Understanding Linguistic Analysis: Grammar, Syntax, and Semantics

Posted on Mar 11, 2025 in Genetics

Linguistic Analysis

Pronunciation

  • Phonetics: Articulation of sounds, audition, perception of sounds, science.
  • Phonology: Sound systems, common sounds, existence/absence of sounds, branch of linguistics.

Grammar

  • Morphology: Word structure, morphemes, word forms (morphosyntactic features affected, no change syntactic category, inflection), lexemes (meaning, syntactic category).
  • Syntax: Constituent structure, steps: identification of constituents, syntactic categories, word order: canonical clause.

Meaning

  • Semantics: Lexicon, lexical semantics: synonymy, acronymy. The sense conventionally assigned to sentences independently of the contexts in which they might be uttered, knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what circumstances it would be true, entailments: knowing the truth of another sentence.
  • Pragmatics: How utterances are interpreted in context, conversational implicatures/requests, literal meaning vs implied meaning.

Interaction

Phonology & grammar (plural, 3rd person sg), Phonology & syntax (have/could have broken, connected speech), phonology & semantics (sip vs zip), semantics & morphology (ex-partner, un-kind), semantics & syntax (nothing doing/doing nothing), syntax & pragmatics (Geoff and I will do it/ me and Geoff will do it).

Prescriptive Grammars

Set of rules and examples dealing with the syntax and word structures of a language. Learning of a language. Description of rules for proper usage, avoidance of mistakes, they aim at improving the speech and writing of speakers & give advice on how they ought to use the language. They make no distinction between STANDARD and NONSTANDARD, FORMAL and INFORMAL, but between CORRECT and INCORRECT. Specialists: editors, teachers.

Descriptive Grammars

Aim at describing usage in a non-judgemental way, systematic study of the grammatical system actually used by speakers. Description of what the language is like – how speakers of a language really speak and write making distinction between STANDARD and NON-STANDARD (no dialect is better than any other), FORMAL and INFORMAL. Specialists: Linguistics. Study the use of our words, phrases, clauses, sentences.

Word, Phrase, and Clause

  • Word:
    • Open-class words (lexical words): nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, adverbs.
    • Closed-class words (grammatical, structure, function words): prepositions, pronouns, determiners, modal auxiliary verbs, non-modal auxiliary verbs (be, have, do), conjunctions.
  • Phrase: Structure: (dependent(s)) + HEAD + (dependent(s)). Obligatory: HEAD. Optional: dependent. Premodifiers: before the head. Postmodifiers: after. Types: NP, VP, AdjP, AdvP, PP.
  • Clause: Subject + predicate.
    • Independent vs Dependent:
      • Independent Clause: main clause (complete in itself).
      • Dependent Clause: subordinate clause (necessarily depending on another element).
    • Finite vs Non-finite.

Types of Sentences

  1. Simple Sentence: Robert phoned Monica yesterday morning. Simple sentences contain only one complete sentence, and no additional subordinate clause. They are quite basic.
  2. Compound Sentence: I wanted to come to the party, but I felt unwell. Compound sentences contain at least two complete sentences (main clauses) joined by: a coordinator (and, but, so, etc), a conjunctive adverb (in addition, on the one hand, nevertheless, etc), or simply a semicolon.
  3. Complex Sentence: I didn’t come to the party because I felt unwell. Complex sentences contain at least one main clause and one subordinate clause. Main clauses are complete sentences and complete ideas, and therefore can stand alone. Subordinate clauses are dependent and cannot stand independently of the main clause. Types of dependent clauses in complex sentences: Adverb, Noun, Adjective.

Definitions

  • Grammar: Whole system and structure of a language usually taken as consisting of syntax & morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also phonology and semantics.
  • Syntax: The part of linguistics that studies sentence structure.
  • Morphology: The study of words, their internal structure and how they are formed.
  • Phrase: Words can be grouped together, but without a subject or a verb. This is called a phrase. Because a phrase has neither a subject nor verb, it can’t form a “predicate”.
  • Clause: Groups of words that have both subject and predicate. Can sometimes act like a sentence.
  • Sentence: Complete sentence has subject and predicate, often composed of +1 clause.