IBN TOFAIL UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF LETTERS AND HUMAN SCIENCES

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Introduction to
Linguistics

2019/2020
Contents :

1. What is language

2. What is linguistics

3. Phonetics

4. Phonology

5. Morphology

6. Syntax

7. Semantics
 What Is Language? 3

Given the huge range of forms of communication, it is important

that before we embark on our study of language we have a clear
understanding of what we mean by the term language. Our first
response might be that language relates to communication between
human beings and not to communication between animals, and that
is certainly a useful first step towards a definition. But are applause
in a theatre, an expression of friendship by means of a smile or
attracting somebody's attention by means of a 'cough' any more a
part of language than are the alarm calls of vervet monkeys which
distinguish between snakes, leopards and eagles?
One attempt to define human language was made by the
American linguist Charles F. Hockett (Hockett, 1958). He enumer-
ated a number of features which, he argued, constitute human
language. Other communication systems might exhibit one or more
of these features but only human language has them all. The 'dance'
of the honey-bee which informs other bees about the location of a
source of nectar meets many of the criteria. It meets, for example,
that of interchangeability: any creature that can transmit the
information can also receive such information and vice versa. It
meets that of productivity, the ability to vary a message to reflect
differences in the circumstances concerned; this is clearly necessary
in a case where the source of the nectar may be constantly changing.
The dance does not, however, meet the criterion of cultural
transmission for the bees are acting instinctively, not behaving in a
way that they have learnt from others. This last criterion is
particularly associated with human language for the one stimulates
the other; we acquire our native tongue by cultural transmission and
it is by means of our native tongue that we receive cultural
transmissions, that we learn and adapt. This is the spiral that has
driven human development.
So how, then, might we define the term language? An earlier
American linguist, Edward Sapir, gave a definition in a book
published in 1921 (Sapir, 1921, p. 8). He supported the hypothesis
that language relates to communication between human beings.
Just as Hockett was to associate human language with cultural
transmission, so too Sapir considered that it is 'non-instinctive' and
'voluntarily produced'. Thus for him language does not include
4 An Introduction to Linguistics

such instinctive forms of communication as smiling and cries of

pain. His definition is as follows :

Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of com-

municating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of
voluntarily produced symbols.

He goes on to say that these symbols are, in the first instance,

auditory; thus language is primarily a matter of speech as opposed
to, say, sign language.
The element 'symbols' reflects the fact that there is rarely an
inherent association between a word and the object or concept that
it denotes. Any sequence of sounds can serve to denote an object as
long as the speakers of the language concerned make the same
association; we could just as well denote a dog using the word
perro, the word chien or the word hand, as the Spaniards, the French
and the Dutch have shown. The element 'system' reflects the fact
that language provides us with the framework for generating appro-
priate utterances rather than providing us with an infinite store of
ready-made utterances. We can create utterances never uttered
before; this may possibly be the first time that anyone has ever
written the following: 'An elderly mariner leading a monkey by a
chain staggered into a bank and asked a teller for a glass of whisky
and a banana'!
For comparison we may look at a definition given by a modern
British linguist, David Crystal, who wrote the following (Crystal,
1989, p. 251):

The discussion may be summarized by referring to language as

human vocal noise (or the graphic representation of this noise in
writing) used systematically and conventionally by a community
for purposes of communication.

Thus this definition also proposes communication as the principal

function of language. What it does not do is attempt to specify what
is communicated; as the British linguist John Lyons points out
(Lyons, 1992, p. 3), Sapir was too restrictive in this.
Nor is there any element corresponding to 'non-instinctive'; while
any particular language is culturally transmitted - an infant acquires
 What Is Language? 5

the language of the society in which it grows up, irrespective of the

language of its parents - it is now generally accepted that humans
inherit a predisposition towards acquiring language. Indeed the
modem linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker uses the word
instinct to embody the essence of human language (Pinker, 1994,
p. 18). Whether one considers language to be instinctive or not
depends on precisely what one is talking about. Language is
instinctive in so far as we are all born with a predisposition to speak,
we all acquire a language without tuition and when we speak we do
not consciously convert our thoughts into speech. Language is,
however, non-instinctive in that we can choose what to say or
whether to say anything at all; it is not instinctive in the way that
removing one's hand from a very hot plate is, done before we are
even aware of the situation.
Both definitions refer to the element of system and both allude to
the fact that the association between the words used and the things
that they denote is not inherent, Sapir by using the word symbols and
Crystal by referring to the fact that the association is the result of
convention. Crystal, in referring to vocal noise, is more specific
about the principal way in which the message is physically
transmitted.
While, as R. H. Robins suggests (Robins, 1990, p. 12), there is a
danger of definitions of language being simplistic, it might help us
to focus our study of language if we try to distil a definition. Such a
definition might be something like the following: 'Language is a
form of human communication by means of a system of symbols
principally transmitted by vocal sounds.'

1.3 The Functions of Language

The term communication, then, can be used to cover most of the
function of language. But the function of language is varied. I've got
a knife could imply that it is now only necessary to find a fork before
one can start eating or it could be a warning. Do you have a knife?
could be an offer to lend a knife or a request to borrow one. If the
person we are talking to has been ill we probably want an honest
answer to the question How are you?; if we ask it simply as part of a
greeting we may not want an honest answer. Linguists have
different terms for the different functions of language. In the case of
Howare you? used just to be sociable, for example, they use the term
2 Introduction

l . l | W hat is Linguistics?

Linguistics is all about human language,

“ From a linguist’s vie w p o in t Homo sapiens, that means it is primarily concerned with
the ‘rational' or ‘k n o w in g ’ species, is above the uniquely human capacity to express
all Homo loquens, the ‘talking’ species.” ideas and feelings by voluntarily produced
(Matthews 2003 : 14 ) speech sounds or their equivalents, such
as gestures in sign languages used by deaf
persons. Linguistics can be broadly defined as the scientific study
o f language or o f particular languages. Scholars who systemati­
cally study language usually refer to themselves as linguists. Com­
pare the following definitions from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dic­
tionary o f Current English:

lin-guist / lir jg w is t / noun

1 a person who knows several foreign languages well: She’s an excellent lin­
guist. 0 I’m afraid I’m no linguist (= I find foreign languages difficult).
2 a person who studies languages or linguistics

In this book, we w ill use the term linguist as defined by the second
o f the above dictionary entries. From the point o f view o f linguis­
tics, a linguist does thus not necessarily have to speak many differ­
ent languages fluently, just as a professional geographer does not
have to know the location o f all the rivers, towns and cities in the
world by heart.
Humans in all parts o f the world have been interested in lan­
guage for thousands o f years and have developed a wide variety o f
perspectives in language studies. As a result, linguists today ap­
proach language from a vast and grow ing number o f different
angles or specialise in certain aspects o f language.

1.2 | Branches of Linguistics

Traditional Core The field o f linguistics encompasses a wide range o f “ways” to

Branches study language, which are reflected in the subdivision o f linguistics
into branches (or subfields). Traditionally, linguists identify five
core branches o f linguistics, phonetics (namely the study o f
speech sounds in general), phonology (the study o f the sound sys­
tems o f individual languages), morphology (the study o f the ere-
 B r a n c h e s of L i n g u i s t i c s 3

ation, structure and form o f words), syntax (the study o f structural

units larger than one word, i.e. phrases and sentences), and seman­
tics (the study o f word and sentence meaning). This is also the
order in which these fields appear in Chapter 3 to 6 in this book.
W e w ill thus pursue a bottom-up approach, starting with speech
sounds, i.e. the smallest units o f language, and working our way up
towards larger structures o f language:

Fig. 1.1

branch phonetics phonology morphology syntax semantics

concerned speech sound words and phrases and word and

with sounds in systems of their sentences sentence
general languages components meaning

Traditional core branches o f linguistics (simplified)

These core areas o f linguistic study, however, are not the only Expanding the Core
branches that are subsumed under the umbrella term linguistics. A
number o f branches o f linguistics have appeared in recent years
and decades, o f which pragmatics (the study o f meaning in con­
text) and sociolinguistics (the study o f the relationship between
language and society) have been selected for this book, as they are
among the most dynamic and widely studied subfields o f linguis­
tics today. Many linguists now include both pragmatics and socio­
linguistics when they speak about the core branches o f linguistics.
Similarly to sociolinguistics, which has developed as a result o f More Branches
overlapping interests o f linguistics and sociology, many other
branches o f linguistics have been set up to describe interdiscipli­
nary approaches: for example, anthropological linguistics (anthro­
pology and linguistics), biolinguistics (biology and linguistics), clin­
ical linguistics (medicine and linguistics), computational linguis­
tics (computer science and linguistics), ethnolinguistics (ethnology
and linguistics), philosophical linguistics (philosophy and linguis­
tics) and psycholinguistics (psychology and linguistics), to name
only a few.
The branches o f linguistics we have mentioned so far belong for Different Kinds of
the most part to the traditional core or have developed from the Branches
collaboration o f linguistics and a neighbouring field o f study. W e
4 In tr o d u c tio n

w ill now briefly turn to two examples o f branches that are distin­
guished for other reasons, namely applied linguistics and corpus
linguistics.
Applied linguistics can be broadly defined as the branch o f lin­
guistics that seeks to solve language-related problems in the real
world. Originally, applied linguistics essentially focussed on the rel­
evance o f linguistic study for language teaching, particularly for­
eign language teaching, but has since much expanded its scope.
Other fields o f application now include, for example, the linguistic
analysis o f language disorders and the planning o f national
language policies. Today, the label “applied” in the broader sense
is occasionally even used in combination with other branches
o f linguistics, as in applied psycholinguistics or applied socio­
linguistics.
Corpus linguistics, on the other hand, is not defined by the
possible application o f the results o f linguistic study, but by the
methodology used. A corpus is a collection o f authentic language
material, now frequently in the form o f machine-readable data­
bases. Corpus linguists are interested in actual language use. For
example, linguists can search these corpora for all occurrences o f a
certain linguistic feature and interpret both the number o f occur­
rences as well as the context in which such a feature occurs.
The variety o f approaches and specialisations frequently shows
in differences in terminology. In this book, we will, wherever pos­
sible, use widely accepted terminology that can be found in most
international textbooks o f linguistics. However, it has to be kept in
mind that there is some variation in the use o f linguistic termin­
ology, even among linguists. W e w ill point out some o f the most
important cases o f terminological variation as w e go along.

