COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE
Spoken human language is composed of sounds that do not in themselves
have meaning, but that can be combined with other sounds to create entities
that do have meaning. Thus p, e, and n do not in themselves have
any meaning, but the combination pen does have a meaning. Language also
is characterized by complex syntax whereby elements, usually words, are
combined into more complex constructions, called phrases, and these
constructions in turn play a major role in the structures of sentences.
A The Sounds of Language Because most languages are primarily spoken, an important part of the overall
understanding of language involves the study of the sounds of language.
Most sounds in the world's languages—and all sounds in some languages,
such as English—are produced by expelling air from the lungs and modifying the
vocal tract between the larynx and the lips. For instance, the sound p
requires complete closure of the lips, so that air coming from the lungs builds
up pressure in the mouth, giving rise to the characteristic popping sound when
the lip closure is released. For the sound s, air from the lungs passes
continuously through the mouth, but the tongue is raised sufficiently close to
the alveolar ridge (the section of the upper jaw containing the tooth
sockets) to cause friction as it partially blocks the air that passes. Sounds
also can be produced by means other than expelling air from the lungs, and some
languages use these sounds in regular speech. The sound used by English
speakers to express annoyance, often spelled tsk or tut, uses air
trapped in the space between the front of the tongue, the back of the tongue,
and the palate. Such sounds, called clicks, function as regular speech sounds
in the Khoisan languages of southwestern
Phonetics is the field of language study concerned with the physical
properties of sounds, and it has three subfields. Articulatory phonetics
explores how the human vocal apparatus produces sounds. Acoustic phonetics
studies the sound waves produced by the human vocal apparatus. Auditory
phonetics examines how speech sounds are perceived by the human ear. Phonology,
in contrast, is concerned not with the physical properties of sounds, but
rather with how they function in a particular language. The following example
illustrates the difference between phonetics and phonology. In the English
language, when the sound k (usually spelled c) occurs at the
beginning of a word, as in the word cut, it is pronounced with aspiration
(a puff of breath). However, when this sound occurs at the end of a word, as in
tuck, there is no aspiration. Phonetically, the aspirated k and
unaspirated k are different sounds, but in English these different
sounds never distinguish one word from another, and English speakers are
usually unaware of the phonetic difference until it is pointed out to them.
Thus English makes no phonological distinction between the aspirated and
unaspirated k. The Hindi language, on the other hand, uses this sound
difference to distinguish words such as kal (time), which has an
unaspirated k, and khal (skin), in which kh represents the
aspirated k. Therefore, in Hindi the distinction between the aspirated
and unaspirated k is both phonetic and phonological.
B Units of Meaning While many people, influenced by writing, tend to think of words as the basic
units of grammatical structure, linguists recognize a smaller unit, the
morpheme. The word cats, for instance, consists of two elements, or
morphemes: cat, the meaning of which can be roughly characterized as
“feline animal,” and -s, the meaning of which can be roughly
characterized as “more than one.”Antimicrobial, meaning “capable of
destroying microorganisms,” can be divided into the morphemes anti-
(against), microbe (microorganism), and -ial, a suffix that makes
the word an adjective. The study of these smallest grammatical units, and the
ways in which they combine into words, is called morphology.
C Word Order and
Sentence Structure Syntax is the study of how words combine to make sentences. The order of words
in sentences varies from language to language. English-language syntax, for
instance, generally follows a subject-verb-object order, as in the sentence
“The dog (subject) bit (verb) the man (object).” The sentence “The dog the man bit”
is not a correct construction in English, and the sentence “The man bit the
dog” has a very different meaning. In contrast, Japanese has a basic word order
of subject-object-verb, as in “watakushi-wa hon-o kau,” which literally
translates to “I book buy.” Hixkaryana, spoken by about 400 people on a
tributary of the
A general characteristic of language is that words are not directly
combined into sentences, but rather into intermediate units, called phrases,
which then are combined into sentences. The sentence “The shepherd found the
lost sheep” contains at least three phrases: “the shepherd,””found,” and “the
lost sheep.” This hierarchical structure that groups words into phrases, and
phrases into sentences, serves an important role in establishing relations within
sentences. For instance, the phrases “the shepherd” and “the lost sheep” behave
as units, so that when the sentence is rearranged to be in the passive voice,
these units stay intact: “The lost sheep was found by the shepherd.”
D Meaning in Language While the fields of language study mentioned above deal primarily with the
form of linguistic elements, semantics is the field of study that deals with
the meaning of these elements. A prominent part of semantics deals with the
meaning of individual morphemes. Semantics also involves studying the meaning
of the constructions that link morphemes to form phrases and sentences. For
instance, the sentences “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” contain
exactly the same morphemes, but they have different meanings. This is because
the morphemes enter into different constructions in each sentence, reflected in
the different word orders of the two sentences.