Structure of English
Phonetics | Morphology | Latin and Greek | New Words
Phonemes, Morphemes, Syntax. Meaning
Overview of the study of language. Over the last hundred years Linguistics has progressed by adopting and adapting a variety of structuralist notions, which means that rather than dealing with all the complexity associated with language, linguists have viewed language in terms of different systems: the sound system, the syntax system, and so on. Following this approach, we might start off with the sounds of language and try to define the basic set of sound units (both for English and for all languages) and discover the way in which the sound units combine. Similarly we can look at the units making up words (i.e. morphemes) and ask what patterns we can find in the behaviour of morphemes. We can approach syntax in a similar way. There are drawbacks with this methodology and meaning and context are less amenable to this approach, but linguists have got a lot of mileage out of these notions, which go back to Saussure.
We can study the structure of language in a variety of ways. For example, we can study classes of words (parts of speech), meanings of words, with or without considering changes of meaning (semantics); how words are organised in relation to each other and in larger constructions (syntax); how words are formed from smaller meaningful units (morphology); the sounds of words (perception and pronunciation or articulation); and how they form patterns of knowledge in the speaker's mind (phonetics and phonology); and how standardized written forms represent words (orthography). Since this website is primarily devoted to the exploration of English through its words, the focus in this website is on morphology (word stucture) and other aspects of words, such as etymology, lexical semantic change, word usage, lexical types of words, and words marking specific linguistic varieties.