A COMPILED COMPENDIUM IN ENGLISH 55

A Compendium
Presented to
PROF. CORAZON U. MORGIA
Faculty, College of Social Science and Humanities
Mindanao State University,
Marawi City

In Partial Fulfillment
Of the requirements for the course
ENGLISH 55 – Ff (DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS)
First Semester, (2019-2020)

By

AMPASO, Somaya M.

January, 2019

AN INTRODUCTION
TO LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE is a system of conventional
spoken, manual, or written symbols by
means of which human beings, as members
of a social group and participants in
its culture, express themselves. The
functions of language
include communication, the expression
of identity, play, imaginative expression,
and emotional release.
CHARACTERISTICS OF
LANGUAGE
Many definitions of language have been
proposed. Henry Sweet, an English phonetician
and language scholar, stated: “Language is the
expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds
combined into words. Words are combined into
sentences, this combination answering to that of
ideas into thoughts.” The American
linguists Bernard Bloch and George L. Trager
formulated the following definition: “A
language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols
by means of which a social group cooperates.”
Any succinct definition of language makes a
number of presuppositions and begs a number of
questions. The first, for example, puts excessive
weight on “thought,” and the second uses
“arbitrary” in a specialized, though legitimate,
way.
Every physiologically and mentally typical
person acquires in childhood the ability to make
use, as both sender and receiver, of a system of
communication that comprises a circumscribed
set of symbols (e.g., sounds, gestures, or written
or typed characters). In spoken language,
this symbol set consists of noises resulting from
movements of certain organs within the throat
and mouth. In signed languages, these symbols
may be hand or body movements, gestures, or
facial expressions. By means of these symbols,
people are able to impart information, to express
feelings and emotions, to influence the activities
of others, and to comport themselves with
varying degrees of friendliness or hostility
toward persons who make use of substantially
the same set of symbols.
Different systems of communication constitute
different languages; the degree of difference
needed to establish a different language cannot
be stated exactly. No two people speak exactly
alike; hence, one is able to recognize the voices
of friends over the telephone and to keep distinct
a number of unseen speakers in a radio
broadcast. Yet, clearly, no one would say that
they speak different languages. Generally,
systems of communication are recognized as
different languages if they cannot be understood
without specific learning by both parties, though
the precise limits of mutual intelligibility are
hard to draw and belong on a scale rather than
on either side of a definite dividing line.
Substantially different systems of
communication that may impede but do not
prevent mutual comprehension are
called dialects of a language. In order to describe
in detail the actual different language patterns of
individuals, the term idiolect, meaning the habits
of expression of a single person, has been
coined.
Typically, people acquire a single language
initially—their first language, or native tongue,
the language used by those with whom, or by
whom, they are brought up from
infancy. Subsequent “second” languages are
learned to different degrees of competence under
various conditions. Complete mastery of two
languages is designated as bilingualism; in many
cases—such as upbringing by parents using
different languages at home or being raised
within a multilingual community—children
grow up as bilinguals. In traditionally
monolingual cultures, the learning, to any extent,
of a second or other language is an activity
superimposed on the prior mastery of one’s first
language and is a different process intellectually.
Language, as described above, is species-
specific to human beings. Other members of the
animal kingdom have the ability to
communicate, through vocal noises or by other
means, but the most important single feature
characterizing human language (that is, every
individual language), against every
known mode of animal communication, is
its infinite productivity and creativity. Human
beings are unrestricted in what they can
communicate; no area of experience is accepted
as necessarily incommunicable, though it may
be necessary to adapt one’s language in order to
cope with new discoveries or new modes
of thought. Animal communication systems are
by contrast very tightly circumscribed in what
may be communicated. Indeed, displaced
reference, the ability to communicate about
things outside immediate temporal and spatial
contiguity, which is fundamental to speech, is
found elsewhere only in the so-called language
of bees. Bees are able, by carrying out various
conventionalized movements (referred to
as bee dances) in or near the hive, to indicate to
others the locations and strengths of food
sources. But food sources are the only known
theme of this communication system.
Surprisingly, however, this system, nearest to
human language in function, belongs to a
species remote from humanity in the animal
kingdom. On the other hand, the animal
performance superficially most like human
speech, the mimicry of parrots and of some other
birds that have been kept in the company of
humans, is wholly derivative and serves no
independent communicative function.
Humankind’s nearest relatives among the
primates, though possessing a vocal physiology
similar to that of humans, have not developed
anything like a spoken language. Attempts to
teach sign language to chimpanzees and other
apes through imitation have achieved limited
success, though the interpretation of the
significance of ape signing ability remains
controversial.
In most accounts, the primary purpose of
language is to facilitate communication, in the
sense of transmission of information from one
person to
another. However, sociolinguistic and psycholin
guistic studies have drawn attention to a range of
other functions for language. Among these is the
use of language to express a national or local
identity (a common source of conflict in
situations of multiethnicity around the world,
such as in Belgium, India, and Quebec). Also
important are the “ludic” (playful) function of
language—encountered in such phenomena
as puns, riddles, and crossword puzzles—and
the range of functions seen in imaginative or
symbolic contexts, such as poetry, drama, and
religious expression.
Language interacts with every aspect of human
life in society, and it can be understood only if it
is considered in relation to society. This article
attempts to survey language in this light and to
consider its various functions and the purposes it
can and has been made to serve. Because each
language is both a working system of
communication in the period and in
the community wherein it is used and also the
product of its history and the source of its future
development, any account of language must
consider it from both these points of view.
The science of language is known as linguistics.
It includes what are generally distinguished as
descriptive linguistics and historical linguistics.
Linguistics is now a highly technical subject; it
embraces, both descriptively and historically,
such major divisions
as phonetics, grammar (including syntax and mo
rphology), semantics, and pragmatics, dealing in
detail with these various aspects of language.
Phonetics
 PHONETICS is the scientific study of speech sounds. It is a fundamental
branch of linguistics.

PHONE is a speech sound; phones are represented with phonetic symbols

that bear some resemblance to a letter in an alphabet language in English.

Three Aspects of Phonetics:

1. Articulatory Phonetics describes how vowels and consonants are produced or articulated in
various parts of the mouth and throat.
2. Acoustic Phonetics a study of how speech sounds are transmitted: when sound travels through
the air from the speaker’s mouth to the hearer’s ear it does so in the form of vibrations in the air.
3. Auditory Phonetics a study of how speech sounds are perceived: looks at the way in which the
hearer’s brain decodes the sound waves back into the vowels and consonants originally intended
by the speaker.

INTERNATONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (IPA) is an evolving standard originally

developed by the International Phonetic Association in 1888 with the goal of transcribing the sounds of
all human languages. The IPA is not just an alphabet but also a set of principles for transcription, which
differ ways all according to the principles of IPA. The ARPAbet (Shoup, 1980) is another phonetic
alphabet, but one that is specifically designed for American English and which uses American Standard
Code for Information Interchange (ASCII).
Many of the IPA and ARPAbet symbols are equivalent to Roman letters used in the orthography of
English and many other languages. For example the ARPAbet phone [p] represents the consonant sound
at the beginning of platypus, puma, and pachyderm, the middle leopard, or the end of antelope. In
general, the mapping between the letters of English orthography and phones is relatively opaque; a single
letter can represent very different sounds in different contexts.

ARTICULATORY PHONETICS
The Vocal Organs

Sound is produced by rapid movement of air. Most sounds in human spoken languages are produced by
expelling air from lungs through the windpipe – trachea and then out the mouth or nose. As it passes
through the trachea, the air passes through the larynx, commonly known as the Adam’s apple or voice
box. The larynx contains two small folds of muscle, the vocal folds (often referred to non-technically as
the vocal cords) which can be moved together or apart. The space between these two folds is called the
glottis. If the folds are close together (but not tightly closed), they will vibrate as air passes through them;
if they are far apart, they won’t vibrate. Sounds made with the vocal folds together and vibrating are
called voiced; sounds made without this vocal cord vibration are called unvoiced or voice-less. Voiced
sounds include [b], [d], [g], [v], [z], and all the English vowels, among others. Unvoiced sounds include
[p], [t], [k], [f], [s], and others.
The area above the trachea is called the vocal tract, and consists of the oral tract and the nasal tract.
After the air leaves the trachea, it can exit the body through the mouth or the nose. Most sounds are made
by air passing through the mouth. Sounds made by air passing through the nose are called nasal sounds;
nasal sounds use both the oral and nasal tracts as resonating cavities it include m and n and ng.

Phones are divided into two main classes: consonants and vowels. Both kinds of sounds are formed by
motion of air through the mouth, throat, or nose. Consonants are made by restricting or blocking the
airflow in some way, and may be voiced or unvoiced. Vowels have less obstruction, are usually voiced,
and are generally louder and longer-lasting than consonants.

Place of Articulation
Understanding how to produce sounds of language can be a difficult endeavour.

Bilabia – are consonant sounds produced by using both lips together.

Read this word out loud and notice how you're using both lips to pronounce the letters in bold: bump.

Labiodental – dentals are also pretty straightforward; they are articulated by using both the lower lip
and the upper front teeth.
Examples of these sounds in English are pretty much in any word that contains the letters F and V.

Pronounce the word favor and notice the point of articulation.

Linguolabial – are articulated by using both the tongue and the upper lip.

There are very few known linguolabials in languages and I don't know any language which has any.
However, I can still show you how they can be produced. Let's try to pronounce the linguolabial
consonant [t̼ ]:

1. Do as if you're about to say the letter p. You'll notice that both your lips will be joined together.
2. Now, replace your lower lip with the tip of your tongue.
3. Do the p this way.

The result should be the linguolabial [t̼ ].

Dental – Some languages have dental consonants where only the tongue and the teeth are used.

English has two dental sounds: [θ] and [ð].

These consonants are found, respectively, in the words thing and this.

Alveolar – is situated near the alveolar ridge, which is the area lying between the upper front teeth
and the palate, as you can see in this picture:

Pronounce words such as tow and zap and you'll feel that the point of contact is at the area shown on
the picture.

Palatal – it is in the mouth where portions like the back of the tongue are starting to be used to
produce sounds.

The approximant [j], found in the word yet, is also a palatal. Notice that it is the back of the tongue
that comes into near contact with the palate when pronouncing the Y in that word.
Velar – there are a few velars in English, so it should be pretty straightforward to learn what their
point of articulation is.
With the Standard American English pronunciation, read out loud the word king, which has both the
velars [k] and [ŋ] as both the first and last consonant sounds, respectively.

Uvular – it is little deeper in the mouth, the uvula is found (the little thing that's dangling from the top
in the back of the mouth), which is used for uvular consonants.

Sadly, there are none in Standard American English, but imagine that the tongue has to reach an area a
little deeper than the ng in king.

Glottal – is even deeper than the pharynx and epiglottis in the throat. 

The glottis, as much as we might not realize it, is used for the h sound in English; [h].
Just pronounce the words happy and heat and notice how far down the throat these sounds come
from.

Manners of articulation
The main constriction degrees are:

Stop the active articulator touches the passive articulator and completely cuts off the airflow through the
mouth. English stops include: [p], [d], [k], [m].

Fricative the active articulator doesn't touch the passive articulator, but gets close enough that the airflow
through the opening becomes turbulent. English fricatives include [f], and [z].

Approximant the active articulator approaches the passive articulator, but doesn't even get close enough
for the airflow to become turbulent. English approximants include [j], [w], and [l].

Affricatives can be seen as a sequence of a stop and a fricative which have the same or similar places of
articulation. They are transcribed using the symbols for the stop and the fricative. If one wants to
emphasize the affricate as a "single" sound, a tie symbol can be used to join the stop and the fricative
(sometimes the fricative is written as a superscript).

NOTES:

A stop cuts off airflow through the mouth. Airflow through the nose does not matter -- you can have
both oral and nasal stops. Oral stops are often called plosives, including in the IPA chart. Nasal stops
are usually just call ed nasals.

Approximants that are apical or laminal are often called liquids (e.g., [l]). Approximants that
correspond to vowels are often called glides (e.g., [j] corresponds to [i], [w] to [u]).

English has the affricates [t] and [d]. The stop and the fricative halves of these affricates are at the
same place of articulation: the stop is in fact postalveolar rather than alveolar. We could be explicit
about this and underline the [t] and [d] (in IPA, a minus sign under a symbol is a diacritic meaning
"pronounced further back in the mouth"), but most phoneticians believe this difference in the place of
articulation is so predictable that it doesn't have to be marked.
 State of the glottis
For now, we can simply use the terms "voiced" and "voiceless" to answer the question of what the
vocal cords are doing:

In voiced sounds, the vocal cords are vibrating.

In voiceless sounds, the vocal cords are not vibrating.

Ultimately, we will see there are different ways of being voiced or voiceless. The vocal cords can do
a number of things. They can:

be held so wide apart that the air makes no sound passing through them. (This is nice when you have
to breathe 24 hours a day, but not as useful for speaking.)

be held closer together, so that the air passing through them becomes turbulent. This quality of sound
is called breathiness. It is what is happening in apsiration and in the sound [h].

be held together so that the air passing through them causes them to vibrate. This is called voicing.

be held together so tightly that no air can pass through at all, as in a glottal stop.

(By varying their tension and position, the vocal cords can also produce many other effects like breathy
voicing, creaky voicing, and falsetto.)

What the vocal cords are doing is independent of what the higher parts of the vocal tract are doing. For
any place of articulation and any degree of stricture, you can get two different sounds: voiced and
voiceless. For example, [t] and [d] are formed identically in the mouth; the difference is that the vocal
cords vibrate during a [d] but not during a [t]. (The obvious exception is the glottal place of articulation --
you can't vibrate your vocal cords while making a glottal stop.)

In each cell of the IPA chart, the symbol for the voiceless sound is shown to the left and that for the
voiced sound to the right. Some rows only have voiced symbols (e.g., nasals and approximants). You can
write the corresponding voiceless sound using the voiceless diacritic (a circle under the voiced symbol).

Nasality
The soft palate can be lowered, allowing air to flow out through the nose, or it can be raised to block nasal
airflow. As was the case with the vocal cords, what the soft palate is doing is independent the other
articulators. For almost any place of articulation, there are pairs of stops that differ only in whether the
soft palate is raised, as in the oral stop [d], or lowered, as in the nasal stop [n].

