Composed by Kim Huyền – Thanh Thảo – Thành Tài – Văn Tú

1. Language is different from linguistic?

Language is the system of signals that is used to communicate in the

community. Signals are established by signs and conventional meanings. Signals
include speech sounds, gestures, and other forms. For example, when you knock the
door 3 times, other people will know that you want to come in. So, this action is a
signal. Language is arbitrary and conventional. The native speakers know
unconsciously. When they know about the language, they will know the sound
systems, the meaning of word, and the meaning of sentences.

Linguistic is the science of language. If you want to master in language, you

have to study it. When studying linguistic, they know branches that relating to
language such as: phonetic, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics. These branches are about sounds, meaning of words, formation of
words and sentences, etc.

There is a difference between language and linguistic. If you are a native

speaker, you know the native language unconsciously or subconsciously. If you just
learn a language to communicate, you cannot know about the language clearly and
just know how to use. If you want to master a language, you need to study deeply
about linguistic.

2. What are the organs of speech? Why?

Organs of speech are the organs of human body that can be used to produce
sound. We can say that they are part of respiratory and digestive systems.

The first organ is lungs which supply the airstream. Without airstream, we cannot
produce sounds.

The second organ is larynx which is called the voice box. It has 2 vocal cords.
The opening between the vocal cords is called glottis. The larynx is important organ
of speech. When the glottis is half open, the vocal cords vibrate, we have voiced

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sounds. When the glottis is open, the vocal cords do not vibrate, we have voiceless
sounds.

The third organ is pharynx which is the cavity located in the throat
immediately behind the mouth. It has uvular. When the uvular is lowered, the
airstream goes through the nose to make nasal sounds. When the uvula is raised, the
airstream goes through the mouth to make oral sounds.

The fourth organ is oral cavity which is in the mouth. This is where sounds
produced in the larynx are resonated. The size and shape of this resonance chamber
can be changed according to the tongue and the lips.

The final organ is the nasal cavity which is situated on the top of the oral
cavity and is separated from the oral cavity by the palate. It can act as a resonance
chamber.

3. Describe the differences among consonants, vowels, and semi-vowels?

Consonants are speech sounds that they cannot be in isolation and produced
with obstruction to the airstream. For example, /p/ is a consonant, so it cannot
stand alone. When we produce this sound, the airstream goes out with an
obstruction formed by two lips.

Vowels are different from consonants. While consonants cannot be in

isolation, vowels can be in isolation. They are produced without clear obstruction to
the airstream. For example, to produce /i:/, we put the front of tongue high, but
without clear obstruction.

Semi-vowels are sounds that they cannot be in isolation and produced

without clear obstruction of the airstream. When occurring in a word, the must
always be followed directly by a vowel. There are four semi-vowels in English /w, j,
r, h/

4. The importance of transcription in learning language.

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Transcription is a special system of symbols that is used to replace the

sounds, based on the 1-1 relationship between symbols and sounds. This
relationship is always true with no exception.

There are 2 kinds of transcription. They are phonemic transcription and

phonetic transcription. Phonemic transcription is about general sounds, they are
written in / / and are used in low levels of learning language. Phonetic transcription
is about the sounds with diacritics, it is written in [ …] and is used at higher levels of
learning. For example, the word “Ten” can be transcribe into 2 types, phonemic
transcription is /ten/ and phonetic transcription is [thẽn].

Transcription is important in learning languages, especially languages which

are not orthography like English. As English is not orthography, we cannot know
how to pronounce a word exactly when looking at its spelling. That is the reason
why we need to know transcription to pronounce sounds.

5. What are phonemes?

There are 2 definitions of phonemes.

+ A phoneme is the smallest distinctive (contrastive) unit of language.

+ A phoneme is the representative of a class of sounds which are
complementary distribution (phân bố bổ sung = phân bố là điều kiện xuất hiện
= each sound has its own place) or in free variation (biến thể tự do)
6. What are phonological rules?

Rules of phonology are the rules of sound changes

There are 7 rules of phonology.

