28.1 Language Structure
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Consider how we might go about inventing a language. For a spoken language, we would need three building blocks:
- Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language. To say bat, English speakers utter the phonemes b, a, and t. (Phonemes aren’t the same as letters. That also has three phonemes—
th, a, and t.) Linguists surveying nearly 500 languages have identified 869 different phonemes in human speech, but no language uses all of them (Holt, 2002; Maddieson, 1984). English uses about 40; other languages use anywhere from half to more than twice that many. As a general rule, consonant phonemes carry more information than do vowel phonemes. The treth ef thes stetement shed be evedent frem thes bref demenstretien. - Morphemes are the smallest language units that carry meaning. In English, a few morphemes are also phonemes—
the article a, for instance. But most morphemes combine two or more phonemes. Some, like bat or gentle are words. Others— like the prefix pre- in preview or the suffix -ed in adapted—are parts of words. - Grammar is the system of rules that enables us to communicate with one another. Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds (semantics) and in ordering words into sentences (syntax).
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Like life constructed from the genetic code’s simple alphabet, language is complexity built of simplicity. In English, for example, 40 or so phonemes can be combined to form more than 100,000 morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 word forms in the Oxford English Dictionary. Using those words, we can then create an infinite number of sentences, most of which (like this one) are original. I know that you can know why I worry that you think this sentence is starting to get too complex, but that complexity—
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE
- How many morphemes are in the word cats? How many phonemes?
Two morphemes—