• INTRODUCTION –

PART II

• Linguistic description.
• Levels and units of analysis
ENGLISH GRAMMAR I

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 Linguistic analysis
• Linguistics has roughly two goals:
– the description of human language in general
– the description of individual languages
• Each of them can be looked upon as a
contribution to the study of language in general
• Both aim at gaining a better understanding of
the nature and complexity of language
 Levels of analysis
• This task can be simplified setting a number of levels of analysis
that enable linguists to focus their attention on a particular aspect
of what they are studying.
• Although there is no consensus of opinion, it has been customary to
set up at least four levels of study:

• the sound level

• the morphological level,
• the syntactic level, and
• the semantic level

• These levels would be the components of a grammatical

description of a language
 THE SOUND LEVEL
• It is concerned with the study of human speech sounds in general

Phonetics:
• It will study all speech sounds, not just those of a particular language
• it deals with questions such as: how are sounds produced?, how are they
transmitted?, how can they be classified?
Phonology:
• Each language makes a selection from the total range of human speech
sounds. The task of Phonology is the study of the selection made by a
particular language and the systematic functioning of the selected items in
that language

• Phonology, then, differs from Phonetics in being language-specific

 THE MORPHOLOGICAL LEVEL
• This level is concerned with the study of meaningful units
called morphemes
• Morphemes can be defined as the smallest meaningful units
of grammatical description, since they cannot be analysed any
further at this level
• Morphology studies the internal structure of words, that is,
the ways in which morphemes function as constituents of
word structure
 Types of morphemes
• An example:
“disagrees”
dis + agree + s

• “Agree” is a free morpheme, it can occur on its own

• The other two are bound morphemes, they must always co-occur with free
morphemes
• Bound morphemes are also called affixes
 Types of affixes
• Affixes added to the beginning of a word are
called prefixes:
dis– agrees

• Affixes added to the end of a word are suffixes:

disagree-s
 English words
English words, generally, consist of:
• one or more free morphemes:

store- book – bookstore

• combinations of free and bound morphemes:
washes, washing, washed, washable
bookstores
 THE SYNTACTIC LEVEL
• Combining morphemes we can get words
• Combining these words we can form larger
grammatical units called phrases
• These, in turn, combine to form sentences
• Sentences are considered the basic unit of
syntactic analysis.
 examples
• Play+ er + s = “players” [word]

• the + players = “the players” [phrase]

• The players + have arrived [sentence]

[phrase] +[phrase]
 Syntax
• At the syntactic level we study the set of rules
that specify which combinations of words or
of phrases are grammatical and which are not

• We call this study Syntax

 Syntactic rules- examples
• In English, the article precedes the noun:
the players, *players the
• The complement of a preposition is a noun phrase, an
–ing clause or a wh-clause:
He was afraid of the audience [noun phrase]
speaking in front of an audience [-ing clause]
what the audience could think [wh- clause]

BUT: *He was afraid of to speak [*infinitive clause]

 Structure and wordorder
• Syntax determines the sequences of words
that are acceptable in a language and the
relationships among the words.
• The network of relations between the
elements of a sentence is called its structure
• The order in which the words in a structure
appear is known as wordorder
 THE SEMANTIC LEVEL
• This level is concerned with the study of the
meaning that the different units convey.
 Semantics
• Traditionanally it would study meaning relations:
synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, …etc.
• Since the 1980s, theories of grammar have paid
much more attention to issues of lexical meaning
• Some lexical properties, like Aktionsart (lexical
aspect) have effects in the sentence:
He died slowly and painfully (process)
*He expired slowly and painfully (punctual)
 Semantics
• Semantics investigates the meaning of individual
units as well as that of whole sentences.
• Two sentences may contain the same words with
the same meanings and signal entirely different
messages:
Mary loves John / John loves Mary
I would like to marry you / I would like you to marry
 Word meaning and structure
• The meaning of the individual words can affect
the structure of sentences.
• In the following examples the use of story instead
of night implies a structural difference between
the two sentences:
Peter had dreamt the whole story [SVO]
Peter had dreamt the whole night [SVA]
 Wordorder and meaning
• The order in which the elements of a sentence appear can
affect its meaning.
• The messages conveyed by these sentences are not the same
due to wordorder, even though they have the same structure:

John killed Mary / Mary killed John [Both SVO]

The protesters attacked the police/ The police attacked the protester. [Both SVO]
The lion is less dangerous in the cage/ The lion in the cage is less dangerous [Both SVC]
 Structural ambiguity
• Syntactic structures also play a part in meaning, to such
extent that some sentences can have more than one
structure and, therefore, more than one meaning:
– Visiting relatives can be boring
– Freddy likes Susan more than Joan

• This type of sentences are called ambiguous sentences

and they are studied both at the syntactic and at the
semantic level.
21
 Are these sentences ambiguous? Why?
• Young men and women came first.
• Kissing ladies can be awful.
• Jane fed her dog biscuits.
• Kissing men were awful.
• She loves Oscar more than her sister
• The lamb was ready to eat.
• Robert took her picture
• Visiting relatives are boring.
• Marise is one of our French teachers.
• I want to thank my parents, John, and Lisa.
 Ambiguous?
• The girl was followed by a small poodle wearing jeans
• Next came a mother with a very small baby who was pushing a pram
• I always buy my newspapers at the shop next to the police station in which cards, magazines and
fancy goods are displayed.
• A sailor was dancing with a wooden leg.
• The old men and women left the room.
• Bill sold the invisible man's hat.
• I saw her duck.
• The chickens are too hot to eat.
• I said I would see you on Tuesday.
• Students hate annoying professors.
• Sue adores men who love women who don't smoke.
• They hit the man with a cane.
• Happily they left.