Understanding the Linguistic Sign: Key Features & Components
The Linguistic Sign: An Inseparable Unit
The linguistic sign is an inseparable unit with two levels:
- Signifier (Expression): Identifiable with the acoustic image.
- Signified (Content): Identified with the concept.
It is further characterized by the following features:
Key Features of the Linguistic Sign
- Arbitrariness: The relationship between signifier and signified is unmotivated, a product of human will.
- Conventionality: Language users accept the signs, whose values have been agreed upon throughout their history.
- Orality: Languages are basically oral. Other forms of expression, such as writing, arise from its oral character.
- Linearity: The linguistic sign is developed in time units that unfold without physical overlap. Messages are always forming a chain.
- Immutability (Synchronous): No speaker can voluntarily change the value of a sign, as this would risk being misunderstood. This feature is a consequence of its diachronic conventionality.
- Mutability (Diachronic): Over time, the signs may change in form and in content.
- Segmentation: It is divisible into units: text, paragraph, sentence, clauses… down to the doubly-articulated phoneme. Any message can be decomposed into minimal meaningful units, monemes.
Sound and Phonetics
Sound: Minimal articulatory unit. When transcribing the sounds of a language, we represent them in brackets (e.g., (b)). Phonetics studies their production, characteristics, organs involved, and so on.
The Phoneme and Phonology
The Phoneme: Minimum unit that distinguishes meaning in a language. It is represented between bars: /b/. Phonology studies its traits, oppositions that are set to produce changes in meaning, and so on.
Suprasegmental Phonological Level
- Pause: Interruption of the phonic chain may differ, for example, in a proposition with a specified explicative adjective.
- Stress: Distinguishes words such as ‘title’, ‘title’, ‘titled’.
- Intonation: Three clearly opposite types: declarative, interrogative, and exclamatory.
Phonic Features of Andalusian Spanish
Vocalic, consonantal (lisp and lisp), aspiration of the initial ‘h’ from Latin etymological origin, yeísmo, spirantization, the phoneme implosive neutralizes liquid, drop intervocalic voiced stops, aspiration final ‘s’, short for other final consonants.
Morphology and Syntax
Morphology involves the analysis of both the form of words and the functions they perform within the sentence. Morphology deals with morphemes and words. Syntax deals with phrases and sentences. The relation of sentences to each other is regulated by syntax.
Lexeme and Morpheme
Lexeme: The moneme that contains the lexical meaning, that is, what refers to extra-linguistic reality (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs).
Morpheme: The moneme with grammatical meaning, that is, meaning that refers to the language itself. Accordingly, we will discuss gender morphemes, number, person, time, etc.
Independent morphemes need not be associated with any other; these are determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections. Dependent morphemes, however, must be associated with another moneme and are classified as:
- Declension: Indicates the genre, number, aspect, mood, etc., depending on whether it is a noun, adjective, verb, or other category.
- Derivation: Affixes are classified depending on their position regarding the lexeme. In this sense, we distinguish prefix, infix, and suffix. Suffixes give rise, along with prefixes, to derived words.