Levels of

Linguistic
Analysis
 Language Structure

– Language has a hierarchical structure

– Made up of units
– It has a layered system
– Language can be studied only in an analytical or systematic way
– Based on the different levels, we have therefore different branches of language
study:
- Phonetics
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Discourse
 Phonetics

– Study of the production, transmission and reception of speech sounds

– Studies language at the level of sounds
– How sounds are articulated by the human speech mechanism and received by
the auditory mechanism
– How sounds can be distinguished and characterized by the manner in which
they are produced
– Most basic level of language
 Phonology

– Study of the selection and organization of speech sounds in a language

– Analyses the arrangement of speech sounds of particular languages
– Studies the combination of sounds into organized units of speech, formation of
syllables and larger units
– Describes the sound system of a particular language and the combination and
distribution of sounds that occur in that language
 Morphology

– Study of morphemes- the smallest meaningful units in the language structure

– Looks at how morphemes are organized into words
– Studies the patterns of formation of words
– Deals with the rules of combination of morphemes to form words, as suffixes or
prefixes are attached to single morphemes to form words
– Studies the changes that take place in the structure of words (eg.the morpheme
‘take’ changes into ‘took’ or ‘taken’, signifying a change in tense)
– Morphological changes often involve changes at the level of both sound and
meaning (i.e. phonological and semantic levels)
 Syntax

– Level at which we study how words combine to form phrases, phrases combine
to form clauses and clauses join together to form sentences
– Syntactic study looks for the principles of sentence construction in a language
– Involves therefore the description of the rules of positioning of elements in the
sentence
– Syntax also attempts to describe how the various elements function in a
sentence (their roles)
– Rules of syntax should be comprehensive enough to explain how meaningful
and grammatical sentences are constructed
 Semantics

– Study of meanings
– Attempts to analyse the structure of meaning in a language (how words similar
or different are related)
– Inter-relationships are shown through categories
– Tries to give an account of both word and sentence meaning
– Attempts to analyse and define what is considered to be abstract
– An extension of semantics is pragmatics, which deals with the contextual
aspects of meaning in particular situations by considering utterances made by
speakers
 Discourse

– Study of language chunks- units bigger than a sentence

– At this level we analyse inter-sentential links that form a connected/ cohesive
text
– By studying these elements of cohesion, we can understand how a piece of
connected language can have greater meaning that is more than the sum of the
individual sentences
Thank you