Laterality
When you form an [l], your tongue tip touches your alveolar ridge (or maybe your upper teeth) but it
doesn't create a stop because one or both sides of the tongue are lowered so that air can flow out along the
side. Sounds like this with airflow along the sides of the tongue are called lateral, all others are
called central (though we usually just assume that a sound is central unless we explicitly say it's lateral).
The side of the tongue can lower to different degrees. It can lower so little that the air passing through
becomes turbulent (giving a lateral fricative like [belted-l] or [l-ezh]) or it can lower enough for there to
be no turbulence (a lateral approximant). The [l] of English is a lateral approximant.

Phonetics: Vowels
This table shows English vowel sounds with IPA symbols (International Phonetic Alphabet) and standard
symbols (std). The words in parentheses represent the IPA transcription. Standard symbols are used in
most English dictionaries.

For each sound there is a word that demonstrates where the sound occurs (word initial, middle, or word
final) and how the sound occurs (what letter or letter combinations).

English Vowel Sounds

IPA std examples

 I ĭ it dish  
(It) (dI )

 
i ē she green machine
( i) (g in (m in)

sunny ski please

(s ni) (ski) (pliz)

ĕ red head said

( d) (h d) (s d)

    any    
( ni)

ă and plaid  
( nd) (pl d)

ŏ hot father  
(h t (f )

ô August thaw bought

( g st) ( ) b t)

    fall    
(f l)

put book should

(p t) (b k) ( d)

u ū room who through

 (rum) (hu) ( ru)

you shoe July

(ju) ( u) ( uli)

flew two blue

(flu) (tu) (blu)

ŭ up tough  
( p) (t f)

  sofa enemy incredible

(s f ) ( n mi) (Inkr d bl)

gallop focus  
(g l p) (f k s)

The  symbol is called a schwa.

Diphthongs

eI ā they gray aid

( eI) (g eI) (eId)

ate great freight

(eIt) (greIt) (freIt)

résumé    
(r zumei)

aI ī fine aisle sight

(faIn) (aIl) (saIt)

why bye lie

 (waI) (baI) (laI)

buy guide  
(baI) (gaId)

oi toy noise  
(t ) (n z)

ou cow house  
(k ) (h s)

ō snowing sew though

(sn wIŋ) (s ) ( )

hello toe soap

(h l ) (t ) (s p)

ju y unite humid few

(junaIt) (hjumId (fju)

ewe youth eulogy

(ju) (ju ) (jul gi)

Vowel sounds with "r" endings

  arm guard heart

( m) (g d) (h t)

  ore floor four

 ( ) (fl r) (f )

    more    
(m )

  near here cheers

(n ) (h ) ( s)

    pier    
(p )

  hair where mare

(h ) (w ) (m )

merry their  
(m I) ( )

  burn learn sir

(b n) (l n) (s )

October worm
( kt b ) (w m

Phonetics: Consonants
The words in parentheses represent the IPA transcription.

Note that the examples are in three columns. The first column provides an example of the sound when it
is word initial (at the beginning of the word). The second column provides an example of the sound when
it is word internal (in the middle of the word). The third column provides an example of the sound when it
is word final (at the end of the word). Note also that for each letter the examples show different spellings
that produce the same sound.
 

English Consonant Sounds

IPA initial internal final

p please purple help
(pliz) (p p l) (h lp)

  apple grape
( p l) (greIp)

b book noble web

(b k) (n b l) (w b)

  cabbage  
(k bI g)

f five fifty gulf

(faIv) (fIfti) (g lf)

  raffle off
(r f l) ( f)

phone hyphen nymph

(f n) (haIf n) (nImf)

  roughly tough
(r fli) (t f)

v vanilla seven five

(v nIl ) (s v n) (faIv)

thirty nothing path

( ti) (n Iŋ) (p )

 
 they father breathe
( eI) (f ) (bri )

t ten autumn hit

(t n) ( t m) (hIt)

  attain mitt
( teIn) (mIt)

  eighty freight
(eIti) (freIt)

    baked*
(beIkt)

    white
(weIt)

*Pronunciation of simple past –ed ending

d dish widow red

(dI ) (wId ) (r d)

  adding guide
( dIŋ) (g d)

s sir thesis books

(s ) ( is s) (b ks)

scissors massage miss

(sIz z) (m s ) (mIs)

center December ice

(s nt ) (dIs mb ) (is)
 psychology   six
(saIk l gi) (sIks)

    house
(h s)

z zero freezing ooze

(z ) (frizIŋ) (uz)

  fuzzy jazz
(f zi) ( z)

  miser dishes
(maIz ) (dI z)

xenophobe exit please

(z n f b) ( gzIt) (pliz)

  scissors  
(sIz z)

she mushroom radish

( i) (m rum) (r dI )

sure pressure  
( ) (pr )

schist fascist  
( Ist) (f Ist)

  tuition cache
(tuI n) (k )

genre seizure garage

( nr ) (si ) (g r )
   fissure  
(fI )

  vision  
(vI n)

  leisure  
(li )

cheers artichoke March

( s) ( tI k (m )

  picture watch
(pIk ) (w )

jump major  
( mp) (meI )

gentle rigid cage

( nt l) (rI Id) (keI )

  badger bridge
(b ) (brI )

k king baker pink

(kIŋ) (beIk ) (pIŋk)

  rocket black
(r k t (bl k)

cold October attic

(k ld) ( kt b ) ( tIk)

queen equal  
(kwin) (ikw l)
   orchid  
( kId)

  fix cake
(fIks) (keIk)

  broccoli  
(br k li)

g good August drag

(g d) ( g st) (dr g)

  foggy  
(f gi)

  exotic  
( gz tIk)

m May humid ma’am

(meI) (hjum d) (m m)

  summer autumn
(s m ) ( t m)

    lamb
(l m)

n no raining green
(n ) (raInIŋ) (grin)

pneumonia sunny sign

(n m nj ) (s ni) (s n)

knife unknown fine

(naIf) ( n n) (faIn)

 
ŋ   singer spring
(sIŋ ) (sprIŋ)

  pink  
(pIŋk)

w winter snowing  
(wInt ) (sn wIŋ)

what nowhere  
(w t) (n w )

one    
(w n)

j yellow mayor  
(j l ) (meI )

unite beautiful  
(junIt) (bjutIf l)

h hot mishap  
(h t) (mIsh p)

l look eleven cool

(l k) ( l v n) (k l)

llama hello fall

(l m ) (h l ) (f l)

 
 red orange or
(r d) ( n ) ( )

  merry purr
(m i) (p )

Prosodic Feature of Phonetics

Suprasegmental, also called Prosodic Feature. In phonetics, a speech feature such as stress, tone, or
word juncture that accompanies or is added over consonants and vowels; these features are not limited to
single sounds but often extend over syllables, words, or phrases. In Spanish the stress accent is often used
to distinguish between otherwise identical words: término means “term,” termíno means “I terminate,”
and terminó means “he terminated.” In Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinctive
suprasegmental: shih pronounced on a high, level note means “to lose”; on a slight rising note means
“ten”; on a falling note means “city, market”; and on a falling–rising note means “history.” English “beer
dripped” and “beard ripped” are distinguished by word juncture.
The above examples demonstrate functional suprasegmentals. Nonfunctional suprasegmentals that do not
change the meaning of words or phrases also exist; stress in French is an example. Suprasegmentals are
so called in contrast to consonants and vowels, which are treated as serially ordered segments of the
spoken utterance.
Phonology
PHONOLOGY  describes the way sounds function within a given language
and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units.
Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This
importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into
another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between
the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound.
[t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting
sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds
are classified as phonemes. Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is
concerned with the production, audition and perception of speech sounds
(called phones).

PHONEME , in  linguistics , smallest unit of  speech   distinguishing one word
(or word element) from another, as the element   p   in “tap,” which separates
that word from “tab,” “tag,” and “tan.” A  phoneme   may have more than
one variant, called an  allophone which functions as a single sound; for
example, the  p ’s of “pat,” “spat,” and “tap” differ slightly phonetically, but
that difference, determined by  context , has no significance in English. In
some languages, where the variant sounds of   p   can change meaning,
they are classified as separate phonemes— e.g.,   in  Thai   the
aspirated  p   (pronounced with an accompanying puff of air) and
unaspirated  p   are distinguished one from the other.

Phonemes   are based on spoken language and may be recorded with special
symbols, such as those of the  International Phonetic Alphabet . In
transcription, linguists conventionally place symbols for phonemes
between slash marks: /p/. The term   phoneme   is usually restricted to
vowels and consonants, but some linguists extend its application to cover
phonologically relevant differences of pitch,  stress , and rhythm. Nowadays
the phoneme often has a less central place in phonological theory than
it used to have, especially in American linguistics. Many linguists
regard the phoneme as a set of simultaneous distinctive features rather
than as an unanalyzable unit.

ALLOPHONES one of the phonetically distinct variants of

a  phoneme  (q.v.). The occurrence of one allophone rather than another is
usually determined by its position in the word (initial, final, medial, etc.) or
by its phonetic  environment. Speakers of a  language  often have difficulty in
 hearing the phonetic differences between allophones of the same   phoneme,
because these differences do not serve to distinguish one word from
another. In English the  t  sounds in the words “hit,” “tip,” and “little” are
allophones; phonemically they are considered to be the
same  sound  although they are different phonetically in terms of   aspiration,
voicing, and point of articulation. In Japanese and some   dialects  of Chinese,
the sounds  f  and  h  are allophones.

Classification of Phonemes
Minimal Pairs
Minimal pairs are words with different meanings that have the same sounds except for one. These
contrasting sounds can either be consonants or vowels. The words pin and bin are minimal pairs
because they are exactly the same except for the first sound. The words read and rude are also exactly
the same except for the vowel sound. The examples from above, time and dime, are also minimal pairs.
In effect, words with one contrastive sound are minimal pairs. Another feature of minimal pairs is
overlapping distribution. Sounds that occur in phonetic environments that are identical are said to be in
overlapping distribution. The sounds of [ɪn] from pin and bin are in overlapping distribution because
they occur in both words. The same is true for three and through. The sounds of [θr] is in overlapping
distribution because they occur in both words as well.

Free Variation
Some words in English are pronounced differently by different speakers. This is most noticeable among
American English speakers and British English speakers, as well as dialectal differences. This is
evidenced in the ways neither, for example, can be pronounced. American English pronunciation tends
to be [niðər], while British English pronunciation is [najðər].

Phones and Allophones

Phonemes are not physical sounds. They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units
of a language. Phones are considered to be any single speech sound of which phonemes are made.
Phonemes are a family of phones regarded as a single sound and represented by the same symbol. The
different phones that are the realization of a phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme. The use of
allophones is not random, but rule-governed. No one is taught these rules as they are learned
subconsciously when the native language is acquired. To distinguish between a phoneme and its
allophones, I will use slashes // to enclose phonemes and brackets [] to enclose allophones or phones.
For example, [i] and [ĩ] are allophones of the phoneme /i/; [ɪ] and [ɪ ]̃ are allophones of the phoneme /ɪ/.

Complementary Distribution
If two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, they are said to be in complementary distribution.
These sounds cannot occur in minimal pairs and they cannot change the meaning of otherwise identical
words. If you interchange the sounds, you will only change the pronunciation of the words, not the
meaning. Native speakers of the language regard the two allophones as variations of the same sound.
To hear this, start to say the word cool (your lips should be pursed in anticipation of /u/ sound), but
then say kill instead (with your lips still pursed.) Your pronunciation of kill should sound strange
because cool and kill are pronounced with different allophones of the phoneme /k/.
Nasalized vowels are allophones of the same phoneme in English. Take, for example, the sounds in bad
and ban. The phoneme is /æ/, however the allophones are [æ] and [æ̃ ]. Yet in French, nasalized vowels
are not allophones of the same phonemes. They are separate phonemes. The words beau [bo] and bon
[bõ] are not in complementary distribution because they are minimal pairs and have contrasting sounds.
Changing the sounds changes the meaning of the words. This is just one example of differences
between languages.

The Distinctive Features Phonemes

Sonorant

 A normally voiced sound characterized by relatively free air flow through the vocal tract; sonorants
include vowels, semivowels, liquids, and nasals. The opposite of sonorants are obstruents, which constrict
the flow of air more severely.

Consonantal

Sounds characterized by a partial or complete obstruction of the flow of air through the speech organs.
[+ consonantal]: stops, affricates, fricatives (excluding [h]), nasals, liquids
[- consonantal]: vowels, semivowels, [h]

Syllabic

Each syllable in a word requires a syllabic sound; put another way, every word has just as many syllabics
as there are syllables. Vowels are always syllabic; nasals and liquids may or may not be (hence they are
marked that way on the chart); and the other consonants are never syllabic.

Continuant

The flow of air in continuants is not blocked at any point in the articulation of the sound. They include all
the sounds other than stops and affricates.

Nasal

When the velum is relaxed the air flows through nasal cavity to produce nasal sounds. English has three
[+ nasal] consonants.

Labial

 Labial sounds are articulated by an obstruction at the lips. (This does not include rounding, which also
takes place at the lips.)
[+ labial]: p, b, f, v, m

Alveolar

Sounds formed by touching or nearly touching the tip of the tongue to the hard ridge immediately behind
the upper front teeth.
[+ alveolar]: t, d, s, z, n, l, r
Palatal

Sounds produced by moving the front part of the tongue to or near the hard palate at the roof of the
mouth.
[+ palatal]: [cv], [jv], [sv], [zv], y (where the “v” indicates a hacek above the first letter)

Velar

Sounds produced by moving the back of the tongue to or near the velum (soft palate).
[+ velar]: k, g, [eng]

Anterior

Anterior sounds are produced by an obstruction in the front part of the oral cavity, from the alveolar ridge
forward. They include labials, interdentals, and alveolars (but not alveolopalatals).

Coronal

Sounds made by raising the front (or blade) of the tongue from a neutral position.
[+ coronal]: interdentals, alveolars, alveolopalatals

Sibilant as the name suggests, sibilant sounds produce a “hissing” effect by forcing the air through a
narrow opening formed using the middle of the tongue.
[+ sibilant]: [cv, jv, s, z, sv, zv] (where “v” indicates a hacek)

Voiced sounds are produced with vibrating vocal cords. They include all sounds that are [+ sonorant], and
with the exception of [h] all obstruents come in voiced/voiceless pairs.

