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'Levels' of Language
The Grammatical Level
A second linguistic level we can distinguish is that of grammar
(by which we mean, the form, positioning and grouping of the elements
that go to make up sentences). Most of English grammar is controlled by
the order in which words and phrases come in the sentence. This aspect
of grammar is usually called syntax, and English is pretty extreme in
its extensive use of syntax, compared with most of the world's languages.
And if you change the grammar you also change the meaning. So note that
sentence (1) below uses exactly the same words as sentence (2) but the
different syntax results in radically different meanings:
1. Girls like cats.
2. Cats like girls.
In (1) 'girls' is the subject and 'cats' the object, and in (2) 'cats'
is the subject and 'girls' the object.
Grammatical relations in languages can also be controlled by adding
grammar-indicating elements onto the words themselves. Most of the world's
languages use morphology more extensively than English to indicate grammatical
relations. This is often referred to informally as 'adding endings to
words', because, although some languages put such grammatical markers
at the beginning, or even in the middle, of words, most put them at the
end. This sort of grammatical structuring is usually called morphology.
Morphology accounts for the building blocks of meaning inside words.
Although English is a very syntactic language, it does have some morphology.
So, in the above examples, the adding of the '-s' ending indicates plural.
Hence the one-word item 'cats' is composed of two morphemes, CAT
+ PLURAL, and the first of these morphemes has 3 phonemes /kat/ and the
second morpheme has one, /s/.
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