1.3 | Central Concepts of Linguistics

Ferdinand de Saussure Linguistics at the beginning o f the 21st century is still to a large
extent based on the ideas o f the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saus­
sure (1857-1913), which were responsible for a fundamental
change o f direction o f linguistic study in the early 20th century.
This holds particularly true for linguistics as viewed from a Euro­
pean perspective. Saussure’s ideas were only published after his
death, when some o f his students compiled the Cours de linguistique
 C e n t r a l C o n c e p t s of L i n g u i s t i c s 5

générale (or Course in General Linguistics) from his lecture materials in

1916. Many linguists have since considered Saussure the founder
o f modern linguistics.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) Fig. 1.2

One o f the major changes brought about by Saussure’s ideas is the Synchrony versus
distinction between the study o f languages at a certain point in Diachrony
time called synchrony (or synchronic linguistics), and the study o f
language change over time termed diachrony (or diachronic lin­
guistics, or historical linguistics). Saussure’s call for the primacy
o f synchrony led to a paradigm shift from a predominantly histori­
cal orientation o f linguistics in the 19th
century to a predominantly synchronic
orientation o f linguistics in the 20th and “The object of study in linguistics is not a
21st century. Historical linguistics has not com bination of the w ritten and the spoken
completely ceased to exist, but it is now w ord. The spoken w ord alone constitutes
rather based on systematic synchronic that object.”
descriptions at different points in time (Saussure 1916:24-25)
during the history o f a language.
Another major change was caused by Saussure’s call for the pri- Spoken versus Written
macy o f the spoken word. Most linguistic study in the 19th centu- Language
ry had been concerned with the written form o f language, but
Saussure (1983:24) insisted that “ [t]he sole reason for the existence
o f the latter [i.e. the written form] is to represent the form er [i.e.
the spoken form ]”. This notion is o f fundamental importance to
Saussure’s model o f the linguistic sign (cf. Fig. 1.3).
A further fundamental change o f direction in linguistic study Prescriptivism versus
that is connected with Saussure’s ideas, and the last w e would like Descriptivism
to mention here, is the transition from a prescriptive (or norma­
tive) period o f linguistics to a descriptive approach. Descriptive
linguistics aims to describe the facts o f linguistic usage as they are
 Introduction

in practice, whereas prescriptive linguistics attempts to prescribe

rules o f “correctness”, i.e. to lay down normative rules as to how
language should be used. Since the beginning o f the 20th centuiy,
linguistics has been increasingly critical o f prescriptivism and has
been favouring the approach o f descriptivism.
Structuralism At the heart o f Saussure’s ideas is the focus o f linguistics on the
structure o f the language system shared by members o f a certain
speech community. This is why the Saussurean type o f linguistics
is also referred to as structural linguistics (or structuralist lin­
guistics). The centre o f study is the language system (or langue)
and not the concrete language use by the individual (or parole).
Structural linguistics aims at the description and analysis o f all ele­
ments o f the language system and the relationships that exist
between them. These elements and their interrelationships are
investigated at all structural levels o f linguistics, such as sounds,
words and sentences.
The Linguistic Sign Related to Saussure’s call for the primacy o f the spoken word is
another one o f his groundbreaking contributions to modern lin­
guistics, namely his model o f the linguistic sign. According to
Saussure, the linguistic sign is made up o f two inseparably con­
nected parts, like two sides o f a coin. The linguistic sign consists o f
a sound or usually a sound sequence (or sound pattern), the so-
called signifiant (or signifier), at the level o f expression, and a con­
cept, the so-called signifié (or signified), at the level o f meaning:

Fig. 1.3

Saussure’s model o f meaning concept

the linguistic sign
(signifié/signified)
(adapted from Saus­
sure 1983:67)
sound pattern
expression [tri: (signifiant/s\gn\f\er)

Arbitrariness Saussure emphasises that there is no internal natural link between

the sound shape and the meaning o f the linguistic sign. Neither
does the form o f a word dictate its meaning, nor is the meaning
predictable from the form. This is illustrated by the fact that the
same concept can be referred to by completely different sound pat-
 C e n t r a l C o n c e p t s of L i n g u i s t i c s 7

terns in different languages. For example, the same animal that can
be represented by [dog] in English, is usually referred to as [hunt] in
German and [Jjê] in French. The relationship between the sound
pattern and the concept is thus said to be arbitraiy. The principle
o f arbitrariness o f the linguistic sign states that the connection
between the sound pattern and the concept o f a sign is by conven­
tion only.

| Fig-1.4

m ea ning Arbitrariness o f the

linguistic sign

e xpre ssio n [dog] [hunt] [Jjê]

English German French

There are, however, a small number o f expressions for which the Onomatopoeia
principle o f arbitrariness does not hold completely true. Words
such as boom [bu:m] or bang [baerj] show at least a partial corres­
pondence o f sound pattern and meaning. Such expressions which
include sounds that are similar to the noises they describe are
called onomatopoeic. Onomatopoeia is thus frequently cited as
an exception to the principle o f arbitrariness.
The important influence o f Saussure’s ideas and structuralist Post-Saussurean
linguistic thinking on modern linguistics is essentially undisputed. Developments
However, at least two other influential linguistic schools o f
thought have to be mentioned when we speak about the discipline
o f linguistics since the beginning o f the 20th centuiy.
One o f the other important schools o f thought started to devel­ Functionalism
op around 1930 and is commonly referred to as functionalism (or
Prague School o f functionalism). Functionalism partly continues
structuralist ideas but focuses on the function or functions o f lan­
guage and individual linguistic features. For example, the so-called
organon model o f languages as suggested by Karl Biihler distin­
guishes between three main functions o f language: an expressive
function that allows the addressers to express their own beliefs
and feelings, a representative function that allows us to talk about
the world, and an appellative function that allows the addresser to
make a request or issue a command.
8 I Introduction

Generative Linguistics Since the 1950s, a linguistic school o f thought called generative
linguistics (or: formalism) has become increasingly influential,
particularly in American linguistics. The term generative was intro­
duced by Noam Chomsky in his influential book Syntactic Structures
in 1957. Extremely simplified, we can say that the generative
approach reflects the fact that all speakers o f a language can pro­
duce, or generate, a theoretically unlimited number o f grammati­
cal sentences from a limited number o f means, i.e. words and the
rules for their combination. Chomsky distinguishes between com­
petence, the knowledge w e have o f the language we grow up with,
and performance, the speech we actually produce. Our complete
knowledge o f our native language is often also referred to as our
grammar. Generative linguistics is traditionally most influential
in the subfleld o f syntax (cf. Chapter 5).

Fig. 1-5 | structuralism

Structuralism,
functionalism
functionalism and
formalism (adapted
from Kortmann formalism
2005:32)

1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 I960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Today, structuralism, functionalism and formalism exist side by

side in modern linguistics, as indicated in Fig. 1.5. Additionally, the
interest in historical linguistics has been on the rise since the early
1990s. Historical linguistics now incorporates findings and meth­
ods developed in different branches o f synchronic linguistics, mak­
ing use o f language corpora and forming new subfields such as his­
torical semantics and historical sociolinguistics.
 Chapter IV

PHONETICS
Nanik Mariani

PHONETICS
Imagine that a restaurant manager who has always had trouble with the spelling of
English words places an advertisement for a new SEAGH. You see the advertisement and your
conclusion leads you to ask how he came to form this unfamiliar word. It’s very simple, he says.
Take the first sound of the word SURE, the middle sound of the word DEAD, and the final
sound of the word LAUGH. You will, of course, recognize that this form conveys the
pronunciation usually associated with the word chef. (Yule, 1987: 33)
This tale, however unlikely, may serve as a reminder that the sounds of spoken English
do not match up, a lot of the time, with letters of written English. If we cannot use the letters of
the alphabet in a consistent way to represent the sounds we make, how do we go about
describing the sounds of a language like English? One solution is to produce a separate
alphabet with symbols which represent sounds. Such a set of symbols does exist and is called
the ‘phonetic alphabet’. We will consider how these symbols are used to represent both the
consonant and vowel sounds of English words and what physical aspects of the human vocal
tract are involved in the production of those sounds.
Knowing a language includes knowing the sounds of that language. When you know a
language, you know words in that language, i.e. sound units that are related to specific
meanings. However, the sounds and meanings of words are arbitrary. For the most part, there
is no relationship between the way a word is pronounced (or signed) and its meaning.1
Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, which are known more technically as phones. A
whole chain of activities is involved in communicating meaning by sound. First of all, a speaker
encodes meaning into sounds, which he or she produces using the tongue, lips, and other
articulatory organs. These sounds are transmitted through the air to reach the hearer. Then the
hearer perceives them through auditory processes, finally translating them back into meaning.
There are therefore three aspects to the study of speech sounds:
1. Articulatory phonetics, which is the study of how speech sounds are made or
‘articulated’;
2. Acoustic phonetics, which is the study of how speech sounds are transmitted, deals
with the physical properties of speech as sound waves ‘in the air’, such as intensity,
frequency, and duration;
3. Auditory phonetics (or perceptual), which is the study of how speech sounds are heard,
deals with the perception via the ear, of speech sounds.