Back a sound produced in vowels and semivowels with the tongue drawn back or retracted from a neutral
position.
[+ back]: back vowels and [w]

Rounded sounds produced with a rounding of the lips to give a narrow opening. Rounded sounds include
open o, close o, tense u, lax u, and [w].

High the body of the tongue is raised in producing high sounds. This feature applies only to four vowels
in English: tense and lax u and i. Note that vowels that are neither high nor low (i.e., [- high], [- low]) are
mid vowels, which are otherwise not categorized here.

Low sounds are produced with the jaw slightly open to allow the body of the tongue to draw lower.
American English has three low vowels. Note that vowels that are neither high nor low (i.e., [- high], [-
low]) are mid vowels, which are otherwise not categorized here.

Tense sounds are produced with a contraction of muscles at the base of the tongue. In American English
the feature applies only to vowels that are not low (that is, [- low]). There are four [+ tense] vowels [i, e,
u, o]
 7 TYPES OF PHONOLOGICAL RULES

Phonological rules can be classified by the kind of process they involve. Here are the seven major
types of phonological rules/processes with examples.

1. Assimilation – phonological process in which a sound changes to resemble a nearby sound and
can occur both forward and backward.

Ex. The prefix in- where sometimes it appears as in– and others as im-. In front of bilabial words, in–
becomes im-. This also happens across word boundaries, like in between pronounced with an m.

2. Dissimilation – phonological process in which two close sounds changes to become less alike.

Ex. Manner dissimilation where a stop becomes a fricative when followed by another stop. The word
sixth is pronounced sikst, /sθ/ becomes /st/.

3. Insertion – phonological process in which a sound is added to a word.

Ex. Voiceless stop insertion where between a nasal consonant and a voiceless fricative, a voiceless stop
with the same place of articulation as the nasal consonant is inserted. In English, many say hampster
instead of hamster, a /p/ is added.

4. Deletion – phonological process in which speech sounds disappear from words.

Ex. English is a fast/common speech language, so vowels can be deleted to make the word one syllable,
and easier to pronounce in a fast manner. Police becomes plice, and friendship is said as frienship.

5. Metathesis – phonological process in which sounds switch places in the phonemic structure of a
word.

Ex. To make words easier to pronounce and understand, letters are switched. Two historical examples
include Old English (brid and aks) becoming Modern English (bird and ask).

Metathesis involves either consonants switching position with an adjacent consonant in a cluster or

transposition with a vowel. There are three main patterns.

Switching

C1C2 → C2C1    

This type of metathesis simply involves the reversal of the consonants within two-consonant clusters that
typically appear in syllable-final position. For example, the word mask /mɑsk/ may be realized as
/mɑks/. Here, the sound segments of the cluster /-sk/ at the end of the syllable are reversed. Further
examples include:

 
 best /bɛst/ → /bɛts/

tops /tɒps/ → /tɒsp/

desk /dɛsk/ → /dɛks/

This switching of consonants in clusters does not generally occur in syllable-initial position because
reversing syllable-initial clusters (e.g. /bl-/, /sp-/, /kw-/) results in sound sequences that are not allowable
under the phonological rules of English. For example, if the cluster /fr-/ is reversed this yields the
cluster /rf-/. According to the rules of English phonology, an approximant /r/ cannot be immediately
followed by a fricative /f/. This sequence is, therefore, ungrammatical.

C1VC2 → C2VC1

Switching can also occur in CVC sequences. Here, the first and last consonants are reversed. An example
of this type of reordering is when the word tiger /taɪgə/ is realized as /gaɪtə/. Here the initial
C1VC2 sequence /taɪg/ is reversed to produce the C2VC1 sequence /gaɪt/. Further examples include the
following.

cup /kʌp/ → /pʌk/

pack /pæk/ → /kæp/

football /fʊtbɔl/ → /tʊfbɔl/

remember /rəmɛmbə/ → /mərɛmbə/

 Transposition

C1C2V → C1VC2

This final type of metathesis involves the participation of a two-member consonant cluster but this time,
instead of the consonants simply switching places, they are transposed to either side of a
vowel. In sum, it involves a re-sequencing of a two-consonant cluster and vowel combination (CCV) to
produce a CVC syllable. With this process the order of the consonants typically remains unchanged, i.e.
the first consonant in the cluster is the first consonant in the CVC syllable, and the second consonant in
the cluster is the second consonant in the CVC syllable. An example is the word fly /flaɪ/ being realized as
/faɪl/, where the second consonant of the initial cluster is placed after the nuclear vowel. Further examples
include the following.

star /stɑ/ → /sɑt/

 blue /blu/ → /bul/

play /pleɪ/ → /peɪl/

6. Strengthening (fortition) – phonological process in which a sound is made stronger.

Ex. Aspiration is where voiceless stops become aspirated when they occur at the beginning of a stressed
syllable. Top is said with as h.

7. Weakening (lenition) – phonological process in which a sound becomes weaker.

Ex. The definition of flapping is before a stressed vowel and before and unstressed vowel where the
sound is pronounced with articulation resembling a flap. The word kitty is an example where the alveolar
stop is realized as /r/.

Prosodic Phonology 

Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic - even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard
resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic constituents
(syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and provides
evidence for each one from numerous languages.

It includes a chapter in which experimental psycholinguistic data support the proposed hierarchy.A
perceptual study provides evidence that prosodic constituent structure - not syntactic constituent structure
- predicts whether listeners are able to disambiguate different types of ambiguous sentences. A chapter on
the phonology of poetic meter examines portions of Dante's Divine Comedy.It is demonstrated that the
constituents proposed for spoken language also make interesting predictions about literary metrical
patterns.

It is an important reference not only for phonologists, but for all linguists interested in the issue of
interfaces among the components of grammar. It is also a basic resource for psycholinguists and cognitive
scientists working on linguistic perception and language acquisition.

Phonological Awareness
Most of us remember doing the Hokey Pokey and clapping out the syllables to “that’s what it’s all about.”
It seems like just a fun game, but the Hokey Pokey is also a tool that builds phonological awareness—a
key skill that lays a foundation for success with reading.
Phonological awareness lets kids recognize and work with the sounds of spoken language. In
preschoolers, it means being able to pick out rhyming words and count the number of syllables in a name.
It also involves noticing alliteration (how sounds repeat themselves). For example, “Susie sold six salami
sandwiches.” (Preschools usually include this type of language play, songs, rhymes, and stories in their
daily activities.) 

Phonological awareness moves from noticing to doing. After kids recognize rhyming words, they start to
come up with rhymes on their own. Once they can identify the number of syllables in a word, they begin
to break words apart into syllables or single sounds by listening rather than clapping.

Phonological awareness is made up of a group of skills. The most sophisticated—and latest to develop—
is called phonemic awareness. This skill lets kids tune in to phonemes (the individual sounds in a word).

Phonemic awareness includes the ability to separate a word into the sounds that make it up and blend
single sounds into words. It also involves the ability to add, subtract, or substitute new sounds in words.

Phonological processes
Children below the age of about 4;06 years may not have sufficient ability to fully co-ordinate the
movement of their vocal apparatus. As a consequence, certain sounds, sound combinations or transitions
from one sound to another may be currently too difficult. The child may, therefore, simplify the
production of complex words. However, in the typically developing child, these simplifications are not
random but fairly predictable.

Many so-called phonological simplifying processes have been identified. In fact, there are far too many
to cover adequately in this article. However, I will provide some selected examples that will serve to
illustrate how phonological processes operate. We will consider two broad categories: (1) structural
simplifications, and (2) systemic simplifications.

Structural simplifications involve some alteration to the structure of a particular word. We will consider
three:

Reduplication occurs whenever the initial CV syllable in a multisyllabic word is repeated.

Consider the word bottle said as bobo.

In this example, the first syllable is reduplicated. This is a fairly simple structural process that can be
summarized as:

syllable1 syllable2 → syllable1 syllable1

Other examples include biscuit being said as bibi, and water being said as wawa.

Deletion a simple way to alter the structure of a word is to omit particular speech segments. There are
two main speech segments that are typically deleted: (1) consonants, and (2) weak syllables.

 Consonant deletion

Consonant deletion occurs whenever a consonant in syllable-initial or syllable-final position is omitted.

Children may delete sounds at the beginning of words (initial consonant deletion),
e.g. cat becomes at, boat becomes oat or at the ends of words (final consonant deletion),
e.g. lid becomes li, cup becomes cu.

Consonant deletion is a typical phonological process for children between the ages of 2;00-3;06 years.

 Weak syllable deletion

Weak syllable deletion occurs whenever the unstressed or weak syllable of a multi-syllabic word is
omitted.

In this process whole syllables are deleted. These are typically unstressed syllables (e.g. the ‘ba’
in banana; the ‘to’ in octopus). So, for example, banana may become nana; octopus may become ocpus.

This is a typical process In children between the ages of 2;00-4;00 years.

Metathesis occurs when two consonants within a syllable are placed in a different order.

In sum, there is a reordering of the sequence of consonants (C) and vowels (V) within a syllable. For
example, in a CVC sequence the first and last consonants may be reversed,
e.g. cup becomes puc; dog becomes god.

Cluster reduction occurs when one or more consonants in a cluster is omitted.

We know that some words in English are structured with clusters of more than one consonant in a
sequence, e.g. plan (CCVC), mast (CVCC).

These clusters may be deleted completely, e.g. plan (CCVC) becomes an (VC); mast (CVCC)

becomes ma (CV).

Alternatively the cluster may be partially reduced by only articulating one of the consonants in the cluster,
e.g. plan (CCVC) may become pan (CVC) or lan (CVC); mast (CVCC) may become mas (CVC)
or mat (CVC).

Cluster reduction is often observed in children between 2;00-3;06 years of age.

Phonological Processes Categories:

Substitutions

Again, there are many different types of substitutions that can be made in typically developing speech.
We will look at just three of these to get a flavor of how these phonological processes operate.

Fronting

Fronting occurs when any consonant that is made posterior to the alveolar ridge is substituted by another
consonant that is made at or in front of the alveolar ridge.
For example, goat may be said as doat. Here the back sound ‘g’ (usually made with the back of the
tongue lifting towards the back of the mouth) is substituted with the front sound ‘d’ (made towards the
front of the mouth, with the tongue tip lifting towards the gum ridge just behind the upper incisors). Other
examples include cod being said as tod, and gun being said as dun.

Fronting is often widespread in children from the age of 2;00 years up to as old as 4;06 years.

Backing

Backing occurs whenever a non-velar or non-glottal consonant (i.e. a bilabial, labio-dental, dental,
alveolar, post-alveolar or palatal consonant) is substituted by a velar /k ɡ ŋ/ or glottal /h ʔ/consonant.

For example, bun may be said as gun. Here the front sound ‘b’ (usually made with the two lips coming
together) is substituted with the back sound ‘g’ (made with the back of the tongue lifting towards the back
of the mouth). Other examples include door being said as goor, and tar being said as car.

Backing is frequently observed as a typical process in children from 2;00-3;00 years of age.

Stopping

Stopping occurs when continuant consonants (nasals, fricatives, affricates and approximants) are
substituted with a stop consonant /p b t d k g ʔ/.

For example, consider the word sock. The initial ‘s’ sound is sustainable, i.e. you are able to prolong this
sound when you say it. Try it now by taking a deep breath and see how long you can say the single sound
‘ssss…’ It is evident that you can hold this sound for several seconds. But now try and sustain the sound
‘t’ (as in the words tip and hot). You’ll see that this sound cannot be sustained – you say the sound and
then it is over in a moment. This is an example of a plosive sound (see Consonants).

Now, suppose the word sock is said as tock. The sustainability of the initial ‘s’ has been stopped by
substituting it with the unsustainable sound ‘t’. This is, therefore, known as stopping. Other examples
include van said as ban, and ship said as dip.

Depending on which sustainable speech sound is stopped, this process appears in the speech of typically
developing children from 2;00-4;06 years of age.

Assimilations

Assimilation occurs when one speech segment is transformed into another owing to the influence of a
neighbouring segment.

A relatively common assimilation in children up to about the age of 3;00 years is word-final de-voicing.

Word-final de-voicing

To understand this process we need to be clear about the distinction between a voiced consonant and
a voiceless consonant. Simply, a voiced consonant is one which is made with the vocal folds (vocal cords)
vibrating (e.g. ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘g’, ‘z’, ‘v’) and a voiceless consonant without vibration (e.g. ‘p’, ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘f’, ‘s’).
It is relatively easy to determine which is which by simply placing your fingers on your voice box
(larynx) whilst you say the sound. If the sound is voiced you will feel the vibrations caused by the moving
vocal folds in your fingers. Of course, if it is voiceless you will not feel any vibrations.

Now, children between the ages of 2;00-3;00 years of age seem to find the production of voiceless
consonants simpler than the production of voiced consonants when they occur at the ends of words. So,
the word bed may be said as bet. Here the word-final voiced consonant ‘d’ is assimilated into its voiceless
counterpart ‘t’. Other examples include bag being said as bak, and lab being said as lap.

Morpholog
y
 Morphology is the study of words. Morphemes are the minimal units of
words that have a meaning and cannot be subdivided further. There are
two main types: free and bound. Free morphemes can occur alone and bound
morphemes must occur with another morpheme. An example of a free
morpheme is "bad", and an example of a bound morpheme is "ly." It is bound
because although it has meaning, it cannot stand alone. It must be attached to
another morpheme to produce a word.

Morpheme is the smallest syntactical and meaningful linguistic unit that

contains a word, or an element of the word such as the use of –s whereas
this unit is not divisible further into smaller syntactical parts.

Types of Morphemes
Free Morpheme
The free morpheme is just a simple word that has a single morpheme; thus, it is free and can occur
independently. For instance, in “David wishes to go there,” “go” is a free morpheme.

Bound Morpheme
By contrast to a free morpheme, a bound morpheme is used with a free morpheme to construct a complete
word, as it cannot stand independently. For example, in “The farmer wants to kill duckling,” the bound
morphemes “-er,” “s,” and “ling” cannot stand on their own. They need free morphemes of “farm,”
“want” and “duck” to give meanings.

