Sounds words sentences
There are sounds. Certain ordered sounds make up words. Words make up phrases (Eg: noun phrases, verb phrases), which in-turn make up sentences.
Word morphology
Morpheme
Parts of a word which are not further divisible are called morphemes. Eg: In ‘sunism’, ‘sun’ is the root/ stem word, while ‘ism’ is an affix; both are morphemes.
Inflection
Inflectional morphemes alter the words gender, tense, number etc.: ’s’ in suns. ‘ism’ (as in ‘sunism’) is a derivational morpheme as it is used to derive a new separate word.
Word/ phrase roles/ categories
The general role a word/ phrase plays (as against its specific meaning) in a sentence is called a ‘part of speech’.
Depending on the number of words that can play a certain role, the word role/ class is closed or open. Eg: determiners in English is a closed class.
Content vs function words
Words are either content words which have lexical meaning, or are function words (aka grammatical / structure-class words) which serve grammatical purpose while carrying little or no independent meaning.
Parts of speech
-
noun (communicates objects/ subjects)
-
verb (communicates action), article (a, the .. )
-
adjective (qualifies the noun)
-
adverb
-
preposition and postposition (Aka adposition, clarifies a noun’s grammatical case: of, on, in etc..)
-
pronoun (a generic noun, like ’he’ ..)
-
conjunction (and, but, or) A subordinating conjunction, which joins a subordinate clause to the main clause (Eg: if).
-
particle: A function word which does not belong to other classes. interjection and filler words(’oh!’).
Other important parts of speech include wh-word (question word), Modal (could, would, must, can, might ..), list item markers.
Noun and verb sub-roles
A noun word can have further generic sub-roles based on what gender, number and grammatical case (especially possessive in English) it communicates.
A verb word can also have sub-roles based on whether it communicates grammatical/ subject’s gender, subject’s number, person (1st, 2nd or 3rd person), aspect, mood (imperative, wishfulness), time and completeness of the action (present/ past/ future) etc.. This is called ’tense’. If it calls attention to the completeness of an action it is called ‘perfect’.
Semantics and ambiguity
Word meaning ambiguity
Meanings of words themselves are ambiguous. Even their part-of-speech can be ambiguous - this ambiguity can lead to different parse trees; for example ‘dogs’ in: ‘The sailor dogs the barmaid’.
Sentence ambiguity
Meanings of sentences, even after the meanings of words have been fixed, is still ambiguous due to the presence of differing possible parse trees. Then, there is analogy, sarcasm etc..
Grammar
Language structure is described by a grammar. A grammar attempts to model how a sentence of the language is formed.
A grammar can be descriptive or generative, the distinction being that in the latter case the decision made by the grammar of sentence correctness/ membership is ultimate. Generative grammars include computer languages and Sanskrit.