Phonetic Alphabet
Spelling, or orthography, does not consistently represent the sounds of language. Spelling,
or orthography, of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented by

1
https://ielanguages.com/what-is-linguistics.html
19 An Introduction to Linguistics
several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the
same vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea.
Some problems with ordinary spelling:
1. The same sound may be represented by many letters or combination of letters:
He – people -key - believe - seize – machine - Caesar
Seas – see - amoe
2. The same letter may represent a variety of sounds:
father village
badly made many
3. A combination of letters may represent a single sound
shoot character Thomas
either physics rough
coat deal
4. A single letter may represent a combination of sounds
xerox
5. Some letters in a word may not be pronounced at all
autumn sword resign pterodactyl
lamb corps psychology write
knot
6. There may be no letter to represent a sound that occurs in a word.
Cute use

In 1888 the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was invented in order to have a
system in which there was a one- to-one correspondence between each sound in language and
each phonetic symbol. Someone who knows the IPA knows how to pronounce any word in any
language.2

Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation

p pill d dill h heal ʌ but

b bill n neal l leaf aj light
m mill s seal r reef ɔj boy
f feel z zeal j you ɪ bit
v veal tʃ chill w witch ɛ bet
θ thigh dʒ Jill i beet ʊ foot
ð thy ʍ which e bait ɔ awe
ʃ shill k kill u boot a bar
ʒ azure g gill o boat ə sofa
t till ŋ ring æ bat aw cow

In this discussion, we just focus on the articulatory phonetics. In the articulatory phonetics,
we investigate how speech sounds are produced using the fairly sophisticated oral equipment
we have. This is related to the manner of articulation. The manner of articulation is “the way the
airstream is affected as it flows from the lungs and out of the mouth and nose”.
We start with the air pushed out by the lungs up through the trachea (the ‘windpipe’) to
the larynx. Inside the larynx are our vocal cord which take two basic positions: (1) When the
vocal cords are spread apart, the air from the lungs passes between them unimpeded. Sounds
produced in this way are described as voiceless. This is to say that “Voiceless sounds are those
produced with the vocal cords apart so the air flows freely through the glottis”; and (2) When the vocal

2
https://ielanguages.com/phonetics.html
20 An Introduction to Linguistics
cord are drawn together, the air from the lungs repeatedly pushes them apart as it passes
through. Creating a vibration. Sounds produced in this way are described as voiced. In other
words, “Voiced sounds are those produced when the vocal cords are together and vibrate as air passes
through.”

We need to know the differences between voiced and voiceless sounds based on the
reasons:

a. The voiced/voiceless distinction is important in English because it helps us distinguish

words like:

Rope [roʊp] / robe [roʊb]

fine [faɪn] /vine/[vaɪn]

seal [si:l] / zeal [zi:l]

b. Some voiceless sounds can be further distinguished as aspirated or unaspirated

aspirated unaspirated

pool [phu:l] spool [spu:l]

tale [thell] stale [stell]

kale [khell] scale [skell]

c. Oral sounds are those produced with the velum raised to prevent air from escaping out
the nose
d. Nasal sounds are those produced with the velum lowered to allow air to escape out the
nose
e. So far we have three ways of classifying sounds based on phonetic features: by voicing,
by place of articulation, and by nasalization
[p] is a voiceless, bilabial, oral sound
[n] is a voiced, alveolar, nasal sound

As examples of this distinction, we can try to saying the words pick and fish, which
have voiceless sounds at the beginning and end. Then say the words big and viz, which have
voiced sounds at the beginning and end. The distinction can also be felt physically if we place a
fingertip gently on the top of our ‘Adam’s apple’ (i.e. part of our larynx) and produce sounds
like Z-Z-Z-Z or V-V-V-V. Since these are voiced sounds, we should be able to feel some
vibration. Keeping our fingertip in the same position, make the sounds S-S-S-S or F-F-F-F. Since
these are voiceless sounds, there should be no vibration. Another trick is to put a finger in each
ear, not too far, and produce the voiced sounds to hear some vibration, whereas no vibration
will be heard if the voiceless sounds are produced in the same manner. See figure 1 below:

21 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Figure 1: Superior view of the larynx.

The first thing it is necessary to state about a sound when providing an articulatory description,
then, is whether it is voiced (the vocal folds are vibrating) or voiceless (there is no vocal fold
vibration)

Consonants
Consonants are sounds produced with some restriction or closure in the vocal tract.
Another one states that consonants are speech sounds produced when air from the lungs is
pushed through the glottis (the opening between the vocal cords) and out the mouth. They are
classified according to voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral sounds, places of articulation and
manners of articulation. We have discussed a little bit about voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral
sounds. The following will discuss consonants from the perspectives of places of articulation.
Once the air has passed through the larynx, it comes up and out through the mouth
and/or the nose. Most consonant sounds are produced by using the tongue and other parts of
the mouth to constrict, in some way, the shape of the oral cavity through which the air is
passing. The terms used to describe many sounds are those which denote the place of
articulation of the sound, that is, the location, inside the mouth, at which the constriction takes
place.
To describe the place of articulation of most consonant sounds, we can start at the front of the
mouth and work back. We can also keep the voiced – voiceless distinction in mind and begin
using the symbols of the phonetic alphabet to denote specific sounds. The symbols will be
enclosed within square brackets [ ].
These are the places where the constrictions and obstructions of air occur.

22 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Source: https://www.mimicmethod.com/ft101/place-of-articulation/

PLACE OF ARTICULATION

The consonants produced based on the place of articulation are:

a. Bilabial: lips together. The bilabial sounds are made by bringing both lips closer together.
There are five such sounds in English: [p] pat, which is voiceless, and [b] bat, [m] mat,
which are voiced. The [w] sound found at the beginning of the way, walk, and the world is
also a bilabial and even [w] where (present only in some dialects).
b. Labiodental: lower lip against front teeth. The labiodental consonants are made with the lower
lip against the upper front teeth. English has two labiodentals, which are in the initial
sounds and the final sounds: [f] which is voiceless, as in fat and [v] which is voiced, as in vat
and [f] in safe and [v] in save
c. Interdental: tongue between teeth. The interdentals are made with the tip of the tongue
between the front teeth. The term Dental is sometimes used to describe a manner of
pronunciation with the tongue tip behind the upper front teeth. There are two interdental
sounds in English: [θ] thigh and [ð] thy. The initial sound of thin and the final sound of bath

interdental is represented by the symbol [ð] and is found in the pronunciation of the initial
sound of thus and the final sound of bathe.
d. Alveolar: tongue near the alveolar ridge on the roof of the mouth (in between teeth and hard
palate). Alveolar consonants are consonant sounds that are produced with the tongue close
to or touching the ridge behind the teeth on the roof of the mouth. The name comes from
alveoli - the sockets of the teeth. The consonant sounds /t/, /n/ and /d/ are all alveolar
consonants. Just behind the upper front teeth, there is a small ridge called the alveolar
ridge. The English alveolar consonants are as follows:

/n/ as in “no” and “man“

/t/ as in “tab” and “rat“
/d/ as in “dip” and “bad“

23 An Introduction to Linguistics
 /s/ as in “suit” and “bus“
/z/ as in “zit” and “jazz“
/l/ as in “luck” and “fully”

e. Palatal – if you let your finger glide back along the roof of your mouth, you will note that
the anterior portion is hard, and the posterior portion is soft. Sounds made with the tongue
near the hard part of the roof of the mouth are called palatal sounds. English makes five
sounds in the region of the hard palate: [ʃ]leash, [ʒ]measure, [tʃ]church, [dʒ] judge, [ǰ]
yes. More precisely, [ʃ,ʒ,tʃ], and [dʒ] are alveopalatal sounds, because they are made in
the area between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate.

f. Velar – the soft part of the roof of the mouth behind the hard palate is called the velum.
Sounds made with the tongue near the velum are said to be velar. There is a voiceless velar
sound, represented by the symbol [k], which occurs not only in kid and kill, but is also the
initial sound in car and cold. Despite the variety in spelling, this [k] sound is both the initial
and final sound in words cook, kick, and coke. The voiced velar sound to be heard at the
beginning of the words like go, gun, and give is represented by [g]. This is also the final
sound in words like bag, mug, and, despite the spelling, plague.

One other voiced velar is represented by the symbol [η]. In English, the sound is normally
written as the two letters ‘ng’ so, the [η] sound is at the end of sing, sang, and, despite the
spelling, tongue. It would occur twice in the form of ringing. Be careful not to be misled by
the spelling – the word bang ends with the [η] sound only. There is no [g] sound in this
word.

g. Glottal – the space between the vocal cord is the glottis. English has two other sounds which
are produced without the active use of the tongue and other parts of the mouth. One is the
sound [h] which occurs at the beginning of having and house, and, for most speakers, as the
first sound in who and whose. This sound is usually described as voiceless glottal. The
‘glottis’ is the space between the vocal cord in the larynx. When the glottis is open, as in the
production of other voiceless sounds, but there is no manipulation of the air passing out
through the mouth, the sound produced is that represented by [h]. When the glottis is
closed completely, very briefly, and then released, the resulting sound is called a glottal
stop. This sound occurs in many dialects of English but does not have a written form in the
Roman alphabet. The symbol used in phonetic transcription is [ʔ]. You can produce this
sound if you try to say the words butter or bottle without pronouncing the –tt- sound in the
middle. In Britain, this sound is considered to be a characteristic aspect of Cockney speech
and, in the United States, of the speech of many New Yorkers.

24 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Figure 2: Sagittal section of the vocal tract (Organ of Speech)

MANNER OF ARTICULATION
Besides stating whether a sound is voiced or voiceless and giving the sound’s point of
articulation, it is necessary to describe its manner of articulation, that is, how the airstreams is
modified by the vocal tract to produce the sound. The manner of articulation of a sound
depends on the degree of closure of the articulators (how close together or far apart they are).
• Stops – stops are made by obstructing the airstreams completely in the oral cavity. Notice that
when you say [p] and [b] your lips are closed together for a moment, stopping the airflow.
[p] and [b] are bilabial stops. [b] is a voiced bilabial stop. [t], [d], [k], and [g] are also stops.
The glottal stop [ʔ] is made by momentarily closing the vocal folds. The expression uh –
oh has a [ʔ] before each vowel. If you stop halfway through uh – oh and hold your
articulators in position for the second half, you should be able to feel yourself making the
glottal stop. (it will feel like a catch in your throat). Nasal consonants are also stops in terms
of their oral articulators. [f]; [v]; [s]; [z]
• Fricatives –
[θ]; [ð];[ ʃ]; [Ʒ] t blocking the airstreams, and having the air push
through the narrow opening. As the air is pushed through, a type of friction is produced and
the resulting sounds are called fricatives. If you put your open hand in front of your mouth
when making these sounds, [f] andʃ] in particular, you should be able to feel the stream of
air being pushed out. A word like fish will begin and end with ‘voiceless fricatives’. The

• Africates – an affricate is made by briefly stopping the airstreams completely and then
releasing the articulators slightly so that friction is produced. (Affricates can be thought of as
25 An Introduction to Linguistics
a combination of a stop and a fricative.) English has only two affricates, [tʃ] and [dʒ,]. [tʃ] is
a combination of [t] and [∫], .

jeep, It is a ‘voiced affricate’.