Types of Bound Morphemes

Inflectional Morphology

Bound morphemes can do one of two different jobs. Inflectional morphology conveys grammatical
information, such as number, tense, agreement or case. English has relatively few inflectional
morphemes, but many other languages have much richer systems

Inflectional morphemes are morphemes that add grammatical information to a word. When a word is
inflected, it still retains its core meaning, and its category stays the same. We’ve actually already talked
about several different inflectional morphemes:

The number on a noun is inflectional morphology.  For most English nouns the inflectional morpheme
for the plural is an –s or –es (e.g., books, cars, dishes) that gets added to the singular form of the noun,
but there are also a few words with irregular plural morphemes. Some languages also have a special
morpheme for the dual number, to indicate exactly two of something. Here’s an example from Manam,
one of the many languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. You can see that there’s a morpheme on the
noun woman that indicates dual, for exactly two women, and a different morpheme for plural, that is,
more than two women.
 Manam (Papua New Guinea)

 /áine ŋara/ that woman singular

  /áine ŋaradiaru/ those two women dual

  /áine ŋaradi/ those women plural

The tense on a verb is also inflectional morphology. For many English verbs, the past tense is spelled
with an –ed, (walked, cooked, climbed) but there are also many English verbs where the tense inflection is
indicated with a change in the vowel of the verb (sang, wrote, ate).  English does not have a bound
morpheme that indicates future tense, but many languages do.

Another kind of inflectional morphology is agreement on verbs.  If you’ve learned French or Spanish or
Italian, you know that the suffix at the end of a verb changes depending on who the subject of the verb is.
That’s agreement inflection.  Here are some examples from French. You can see that there’s a different
morpheme on the end of each verb depending on who’s doing the singing.

French

1st je chante I sing

2d tu chantes you sing

3d elle chante she sings

 1st nous chantons we sing

2d vous chantez you (pl.) sing

3d elles chantent they sing

And in some languages, the morphology on a noun changes depending on the noun’s role in a sentence;
this is called case inflection.  Take a look at these two sentences in German: The first one, Der Junge
sieht Sofia, means that, “The boy sees Sofia”.  Look at the form of the phrase, the boy, “der Junge”.
Now, look at this other sentence, Sofia sieht den Jungen, which means that “Sofia sees the boy”. In the
first sentence, the boy is doing the seeing, but in the second, the boy is getting seen, and the word for
boy, Junge has a different morpheme on it to indicate its different role in the sentence.  That’s an example
of case morphology, which is another kind of inflection.

German

Der Junge sieht Sofia. The boy sees Sofia.

Sofia sieht den Jungen Sofia sees the boy.

Derivational morphology

The other job that morphemes do is derivation, the process that creates new words. In English, one of the
most common ways to derive a new word is by adding a derivational affix to a base. The newly-derived
word can then serve as a base for another affix.
The other big job that morphemes have is a derivation.  The derivation is the process of creating a new
word. The new, derived word is related to the original word, but it has some new component of meaning
to it, and often it belongs to a new category.

One of the most common ways that English derives new words is by affixing a derivational morpheme to
a base.  For example, if we start with a verb that describes an action, like teach and we add the
morpheme –er, we derive a morphologically complex noun, teacher, that refers to the person who does
the action of teaching. That same -er morpheme does the same job in singer, dancer, baker, and writer.

Verb Suffix Noun

teach -er teacher

sing -er singer

dance -er dancer

bake -er baker

write -er writer

If we start with an adjective like happy and add the suffix –ness, we derive the noun that refers to the state
of being that adjective, happiness.

Verb Suffix Noun

teach -er teacher

sing -er singer

dance -er dancer

bake -er baker

write -er writer

Adding the suffix –ful to a noun derives an adjective, like hopeful.

Noun Suffix Adjective

hope -ful hopeful

joy -ful joyful

care -ful careful

dread -ful dreadful

Adding the suffix–ize to an adjective like final derives a verb like finalize.

Adjective Suffix Verb

final -ize finalize

modern -ize modernize

social -ize socialize

public -ize publicize

Notice that each of the morphologically complex derived words is related in meaning to the base, but it
has a new meaning of its own. English also derives new words by prefixing, and while adding a
derivational prefix does lead to a new word with a new meaning, it often doesn’t lead to a category
change.

Prefix Verb Verb

re- write rewrite

re- read reread

re- examine reexamine

re- assess reassess

Each instance of derivation creates a new word, and that new word could then serve as the base for
another instance of derivation, so it’s possible to have words that are quite complex morphologically.

For example, say you have a machine that you use to compute things; you might call it
a computer (compute + -er).Then if people start using that machine to perform a task, you could say that
they’re going to computerize (computer + -ize) that task.  Perhaps the computerization (computerize + -
ation) of that task makes it much more efficient. You can see how many words have many steps in their
derivations.

Morphological Process

Word Formation Rule is a rule of grammar by which morphologically complex words are

formed out of (free and/or bound) morphemes. Word formation rules are necessary in theories which
assume that the lexicon only contains a set of underived words, and that complex words are derived from
these listed forms.

Compounding words are formed when two or more lexemes combine into a single new word. It may be
written as one word or as two words joined with a hyphen..

Examples:
Notebook
Blueberry
Workroom
Breastfeed
Stir-fry

Clipping is the word formation process in which a word is reduced or shortened without changing the
meaning of the word. Clipping differs from back-formation in that the new word retains the meaning of
the original word.

Examples:
laboratory – lab
mathematics – math
memorandum – memo
photograph – photo
public house – pub
raccoon – coon
 reputation – rep

Blending is the word formation process in which parts of two or more words combine to create a new
word whose meaning is often a combination of the original words.

Examples:
advertisement + entertainment →advertainment
biographical + picture → biopic
breakfast + lunch → brunch
chuckle + snort → chortle
cybernetic + organism → cyborg
guess + estimate → guesstimate
hazardous + material → hazmat
motor + hotel → motel
prim + sissy → prissy
simultaneous + broadcast → simulcast

Back-formation is the word formation process in which an actual or supposed derivational affix detaches
from the base form of a word to create a new word.
Examples:
babysitter – babysit
donation – donate
gambler – gamble
hazy – haze
moonlighter – moonlight
obsessive – obsess
procession – process
resurrection – resurrect
sassy – sass
television – televise

Conversion is the word formation process in which a word of one grammatical form becomes a word of
another grammatical form without any changes to spelling or pronunciation.

Examples:
Noun – Verb

access – to access
bottle – to bottle
can – to can
closet – to closet
email – to email
eye – to eye
fiddle – to fiddle
fool – to fool
Google – to google
host – to host

Verb – Noun

to alert – alert
 to attack – attack
to call – call
to clone – clone
to command – command
to cover – cover
to cry – cry
to experience – experience
to fear – fear
to feel – feel
to hope – hope

Abbreviation is the word formation process in which a word or phrase is shortened. Initialisms are a type
of abbreviation formed by the initial letters of a word or phrase. Although abbreviation is largely a
convention of written language, sometimes abbreviations carry over into spoken language.

Examples:
Written Abbreviations
Apr. – April
cm – centimeter(s)
d. – died, died in
dept. – department
Dr. – doctor
Jr. – Junior
Mr. – Mister
oz – ounce(s)
Sun. – Sunday
yd – yard(s)

Spoken-Written Abbreviations
A.M. – ante meridiem [in the morning]
B.C.E. – Before Common Era
GOP – Grand Old Party (Republican Party)
HIV – Human Immunodeficiency Virus
i.e. – id est [that is]
JFK – John Fitzgerald Kennedy
OJ – orange juice
PMS – premenstrual syndrome

Acronyms are words formed by the word formation process in which an initialism is pronounced as a
word.

Examples:
ASAP – as soon as possible
AWOL – absent without leave
laser – light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASDAQ – National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations
PIN – personal identification number
radar – radio detection and ranging
scuba – self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
TESOL – Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
 WASP – White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

Eponyms are a word form by the word formation process in which a new word is formed from the name
of a real of fictitious person.

Examples:
atlas – Atlas
boycott – Charles C. Boycott
cardigan – James Thomas Brudnell, 7th Earl of Cardigan
cereal – Ceres
dunce – John Duns Scotus
guillotine – Joseph IgnaceGuillotin
jacuzzi – Candido Jacuzzi
luddite – Ned Ludd
malapropism – Mrs.Malaprop
mesmerize – Franz Anton Mesmer
mirandize – Ernesto A. Miranda
narcissistic – Narcissus
nicotine – Jean Nicot
pasteurization – Louis Pasteur
poinsettia – Noel Roberts Poinsett
praline – César de Choiseul, Count Plessis–Praslin
sadistic – Marquis de Sade
salmonella – Daniel Elmer Salmon
sandwich – John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich
volcano – Vulcan

Coinage is the word formation process in which a new word is created either deliberately or accidentally
without using the other word formation processes and often from seemingly nothing. It is also referred to
simply as neologisms, the word neologism meaning “new word.”

Examples:
aspirin
escalator
heroin
band-aid
factoid
Frisbee
Google
kerosene
Kleenex
Laundromat
linoleum
muggle
nylon
psychedelic
quark
Xerox
zipper
Nonce words are new words formed through any number of word formation processes with the resulting
word meeting a lexical need that is not expected to recur. Nonit is created for the nonce, the term for the
nonce meaning “for a single occasion.”

Examples:
cotton-wool – to stuff or close (the ears) with cotton-wool.
jabberwock – The name of the fabulous monster in Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky. Hence in
allusive and extended uses, especially “incoherent or nonsensical expression.” So jabberwocky is
invented language, meaningless language, nonsensical behavior; also nonsensical, meaningless,
topsy-turvy.
touch-me-not-ishness – having a “touch-me-not” character; stand-off-ish.
twi-thought – an indistinct or vague thought.
witchcraftical – The practices of a witch or witches; the exercise of supernatural power supposed to
be possessed by persons in league with the devil or evil spirits. Power or influence like that of a
magician; bewitching or fascinating attraction or charm.

Loanwords are the word formation process in which a word from one language is borrowed directly into
another language.

Examples:
algebra – Arabic
bagel – Yiddish
cherub – Hebrew
chowmein – Chinese
fjord – Norwegian
galore – Irish
haiku – Japanese
kielbasa – Polish
murder – French
near – Sanskrit
paprika – Hungarian
pizza – Italian
smorgasbord – Swedish
tamale – Spanish
yo-yo – Tagalog

Calquing is the word formation process in which a borrowed word or phrase is translated from one
language to another. also referred to as root-for-root or word-for-word translations.

Examples:
beer garden – German – Biergarten
blue-blood – Spanish – sangreazul
commonplace – Latin – locus commūnis
flea market – French – marché aux puces
free verse – French – verslibre
loanword – German – Lehnwort
long time no see – Chinese – hǎojiǔbujiàn
pineapple – Dutch – pijnappel
scapegoat – Hebrew – ezozel
wisdom tooth – Latin – dēnssapientiae
ALLOMORPH are forms that are related to each other but slightly different, depending on the
surrounding environment.

a variant form of a morpheme that can refer to affixes, word endings, or adjacent word choices, and can
change the sound of the word although the changes do not change the meaning of the word. It can
include creating a plural, tenses, choice of article, and more.

A simple example is the English word a.  It means something like “one of something, but not any
particular one”, like in these examples:

a book
a skirt
a friend
a phone call

But if the word following a begins with a vowel and not a consonant, then the word a changes its form:

an apple
an ice cream cone
an iguana
an idea

The two forms a and an are slightly different in their form, but they clearly both have the same meaning.
And each one shows up in a different predictable environment: a before words that start with consonants
and an before words that begin with vowels.

Another example of allomorphy in English is in the plural morpheme. In written English, the form of the
plural morpheme is spelled -s, as in:

carrots
books
hats
friends
apples
iguanas

But it’s spelled –es in words like:

churches
bushes
quizzes

And in fact, even in the cases where it’s spelled -s, it’s pronounced as [s] for words that end in a voiceless
segment (carrots, books, cliffs) and as [z] for words that end in voiced sounds (worms, dogs, birds).  So
it’s got two written forms (-s and -es) and three spoken forms ([s], [z], [ɨz]), but a consistent meaning of
“more than one”.  Each form is an allomorph of the plural morpheme.
Types of Allomorphs
Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy
Sound-based allomorphs which includes indefinite articles and additive allomorphs

Examples:

Basic Word Ending Sounds

Allomorph Sounds
Morpheme Morpheme
Like…

fished
Awesome -zm
talked

Boxes -zz grabbed

Busses -iz hats

Cats -s wanted

dogs
-z
judges

Rule: Whether a or an is the allomorph chosen depends on how an

adjacent morpheme is pronounced.

Indefinite Article Allomorphs

a dog an eagle
a flower an inch
a window an Oscar
 Additive Allomorph
Adding an affix changes the tense or creates a positive or negative impression, and the word sound may
change.

To show some differences in meaning, something is added to a word.

Examples:

Regular Past Tense Morphemes Negative Prefixes

Sounds like id after d or t: Sounds like il before l:

 defeated  illegal
 heated  illegible
 threaded
 waded

Sounds like im before bilabial sounds:

Sounds like t after all other voiceless sounds:  immature

 impossible
 hissed
 picked
 ripped Sounds like in elsewhere:

 ineligible

Sounds like d after all other voiced sounds:  inexpensive

 independent
 fizzed
 howled
 measured Sounds like un elsewhere:
 wedged
 unassailable

Morphologically Conditioned Allomorphy

Structure-based allomorphs. This is typical of English in that there is no one-size-fits-all rule.

Examples:
Assume assumption assumptive assumable

Consume consumption consumptive consumable

Presume presumption presumptuous presumable

Resume resumption resumptive resumable

Subsume subsumption subsumptive subsumable

-ally an-throp-olog-ic-ally
lin-guist-ic-ally
lit-er-ally
phys-ic-ally

-ly ac-cid-ent-ly

Lexically Conditioned Allomorphy

Forms a plural for nouns using a simple plural of -s or -es, the replacive, or zero allomorphs. It’s also
about the formation of different verb tenses — suppletion allomorphs.
Examples:

Simple Plural uses -s or -es

girl girls box

school schools minus

flower flowers fox

plane planes wrench

Replacive Allomorph
Replaces letters within the word to create plurals using -en, irregular plurals, or past tense forms.
To indicate some differences in meaning, sound used to replace other sounds in words. 
Examples:

-en Plurals

brother brethren

child children

man men

woman women

ox oxen

Noun-Verb Replacives

Definition: A rare type of replacive morpheme which distinguishes nouns from verbs.

