Linguistic structure

Whether it is spoken, written, or signed, every language has structure, which can be described, as Leech notes, by postulating:

(1) rules governing the pronunciation of sounds; the ways that words are

put together; the manner in which phrases, clauses, and sentences

are structured; and, ultimately, the ways that meaning is created;

(2) principles stipulating how the structures that rules create should be

used (e.g. which forms will be polite in which contexts, which forms

will not).

Rules are studied under the rubric of grammar,principles within the province of pragmatics.To understand what is meant by rules and principles, and why they are studied within grammar and pragmatics, consider why a three-year-old child would utter a sentence such as I broked it [ai broυkt It] to his father, who just entered a room that the child was playing in to discover that the child had broken a wheel off a truck that he had been playing with.

To account for why the child uttered I broked it rather than, say, Breaked it I, it is necessary to investigate the linguistic rules the child is using to create the structure that he did. Linguistic rules are different from the rules that people learn in school: “Don’t end sentences with prepositions”; “Don’t begin a sentence with but”; “Don’t split infinitives.” These are prescriptive rulesand are intended to provide guidance to students as they learn to speak and write so-called Standard English. Linguistic rules, in contrast, serve to describe what people know about language: the unconscious knowledge of language they possess that is part of what Noam Chomsky describes as our linguistic competence. Even though the sentence the child uttered does not conform to the rules of Standard English – the past tense form of the verb break is broke, not broked – it provides evidence that the child is aware of the rules of English grammar. He has applied a past tense ending for the verb, spelled -ed in writing, but has not reached a stage of acquisition where he is able to recognize the difference between regular and irregular verb forms.

Rules of grammar operate at various levels:

Phonetics/Phonology: This level focuses on the smallest unit of structure in language, the phoneme. Linguistic rules at this level describe how sounds are pronounced in various contexts. For instance, there is a rule of voicing assimilationin English that stipulates that when a past

tense marker is added to the stem of a verb, the last sound in the stem determines whether the marker is voicedor unvoiced(i.e. whether or not the vocal cords vibrate when the consonant is pronounced). Thus, even though the child uses the wrong past tense form, the past tense marker is pronounced as /t/ because the last sound in the stem, /k/, is unvoiced. Had the stem been kill, which ends in voiced /l/, the past tense marker would have been voiced /d/.

Morphology: The next level of structure is the morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in language. Rules of morphology focus on how words (and parts of words) are structured. At the beginning of the sentence, the child uses the pronoun I rather than me because English has rules of case assignment – pronouns functioning as subject of a sentence take the subjective form(sometimes referred to as the nominative case) rather than the objective form(or accusative case). And because the number of the subject is singular, I is used rather than the plural form we.

Syntax: The largest level of structure is the clause, which can be analyzed into what are called clause functions: subject, predicator, object, complement, and adverbial. The child’s utterance, I broked it, is a main clause– it can stand alone as a sentence, as opposed to a subordinate clause, which has to be part of an independent clause – and can be analyzed as containing a subject (I), a predicator (broked), and a direct object (it). At the level of syntax, there are many rules stipulating how constituents within a clause are grouped. For instance, all languages have constraints on how constituents should be ordered. Because English is an SVO (subject–verb–object) language, the utterance is I broked it rather than I it broked (an SOV word order, found in languages such as Japanese).

Semantics: Because meaning is at the core of human communication, the study of semantics cuts across all of the other levels thus far discussed. At the level of sound, in the words kick /kIk/ and sick /sIk/, the choice of /k/ vs. /s/ results in words with two entirely different meanings. At the level of morphology, placing the prefix un- before the word happy results in a word with an opposite meaning: unhappy. At the level of syntax, the sentence Jose wrote to Carla means something entirely different than Carla wrote to Jose because in English, word order is a crucial key to meaning. But even though meaning is present at all levels of linguistic structure, the study of semantics is typically focused on such topics as the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and the ability of words to refer to points in time or individuals in the external world (deixis). For instance, the verb broked in the child’s utterance has a specific meaning (e.g. the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines break as “to separate into parts with suddenness or violence”), and is marked as occurring during a specific

time (the past, as indicated by the past tense verb ending -ed). The utterance also contains the first person pronoun I, which refers to the speaker (in this case the child), and the pronoun it, which refers to something not in the text but in the context (the wheel on the child’s car).

For many linguists, however, grammar involves the study of linguistic rules that are part of our linguistic competence: the unconscious knowledge of the rules of a language that any fluent speaker possesses.

How language is structured also depends heavily on context: the social contextin which language is used as well as the linguistic context– the larger body of sentences – in which a particular linguistic structure occurs. The study of this facet of language is conducted within the domain of pragmatics, which is concerned less with how grammatical constructions are structured and more with why they have the structure that they do.

Thus, to fully understand the meaning of I broked it, it is useful to see the larger context in which this construction occurred, specifically the father’s response to it:

Child: I broked it.

Father: That’s ok. Let’s see if we can fix it.

Rules and principles also raise issues of grammaticalityand acceptability. A sentence is grammatical if its structure conforms to a rule of grammar. Thus, of the four sentences below, (a)–(c) are grammatical; only (d) is ungrammatical:

(a) I don’t have any money

(b) I have no money.

(d) *Have I don’t money any.

Acceptability judgments will vary from speaker to speaker and reflect the fact that we all have opinions about what we see as good and bad uses of language. Because ain’t is a highly stigmatized word, many people will react very negatively to its usage, judging it as highly unacceptable in any context. Despite this attitude, ain’t is still widely used, and those using it

obviously find it acceptable, at least in some contexts. For instance, ain’t occurs quite commonly in song lyrics: “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,” “Ain’t that a shame,” “There ain’t no mountain high enough, Ain’t no valley low enough, Ain’t no river wide enough.” One could hardly imagine these lyrics being changed: “You aren’t anything but a hound dog.” The distinction between grammaticality and acceptability is important because these notions describe what is possible in language versus what we prefer or do not prefer.

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