highly pejorative. In
Europe and North America the dog is generally valued highly, but the
normal term for a female dog, bitch, has an unfavourable connotation, like the word for (male) dog in the Middle East.
Numerous examples could be given in support of the need to distinguish between referents and references, such as snake. The referent of snake is unambiguous, but the reference of a snake handler differs greatly from
the reference for someone who has barely escaped being bitten by
oisonous snake or someone brought up in fear of snakes. The reference of words and morphemes thus varies from individual to individual as a result of their experiences in life, in reading, and in other associations.
In dealing with meaning we would like to determine how the meaning of an item is acquired and how it is stored and managed in the brain. We
acquire the meanings of common words in accordance with their
referent. A child comes to know what dog means by having the animal
pointed out when the word is uttered. Such a learning process applies to
the general vocabulary; it is supplemented by illustrations, pictures on TV, etc. In the learning process children are often given contrasts with
other animals, such as cats, and horses. In this way a child
eirchies; dogs, cats, and horses belong to the class of animals.
Moreover, parallel words are taught in this way. Dog is associated with
puppy, cat with kitten, horse with pony. Such associations furnish
patterns of synonymy. A child learns that certain words are equivalent to others in most respects. Synonyms are words of the same or nearly the same meaning. In much the same way, a child learns contrasting words.
Left is opposed to right, no to yes, good to bad. Antonyms, or words
opposite in meaning, are learned and associated with one another.
We apparently store words in such groups in some part of our brain. It
has long been assumed on the basis of psychological experimentation that synonyms are stored in parallel, as are antonyms. If in playing word
games we are asked to supply a list of words, they generally are from
the same area of meaning: aunt calls up uncle rather than words like
chair, pant or until. When asked to furnish ten or so words, we respond
with items like father, mother, sister, brother, and so on, rather than
lion, Christmas, school and the like. The items we draw on accord with
semantic relationships, whether that of synonyms, antonyms, or
hyponyms, that is inclusion under a term of more general meaning. The
determination of such relationships indicates that meanings are
associated by sets; in semantic study these are known as fields.
We have mentioned under the syntactic component that other word
relationships involve units that are smaller or larger than single words.
For example, many words take prefixes like pre-, un-, re-, and suffixes
like –able, -ness and –ize to augment their meanings; thus, energy does
not mean the same as energize. Also, some words can enter into relationships with other words to form compounds or idioms; for
example, sidewalk and kick the bucket. Some of the most common idioms involve the particles on, off, in, and out in construction with a
variety of verbs, particularly in slang expressions like tie one on, knock
it off, sit in, and freak out. Tie one on has a specialized meaning that
goes beyond the meanings of its components.
From the above discussion we thus see that any description of language
must include the semantic component that will specify the meanings and
relationships of words and sentences as well as the relationships within
and between sentences.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4
1. What is semantics?
2. How will word-order affect the meaning of an expression?
3. Distinguish between referent and reference
4. Explain the terms synonym and antonym
4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, we have tried to give an overview of the
ugce. Toe four levels of structure that we discussed are interrelated in spite of the fact that they are treated separately in language textbooks.
5.0 SUMMARY
You have learnt in this unit that:
• there are four levels of linguistic structure: lexicon, phonology, syntax and semantics;
• the lexicon is synonymous with vocabulary and provides all the information required in the use of a lexeme in the language;
• phonology describes the sounds and their permissible sequences in the language;
• syntax describes the ways words of the language are combined to form phrases and sentences;
• semantics deals with meanings (literary or figurative) of words, phrases and sentences; and
• these four levels must be treated in any good description of a language.
ANSWER TO SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
1. Four levels: Lexicon, phonology, syntax and semantics
2. A lexicon (or vocabulary) is that ‘component’ that contains all
the in formation about the structural properties of the
exmicsan a language.
3. The two kinds of information a lexicon should contain are syntactic information and morphological information. Syntactic
information includes the syntactic category of the lexical item, where the item occurs in sentences, etc. Morphological
information refers to permissible combination of prefixes, suffixes and roots (stems) which combine to make up a word.
ANSWER TO SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
1. Phonology is the scientific study of speech sounds and speech
patterns in a language.
2. Knowing a language implies knowing the sounds of the language,
how these sounds are organized to form words, and what the
different sound sequences mean.
3. Distinctive sounds in a language are responsible for the contrastive meanings of words.
6.0 TUTOR MARKED ASSIGNMENT
1. In what ways are all the levels of linguistic description discussed above related?
2. (a) What are the levels of grammatical description? (b) Describe the function of each level.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS
Clark, V. P., P. A. Eschlolz and A. F. Rosa (Eds.). (1981). Language:
Introductory Readings. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Culicover, P. W. (1982). Syntax. 2nd Edition. New York: Academic
Press.
Lehmann, W. P. (1983). Language: An Introduction. New York:
Random House.
Okolo, B. A. and P. A. Ezikeojiaku. (1999). An Introduction to
Language and Linguistics. Benin City: Mindex Publishing Co.
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