Irregular Plurals

foot feet goose geese

mouse mice tooth teeth

alumnus alumni criterion criteria

alumna alumnae

stratum strata

Irregular Past Tenses

swim swam swum

drink drank drunk

sing sang sung

bring brought

take took taken

break broke broken

Zero Allomorph
There is no change from singular to plural.
No change in shape of the word despite some differences in the sense identified. 

Examples:

deer moose

fish sheep

Suppletion
Allomorphs of a morpheme are phonologically unrelated and changes the shape of the word.

To indicate some differences in a sense, there is a complete change in the form of words.
Examples:

be am are is was been

go goes went gone

good better best

one first

bad worse worst

Affixes are divided into many categories, depending on their position with reference to the
stem. Prefix and suffix are extremely common terms. Infix and circumfix are less so, as they are not
important in European languages. The other terms are uncommon.

Categories of affixes

Affix Example Schema Description

Prefix un-do prefix-stem Appears before the stem

Prefixoid/semi-
Appears before the stem, but
prefix/pseudo- flexi-cover prefixoid-stem
is only partially bound to it
prefix[1]

Suffix/postfix look-ing stem-suffix Appears after the stem

Suffixoid[2]/semi-
Appears after the stem, but is
suffix[3]/pseudo- cat-like stem-suffixoid
only partially bound to it
suffix

Appears within a stem —

Infix Abso⟨bloody⟩lutely st⟨infix⟩em common e.g. in Austronesian
languages

circumfix⟩stem⟨circumfi One portion appears before the

Circumfix en⟩light⟨en
x stem, the other after

Links two stems together in

Interfix speed-o-meter stema-interfix-stemb
a compound

Incorporates
a reduplicated portion of a
Duplifix money~shmoney stem~duplifix stem
(may occur before, after, or
within the stem)
 Maltese: k⟨i⟩t⟨e⟩b
A discontinuous affix that
"he wrote"
Transfix s⟨transfix⟩te⟨transfix⟩m interleaves within a
(compare
discontinuous stem
root ktb "write")

Simulfix mouse → mice stem\simulfix Changes a segment of a stem

Changes
produce (noun)
Suprafix stem\suprafix a suprasegmental feature of a
produce (verb)
stem

Alabama: tipli
"break up" The elision of a portion of a
Disfix st⟩disfix⟨em
(compare stem
root tipasli "break")
Syntax
 SYNTAX refers to the  rules  that govern the ways in which  words  combine
to form  phrases,  clauses, and  sentences. The term "syntax" comes from the
Greek, meaning "arrange together." The term is also used to mean the study
of the syntactic properties of a language. In computer contexts, the term
refers to the proper ordering of symbols and codes so that the computer
can understand what instructions are telling it to do.

Syntax is one of the major components of  grammar. It's the concept that
enables people to know how to start a question with a question word
("What is that?"), or that adjectives generally come before the   nouns they
describe ("green chair"), subjects often come before verbs in non-question
sentences ("She jogged"), prepositional phrases start with prepositions ("to
the store"), helping verbs come before main verbs ("can go" or "will do"),
and so on.

For native speakers, using correct syntax is something that comes

naturally, as word order is learned as soon as an infant starts absorbing
the language. Native speakers can tell something isn't said quite right
because it "sounds weird," even if they can't   detail the exact grammar rule
that makes something sound "off" to the ear.  

"It is  syntax  that gives the words the power to relate to each other in a
sequence...to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually
in just the right place"(Burgess 1968)

Syntactic rule is concerned to specify what is and what is not possible in a language. By using
Syntactic rules we can tell that something (sentences or words) cannot be cathegorized as Language. They
have to follow the rules in order to be called as a correct sentence or phrase of a language. This part of
rule also will explain the relation between rules and sentences. These following explanation will gives a
brief explanation about syntactic rules.

SYNTACTIC RULES

1. The Nature of Phrase Structure Rules.

This is also known as Chomskyan Phrase Structure Grammar, Chomsky even mentioned that “a
grammar is just a set of PS rules”. In this syntactic rule, we will find out that a syntactic chategory is
followed by another sequence of one or more chategories
 C0 C1 C2 ………..C11

These are different way of saying the same thing. One thing that we should stress about PS rules is
that they state that certain structures are possible, in other words they allow or licence certain structures.
If a language has a rule NP Det N and no other rule with NP on the left hand side, an NP must
immediately dominate a Det followed by an N.

This syntactic rules have been rejected by both GB (Governmen-binding theory) and PSG (Phrase
Structure Grammar). Eventhough it was rejected and not considered as grammar but we still have to know
about it

2. Rules and Sentences

To understand why the PS being rejected we need to know about the rules and sentence first. This
will definitely shown a greal differences to the PS. To make the ilustration easily to comprehend we will
need to know the rule first. This rules is not based only from one rules but a set of rules.

Set of Rules

a. S NP VP S = Sentence

b. NP Det N NP = Noun Phrase

c. VP V NP VP = Verb Phrase

d. VP V S Det = Determiner

N = Noun

Besides knowing the rules, we also need to assign a set of word

Set of Lexicon

a. Kid N

b. Car N

c. Cat N

d. Hit V
e. The Det

f. a Det

g. Kiss V

h. Thought V

From the trees above we can see that this trees follows the rules S = NP VP and also contain the second
rules NP = Det N and the third rules

S = V NP.

the trees above we can see that this trees follows the rules S = NP VP and also contain the second rules
NP = Det N and the third rules

S = V NP and the fourh rules VP = V S

3. Immediate Dominance and Linear Precedence Rules

We noted earlier that both GB and PSG rejects PS rules. The problem with PS rules is that they
miss generalizations about the order of consituents. That is why they should be replaced by another rules.

Among the PS rules that we might have in a grammar of English are the following:

1. a. V’ V NP V = Verb

b. V’ V PP P = Preposition

c. V’ V S PP = Prepositional Phrase

d. V’ V NP PP S = Sentence

e. V’ V NP S NP = Npun Phrase

f. V’ V PP S A = Adjective

2. a. N’ N PP
 b. N’ N S

3. a. A’ A PP

b.A’ A S

4. a. P’ P NP

b. P’ P PP

c. P’ P S

d. P’ P NP PP

The fact that PS rules miss generalization about Linear order in this way is a serious objection to them.
The obvious way to avoid this problem is to assume separate immediate dominance and linear precedence
statements. The immediate dominance is to distinguish them from PS rules by separating the right hand
side categories by commas. A further objection to PS rules is that they obscure similarities between
different language.

4. Non-local Condition on Trees

This is the part where we will find out the difference between GB and PSG rules. It is natural to
ask whether we need non-local condition on trees. PSG assumes that there is no need for such conditions,
but GB assumes that they are necessary.

Types of Sentence Structures

Types of sentences and their syntax modes include simple sentences, compound sentences, complex
sentences, and compound-complex sentences. Compound sentences are two simple sentences joined by a
conjunction. Complex sentences have dependent clauses, and compound-complex sentences have both
types included.

Simple sentences follow a subject-verb format.

Examples:
 The boy jumped.
 The girl sang.

Compound sentences have more than one subject or verb.

Examples:
 The boy jumped and the girl sang.
 I did not go to the concert but I went to the fair.

Complex sentences contain a subordinating clause.

Examples:
 The boy jumped even though he was nervous.
 Because she was excited, the girl sang.

Compound-complex sentences contain two independent clauses and more dependent clauses.

Examples:
 Even though he was nervous, the boy jumped and he landed across the stream.
 The girl sang and the woman shrieked because they were excited.

Parallel Structure in Sentences it is when constructing sentences, it is important to always keep in mind
that ideas should be parallel.

In English, parallel structure is most often an issue when creating a series list. Therefore, we will look at
an example of appropriate parallel structure through lists.

Correct example:
 I like running, jumping, and hiking.
In this example, three gerunds are used (running, jumping, hiking) to create the grammatically correct list.

Incorrect example:
 I like to run, jumping, and hiking.
In this example, “to run” and “jumping” and “hiking” are not parallel. “To run” is an infinitive and
“jumping” and “hiking” are gerunds. This sentence is grammatically incorrect and this sentence does not
have proper syntax.
Semantics
 SEMANTICS , also called  semiotics, semology , or  semasiology , the
philosophical and scientific study of   meaning   in natural and
artificial  languages . The term is one of a group of English words formed
from the various derivatives of the Greek verb   sēmainō   (“to mean” or “to
signify”). The noun  semantics   and the adjective  semantic   are derived
from  sēmantikos   (“significant”);  semiotics   (adjective and noun) comes
from  sēmeiōtikos   (“pertaining to signs”);  semiology   from  sēma   (“sign”)
+  logos   (“account”); and  semasiology   from  sēmasia   (“signification”)
+  logos .

It is difficult to formulate a distinct   definition   for each of these terms,

because their use largely overlaps in the literature despite individual
preferences. The word  semantics   has ultimately prevailed as a name for the
doctrine of meaning, of linguistic meaning in particular.   Semiotics   is still
used, however, to denote a broader field: the study of sign-using behaviour
in general.

Seven Types of Meaning piece of language conveys its dictionary meaning, connotations beyond
the dictionary meaning, information about the social context of language use, speaker’s feelings and
attitudes rubbing off of one meaning on the another meaning of the same word when it has two meanings
and meaning because of habit occurrence.
Broadly speaking, ‘meaning’ means the sum total of communicated through language. Words, Phrases
and sentences have meanings which are studies in semantics.
Geoffrey Leech in his ‘Semantic- A Study of meaning’ (1974) breaks down meaning into seven types or
ingredients giving primacy to conceptual meaning.

The Seven types of meaning according to Leech are as follows.

1. Conceptual or Denotative Meaning:
Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the basic propositional meaning
which corresponds to the primary dictionary definition. Such a meaning is stylistically neutral and
objective as opposed to other kinds of associative meanings. Conceptual
Meanings are the essential or core meaning while other six types are the peripheral. It is peripheral in as
sense that it is non-essential. They are stylistically marked and subjective kind of meanings. Leech gives
primacy to conceptual meaning because it has sophisticated organization based on the principle of
contractiveness and hierarchical structure.

E.g.
/P/ can be described as- voiceless + bilabial + plosive.
Similarly
Boy = + human + male-adult.
The hierarchical structure of ‘Boy’ = + Human + Male-Adult
Or “Boy” =Human – Male/Female-adult in a rough way.
Conceptual meaning is the literal meaning of the word indicating the idea or concept to which it refers.
The concept is minimal unit of meaning which could be called ‘sememe’. As we define phoneme on the
basis of binary contrast, similarly we can define sememe ‘Woman’ as = + human + female + adult. If
any of these attribute changes the concept cease to be the same.
Conceptual meaning deals with the core meaning of expression. It is the denotative or literal meaning. It
is essential for the functioning of language. For example, a part of the conceptual meaning of ‘Needle”
may be “thin”, “sharp” or “instrument”.
The organization of conceptual meaning is based on two structural principles- Contrastiveness and the
principle of structure. The conceptual meanings can be studied typically in terms of contrastive features.
For example the word “woman” can be shown as:
“Woman = + Human, -Male, + Adult”.
On the contrary, word
“Boy” can be realized as:-
“Boy = “+ human, + male, - Adult”.
By the principle of structure, larger units of language are built up out smaller units or smaller units or
smaller units are built out larger ones.
The aim of conceptual meaning is to provide an appropriate semantic representation to a sentence or
statement. A sentence is made of abstract symbols. Conceptual meaning helps us to distinguish one
meaning from the meaning of other sentences. Thus, conceptual meaning is an essential part of language.
A language essentially depends on conceptual meaning for communication. The conceptual meaning is
the base for all the other types of meaning.

2. Connotative Meaning:
Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual
content. It is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in the real
world. It is something more than the dictionary meaning. Thus purely conceptual content of ‘woman’
is +human + female+ adult but the psychosocial connotations could be ‘gregarious’, ‘having maternal
instinct’ or typical (rather than invariable) attributes of womanhood such as ‘babbling’,’ experienced in
cookery’, ‘skirt or dress wearing ‘etc. Still further connotative meaning can embrace putative properties
of a referent due to viewpoint adopted by individual, group, and society as a whole. So in the past woman
was supposed to have attributes like frail, prone to tears, emotional, irrigational, inconstant , cowardly etc.
as well as more positive qualities such gentle, sensitive, compassionate, hardworking etc. Connotations
vary age to age and society to society.

E.g. Old age ‘Woman’ - ‘Non-trouser wearing or sari wearing’ in Indian context must have seemed
definite connotation in the past.
Present ‘Woman’---- Salwar/T-shirt/Jeans wearing.
Some times connotation varies from person to person also
. E.g. connotations of the word ‘woman’ for misogynist and a person of feminist vary.
The boundary between conceptual and connotative seems to be analogous. Connotative meaning is
regarded as incidental, comparatively unstable, in determinant, open ended, variable according to age,
culture and individual, whereas conceptual meaning is not like that . It can be codified in terms of limited
symbols.

3. Social Meaning:
The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is called the social
meaning. The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other variations of
language. We recognize some words or pronunciation as being dialectical i.e. as telling us something
about the regional or social origin of the speaker. Social meaning is related to the situation in which an
utterance is used.
It is concerned with the social circumstances of the use of a linguistic expression. For example, some
dialectic words inform us about the regional and social background of the speaker. In the same way, some
stylistic usages let us know something of the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer
E.g. “I ain’t done nothing”
The line tells us about the speaker and that is the speaker is probably a black American, underprivileged
and uneducated. Another example can be
“Come on yaar, be a sport. Don’t be Lallu”
The social meaning can be that of Indian young close friends.
Stylistic variation represents the social variation. This is because styles show the geographical region
social class of the speaker. Style helps us to know about the period, field and status of the discourse.
Some words are similar to others as far as their conceptual meaning is concerned. But they have different
stylistic meaning. For example, ‘steed ’, ‘horse and ‘nag’ are synonymous. They all mean a kind of
animal i.e. Horse. But they differ in style and so have various social meaning. ‘Steed’ is used in poetry;
‘horse’ is used in general, while ‘nag’ is slang. The word ‘Home’ can have many use also like domicile
( official), residence (formal) abode (poetic) , home (ordinary use).
Stylistic variation is also found in sentence. For example, two criminals will express the following
sentence
“They chucked the stones at the cops and then did a bunk with the look”
(Criminals after the event)
But the same ideas will be revealed by the chief inspector to his officials by the following sentence.
“After casting the stones at the police, they abandoned with money.”
(Chief Inspector in an official report)
Thus through utterances we come to know about the social facts, social situation, class, region, and
speaker-listener relations by its style and dialect used in sentences.
The illocutionary force of an utterance also can have social meaning. According to the social situation, a
sentence may be uttered as request, an apology, a warning or a threat, for example, the sentence,
“I haven’t got a knife” has the common meaning in isolation. But the sentence uttered to waiter mean a
request for a knife’
Thus we can understand that the connotative meaning plays a very vital role in the field of semantics and
in understanding the utterances and sentences in different context.

