Language System - Mind Map

Language System

Semantics and Pragmatics: "Semantics, most generally, is about the meaning of sentences. Someone who studies semantics is interested in words and what real-world object or concept those words denote, or point to. Pragmatics is an even broader field that studies how the context of a sentence contributes to meaning" What i take from this quote is that everything depends on the context like an example with Run! the context of this word changes if you are shouting this to support and cheer for someone competing in a race or if you are shouting this to a group of people to take shelter and get away from rocks falling or something that is going to get them.

Syntax: "Syntax is the study of sentences and phrases, or how people put words into the right order so that they can communicate meaningfully. All languages have underlying rules of syntax, which, along with morphological rules, make up every language’s grammar." Just as an example of syntax we have the sentence "Pablo bought food for his cat" it makes a total sense, but if we change the order of the words to "the cat bought food for Pablo" it changes the meaning of the sentence and the message intended. That is what syntax studies.

Morphology: "Morphology is the study of words and other meaningful units of language like suffixes and prefixes." What is interesting about this is how a simple word like talk just by adding a prefix or a suffix to this word it changes the whole meaning of it. For example just by adding the suffix ed it changes the tense of this word to past "talked".

Grammar: "Because all language obeys a set of combinatory rules, we can communicate an infinite number of concepts. While every language has a different set of rules, all languages do obey rules." These rules are for every level of the language; word, phrase and sentence formation.

Lexicon: "Every language has its rules, which act as a framework for meaningful communication. This framework of rules are filled with words Every human language has a lexicon the sum total of all of the words in that language." By using grammatical rules to combine words into logical sentences, we can convey an infinite number of concepts using the appropriate words defined by the lexicon of every language

Phonetics and Phonology: "Phonetics is the study of individual speech sounds; phonology is the study of phonemes, which are the speech sounds of an individual language. These two heavily overlapping subfields cover all the sounds that humans can make, as well as which sounds make up different languages." And as we know every language has t's own rules about phonetics and phonology even if some words in dfferent languages have the same pronounciation.

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