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Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering questions such as how, in what way, when, where, to what extent. This is called the adverbial function and may be performed by single words (adverbs) or by multi-word adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses.
A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech, are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five million idiomatic expressions.
In a computer language, a reserved word is a word that cannot be used as an identifier, such as the name of a variable, function, or label – it is "reserved from use". This is a syntactic definition, and a reserved word may have no user-defined meaning.
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.
Morphological derivation, in linguistics, is the process of forming a new word from an existing word, often by adding a prefix or suffix, such as un- or -ness. For example, unhappy and happiness derive from the root word happy.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness" or "burning fire". It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fault of style. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.
In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation or null derivation, is a kind of word formation involving the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form, which is to say, derivation using only zero. For example, the noun green in golf is derived ultimately from the adjective green.
Mbula is an Austronesian language spoken by around 2,500 people on Umboi Island and Sakar Island in the Morobe Province of Papua New Guinea. Its basic word order is subject–verb–object; it has a nominative–accusative case-marking strategy.
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
In linguistics, an adverbial phrase ("AdvP") is a multi-word expression operating adverbially: its syntactic function is to modify other expressions, including verbs, adjectives, adverbs, adverbials, and sentences. Adverbial phrases can be divided into two types: complement adverbs and modifier adverbs. For example, in the sentence She sang very well, the expression very well is an adverbial phrase, as it modifies the verb to sing. More specifically, the adverbial phrase very well contains two adverbs, very and well: while well modifies the verb to convey information about the manner of singing, very is a degree modifier that conveys information about the degree to which the action of singing well was accomplished.
In the field of linguistics, syntactic change is change in the syntactic structure of a natural language.
Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax. Representational theories, in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters.
When analysing the regularities and structure of music as well as the processing of music in the brain, certain findings lead to the question of whether music is based on a syntax that could be compared with linguistic syntax. To get closer to this question it is necessary to have a look at the basic aspects of syntax in language, as language unquestionably presents a complex syntactical system. If music has a matchable syntax, noteworthy equivalents to basic aspects of linguistic syntax have to be found in musical structure. By implication the processing of music in comparison to language could also give information about the structure of music.
Lexicalist hypothesis is a hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky in which he claims that syntactic transformations only can operate on syntactic constituents. The hypothesis states that the system of grammar that assembles words is separate and different from the system of grammar that assembles phrases out of words.
References
- ↑ Liverpool University, UK Reading Shakespeare has dramatic effect on human brain, 18 December 2006
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