4. Affective or Emotive Meaning:

For some linguists it refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader, listener. It is
what is conveyed about the personal feelings or attitude towards the listener.

E.g. ‘home’ for a sailor/soldier or expatriate

and ‘mother’ for a motherless child, a married woman (esp. in Indian context) will have special
effective, emotive quality.

In affective meaning, language is used to express personal feelings or attitude to the listener or to the
subject matter of his discourse.
For Leech affective meaning refers to what is convey about the feeling and attitude of the speak through
use of language (attitude to listener as well as attitude to what he is saying). Affective meaning is often
conveyed through conceptual, connotative content of the words used

E.g. “you are a vicious tyrant and a villainous reprobation and I hate you”
Or “I hate you, you idiot”.
We are left with a little doubt about the speaker’s feelings towards the listener. Here speaker seems to
have a very negative attitude towards his listener. This is called affective meaning.
But very often we are more discreet (cautious) and convey our attitude indirectly.

E.g. “I am terribly sorry but if you would be so kind as to lower your voice a
little”
Conveys our irritation in a scaled down manner for the sake of politeness. Intonation and voice quality are
also important here. Thus the sentence above can be uttered in biting sarcasm and the impression of
politeness maybe reversed while –

E.g.
“Will you belt up?”- can be turned into a playful remark between intimates if said with the
intonation of a request.
Words like darling, sweetheart or hooligan, vandal have inherent emotive quality and they can be
used neutrally.
I.A. Richards argued that emotive meaning distinguishes literature or poetic language from factual
meaning of science. Finally it must be noted that affective meaning is largely a parasitic category. It
overlaps heavily with style, connotation and conceptual content.

5. Reflected Meaning:
Reflected meaning and collocative meaning involve interconnection
At the lexical level of language, Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual
meaning or multiple conceptual meaning. In such cases while responding to one sense of the word we
partly respond to another sense of the word too. Leech says that in church service ‘the comforter and the
Holy Ghost ’refer to the third in Trinity. They are religious words. But unconsciously there is a response
to their non-religious meanings too. Thus the ‘comforter’ sounds warm and comforting while the ‘Ghost’
sounds ‘awesome’ or even ‘dreadful’. One sense of the word seems to rub off on another especially
through relative frequency and familiarity (e.g. a ghost is more frequent and familiar in no religious
sense.).

In poetry too we have reflected meaning as in the following lines from ‘Futility’

‘Are limbs so dear achieved, are sides,
Full nerved still warm-too hard to stir’
Owen here uses ‘dear’ in the sense of expensiveness. - But the sense of beloved is also eluded.

E.g. Daffodils
“The could not but be gay
In such jocund company”
The word ‘gay’ was frequently used in the time of William Wordsworth but the word now is used for
‘homosexuality’.
In such type cases of multiple meaning, one meaning of the word pushes the other meaning to the
background. Then the dominant suggestive power of that word prevails. This may happen because of the
relative frequency or familiarity of the dominant meaning. This dominant meaning which pushes the other
meaning at the background is called the reflected meaning.
Reflected meaning is also found in taboo words. For examples are terms like erection, intercourse,
ejaculation. The word ‘intercourse’ immediately reminds us of its association with sex (sexual
intercourse). The sexual association of the word drives away its innocent sense, i.e. ‘communication’.
The taboo sense of the word is so dominant that its non-taboo sense almost dies out. In some cases, the
speaker avoids the taboo words and uses their alternative word in order to avoid the unwanted reflected
meaning. For example, as Bloomfield has pointed out, the word ‘Cock’ is replaced by speakers, they use
the word ‘rooster’ to indicate the general meaning of the word and avoid its taboo sense. These words
have non-sexual meanings too. (E.g. erection of a building, ejaculate-throw out somebody) but because of
their frequency in the lit of the physiology of sex it is becoming difficult to use them in their
innocent/nonsexual sense.
Thus we can see that reflected meaning has great importance in the study of semantics.
6. Collocative Meaning:
Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. Words
collocate or co-occur with certain words only e.g. Big business not large or great.Collocative meaning
refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of
words. ‘Pretty’ and ‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’.
However, they slightly differ from each other because of collocation or co-occurrence. The
word ‘pretty’ collocates with – girls, woman, village, gardens, flowers, etc.
On the other hand, the word ‘handsome’ collocates with – ‘boys’ men, etc. so ‘pretty woman’ and
‘handsome man’. While different kinds of attractiveness, hence ‘handsome woman’ may mean attractive
but in a mannish way. The verbs ‘wander’ and ‘stroll’ are quasi-synonymous- they may have almost the
same meaning but while ‘cows may wonder into another farm’, they don’t stroll into that farm
because ‘stroll’ collocates with human subject only. Similarly one ‘trembles with fear’ but ‘quivers with
excitement’. Collocative meanings need to be invoked only when other categories of meaning don’t
apply. Generalizations can be made in case of other meanings while collocative meaning is simply on
idiosyncratic property of individual words. Collocative meaning has its importance and it is a marginal
kind of category.

7. Thematic Meaning:
It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in
terms of ordering focus and emphasis .Thus active is different from passive though its conceptual
meaning is the same. Various parts of the sentence also can be used as subject, object or complement to
show prominence. It is done through focus, theme (topic) or emotive emphasis. Thematic meaning helps
us to understand the message and its implications properly. For example, the following statements in
active and passive voice have same conceptual meaning but different communicative values.
e.g.
1) Mrs. Smith donated the first prize
2) The first prize was donated by Mrs. Smith.
In the first sentence “who gave away the prize “is more important, but in the second sentence “what did
Mrs. Smith gave is important”. Thus the change of focus change the meaning also.
The first suggests that we already know Mrs. Smith (perhaps through earlier mention) its known/given
information while it’s new information.
Alternative grammatical construction also gives thematic meaning. For example,
1) He likes Indian good most.
2) Indian goods he likes most
3) It is the Indian goods he likes most.
Like the grammatical structures, stress and intonation also make the message prominent. For example, the
contrastive stress on the word ‘cotton’ in the following sentence give prominence to the information
1. John wears a cotton shirt
2. The kind of shirt that john wears is cotton one.
Thus sentences or pairs of sentences with similar conceptual meaning differ their communicative value.
This is due to different grammatical constructions or lexical items or stress and intonations. Therefore
they are used in different contents.
“Ten thousand saw I at a glance”
Wordsworth here inverts the structure to focus on ‘ten thousand”
.
Sometimes thematic contrast i.e. contrasts between given and new information can be conveyed by
lexical means.
e.g.
1) John owns the biggest shop in London
2) The biggest shop in London belongs to John.
The ways we order our message also convey what is important and what not. This is basically thematic
meaning.
Associative Meaning:
Leech uses this as an umbrella term for the remaining 5 types of meanings( connotative, social, affective,
reflective and collocative).All these have more in common with connotative than conceptual meaning.
They all have the same open ended, variable character and can be analyzed in terms of scales or ranges
( more/less) than in either or contrastive terms. These meanings contain many imponderable factors. But
conceptual meaning is stable

Types of Semantics
Lexical semantics

Concerns the meanings of words and morphemes. Issues in lexical semantics include, among others,
compositionality (how word meaning is built up from the meanings of morphemes—and why it
sometimes isn’t straightforward) and conceptual mapping (how real-world concepts are mapped to words,
which sometimes differs in startling ways between languages).

Compositional semantics

Concerns how the meanings of words combine to produce the meanings of sentences, especially how
predicates combine with their arguments.

These two broad divisions overlap somewhat. For example, the study of the semantics of modality (how
sentences express possibility, necessity, wishes, and so forth) involves both lexical semantics, as the
meanings of the words expressing modality are complex and varied, and compositional semantics, as it’s
not trivial to show how modal words combine with propositions (basically, declarative sentences).

Situation semantics

Situational semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation

semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There
is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or
events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals
standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved
foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics has led to some genuinely new
approaches to a variety of phenomena in natural language semantics. In the way of illustration, this article
includes relatively detailed overviews of a few selected areas where situation semantics has been
successful: implicit quantifier domain restrictions, donkey pronouns, and exhaustive interpretations. It
moreover addresses the question of how Davidsonian event semantics can be embedded in a semantics
based on situations. Other areas where a situation semantics perspective has led to progress include
attitude ascriptions, questions, tense, aspect, nominalizations, implicit arguments, point of view,
counterfactual conditionals, and discourse relations.

Ideational semantics

The 17th-century British empiricist John Locke held that linguistic meaning is mental: words are used to
encode and convey thoughts, or ideas. Successful communication requires that the hearer correctly
decode the speaker’s words into their associated ideas. So construed, the meaning of an expression,
according to Locke, is the idea associated with it in the mind of anyone who knows and understands that
expression.

But the ideational account of meaning, as Locke’s view is sometimes called, is vulnerable to several
objections. Suppose, for example, that a person’s idea of grass is associated in his mind with the idea of
warm weather. It would follow that part of the meaning of grass, for this person, is warm weather. If so,
then the meaning of grass or any other word may be different for each person. And in that case, how does
anyone fully understand anyone else? Similarly, suppose that a person mistakenly associates the
word beech with the idea of an elm tree. Would it follow that, for this person, beech means elm? If so,
how is it possible to say that anyone misunderstands the meaning of a word or uses a word incorrectly?
As such examples show, the ideational account ignores the “public” nature of meaning. Whatever
meanings are, they must be things that different speakers can learn from and share with one another.

A further objection concerns compositionality. Suppose that a person associates the complex
expression brown cow with the idea of fear, though he is not fearful of all brown things or of all cows—
only brown cows. Thus, the meaning of brown cow, for this person, is not determined by or predictable
from the meanings of brown and cow. Because the example can be generalized (anyone can associate any
idea with any complex expression), it follows that the ideational account is unable to explain the
compositionality of natural languages.

Behaviourist semantics

In an effort to render linguistic meaning public and the study of linguistic meaning more “scientific,” the
American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904–90) proposed that the correct semantics for a natural language
is behaviouristic: the meaning of an expression, as uttered on a particular occasion, is either (1) the
behavioral stimulus that produces the utterance, (2) the behavioral response that the utterance produces,
or (3) a combination of both. Thus, the meaning of fire! as uttered on a particular occasion might include
running or calling for help. But even on a single occasion it is possible that not everyone who
hears fire! will respond by running or calling for help. Suppose, for example, that the hearers of the
utterance include a firefighter, a pyromaniac, and a person who happens to know that the speaker is a
pathological liar. The behaviourist account seems committed to the implausible view that the meaning
of fire! for those people is different from the meaning of fire! for others who run or call for help.
The behaviourist account, like the ideational one, is also vulnerable to the objection based on
compositionality. Suppose that a person’s body recoils when he hears brown cow but not when he hears
either brown or cow alone. The meaning of brown cow, which includes recoiling, is therefore not
determined by or predictable from the meanings of brown and cow.

Referential semantics

As noted above, reference is an apparent relation between a word and the world. Russell, following the
19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, pursued the intuition that linguistic expressions are
signs of something other than themselves. He suggested that the meaning of an expression is whatever
that expression applies to, thus removing meaning from the minds of its users and placing it squarely in
the world. According to a referential semantics, all that one learns when one learns the meaning
of tomato is that it applies to tomatoes and to nothing else. One advantage of a referential semantics is
that it respects compositionality: the meaning of red tomato is a function of the meanings
of red and tomato, because red tomato will apply to anything that is both red and a tomato.
But what about expressions that apparently refer to nothing at all, such as unicorn? A referential
semantics would appear to be committed to the view that expressions such as unicorn, Santa
Claus, and Sherlock Holmes are meaningless. Another problem, first pointed out by Frege, is that two
expressions may have the same referent without having the same meaning. The morning star and the
evening star, for example, refer to the same object, the planet Venus, but they are not synonymous. As
Frege noted, it is possible to believe that the morning star and the evening star are not identical without
being irrational (indeed, the identity of the morning star and the evening star was a scientific discovery).
Such examples have led some philosophers, including Mill himself and Saul Kripke, to conclude that
proper names lack meaning. But the problem also affects common nouns, including definite descriptions.
The descriptions the first president of the United States and the husband of Martha Washington apply to
the same individual but are not synonymous. It is possible to understand both without recognizing that
they refer to the same person. It follows that meaning cannot be the same as reference.

Possible-world semantics

Perhaps unicorn is meaningful because of what it would apply to in certain circumstances, though in

actuality it does not apply to anything. And perhaps the descriptions the first president of the United
States and the husband of Martha Washington are not synonymous because one can imagine
circumstances in which the former would apply and the latter would not, and vice versa. George
Washington might not have become the first president, or Martha might not have married him. Suppose
that the meaning of an expression is determined not only by what it applies to in the actual world but also
by what it would apply to in different “possible worlds.” According to possible-world semantics, the
meaning of a proper or common noun is a function from possible worlds (including the actual world) to
individuals or things: given a possible world as input, the meaning returns as output the individual or
thing that the noun applies to in that world. The meaning of the first president of the United
States determines that the expression applies to George Washington in the actual world but to other
individuals in other possible worlds. Such a refinement of referential semantics does not compromise
compositionality, because the meaning of the first president of the United States is still a function of the
meanings of its constituent expressions in any possible world. The proposal also seems to account for the
difference in meaning between descriptions whose referents are the same, and it seems to explain how an
expression can fail to refer to anything and still be meaningful.
Yet there are important problems with possible-world semantics. Chief among them is the notion of a
possible world itself, which is not well understood. In addition, it turns out that possible-world semantics
does not entirely dispose of objections based on coreferential but nonsynonymous expressions and
nonreferential but meaningful expressions. The expressions triangular and trilateral, for example, are not
synonymous, but there is no possible world in which they do not apply to exactly the same things. And
the expression round square appears to be meaningful, but there is no possible world in which it applies
to anything at all. Such examples are easy to multiply.