• Nasals – Most sounds are produced orally, with the velum raised, preventing airflow from
entering the nasal cavity. However, when the velum is lowered and the airflow is allowed to
flow out through the nose to produce [m], [n], and [ŋ], the sounds are described as nasals.
These three sounds are all voiced. Words like morning, knitting, and name begin and end
with nasals.
• Liquids – when a liquid is produced, there is an obstruction formed by the articulators, but it
is not narrow enough to stop the airflow or to cause friction. The [l] in leaf is produced by
resting the tongue on the alveolar ridge with the airstreams escaping around the side of the
tongue. Thus it is called a ‘lateral liquid’. Liquids are usually voiced in English: [l] is a
‘voiced alveolar lateral liquid’. There is a great deal of variation in the ways speakers of
English make r-sounds; most are voiced and articulated in the alveolar region, and a
common type also involves curling the tip of the tongue back behind the alveolar ridge to
make a retroflex sound. For our purposes [r] as in red may be considered a voiced alveolar
retroflex liquid.
• Glides – The sound [w] and [ϳ] are produced very much as transition sounds. They are called
glides, or ‘semi-vowels’. In pronunciation, they are usually produced with the tongue
moving, or ‘gliding’, to or from a position associated with a neighboring vowel sound. They
are both voiced. Glides occur at the beginning of we, wet, you and yes.
We can also use the chart to find a sound with a particular description by essentially
reversing the above procedure. If you wanted to find the voiced palatal fricative, first look in
the fricative row, then under the palatal column, and locate the symbol in the row marked
“voiced”: This is [z].
The chart can also be used to find classes of sounds. For instance, to find all the alveolar, just
read off all the sounds under the alveolar column. Or, to find all the stops, read off all the
sounds in the stop row.
You should familiarize yourself with the chart so that you can easily recognize the phonetic
symbols. Remember that we are talking about sounds and not letters.

26 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Figure 3 : The Consonants of English

ENGLISH VOWELS
While the consonant sounds are mostly articulated via closure or obstruction in the
vocal tract, vowel sounds are produced with a relatively free flow of air. To describe vowel
sounds, we consider the way in which the tongue influences the ‘shape’ through which the
airflow must pass. Because these sounds are not so easily defined in terms of place and manner
of articulation, we use labels which serve to indicate how each vowel sounds in relation to the
others.
Vocal fold vibration is the sound source for vowels. The vocal tract above the glottis acts as a
resonator affecting the sound made by the vocal folds. The shape of this resonator determines
the quality of the vowel – [i] vs [u] vs [a], for example.
There are several ways in which speakers can change the shape of the vocal tract and
thus change vowel quality. They do this by
1. raising or lowering the body of the tongue
2. advancing or retracting the body of the tongue
3. rounding or not rounding the lips
4. making these movements with a tense or a lax gesture
Therefore, when describing a vowel, it is necessary to provide information about these four
aspects of the articulation of the vowel. Refer to the chart in figure 4 as each aspect is discussed.

27 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Figure 4 : The Vowels of English.

leak Luke

lick look
bait alone boat

set luck bought

sat dot

Tongue Height
If we repeat to ourselves the vowel sounds of seat, set, sat – transcribed [i], [ε], [æ] – we
will find that we open our mouth a little wider as we change from [i] to [ε], and then a little
wider still as we change from [ε] to [æ]. These varying degrees of openness correspond to
different degrees of tongue height: high for [i], mid for [ε], and low for [æ].
High vowels like [i] are made with the front of the mouth less open because the tongue

Conversely, low vowels like the [æ] in sat are pronounced with the front of the mouth open and
the tongue lowered. [æ, a], as in cat and cot, are the low vowels of English. Mid vowels like the
[ε] of set are produced with an intermediate tongue height; in English, these mid vowels are
‫כ‬, o] as in bait, bet, but, bought, boat.
In many American dialects, words like caught and cot, or dawn and Don, are
pronounced differently, with an [‫ ]כ‬and [a], respectively. In other American dialects, these
words are pronounced the same. If we pronounce these pairs the same, we probably use the
unrounded vowel [a] in these words. For most speakers of English, however, the vowel [‫]כ‬
appears in words such as hall, ball, and tall.

Tongue Advancement
Beside being held high or mid or low, the tongue can also be pushed forward or pulled
back within the oral cavity. For example, in the high front vowel [i] as in beat, the body of the
tongue is raised and pushed forward so it is just under the hard palate. The high back vowel [u]
of boot, on the other hand, is made by raising the body of the tongue in the back of the mouth,
toward the velum. The tongue is advanced or pushed forward for all the front vowels, [i, I, e, ε,
‫כ‬,

the word another, require neither fronting nor retraction of the tongue.

Lip Rounding
Vowel quality also depends on lip position. When we say the [u] in two, our lips are
‫]כ‬, as
28 An Introduction to Linguistics
in loop, foot, soap, caught. All other vowels in English are unrounded. In the vowel chart, the
rounded vowels are enclosed in a dotted line forming a rectangle.

Tenseness
Vowels that are called tenses have more extreme positions of the tongue or the lips than
vowels that are lax. The production of tense vowels involves bigger changes from a mid central
position in the mouth. On the vowel chart we can clearly see that the distance between the tense
For example,
tense vowels are made with a more extreme tongue gesture to reach the outer peripherals of the
vowel space. What this means is that the tongue position for the tense high front vowel [i] is
higher and fronter than for the lax high front vowel [I]. Lax vowels are not peripheral, on the
outer edge of the possible vowel space. Compare tense [i] in meet with lax [I] in mitt, or tense

also produced wit

We can consider some sample descriptions of English vowels:
• [i], as in beat, is high, front, unrounded, and tense vowel
• [‫]כ‬, as in caught, is mid, back, rounded, and lax vowel
• [a], as in cot, is low, back, unrounded, and lax vowel
•
refer to the same position in the vocal tract but on different dimensions)
• [e], as in cake, is mid, front, unrounded, and tense vowel

29 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Chapter V

PHONOLOGY
Nanik Mariani

Introduction
Both phonetics and phonology study speech sounds. However, phonetics is different
from phonology. Let us try to examine the similarity and difference from one and another,
Phonetics is the term for the description and classification of speech sounds, mainly how
sounds are produced, transmitted and received. A phoneme is the smallest unit in the sound
system of a language; for example, the [t] sound in the word top. Various phonetic alphabets
have been developed to represent the speech sounds in writing through the use of symbols.
Some of these symbols are identical to the Roman letters used in many language alphabets; for
example, [p] and [b]. Other symbols are used on the basis of the Greek alphabet, such as [θ], to
represent the th- sound in thin and thought. Still, others have been specially invented; e.g. [ð]
for the th- sound in the and then. The most widely used phonetic script is the International
Phonetic Alphabet.
Phonology is the term used for the study of the speech sounds used in a particular
language. The distinctive accents that many learners of English have are due to differences
between the phonological system of their language and that of English. From birth, and
possibly before, we learn to recognize and produce the distinctive sounds of our language. We
do not need to give any thought to how to have the lips, tongue, teeth, etc. working together to
produce the desired sounds. The physical structures of parts of the sound system are adapted to
produce native-language sounds.3
Finch (1998: 48) says that almost all introductory books on linguistics have a section on
the sound structure, or Phonology, of English, which aim to tell you how sounds are formed
and what the principal symbols of the international phonetic alphabet are. Phonology, on the
other hand, is essentially the description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds in a
language. It is, in effect, based on theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously
knows about the sound patterns of that language. Because of this theoretical status, phonology
is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the
actual physical articulation of speech sounds. Thus, when we say that the [t] sounds in the
pronunciation of satin and eighth are the same, we are actually saying that in the phonology of
English they would be represented in the same way. In actual speech, these [t] sounds may be
very different. In the first word, the influence of a following nasal sound could result in some
form of nasal release, while, in the second word, the influence of the following [0] sound would
result in a dental articulation of the [t] sound. This distinction between one [t] sound and
another [t] sound can be captured in a detailed, or narrow, phonetic transcription (Yule, 1987 :
44 – 45).
Yule (1987:45) also says that in the phonology of English, this distinction is less
important than the distinction between the [t] sounds in general and, for example, the [d]
3
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/phono.htm

31 An Introduction to Linguistics
sounds or the [b] sounds. Because there are meaningful consequences related to the use of one
rather than the others. These sounds must be distinct meaningful sounds, regardless of which
individual vocal tract is being used to pronounce them, since they are what make the words tie,
die, and buy meaningfully distinct. Considered from this point of view, we can see that
phonology is concerned with the abstract set of sound in a language which allows us to
distinguish meaning in the actual physical sounds we say and hear.