1/ Assimilation rules: the rule in which one of the sounds becomes fully
or partially similar to the adjoining sound.
Ex: healthy /l+/  [l+]
give me /v+m/  [m+m]

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2/ Dissimilation rules: the rules in which segments change to become

less like a neighboring segment.
Ex: diphthong /f / [p ]
3/ Feature addition rules: In this rule, there is no new feature but there
is only a change in feature value not present in phonemic matrices. The new
sound is just a variant of the original sound and it does not reveal the phonemic
distinction.
Ex: ten /t/  [th]
4/ Segment addition rules: It is inserting a sound segment into a form.
Both consonants and vowels may be inserted in this process.
Ex: box /boks/
When it changes into plural form, we need to add /s/ at the end of the
word. Because the final sound of box is also /s/, it is difficult to produce the
sound /s+s/ in plural form. So adding the vowel /I/ makes the plural formation
easier to perceive.
5/ Segment deletion rules: the rules in which we delete entire phonemic
segment which may be consonants or vowels.
Ex: listen /lis n/ we delete the /t/ sound to perceive easier
6/ Movement rules: the rules in which phonemes are moved from one
place in the string to another. When two segments reserve positions, this process
is known as movement rules.
Ex: ask […sk], but asks […ks]

7/ Schwa rules: the rules in which unstressed vowels become /…/

Ex: I can swim. Since “can” is unstressed, /…/ reduced into the schwa
sound /…/

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Phonological rules provide phonetic information that necessary to change a

general sound (phoneme) into a real sound. Therefore, we can produce sounds
exactly and speak fluently.

These rules are important because there are a lot of sound changes in English.
Firstly, in English words, we have three structures such as consonant-vowel (C-V),
V-C, and C-C. Sound changes occur the most in the structure C-C as consonants have
the definite places of articulation, and we need to change sounds to pronounce
easier. Secondly, in long utterances, English rhythm is stress-timed which leads to
that English sound changes are more common. For example, the sentence ‘I can sing
a song’, we stress two words, namely ‘sing’ and ‘song’, and we have two rhythms in
this utterance, so we need the rules of phonology to pronounce fluently.

7. What are morphemes / words / new words?

Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. It is designated in {}

braces. For example, the word “illegal” has two morphemes because both {il} and
{legal} have meanings. Commonly, there are 2 morphemes including free
morphemes and bound ones. Free morphemes are the ones that can stand alone and
constitute words by themselves. They are able to be content words or function ones.
For instance, boy and gentle are 2 free morphemes. Bound morphemes are the ones
that cannot occur unattached. We have 3 bound morphemes, namely affixes, bound
roots, and contracted forms. For example, morpheme {er} in the word “teacher” is
an affix; the word “audience” has morpheme {audi} that is a bound root.

A word is the smallest meaningful unit which can occur its own in speech and
writing. For example, the noun “beauty” is a word.

New word is a new form of words with new lexical meaning. “Beautiful”, for
instance, is a new word of the word “beauty” because it is formed by adding the
suffix {ful} into the noun “beauty”.

8. Kinds of morpheme according to functions?

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According to functions, in English there are two types of morphemes

including derivational morphemes and inflectional ones. Derivational morphemes
are bound morphemes that add new meanings to an existing word, and form new
words. Derivational morphemes can change the part of speech of words. For
example, the noun “beauty” added a suffix {ful} will form an adjective “beautiful”.
Inflectional morphemes are bound morphemes that create a different form of the
same word. In other words, it has grammatical functions including plural marker -s
(the girls are here), possessive marker ‘s (Tom’s books), third person present
singular marker -s (he likes beer), progressive marker -ing (they are singing), past
tense marker -ed (they wanted apples), past participle marker -en or -ed (she has
eaten dinner), comparative marker -er (he is taller than you), and superlative
marker -est (he is the fastest man).

9. What is a grammatical sentence? Some problems of grammatical

sentences.

A grammatical sentence is a string of words having subjects and predicates,

and conforming to specific patterns determined by the syntactic rules of the
language. For example, “he is tall” is a grammatical sentence because (analyse).

On occasion, a grammatical sentence might be meaningful or meaningless. In

sentence, there are constituents. They have two functions including structural
function and logical or semantic one.

Structural function is based on surface structure. It can be subject, object,

complement, and adjunct. It ensures whether a sentence is grammatical or not.
Logical or semantic function is based on deep structure or semantic roles. It is likely
to be agent, patient, location, theme, and so on. Also, it points out whether a
grammatical sentence is meaningful or not.