Fregean semantics

According to Frege, the meaning of an expression consists of two elements: a referent and what he called
a “sense.” Both the referent and the sense of an expression contribute systematically to the truth or
falsehood (the “truth value”) of the sentences in which the expression occurs.
As noted above, Frege pointed out that the substitution of coreferring expressions in a sentence does not
always preserve truth value: if Smith does not know that George Washington was the first president of the
United States, then Smith believes that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree can be true
while Smith believes that the first president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree is false.
Frege’s explanation of the phenomenon was that, in such sentences, truth value is determined not only by
reference but also by sense. The sense of an expression, roughly speaking, is not the thing the expression
refers to but the way in which it refers to that thing. The sense of an expression determines what the
expression refers to. Although each sense determines a single referent, a single referent may be
determined by more than one sense. Thus, George Washington and the first president of the United
States have the same referent but different senses. The two belief sentences can differ in truth value
because, although both are about the same individual, the expressions referring to that individual pick him
out in different ways.

Verificationist semantics

Frege did not address the problem of how linguistic expressions come to have the meanings they do. A
natural, albeit vague, answer is that expressions mean what they do because of what speakers do with
them. An example of that approach is provided by the school of logical positivism, which was developed
by members of the Vienna Circle discussion group in the 1920s and ’30s. According to the logical
positivists, the meaning of a sentence is given by an account of the experiences on the basis of which the
sentence could be verified. Sentences that are unverifiable through any possible experience (including
many ethical, religious, and metaphysical sentences) are literally meaningless.
The basic idea underlying verificationism is that meaning results from links between language and
experience: some sentences have meaning because they are definable in terms of other sentences, but
ultimately there must be certain basic sentences, what the logical positivists called “observation
sentences,” whose meaning derives from their direct connection with experience and specifically from the
fact that they are reports of experience. The meaning of an expression smaller than a sentence is similarly
dependent on experience. Roughly speaking, the meaning of an expression is given by an account of the
experiences on the basis of which one could verify that the expression applies to one thing or another.
Although the circumstances in which triangular and trilateral apply are the same, speakers go about
verifying those applications in different ways.
The case against verificationism was most ardently pressed in the 1950s by the American
philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. He argued that experience cannot be used to verify individual
observation sentences, because any experience can be taken to verify a given observation sentence
provided that sufficient adjustments are made in the truth values of the other sentences that make up
the scientific theory in which the sentence is embedded. In the case of word meaning, Quine asked: What
experience, or empirical evidence, could determine what a word means? He contended that the only
acceptable evidence is behavioral, given the necessity that meanings be public. But behavioral evidence
cannot determine whether a person’s words mean one thing or another; alternative interpretations, each
compatible with all the behavioral evidence, will always be available. (For example, what possible
behavioral evidence could determine that by gavagai a speaker means “rabbit” rather than “undetached
rabbit part” or “time-slice of a rabbit”?) From the underdetermination of meaning by empirical evidence,
Quine inferred that there is no “fact of the matter” regarding what a word means.

Truth-conditional semantics

Confronted with the skepticism of Quine, his student Donald Davidson made a significant effort in the
1960s and ’70s to resuscitate meaning. Davidson attempted to account for meaning not in terms of
behaviour but on the basis of truth, which by then had become more logically tractable than meaning
because of work in the 1930s by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski. Tarski defined truth for formal (logical
or mathematical) languages in terms of a relation of “satisfaction” between the constituents of a sentence
and sequences of objects. Truth is thereby determined systematically by the satisfaction of sentential
constituents. Tarski showed how to derive, from axioms and rules, certain statements that specify the
conditions under which any sentence of a given formal language is true.
Davidson’s innovation was to employ a Tarskian theory of truth as a theory of meaning. Adopting
Tarksi’s distinction between an “object language” (an ordinary language used to talk about things in the
world) and a “metalanguage” (an artificial language used to analyze or describe an object language),
Davidson proposed that a semantic theory of a natural language is adequate just in case, for each sentence
in the object language, the theory entails a statement of the form ‘S’ is true just in case p, where S is a
sentence in the object language and p is a translation of that sentence in the metalanguage. For the
sentence snow is white, for example, the theory should entail a statement of the form ‘snow is white’ is
true just in case snow is white. Tarski had already shown how to derive such statements. Davidson’s
appropriation of Tarski’s theory of truth thus rendered substantive the rough but venerable idea that to
give the meaning of a sentence is to give its truth conditions.
But how can such a truth-conditional semantics explain the phenomena for which Frege invoked the
notion of sense? The sentences George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and the first president of
the United States chopped down a cherry tree share truth conditions: both are true just in case the
individual who happens to be picked out by George Washington and the first president of the United
States chopped down a cherry tree. But the sentences are not synonymous. Davidson suggested that the
problem could be solved by constructing a semantic theory for the language of any given speaker who
uses those sentences. In order to do so, one must observe the constraints of “radical interpretation”—in
particular, the “principle of charity,” which states that a speaker’s sentences should be interpreted in such
a way that most of them are counted as truthful. Interpretation proceeds as follows: collect the sentences
that a speaker “holds true,” then construct a semantic theory that entails for each of those sentences a
statement of the circumstances in which the speaker would hold that sentence true. According to
Davidson, any such theory will entail ‘George Washington chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in
case George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and ‘the first president of the United States
chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case the first president of the United States chopped down a
cherry tree but not ‘George Washington chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case the first
president of the United States chopped down a cherry tree or ‘the first president of the United States
chopped down a cherry tree’ is true just in case George Washington chopped down a cherry tree. The
fact that the circumstances in which the speaker would hold true George Washington chopped down a
cherry tree are different from the circumstances in which he would hold true the first president of the
United States chopped down a cherry tree accounts for their difference in meaning, thus solving Frege’s
problem.
Although Davidson’s program was influential, most philosophers have remained skeptical of the idea that
a theory of truth can serve as a theory of meaning, in part because of objections such as the following.
Suppose that two speakers, A and B, are identical psychological twins, so that their psychological states
are essentially undistinguishable. Each speaker utters the sentence I am 30 years old. Although they utter
the same sentence, the referent of I as uttered by A is different from the referent of I as uttered by B. The
truth conditions of the two utterances, therefore, will be different. According to the truth-conditional
account, the meanings of the two utterances must accordingly be different. It follows that A and B do not
understand, or mentally grasp, the meanings of their utterances. If they did, the fact that the meanings are
different would entail that A’s psychological state is different from B’s. But by hypothesis their
psychological states are the same. The advocate of the truth-conditional account thus faces a dilemma:
either meaning is not the same as truth conditions, or speakers do not understand their utterances of
sentences such as I am 30 years old.
The American philosophers Hilary Putnam and David Kaplan independently proposed the same solution
to the problem. According to them, the truth conditions of the two utterances are different, and so are their
meanings. And yet both speakers understand the meanings of their utterances, despite the fact that their
psychological states are the same. In particular, both speakers understand their utterances of I. But what
understanding an utterance of I consists of is mentally grasping the “character” (or “stereotype”) of I,
which is the same in both utterances. The character of I is simply a function that associates an utterance
of I in a particular context with the individual who makes that utterance in that context. Thus, both
speakers understand the meanings of their utterances, which are different, by virtue of their grasping the
same character. Similar examples can be generated on the basis of other so-called “deictic” expressions,
whose referents are essentially tied to the context in which they are used (e.g., you, this, that, here,
and now).

Conceptual-role semantics
In order to avoid having to distinguish between meaning and character, some philosophers, including
Gilbert Harman and Ned Block, have recommended supplementing a theory of truth with what is called
a conceptual-role semantics (also known as cognitive-role, computational-role, or inferential-role
semantics). According to that approach, the meaning of an expression for a speaker is the same as
its conceptual role in the speaker’s mental life. Roughly speaking, the conceptual role of an expression is
the sum of its contributions to inferences that involve sentences containing that expression. Because the
conceptual role played by I is the same for both A and B, the meanings of the two utterances of I am 30
years old are the same, even though the referent of I in each case is distinct. In contrast, the meanings
of George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and the first president of the United States chopped
down a cherry tree are different, even though they have the same truth conditions, because the conceptual
role of George Washington is different from that of the first president of the United States for any
speaker. Because the meanings of the two sentences are different, the corresponding beliefs are different,
and this explains how it is possible for a person to affirm one and deny the other without being irrational.
Although the notion of conceptual role is not new, what exactly a conceptual role is and what form a
theory of conceptual roles should take remain far from clear. In addition, some implications of
conceptual-role semantics are strongly counterintuitive. For example, in order to explain how the meaning
of tomato can be the same for two speakers, conceptual-role semantics must claim that the word plays the
same conceptual role in the two speakers’ mental lives. But this is extremely unlikely (unless the speakers
happen to be psychological identical twins). As long as there is the slightest difference between them with
respect to the inferences they are prepared to draw using sentences containing tomato, the conceptual
roles of that word will differ. But then it is difficult to see how any sense could be made of
communication. If each speaker assigns a different meaning to tomato and presumably to most other
words, there is no common meaning to be communicated, and it is a mystery how speakers understand
one another. If, on the other hand, the same words have the same meanings, it must follow that the words
play the same conceptual roles, in which case there would be no need for communication; each speaker
would understand and believe exactly what every other speaker does. In addition, conceptual-role
semantics seems unable to account for compositionality, since the conceptual role of the complex
expression brown cow, in the speaker who fears brown cows but not all brown things or all cows, is not
determined by nor predictable from the conceptual roles of brown and cow.

Gricean semantics

The British philosopher Paul Grice (1913–88) and his followers hoped to explain meaning solely in terms
of beliefs and other mental states. Grice’s suggestion was that the meaning of a sentence can be
understood in terms of a speaker’s intention to induce a belief in the hearer by means of the hearer’s
recognition of that intention.
Grice’s analysis is based on the notion of “speaker meaning,” which he defines as follows: a speaker S
means something by an utterance U just in case S intends U to produce a certain effect in a hearer H by
means of H’s recognition of that intention. The speaker meaning of U in such a case is the effect that S
intends to produce in H by means of H’s recognition of that intention. Suppose, for example, that S
utters the sky is falling to H, and, as a result, H forms the belief that the sky is falling. In such a case,
according to Grice, S had several specific intentions: first, he intended to utter the sky is falling; second,
he intended that H should recognize that he (S) uttered the sky is falling; third, he intended that H should
recognize his (S’s) intention to utter the sky is falling; and fourth, he intended that H should recognize that
he (S) intended H to form the belief that the sky is falling. In those circumstances, according to Grice, the
sky is falling has the speaker meaning that the sky is falling. The place of conventional meaning in
Grice’s conception of language appears to be that it constitutes a feature of words that speakers can
exploit in realizing the intentions referred to in his analysis of speaker meaning.
Although Grice’s approach is not as popular as it once was, the general goal of reducing meaning to the
psychological states of speakers is now widely accepted. In that sense, both Gricean semantics and
conceptual-role semantics represent a return to the 17th century’s emphasis on inner or mental aspects of
meaning over outer or worldly aspects. To what extent semantic properties can be attributed to features of
the human mind remains a deep problem for further study.

The –nyms

Homonyms different words that are pronounced the same, but may or may not be spelled the same (to,
two, and too)

Polysemous word that has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically (bear can
mean to tolerate or to carry or to support)

Homograph different words that are spelled identically and possibly pronounced the same; if they are
pronounced the same, they are also homonyms (pen can mean writing utensil or cage)

Heteronym homographs that are pronounced differently (dove the bird and dove the past tense of dive)

Synonym words that mean the same but sound different (couch and sofa)

Antonym words that are opposite in meaning

Complementary pairs: alive and dead
Gradable pairs: big and small (no absolute scale)

Hyponym set of related words (red, white, yellow, blue are all hyponyms of "color")

Metonym word used in place of another to convey the same meaning (jock used for athlete,
Washington used for American government, crown used for monarcy)

Retronym expressions that are no longer redundant (silent movie used to be redundant because a long
time ago, all movies were silent, but this is no longer true or redundant)

Thematic Roles
Thematic roles are the semantic relationships between the verbs and noun phrases of sentences. The
following chart shows the thematic roles in relationship to verbs of sentences:

Thematic Role Description Example

Agent the one who performs an action Maria ran

Theme the person or thing that undergoes an action Mary called John

Location the place where an action takes place It rains in Spain

 Goal the place to which an action is directed Put the cat on the porch

Source the place from which an action originates He flew from Chicago to LA

Instrument the means by which an action is performed He cuts his hair with scissors

Experiencer one who perceives something She heard Bob play the piano

Causative a natural force that causes a change The wind destroyed the house

Possessor one who has something The tail of the cat got caught

Recipient one who receives something I gave it to the girl

Sentential Meaning
The meaning of sentences is built from the meaning of noun phrases and verbs. Sentences contain truth
conditions if the circumstances in the sentence are true. Paraphrases are two sentences with the same
truth conditions, despite subtle differences in structure and emphasis. The ball was kicked by the boy is
a paraphrase of the sentence the boy kicked the ball, but they have the same truth conditions - that a
boy kicked a ball. Sometimes the truth of one sentence entails or implies the truth of another sentence.
This is called entailment and the opposite of this is called contradiction, where one sentence implies the
falseness of another. He was assassinated entails that he is dead. He was assassinated contradicts with
the statement he is alive.
Pragmatics
 Pragmatics  is a subfield of  linguistics  and  semiotics  that studies the
ways in which  context  contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses   speech
act  theory, conversational  implicature,  talk in interaction  and other
approaches to language behavior in   philosophy,  sociology, linguistics
and  anthropology. Unlike  semantics, which examines meaning that is
conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the
transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic
knowledge (grammar,  lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener but also on
the context of the utterance,   any pre-existing knowledge about those
involved, the inferred  intent  of the speaker, and other factors.   In that
respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome
apparent  ambiguity  since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of
an utterance.

The word  pragmatics  derives via  Latin  pragmaticus  from the  Greek  word
(pragmatikos), meaning amongst others "fit for action",   which comes from
(pragma), "deed, act",(pragma in modern greek: an object,a thing that can
be perceived by the senses)  and that from (prassō/pratto in modern greek),"to
do, to act, to pass over, to practise, to achieve".