Phonemes, Phones and Allophones

Phonemes is a meaningful distinguished sounds in a language. When we considered the basis
of alphabetic writing, we were actually working with the concept of the phoneme as the single
sound type which came to be represented by a single symbol. It is in this sense that the
phoneme /t/ is described as a sound type, of which all the different spoken versions of [t] are
tokens. Note that slash marks are conventionally used to indicate a phoneme, /t/, an abstract
segment, as opposed to the square brackets, [t], used for each phonetic, or physically produced,
segment.
As essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. We know that there
are two phonemes /f/ and /v/ in English because they are the only basis of the contrast in
meaning between the forms fat and vat, or fine and vine. This contrastive property is the basic
operational test for determining the phonemes which exist in a language. If we substitute one
sound for another in a word and there is a change of meaning, then the two sounds represent
different phonemes. The consonant and vowel charts in Chapter IV can now be seen as
essentially a mapping out of the phonemes of English.
The terms which were used in creating that chart can be considered ‘features’ which
distinguish each phoneme from the next. Thus, /p/ can be characterized as [+voiceless,
+bilabial, +stop] and /k/ as [+voiceless, +velar, +stop]. Since these two sounds share some
features, they are sometimes described as members of a natural class of sounds. The prediction
would be that sounds which have features in common would behave phonologically in some
similar ways. A sound which does not share those features would be expected to behave
differently. For example, /v/ has the features [+voiced, +labiodental, +fricative] and so cannot
be in the same ‘natural class’ as /p/ and /k/. Although other factors will be involved, this
feature-analysis could lead us to suspect that there may be a good phonological reason why
words beginning with / pl- / and / kl- / are common in English, but words beginning with /
vl- / are not. Could it be that there are some definite sets of features required in a sound in
order for it occur word-initially before /l/ and /?/ If so, then we will be on our way to
producing a phonological account of permissible sound sequences in the language.
We have already established that, while a phoneme is an abstract unit of sound, there
can be different phonetic realizations of any phoneme. These phonetic units are technically
described as phones. It has been noted by phoneticians that, in English, there is a difference in
pronunciation of the /i/ sound in words like seed and seen. In the second word, the effect of the
nasal consonant [n] makes the [i] sound nasalized. This nasalization can be represented by a
diacritic over the symbol, [i] in narrow phonetic transcription. So, there are at least two phones,
[i] and [i], used in English to realize a single phoneme. These phonetic variants are technically
known as allophones. The crucial distinction between phonemes and allophones is that
substituting one phoneme for another will result in a word with a different meaning (as well as

32 An Introduction to Linguistics
a different pronunciation), but substituting allophones only results in a different pronunciation
of the same word.
It is possible, of course, for two languages to have the same phones, or phonetic
segments, but to treat them differently. In English, the effect of nasalization on a vowel is
treated as allophonic variation because the nasalized version is not meaningfully contrastive.
In French, however, the pronunciation [me] is used for one word mets, meaning ‘dish’, and [me]
for a different word main, meaning ‘hand’, and [so] for seau, meaning ‘pail’, contrasts with [so]
for son, meaning ‘sound’. Clearly, in these cases, the distinction is phonemic.

Minimal Pairs and Sets

When two words such as pat and bat are identical in form except for a contrast in one
phoneme occurring in the same position. The two words are described as a minimal pair. More
accurately, they would be classified as a minimal pair in the phonology of English since Arabic,
for example, does not have this contrast between the two sounds. Other examples of English
minimal pairs are fan – van, bet – bat, site – side. Such pairs have been used frequently in tests of
English as a second language to determine non-native speakers’ ability to understand the
contrast in meaning resulting from the minimal sound contrast.
When a group of words are differentiated each one from the others by changing one
phoneme (always in the same position), then we have a minimal set. Thus, a minimal set based
on the vowel phonemes of English would include feat, fit, fat, fate, fought, foot, and one based on
consonants could have big, pig, rig, fig, dig, wig.
One insight provided by this type of exercise with phonemes is that we can see that
there are indeed definite patterns to the types of sound combinations permitted in a language.
In English, the minimal set we have just listed does not include forms such as lig or vig. As far
as we know, these are not English words, but they can be viewed as possible English words.
That is, our phonological knowledge of the pattern of sounds in English words would allow us
to treat these forms as acceptable if, at some future time, they came into use. They represent
‘accidental’ gaps in the vocabulary of English. It is, however, no accident that forms such as

phonological rules about the sequence or position of English phonemes.

Assimilation and Elision

The example of vowel nasalization in English which we have just noted is a illustration
of another regular process involving phonemes. When two phonemes occur in sequence and
some aspect of one phoneme is taken or ‘copied’ by the other, the process is known as
assimilation. In terms of the physical production of speech, one might assume that this regular
process is occasioned by ease of articulation in everyday speech. In isolation, we would
probably pronounce /I/ and /æ/ without any nasal quality at all. However, in saying words
like pin and pan, the anticipation of forming the final nasal consonant will make it ‘easier’ to go
into the nasalized articulation in advance and consequently the vowel sounds in these words
will be, in precise transcription, [I] and [æ]. This is very regular feature of English speaker’s
pronunciation. So regular, in fact, that a phonological rule can be stated in the following way:
‘Any vowel becomes nasal whenever it immediately precedes a nasal’.
This type of assimilation process occurs in a variety of different contexts. It is
particularly noticeable in ordinary conversational speech. By itself, you may pronounce the
word can as [kæn], but if you tell someone I can go. The influence of the following velar [g] will
33 An Introduction to Linguistics
almost certainly make the preceding nasal sound come out as [ŋ] (a velar) rather than [n] (an
alveolar). The most commonly observed ‘conversational’ version of the phrase is [aykəŋgo].
Notice that the vowel can has also changed to [ə] from the isolated-word version [æ]. The vowel
sound [ə], called ‘schwa’, is very commonly used in conversational speech when a different
vowel would occur in words spoken in isolation. In many words spoken carefully, the vowel
receives stress, but in the course of ordinary talk, that vowel may no longer receive any stress.
For example, you may pronounce and as [And] in isolation, but in the casual use of the phrase
you and me, you almost certainly say [ən], as in [yuənmi].
Note that in the above example, in the environment of preceding and following nasals,
the [d] sound of and has simply disappeared. The [d] sound is also commonly ‘omitted’ in the
pronunciation of a word like friendship [frεnsIp]. This ‘omission’ of a sound segment which
would be present in the deliberate pronunciation of a word in isolation is technically described
as elision. Word-final /t/ is a common casualty in this process, as in the typical pronunciation
[æspεks] for aspects, or in [himsbi] for he must be. You can, of course, solely and deliberately
pronounce the phrase we asked him, but the process of elision in casual speech is likely to
produce [wiæstim]. Vowels also disappear, as in the middle of [IntrIst], or [kæbnIt] for cabinet .
These two processes of assimilation and elision occur in everyone’s speech and should
not be treated as a form of sloppiness or laziness in speaking. In fact, consistently avoiding the
regular patterns of assimilation and elision used in a language would result in extremely
artificial sounding talk. The point of investigating phonological processes (Only a very small
number of which have been explored here) is not to arrive at a set of rules about how a
language should be pronounced, but to try to come to an understanding of the regularities and
patterns which underline the actual use of sounds in language.

.
..

34 An Introduction to Linguistics
.

Chapter VI

MORPHOLOGY

Nanik Mariani

Introduction
The study of analyzing the expression system of a language which is con- cerned with
the identification of morphemes and the ways in which they are distributed or combined into
longer utterances, is called morphology. This term, which literally means ‘the study of forms’,
was originally used in biology, but, since the mid nineteenth century, has also been used to
describe that type of investigation which analyzes all those basic ‘elements’ which are used in a
language. What we have been describing as ‘elements’ in the form of a linguistic message are
more technically known as mor- phemes.
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies the form of words, changes in words,
and the impact of these changes on the meaning and class of words. Morphology as part of
linguistics that studies the forms of words, and changes in meanings that arise as a result of
changes in word forms. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies word structures,
especially regarding morphemes, which are the smallest units of language. They can be base
words or components that form words, such as affixes.
In morphology, we studied about how to form words based on the existing patterns of
the language and we also studied to recognize the well– form and ill–form based on the
principles of the language, so why in some sources defined that morphology is the study of
word formation or the study of architecture of words. When the study about the history of
words or the origins of words, is called, Etymology and the pursuit of lexicography is divided
into two related disciplines: (a) Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compil- ing, writing
and editing dictionaries, and (b) Theoretical lexicography is the scholary discipline of analyzing
and describing the semantic relation- ship within the lexicon / vocabulary of a language and
developing theo- ries of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries.

Branches of and Approaches to Morphology

The two branches of morphology include the study of the breaking apart (the analytic side)
and the reassembling (the synthetic side) of words; to wit, inflectional morphology concerns the
breaking apart of words into their parts, such as how suffixes make different verb forms. Lexical
word formation, in contrast, concerns the construction of new base words, especially complex
ones that come from multiple morphemes. Lexical word formation is also called lexical
morphology and derivational morphology. A widely recognized approach divides the field into
two domains: lexical or derivational morphology studies the way in which new items of vocabulary
can be built up out of combinations of elements (as in the case of in-describ-able); inflectional
morphology studies the ways words vary in their form in order to express a grammatical contrast
(as in the case of horses, where the ending marks plurality).4

4 https://www.thoughtco.com/morphology-words-term-1691407
35 An Introduction to Linguistics
Morphemes VS Phonemes

A continuous stream of speech can be broken up by the listener (or lin- guist) into
smaller, meaningful parts. A conversation, for example, can be divided into the sentences of the
conversation, which can be divided up further into the words that make up each of the
sentences. It is obvious to most people that a sentence has a meaning, and that each of the
words in it has a meaning as well. Can we go further and divide words into smaller units that
still have meanings?
Many people think not; their immediate intuition is that words are the basic meaningful
elements of a language. This is not the case, however. Many words can be broken down into
still smaller units. Think, for example, of words such as unlucky, unhappy, and unsatisfied. The
un- in each of these words has the same meaning, loosely, that of not, but un is not a word by
itself.
Thus, we have identified units – smaller than the word – that have meanings. These are
called morphemes. Let’s consider the words look, looks, and looked . What about the -s in looks
and the –ed in looked ? These segments can be separated from the mean- ingful unit look, and
although they do not really have an identifiable meaning themselves, each does have a
particular function. The –s is required for agreement with certain subjects (She looked, but not
she look), and the –ed signifies that the action of the verb look has already taken place.
Segments such as these are also considered morphemes. Thus, a morpheme is the smallest
linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical function.
In preceding chapter, we defined that phonemes is the smallest dis- tinguished sound in
a language or the minimal unit in the sound system of a language.
Phonemes and morphemes are the two basic signaling units of lan- guage, which are
universal in that they are always found in any language. Each language has phonemes and
morphemes as its signaling units. For ex- ample, the word ‘fat’ has three smallest distinguished
sound (phonemes): ‘fat’ [fæt] : /f/, /æ/, /t/ and also to the word ‘some’ [s m] : /s/, / /, /m/.
Morphemes, on the other hand, is a minimal unit of meaning or grammatical function.
Let’s clarify this definition with one example. We would say that the word reopened in the
sentence The police reopened the investiga- tion consists of three morphemes. One minimal unit
of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning ‘again’), and a minimal
unit of grammatical function is –ed (indicating past tense). It means that a single word may be
composed of one or more morphemes, such as, other examples below:

- one morpheme : open

Happy
- two morphemes : open + ed = opened
happy + ness = happiness
- three morphemes : re + open + ed = reopened
un + happy + ness = unhappiness
- more than three morphemes : un + desire + able + ity =
undesirability
un + gentle + man + ly + ness = ungentlemanliness
FREE AND BOUND MORPHEMES
As stated above that a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or
grammatical function, we can clarify it with some examples. We would say that the word

36 An Introduction to Linguistics
reopened in the sentence The police reopened the investigation consists of three morphemes. One
minimal unit of meaning is open, another minimal unit of meaning is re- (meaning ‘again’), and
a minimal unit of grammatical function is -ed (indicating past tense). The word tourists also
contains three morphemes. There is one minimal unit of meaning, tour, and another minimal
unit of meaning –ist (meaning ‘person who does something’), and also a minimal unit of
grammatical function -s (indicating plural).
From these two examples, we can make a broad distinction between two types of
morphemes. There are free morphemes, that is, morphemes which can stand by themselves as
single words, e.g. open and tour. There are also bound morphemes, that is, those which cannot
normally stand alone, but which are typically attached to another form, e.g. re-, -ist, -ed, -s. This
last set known as affixes. So all affixes in English are bound morphemes. The free morphemes
can be generally considered as the set of separate English word-forms. When they are used with
bound morphemes, the basic word-form involved is technically known as the stem.

For example :
- Undressed : un- : prefix (bound)
dress : stem (free)
-ed : suffix (bound)
- Carelessness : care : stem (free)
-less : suffix (bound)
-ness : suffix (bound)
It should be noted that this type of description is a partial simplification of the
morphological facts of English. There are a number of English words in which the element
which seems to be the ‘stem’ is not, in fact, a free morpheme. In words like receive, reduce, repeat
we can recognize the bound morpheme re-, but the elements –ceive, -duce and –peat are clearly
not free morphemes. There is still some disagreement over the proper characterization of these
elements and you may encounter a variety of technical terms used to describe them. It may help
to work with a simple distinction between forms like-ceive and –duce as ‘bound stems’ and
forms like dress and care as ‘free stems’.
What we have described as free morphemes fall into two categories. The first category is
that set of ordinary nouns, adjectives and verbs which we think of as the words which carry
the ‘content’ of messages we convey. These free morphemes are called lexical morphemes and
some examples are: girl, woman, house, motorcycle, camel, cat, lion, crocodile, happy, tall, beautiful,
green, sincere, close, watch, teach, ride.
The other group of free morphemes are called functional morphemes. Examples are: and, but,
or, while, because, at, in, near, above, an, the, this, it, we. This set consists largely of the functional
words in the language such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and pronouns.
The set of affixes which fall into the ‘bound’ category can also be divided into two types.
The first type is the derivational morphemes. These are used to make new words in the
language and are often used to make words of a different grammatical category from the stem.
Derivational morphemes can change the meaning or part of speech of a word they attach to.
Thus, the addition of the derivational morpheme –ness changes the adjective kind to the noun
kindness. A list of derivational morphemes will include suffixes such as the –ish in foolish, the –ly
in slowly and the –ment in agreement. It will also include prefixes such as re-, pre-, ex-, dis-, im-,
un- and many more.

37 An Introduction to Linguistics
 The second set of ‘bound morphemes’ contains what are called inflectional morphemes.
These are not used to produce new words in the English language, but rather to indicate aspects
of the grammatical function of a word. Inflectional morphemes are used to show if a word is
plural or singular, if it is past tense or not, and if it is a comparative or possessive form.
Examples of inflectional morphemes at work can be seen in the use of –ed to make jump into the
past tense form jumped. And the use of -s to make the word boy into the plural boys. Other
examples are the –ing, -s, -er, est and –‘s inflections in the phrases Ranny is singing, Patria plays,
She is bigger, the richest woman and Prima’s car. Note that, in English, all inflectional morphemes
are suffixes.
In every word we find that there is at least one free morpheme. In a morphologically
complex word, i.e., one composed of a free morpheme and any number of bound affixes, the
free morpheme is referred to as the stem, root, or base. However, if there is more than one affix
in a word, we cannot say that all of the affixes attach to the stem. Consider the word happenings,
for example. When –ing is added to happen, we note that a new word is derived; it is
morphologically complex, but it is a word. The plural morpheme –s is added onto the word
happening, not the suffix –ing.
In English the derivational morphemes are either prefixes or suffixes, but by chance, the
inflectional morphemes are all suffixes. Of course, this is not the same in other languages. As
mentioned above, there are only eight inflectional morphemes in English. They are listed below,
along with an example of the type of stem each can attach to.

The Inflectional Suffixes of English

Stem Suffix Function Example

Wait -s 3rd per. sing. Present She waits there at noon.

Wait -ed past tense She waited there yesterday.
Wait -ing progressive She is waiting there now.
Eat -en past participle Jack has eaten the Oreos.
Chair -s plural The chairs are in the room.
Chair -‘s possessive The chair’s leg is broken
Fast -er comparative Jill runs faster than Joe.
Fast -est superlative Tim runs fastest of all.

The difference between inflectional and derivational morphemes is sometimes difficult to see at
first. Some characteristics of each are listed below to help make the distinction clearer.

Derivational Morphemes
1. Change the part of speech or the meaning of a word, e.g., -ment added to a verb forms a
noun, judg-ment, re-activate means ‘activate again’.
2. Are not required by syntax. They typically indicate semantic relations within a word, but
no syntactic relations outside the word (compare this with inflectional morphemes point
2 below), e.g., un-kind relates un- ‘not’ to kind but has no particular syntactic connections
outside the word – note that the same word can be used in he is unkind and they are
unkind.
3. Are usually not very productive – derivational morphemes generally are selective about
what they’ll combine with, e.g., the suffix –hood occurs with just a few nouns such as
brother, neighbor, and knight, but not with most others, e.g., friend, daughter, or candle.
38 An Introduction to Linguistics
 4. Typically occur before inflectional suffixes, e.g., govern-ment-s: -ment, a derivational
suffix, precedes –s, an inflectional suffix.
5. May be prefixes or suffixes (in English), e.g., pre-arrange, arrange-ment.

Inflectional Morphemes
1. Do not change meaning or part of speech, e.g., big, bigg-er, bigg-est are all adjectives.
2. Are required by the syntax. They typically indicate syntactic relations between different
words in a sentence , e.g., Nim love-s bananas: -s marks the 3rd person singular present
form of the verb, relating it to the 3rd singular subject Nim.
3. Are very productive. They typically occur with all members of some large class of
morphemes, e.g., the plural morpheme –s occurs with almost all nouns.
4. Occur at the margin of a word, after any derivational morphemes, e.g., ration-al-iz-ation-s
: is inflectional, and appears at the very end of the word.
5. Are suffixes only (in English).

It is useful to make one final distinction between types of morphemes. Some morphemes
have semantic content. That is, they either have some kind of independent, identifiable meaning
or indicate a change in meaning when added to a word. Others serve only to provide
information about grammatical function by relating certain words in a sentence to each other
(see point 2 under inflectional morphemes, above). The former are called content morphemes,
and the latter are called function morphemes. This distinction might at first appear to be the
same as the inflectional and derivational distinction. They do overlap, but not completely. All
derivational morphemes are content morphemes, and all inflectional morphemes are function
morphemes, as you might have surmised. However, some words can be merely function
morphemes. Examples in English of such free morphemes that are also function morphemes are
prepositions, articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.

MORPHS AND ALLOMORPHS

The solution to other problems remains controversial. One way to treat differences in
inflectional morphemes is by proposing variation in morphological realization rules. In order to
do this, we draw an analogy with some processes already noted in phonology (Chapter V). If
we consider ‘phones’ as the actual phonetic realization of ‘phonemes’, then we can propose
morphs as the actual forms used to realize morphemes. Thus, the form cat is a single morph
realizing a lexical morpheme. The form cats consists of two morphs, realizing a lexical
morpheme and an inflectional morpheme (‘plural’). Just as we noted that there were
‘allophones’ of a particular phoneme, then we can recognize allomorphs of a particular
morpheme. Take the morpheme ‘plural’. Note that it can be attached to a number of lexical
morphemes to produce structures like ‘cat + plural’, ‘sheep + plural’, and ‘man + plural’. Now,
the actual forms of the morphs which result from the single morpheme ‘plural’ turn out to be
different. Yet they are all allomorphs of the one morpheme. It has been suggested, for example,
that one allomorph of ‘plural’ is a zero-morph, and the plural form of sheep is actually ‘sheep +
-called ‘irregular’ forms of plurals and past tenses in English are
described as having individual morphological realization rules. Thus, ‘man + plural’ or ‘go +
past’, as analyses at the morpheme level, are realized as men and went at the morph-level.