There are 3 factors that make a grammatical sentence meaningless. First of

all, this is argument role that refers to the relationship of a constituent with the

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other constituent in the sentence. For example, “the table likes beer” is not
meaningful because the subject “the table” is not an experiencer, so it is not suitable
for the verb “like”. Secondly, semantic features are contradictory. For instance, “the
round table is square” is meaningless since the adjectives “round” and “square” do
not have the same semantic feature, leading to the fact that they never go together.
The final factor is no sense words. If a sentence is formed by words that do not exist
in dictionary, it is definitely meaningless. For example, “twas brilling, and the slithy
toves” is not meaningful because it has some no sense words as “twas”, “brilling”,
slithy”, and “toves”. From three aforementioned factors, a grammatical sentence is
meaningful if it adapts all of those aspects.

10. Constituents – roles in analyzing languages

Constituent is a unit having a name. In words, constituents are morphemes

and words. In sentences, they are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences. There are
2 kinds of constituent: ultimate constituent and immediate one. Ultimate
constituents are the smallest and irreducible ones. Immediate constituents are the
ones that go together to form larger units.

Constituents play a vital role in analyzing language structures.

Firstly, they help us know the formation of words and sentences. When
they can go together to form a larger unit, the structures are correct. The sentence
“She is a beautifully girl”, for example, is incorrect because the adverb “beautifully”
cannot combine with the noun “girl” to form a noun phrase.

Also, it helps us guess the meaning of words and sentences. For instance,
if someone does not know the meaning of the word “happiness”, they can guess
based on the adjective “happy” and the suffix “-ness”.

Finally, it helps us recognize ambiguity. For example, with the word

“unzippable”, there are two ways to divide it into smaller constituents. The first one
is that we can divide it into a prefix “un” and an adjective “zippable”, and the
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adjective “zippable” is formed by two parts “zip” and “able”, so it means that
something can zip. Therefore, “unzippable” is that something cannot zip. Another
way is that it is likely to be divided into a verb “unzip” and a suffix “-able”, and the
verb “unzip” is formed by two parts “un” and “zip”, so it means open. Therefore,
“unzippable” means that something can open. As a result, when we put a constituent
in different groups, we have different meanings.

11. Meaning in language

There are 2 kinds of meaning in language: literal meaning and non-literal

meaning.

* Literal meaning consists of denotative meaning & connotative meaning.

+Denotative meaning is literal and real meaning we can get in

dictionary without context. For example, the literal meaning of “apple” is a
round fruit with firm, white flesh and a green, red, or yellow skin.

+Connotative meaning is figurative meaning made by the society and

culture. It does not appear in the dictionary. For example, the sentence “You
are tight” means “you are not easy to spend money”.

* Non-literal meaning: contains contextual meaning which includes

linguistic and situational context

+Linguistic context: we get the meaning based on another language

factors. Ex: “He is Bill. I like him.” The context makes us understand that
“him” stands for Bill.

+ Situational context: we know all the words but we don’t know the
meaning because we are not in the context. (we can only know when we are
in the context). Ex: “What time is it?” In the situation that a student goes to
school late and the teacher ask this question, it means that “Why are you
late?”

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12. Language is rule-governed, but the rule of language can be broken

by people. Explain.

Language is the system of signals that is used to communicate in the

community, and it is always governed by rules including sounds, meanings of words
and formation of words and sentences. However, rules are able to be broken by
three phenomena. The first phenomenon is anomaly that is the infraction of
semantic features. The sentence “the bachelor is pregnant”, for example, is a
phenomenon in which rules are broken because the semantic feature of the word
“bachelor” is [+male] and [-pregnant], he cannot be pregnant. Another phenomenon
is metaphor that is non-literal interpretation of sentence. We can use a thing to
compare with another thing, correct things, and we can just communicate if we
understand metaphor. The sentence “he is a snake in grass”, for example, seems no
meaning because we do not know what “a snake in grass” is; it means a bad person
since a snake is dangerous. Therefore, this is a phenomenon that rules are broken.
The last one is idioms that are the group of words with the meanings that cannot be
inferred from the meaning of the individual words. The usual semantic rules for
combining meanings do not apply to idioms. We need to learn by heart idioms. For
instance, the idiom “in deep water” means “in difficult and dangerous situation”.

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