Several Types of Contexts

1. Physical context – objects surrounding the communication, place and time of communication,
what is going on around.

Examples:
I want that book. (accompanied by pointing)
Be here at 9:00 tonight. (place and time reference)

2. Linguistic context – what has been said before in the conversation.

Examples:
Linda came home late yesterday. She thought nobody would notice.
If my mom heard you talk like that…..

3. Social context – the social relationship of the people involved in communication.

Examples:
To the President: Mr. President, stop bugging me and go home.
To your friend: I do hereby humbly request that you might endeavor to telephone me with news
of your arrival occurs.
 4. Epistemic context – what is known by both speaker and hearer.

Speech Act Theories

THEORY
All sort of linguist communication are comprised of linguistic actions. Previously it was conceived that
the very basic unit of communication is words, Symbols, sentences or some kind of token of all of these,
but it was speech act theory which suggested that production or issuances if words, symbols are the basic
units of communication. This issuance happens during the process of performance of speech act. The
meaning of these basic units was considered as the building blocks of mutual understanding between the
people intend to communicate.

“ A theory of language is a theory of action”- Greig E. Henderson and Christopher Brown.

The theory emphasis that the utterances have a different or specific meaning to its user and listener other
than its meaning according to the language. The theory further identify that there are two kinds of
utterances, they are called constative and performative utterances.  In his book of ‘How do things with
words’ Austin clearly talks about the disparities between the constative and performative utterances.

A constative utterances is something which describes or denotes the situation, in relation with the fact of
true or false.

Example: The teacher asked Olivia whether she had stolen the candy. Olivia replies “mmmmmm”. Here
the utterances of Olivia describes the event in pact of answering her teacher whether the situation was true
or false.
The performative utterances is something which do not describes anything at all. The utterances in the
sentences or in the part of sentences are normally considered as having a meaning of its own. The
feelings, attitudes, emotions and thoughts of the person performing linguistic act are much of a principal
unit here.

Example: Bane and Sarah have been dating for the past four years. One fine evening Bane took Sarah to
the most expensive restaurant in town. And he ordered the most expensive wine available in the
restaurant. Then he moved closer to her and asked her that “ will you marry me?”. Sarah burst with
contentment and replied “I will”. Here the “I will” of Sarah express her feelings, attitudes and emotional
towards the context. This utterances have its specific meaning only in relation to it specific context.

Further Austin divides his linguistic act into three different categories. They are,

1. Locutionary act – This is the act of saying something. It has a meaning and it creates an
understandable utterly to convey or express
2. Illocutionary act –  It is performed as an act of saying something or as an act of opposed to
saying something. The illocutionary utterance has a certain force of it. It well well-versed with
certain tones, attitudes, feelings, or emotions. There will be an intention of the speaker or others in
illocutionary utterance. It is often used as a tone of warning in day today life
 3. Perlocutionary act – It normally creates a sense of consequential effects on the audiences. The
effects may be in the form of thoughts, imaginations, feelings or emotions. The effect upon the
addressee is the main charactership of perlocutionary utterances

For example
The locutionary act describes a dangerous situation, the illocutionary act acts as a force of the warning
and perlocutionary acts frighten the addressee.

Austin himself admits that these three components of utterances are not altogether separable.“We must
consider the total situation in which the utterance is issued- the total speech act – if we are to see the
parallel between statements and performative utterance, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed
there is no great distinction between statements and performative utterances.” Austin.

Searle suggested that the basic unit of linguistic communication is speech act. It can be a word, a phrase,
a sentence or a sound, it should fulfil the task of expressing the intention of the user.  Understanding the
user’s intention can lead to complete understanding of the speech act.
 Types of
Ambiguity
 AMBIGUITY is when the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence is
uncertain. There could be more than one meaning.

Typically, it is best to avoid ambiguity in your writing. When you make statements that
are ambiguous, you confuse the reader and hinder the meaning of the text. However,
sometimes ambiguity is used deliberately to add humor to a text.

Types of Ambiguity

1. Potential ambiguity arises when a term or a sentence is ambiguous in and of itself, for example,
before its use in the context of a sentence or paragraph.  Three types of ambiguity are categorised as
potential ambiguity:  lexical, syntactical, and inflective. 

 Lexical Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity is the most commonly known form of ambiguity (Reilly 1991; Walton 1996).  It occurs
when words have more than one meaning as commonly defined and understood.  Considerable potential
ambiguity arises when a word with various meanings is used in a statement of information request.  For
example, "bank" may variously mean the "bank" of a river (noun), to "bank" as related to aeroplane or a
roller-coaster (verb), a savings "bank" (noun), to "bank" money (verb), or a "bank" of computer terminals
(noun) (Turner 1987).  Lexical ambiguity is often reduced or mitigated by the context of the sentence. 

In the case of an information request, lexical ambiguity exists in the statement "A report of our clients for
our marketing brochure mail-out".  The word "report" may have several meanings, independent of its
context.  A gunshot report may echo across the hillside.  A student can report to the lecturer.  A heavy
report can be dropped on the foot.  Although the context may make the meaning clear, the lexical
ambiguity contributes to the overall ambiguity of the statement and increases cognitive effort. 

 Syntactical Ambiguity
Syntactical ambiguity is a structural or grammatical ambiguity of a whole sentence that occurs in a sub-
part of a sentence (Reilly 1991; Walton 1996).  Syntactical ambiguity is a grammatical construct, and
results from the difficulty of applying universal grammatical laws to sentence structure.  An example of
syntactical ambiguity is "Bob hit the man with the stick".  This phrasing is unclear as to whether a man
was hit with a stick, or whether a man with a stick was struck by Bob.  The context can substantially
reduce syntactical ambiguity.  For example, knowing that either Bob, or the man, but not both, had a stick
resolves the syntactical ambiguity. 

Comparing the phrase "Bob hit the man with the stick" to the analogous "Bob hit the man with the scar"
provides some insights.  As a scar is little suited to physical, violent use, the latter formulation clearly
conveys that the man with the scar was struck by Bob (Kooij 1971).

In the case of an information request, syntactical ambiguity exists in the request "A report of poor-paying
clients and client managers.  Determine their effect on our profitability for the last twelve months."  The
request is syntactically ambiguous because the end user can interpret "their" to mean the poor paying
clients, the client managers, or both.  Although the context may reduce or negate the ambiguity,
syntactically the request is ambiguous.

 Inflective Ambiguity
As Walton (1996) notes, inflective ambiguity is a composite ambiguity, containing elements of both
lexical and syntactical ambiguity.  Like syntactical ambiguity, inflective ambiguity is grammatical in
nature.  Inflection arises where a word is used more than once in a sentence or paragraph, but with
different meanings each time (Walton 1996).  An example of inflective ambiguity is to use the word
"scheme" with two different meanings in the fallacious argument, "Bob has devised a scheme to save
costs by recycling paper.  Therefore, Bob is a schemer, and should not be trusted" (Ryle 1971; Walton
1996).  

2. Actual ambiguity refers to ambiguity that occurs in the act of speaking.  It arises when a word or
phrase, without variation either in itself or in the way the word is put forward, has different meanings. 
The statement does not contain adequate information to resolve the ambiguity, resulting in a number of
legitimate interpretations.  Two distinct types of ambiguity are categorised as actual ambiguity: 
pragmatic and extraneous. 

 Pragmatic Ambiguity
Pragmatic ambiguity arises when the statement is not specific, and the context does not provide the
information needed to clarify the statement.  Information is missing, and must be inferred.  An example of
pragmatic ambiguity is the story of King Croesus and the Oracle of Delphi (adapted from Copi and Cohen
1990):

"King Croesus consulted the Oracle of Delphi before warring with Cyrus of Persia.  The Oracle replied
that, "If Croesus went to war with Cyrus, he would destroy a mighty kingdom".  Delighted, Croesus
attacked Persia, and Croesus’ army and kingdom were crushed.  Croesus complained bitterly to the
Oracle’s priests, who replied that the Oracle had been entirely right.  By going to war with Persia,
Croesus had destroyed a mighty kingdom – his own."

Pragmatic ambiguity arises when the statement is not specific, and the context does not provide the
information needed to clarify the statement (Walton 1996).  The information necessary to clearly
understand the message is omitted.  Due to the need to infer the missing information, pragmatically
ambiguous statements have multiple possible interpretations (Walton 1996).  Croesus interpreted the
Oracle’s statement as indicating his success in battle – the response he desired.  As noted by Hamblin
(1970), Croesus’ logical response to the oracular reply would have been to immediately ask the Oracle,
"Which kingdom?"  Further information is needed to resolve pragmatic ambiguity. 

In the case of an information request, pragmatic ambiguity exists in the request for "A report of all the
clients for a department."  The ambiguity is that the request does not refer to a specific department.  The
end user could legitimately prepare a report for any department.  Further information is needed to resolve
this actual ambiguity in this case.

Extraneous Ambiguity
In contrast to pragmatic ambiguity, in which information necessary to clearly understand the message is
omitted, extraneous ambiguity arises from an excess of information.  Clearer communication arises where
the minimally sufficient words needed to convey the message of the statement are used (Fowler and
Aaron 1998).  Where more words are used than necessary, or where unnecessary detail is provided in the
communication that is not part of the message, ambiguity arises.  The excess detail obscures the essential
message and contributes to different emphases or interpretations.

The use of passive voice, vacuous words, or the repetition of phrases with the same meaning all
contribute to lack of clarity (Fowler and Aaron 1998).  The use of clichés and the over-use of figures of
speech add volume to the statement, but add little or no meaning.  Pretentious and indirect writing also
adds to the bulk of the statement, but without adding meaning.  Fowler and Aaron (1998) provide the
following comparative example:

 Pretentious:    To perpetuate our endeavour of providing funds for our elderly citizens as we do at
the present moment, we will face the exigency of enhanced contributions from all our citizens.
 Revised:    We cannot continue to fund Social Security and Medicare for the elderly unless we
raise taxes. 
The extra volume contributes to vagueness in the first statement, and adds to the multiplicity of legitimate
interpretations of the statement.  The first statement exhibits extraneous ambiguity.  The second statement
communicates forcefully and concisely. 

An example of extraneous ambiguity in an information request is "A report of all clients (and their names
and addresses only) for the Tax and Business Services department.  Some of those clients are our biggest
earners, you know".  The last sentence is extraneous, and contains detail that is redundant, uninformative,
or misleading relative to the fundamental message.  In information theoretic terms, extraneous ambiguity
is "noise" in the communication (Axley 1984; Eisenberg and Phillips 1991; Severin and Tankard 1997). 

3. Imaginary ambiguity occurs when a word with a fixed meaning seems to have a different one. 
Imaginary ambiguity derives from the optional interpretation that the recipient of the communication
places on the information received.  Two distinct types of ambiguity can be categorised as imaginary
ambiguity:  emphatic and suggestive. 

 EMPHATIC AMBIGUITY
The question of ambiguity deriving from accent, or emphasis in speaking, is an ancient one (Hamblin
1970).  When a phrasing is rendered in the written form, the verbal emphasis may only be crudely
indicated.  Significant meaning and context is lost.  Rescher (1964) provides the following example of
emphatic ambiguity: 

The intended meaning of the democratic credo "Men were created equal" can be altered by stressing the
word "created" (implying "that’s how men started out, but they are no longer so"). 

The verbal emphasis creates an inference of meaning that is a legitimate interpretation of the phrasing. 
That is, changes in intonation can yield different interpretations. 
In the case of an information request, emphatic ambiguity occurs in the example information request of
"A report of our good clients".  Ambiguity can derive from placing different emphases on the words. 
Depending on the context or on emphasis used, "good clients" could be legitimately interpreted to be
clients that pay on time or clients that have the highest dollar-value sales.  Indeed, with an ironic
emphasis on the word "good", this request could be interpreted as a list of our worst clients – those that do
not pay.  The information necessary to resolve the ambiguity is often difficult to convey using only
printed media. 
  SUGGESTIVE AMBIGUITY
Despite the apparent clarity of the sentence in question, suggestive ambiguity creates diverse implications
and innuendos that can produce different implications (Walton 1996).  Fischer (1970) provides an
example: 

The First Mate of a ship docked in China returned drunk from shore leave, and was unable to write up the
ship’s log.  The displeased Captain completed the log, adding, "The Mate was drunk all day".  The next
day, the now-sober Mate challenged the Captain over the entry, as it would reflect poorly on him.  The
Captain responded that the comment was true, and must stand.  Where upon the mate added to that day’s
log, "The Captain was sober all day".  In reply to the Captain’s challenge, the mate responded "the
comment is true, and must stand" (derived from Trow 1905, pp 14-15). 

The phrase "The Captain was sober all day" contains suggestive ambiguity.  As a further example, the
statement, "The President is now an honest man", is perfectly clear, and yet considerable innuendo exists. 
The fact that the President’s current honesty is worthy of comment implies that the President was
previously dishonest.  

Both phrases are perfectly clear, and, indeed, true.  However, considerable innuendo exists.  The fact that
the Captain’s sobriety, or the President’s honesty, is singled out for special comment implies that such a
state of affairs is unusual (Walton 1996).  The statements are suggestively ambiguous. 

In the case of an information request, an example of this ambiguity is, "A report of the clients of this
accounting practice that have lodged taxation returns in the past five years in accordance with the
requirements of the Australian Taxation Office".  The request for information is quite clear.  By
definition, however, all taxation returns should be lodged in accordance with the Australian Taxation
Office’s requirements.  The extra phrase introduces suggestive ambiguity into the information request by
suggesting that the report will not consist of all taxation clients, because some clients may not have
complied with the Tax Office’s requirements. 

Therefore, understanding language and learning, you considered the role of language in learning and
started out from the assumption that language, and more particularly, linguistic interaction with other
people, is a key aspect of learning. You also began to develop more critical skills, asking questions about
what we actually mean by language and whether it is possible and necessary to separate out one language
from another. In relation to English in particular, you began to question the extent to which new forms of
English or ‘Englishes’ must begin to be recognized alongside more established ones. The growing
discomfort with established notions of language in general and English in particular has been prompted
by well-documented and intensified global interconnectedness in recent years, leading to increased
language contact and a growing number of English-language users. Such real-world phenomena bring
into question what we mean by English and what we mean by language.