39 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Chapter VII

SYNTAX
Fatchul Mu’in

Introduction

Syntax refers to "the whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general,
usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also
phonology and semantics.". It includes the syntax, but it's not limited to that. The syntax of a
language is also referred as , "the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences
in a language.", “ the grammatical structure of words and phrases to create coherent sentences.
Syntax is roughly about word order. Grammar has two overlapping meanings: 1.
Everything about how a language works, including syntax as a subset. 2. How words are
inflected, conjugated, declined according to aspect, degree, gender, mood, number, person,
tense, etc. One part of grammar is called Morphology. It has to do with the internal economy of
words. So a word like bookkeepers has four morphemes (book, keep, -er, -s) and is put together
with morphology. The other part is called Syntax. It has to do with the external economy of
words, including word order, agreement; like the sentence For me to call her sister would be a bad
idea and its syntactic transform It would be a bad idea for me to call her sister. That's syntax. English
grammar is mostly syntax.
From the other perspective, the syntax is defined as the study of arrangements of words into
phrases, clauses, and sentences or syntactical constructions. The smallest units of syntax are words.
When two or more words are arranged in a certain way, the result refers to syntactical construction.
In other words, it can be said that a syntactical construction is a construction in which its immediate
constituents (IC-a) are words (or free morphemes). An immediate constituent (IC) refers to a
constituent (or element) that directly form the construction.
As has been mentioned before, the smallest units of syntax are words. Then, words will
be discussed in the following.
Based on one perspective, grammarians classify the words into eight types of parts of
speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition,
conjunction, and interjection. The part of speech indicates how the word functions in meaning
as well as grammatically within the sentence. An individual word can function as more than
one part of speech when used in different circumstances. Understanding parts of speech is
essential for determining the correct definition of a word when using the dictionary.
Meanwhile, structural linguists classify words into two great classes: content and function
words.

Firstly, the parts of speech cover: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition,
conjunction, and interjection. Let us explain them in following:

1. Noun

47 An Introduction to Linguistics
 SYNTAX

0. INTRODUCTION
Syntax is about the study of sentence structure. So let’s define what we mean
by “structure.” Consider the sentence in (1):
1) The student loved his syntax assignments.

Syntax: A Generative Introduction, Third Edition. Andrew Carnie.

© 2013 Andrew Carnie. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
72 Preliminaries

One way to describe this sentence is as a simple linear string of words.

Certainly this is how it is represented on the page. We could describe
the sentence as consisting of the words the, student, loved, his, syntax, and
assignments in that order. As you can probably figure out, if that were all
there was to syntax, you could put down this book here and not bother with
the next fifteen chapters. But that isn’t all there is to syntax. The statement
that sentence (1) consists of a linear string of words misses several important
generalizations about the internal structure of sentences and how
these structures are represented in our minds. In point of fact, we are going
to claim that the words in sentence (1) are grouped into units (called
constituents) and that these constituents are grouped into larger
constituents, and so on until you get a sentence.
Notice that on a purely intuitive level, certain words seem to be closely
related to one another. For example, the word the seems to be tied more to
the meaning of student than it is to loved or syntax. A related intuition can be
seen by looking at the sentences in (2).
2) a) The student loved his phonology readings.
b) The student hated his morphology professor.
Compare these sentences to (1). You’ll see right away that the relationship
between the student and his syntax assignments in (1) and the student and
his phonology readings in (2a) is the same. Similarly, the relation between
the student and his morphology professor in (2b), while of a different kind
(hating instead of loving), is similar: There is one entity (the student) who is
either hating or loving another entity (his syntax assignments, his phonology
readings or his morphology professor). In order to capture these intuitions (the
intuition that certain words are more closely connected than others, and the
intuitions about relationships between words in the sentence), we need a
more complex notion. The notions we use to capture these intuitions are
constituency and hierarchical structure. The idea that the and student are
closely related to one another is captured by the fact
that we treat them as part of a bigger unit that contains them, but not
other words. We have two different ways to represent this bigger unit.
One of them is to put square brackets around units:
3) [the student]
The other is to represent the units with a group of lines in what is called a
tree structure:
4)
the student
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 73

These bigger units are called constituents. An informal definition for

a constituent is given in (5):
5) Constituent: A group of words that function together as a unit.
Constituency is the most important and basic notion in syntactic theory.
Constituents form the backbone of the rest of this book. They capture the
intuitions mentioned above. The “relatedness” is captured by membership
in a constituent. As we will see it also allows us to capture the relationships
between constituents exemplified in (1).
Constituents don’t float out in space. Instead they are embedded one
inside another to form larger and larger constituents. This is hierarchical
structure. Foreshadowing the discussion below a bit, here is the structure
we’ll develop for (1):

6) TP

NP VP

D N V NP
The student loved
D AdjP N
his assignments
A
syntax
This is a typical hierarchical tree structure. The sentence constituent
(represented by the symbol TP) consists of two constituents: a subject noun
phrase (NP) [the student] and a predicate phrase or verb phrase (VP) [loved
his syntax assignments]. The subject NP in turn contains a noun (N) student
and a determiner (or article) (D) the. Similarly the VP contains a verb (V),
and an object NP [his syntax assignments]. The object NP is further broken
down into three bits: a determiner his, an adjective syntax, and a noun
assignments. As you can see this tree has constituents (each represented by
the point where lines come together) that are inside other constituents. This
is hierarchical structure. Hierarchical constituent structure can also be
represented with brackets. Each pair of brackets ([ ]) represents a constituent.
We normally put the label of the constituent on the left member of the pair.
The bracketed diagram for (6) is given in (7):
7) [TP[NP[DThe][Nstudent]][VP[Vloved][NP[Dhis][AdjP[Adjsyntax]][Nassignments]]]].
As you can see, bracketed diagrams are much harder to read, so for the most
part we will use tree diagrams in this book. However, sometimes bracketed
74 Preliminaries

diagrams have their uses, so you should be able to translate back and forth
between trees and bracketed diagrams.

The Psychological Reality of Constituency

In the 1960s, Merrill Garrett and his colleagues showed that constituency
has some reality in the minds of speakers. The researchers developed a
series of experiments that involved placing a click in a neutral place in the
stream of sounds. People tend to perceive these clicks not in the place
where they actually occur, but at the edges of constituents. The italicized
strings of words in the following sentences differ only in how the
constituents are arranged.
i) [In her hope of marrying] An/na was impractical.

ii) [Harry's hope of marrying An/na] was impractical.


Syntactic constituency is marked with square brackets [ ]; the placement

of the click is marked with a slash /. People perceive the click in different
places (marked with a ) in the two sentences, corresponding to the
constituent boundaries – even though the click actually appears in the
same place in each sentence (in the middle of the word Anna).

1. RULES AND TREES

Now we have the tools necessary to develop a simple theory of sentence

structure. We have a notion of constituent, which is a group of words
that functions as a unit, and we have labels (parts of speech) that we can use
to describe the parts of those units. Let’s put the two of these together
and try to develop a description of a possible English sentence. In generative
grammar, generalizations about structure are represented by rules. These
rules are said to “generate” the tree. So if we draw a tree a particular way,
we need a rule to generate that tree. The rules we are going to consider
in this chapter are called phrase structure rules (PSRs) because they generate
the phrase structure tree of a sentence.

1.1 Noun Phrases (NPs)

Let’s start with the constituents we call noun phrases (or NPs) and explore
the range of material that can appear in them. The simplest NPs contain
only a noun (usually a proper noun [+proper], pronoun [+pron], mass noun
[count] or a plural noun [+plural]):
8) a) John b) water c) cats
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 75

Our rule must minimally generate NPs that contain only an N.

The format for PSRs is shown in (9a); we use X, Y, and Z here as variables
to stand for any category. (9b) shows our first pass at an NP rule:
9) a) XP  XYZ

the label “consists of” the elements that make up

for the constituent the constituent
b) NP  N
This rule says that an NP is composed of (written as ) an N. This rule
would generate a tree like (10):
10) NP

N
There are many NPs (e.g., those that are [+count]) that are more complex
than this of course:
11) a) the box
b) his binder
c) that pink fluffy cushion
We must revise our rule to account for the presence of determiners:
12) a) NP  D N
This generates a tree like:
b) NP

D N
the box
Compare the NPs in (8) and (11): You’ll see that determiners are optional.
This being so, we must indicate their optionality in the rule. We do this
with parentheses ( ) around the optional elements:
13) NP  (D) N
Nouns can also be optionally modified by adjectives, so we will need
to revise our rule as in (14) (don’t worry about the “P” in AdjP yet,
we’ll explain that below).
14) a) the big box b) his yellow binder
15) NP  (D) (AdjP) N
76 Preliminaries

Nouns can also take prepositional phrase (PP) modifiers (see below where
we discuss the structure of these constituents), so once again we’ll have to
revise our rule:
16) a) the big box of crayons
b) his yellow binder with the red stripe
17) NP  (D) (AdjP) N (PP)
For concreteness, let’s apply the rule in (17):
18) NP

D AdjP N PP1
the box
big of crayons
The NP constituent in (18) consists of four subconstituents: D, AdjP, N
and PP.
For the moment, we need to make one more major revision to our NP
rule. It turns out that you can have more than one adjective and more
than one PP in an English NP:
19) The [AdjP big] [AdjP yellow] box [PP of cookies] [PP with the pink lid].
In this NP, the noun box is modified by big, yellow, of cookies, and with the pink
lid. The rule must be changed then to account for this. It must allow more
than one adjective and more than one PP modifier. We indicate this with a +,
which means “repeat this category as many times as needed”:
20) NP  (D) (AdjP+) N (PP+)
We will have cause to slightly revise this rule in later sections of this chapter
and later chapters, but for now we can use this rule as a working hypothesis.

You now have enough information to try CPS 1–3.

1.2 Adjective Phrases (AdjPs) and Adverb Phrases (AdvPs)

Consider the following two NPs:
21) a) the big yellow book
b) the very yellow book

1
I’m using a triangle here to obscure the details of the PP and AdjP. Students should
avoid using triangles when drawing trees, as you want to be as explicit as possible.
I use it here only to draw attention to other aspects of the structure.
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 77

On the surface, these two NPs look very similar. They both consist of a
determiner, followed by two modifiers and then a noun. But consider what
modifies what in these NPs. In (21a) big modifies book, as does yellow. In (21b)
on the other hand, only yellow modifies book; very does not modify book
(*very book) – it modifies yellow. On an intuitive level then, the structures of
these two phrases are actually quite different. (21a) has two adjective
constituents that modify the N, whereas (21b) has only one [very yellow].
This constituent is called an adjective phrase (AdjP). The rule for the
adjective phrase is given in (22a):
22) a) AdjP  (AdvP) Adj
b) AdjP

AdvP Adj
yellow
Adv
very
This will give us the following structures for the two NPs in (21):
23) a) NP

D AdjP AdvP N
the book
Adj Adj
big yellow
b) NP

D AdjP N
the book
AdvP Adj
yellow
Adv
very
So despite their surface similarity, these two NPs have radically different
structures. In (23a) the N is modified by two AdjPs, in (23b) by only one.
This leads us to an important restriction on tree structures:
24) Principle of Modification (informal): Modifiers are always attached within
the phrase they modify.
78 Preliminaries

The adverb very modifies yellow, so it is part of the yellow AdjP in (23b).
In (23a) by contrast, big doesn’t modify yellow, it modifies book, so it is
attached directly to the NP containing book.
A very similar rule is used to introduce AdvPs:
25) AdvP  (AdvP) Adv
26) very quickly
27) AdvP

AdvP Adv
quickly
Adv
very
Here is a common mistake to avoid: Notice that the AdvP rule specifies that
its modifier is another AdvP: AdvP  (AdvP) Adv. The rule does NOT say
*AdvP  (Adv) Adv, so you will never get trees of the form shown in (28):
28) AdvP

Adv Adv
Ad

You might find the tree in (27) a little confusing. There are two Advs
and two AdvPs. In order to understand that tree a little better, let’s introduce
a new concept: heads. We’ll spend much more time on heads in chapters 6
and 7, but here’s a first pass: The head of a phrase is the word that gives
the phrase its category. For example, the head of the NP is the N, the head
of a PP is the P, the head of the AdjP is Adj and the head of an AdvP is Adv.
Let’s look first at an adjective phrase (29a) and compare it to a complex AdvP:
29) a) AdjP b) AdvP
head head
AdvP Adj AdvP Adv
head yellow head quickly
Adv Adv
very very
In (29a), the heads should be clear. The adverb very is the head of the adverb
phrase and the adjective yellow is the head of AdjP. In (29b) we have the
same kind of headedness, except both elements are adverbs. Very is the head
of the lower AdvP, and quickly is the head of the higher one. We have two
adverbs, so we have two AdvPs – each has its own head.
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 79

With this in mind, we can explain why the “very” AdvP is embedded
in the AdjP. Above we gave a very informal description of the Principle
of Modification. Let’s try for a more precise version here:
30) Principle of Modification (revised): If an XP (that is, a phrase with some
category X) modifies some head Y, then XP must be a sister to Y (i.e.,
a daughter of YP).
31) AdjP = YP Mother

AdvP = XP Adj = Y

Adv Sisters to each other

The diagram in (31) shows you the relations mentioned in the definition in
(30). If we take the AdjP to be the mother, then its daughters are the AdvP
and the head Adj. Since AdvP and Adj are both daughters of the same
mother, then we say they are sisters. In (30) X and Y are variables that stand
for any category. If one XP (AdvP) modifies some head Y (Adj), then the XP
must be a sister to Y (i.e., the AdvP must be a sister to the head Adj),
meaning they must share a mother. You’ll notice that this relationship is
asymmetric: AdvP modifies Adj, but Adj does not modify AdvP.

You now have enough information to try WBE 1 and GPS 1.

1.3 Prepositional Phrases (PPs)

The next major kind of constituent we consider is the prepositional phrase
(PP). Most PPs take the form of a preposition (the head) followed by an NP:
32) a) [PP to [NP the store]]
b) [PP with [NP an axe]]
c) [PP behind [NP the rubber tree]]
The PP rule appears to be:
33) a) PP  P NP
b) PP

P NP
with
D N
an axe
80 Preliminaries

In the rule we’ve given here, the NP in the PP is obligatory. There may
actually be some evidence for treating the NP in PPs as optional. There is
a class of prepositions, traditionally called particles, that don’t require
a following NP:
34) a) I haven’t seen him before.
b) I blew it up.
c) I threw the garbage out.
If these are prepositions, then it appears as if the NP in the PP rule is
optional:
35) PP  P (NP)
Even though all these particles look similar to prepositions (or are at least
homophonous with them), there is some debate about whether they are
or not. As an exercise you might try to think about the kinds of phenomena
that would distinguish particles from prepositions without NPs.

You now have enough information to try WBE 2 and GPS 2 & 3.

1.4 Verb Phrases (VPs)

Next we have the category headed by the verb: the verb phrase (VP).
Minimally a VP consists of a single verb. This is the case of intransitives
(V[NP __]):
36) a) VP  V
b) Ignacious [VP left].
c) VP

V
left
Verbs may be modified by adverbs (AdvPs), which are, of course, optional:
37) a) Ignacious [VP left quickly].
b) VP  V (AdvP)
c) VP

V AdvP
left
Adv
quickly
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 81

Interestingly, many of these adverbs can appear on either side of the V,

and you can have as many AdvPs as you like:
38) a) Ignacious [VP quickly left].
b) Ignacious [VP [AdvP deliberately] [AdvP always] left [AdvP quietly]
[AdvP early]].
c) VP  (AdvP+) V (AdvP+)
39) VP

AdvP AdvP V AdvP AdvP

left
Adv Adv Adv Adv
deliberately always quietly early
You’ll recall from chapter 2 that there is a subcategory of verbs that can take
an NP object (the transitive V[NP __ NP]); these NPs appear immediately after
the V and before any AdvPs:
40) a) VP  (AdvP+) V (NP) (AdvP+)
b) Bill [VP frequently kissed his mother-in-law].
c) Bill [VP kissed his mother-in-law quietly]. (cf. *Bill [VP kissed quietly his
mother-in-law].)
41) VP

V NP AdvP
kissed
D N A
his mother-in-law quietly
It is also possible to have two NPs in a sentence, for example
with a double object verb like spare (V[NP __ NP NP]). Both these NPs must come
between the verb and any AdvPs:
42) I spared [NP the student] [NP any embarrassment] [AdvP yesterday].
Note that you are allowed to have a maximum of only two argument NPs.
For this reason, we are not going to use the Kleene plus (+) which allows you
to have as many as you like. Instead we are going to simply list both NPs
in the rule:
43) a) VP  (AdvP+) V (NP) (NP) (AdvP+)
82 Preliminaries

b) VP

V NP NP AdvP
spare
D N D N Adv
the student any embarrassment yesterday
Verbs can be modified by PPs as well. These PPs can be arguments as in
ditransitive verbs of the type V[NP __ NP PP] (e.g., the PP argument of the verb
put) or they can be simple modifiers like for a dollar below. These PPs
can appear either after an adverb or before it.
44) a) Bill [VPfrequently got his buckets [PP from the store ] [PP for a dollar]].
b) VP  (AdvP+) V (NP) (NP) (AdvP+) (PP+) (AdvP+)
c) VP

AdvP V NP PP PP
got
Adv D N P NP P NP
frequently his buckets from for
D N D N
the store a dollar
The rule in (44b) is nearly our final VP rule for this chapter; we’ll need to
make one further adjustment to it once we look at the structure of clauses.

You now have enough information to try WBE 3, GPS 4, and CPS 4.

1.5 Clauses
Thus far, we have NPs, VPs, APs, and PPs, and we’ve seen how they can
be hierarchically organized with respect to one another. One thing that we
have not accounted for is the structure of the sentence (or more accurately
clause).2 A clause consists of a subject NP and a VP. The label we use
for clause is TP (which stands for tense phrase).3
45) [TP[NP Bill ] [VP frequently got his buckets from the store for a dollar]].
This can be represented by the rule in (46):

2
We’ll give a proper definition for clause in a later chapter.
3
In other books you might find sentences labeled as S or IP. S and IP are essentially
the same thing as TP. We’ll use TP here since it will make the transition to X-bar
theory (in chapter 6) a little easier.
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 83

46) TP  NP VP
A tree for (45) is given in (47):
47) TP

NP
VP
N
Bill AdvP V NP PP PP
got
Adv D N P NP P NP
frequently his buckets from for
D N D N
the store a dollar
TPs can also include other items, including (unsurprisingly) elements of the
category T, such as modal verbs and auxiliary verbs like those in (48):
48) a) Cedric might crash the longboat.
b) Gustaf has crashed the semi-truck.
It may surprise you that we won’t treat these as verbs. The reason for this
will become clear in later chapters. Note that the T in the TP is optional.
49) TP  NP (T) VP
A tree showing the application of this rule is given in (50):
50) TP

NP T VP
might
N V NP
Cedric crash
D N
the longboat
Clauses don’t always have to stand on their own. There are times when one
clause is embedded inside another:
51) [TP Shawn said [TP he decked the janitor]].
In sentence (51) the clause he decked the janitor lies inside the larger main
clause. Often embedded clauses are introduced by a complementizer
like that or if:
84 Preliminaries

52) [TP Shawn said [CP [C that ] [TP he decked the janitor]]].
We need a special rule to introduce complementizers (C):
53) a) CP  (C) TP
b) TP

NP VP

N V CP
Shawn said
C TP
that
NP VP

N V NP
he decked
D N
the janitor
For the moment we will assume that all embedded clauses are CPs, whether
or not they have a complementizer. We'll show evidence for this in chapter 7.
This means that a sentence like Shawn said he decked the janitor will have a CP
in it even though there is no complementizer that.
54) TP

NP VP

N V CP
Shawn said
TP

NP VP

N V NP
he decked
D N
the janitor
Embedded clauses appear in a variety of positions. In (54),
the embedded clause appears in essentially the same slot as the direct object.
Embedded clauses can also appear in subject position:
 Chapter 3: Constituency, Trees, and Rules 85

55) [TP [CP That he decked the janitor] worried Jeff].

Because of this we are going to have to modify our TP and VP rules to allow
embedded clauses. Syntacticians use curly brackets { } to indicate a choice.
So {NP/CP} means that you are allowed either an NP or a CP but not both.
The modification to the TP rule is relatively straightforward. We simply
allow the choice between an NP and a CP in the initial NP:
56) a) TP  {NP/CP} (T) VP
b) TP

CP VP

C TP V NP
that worried
NP VP N
Jeff
N V NP
he decked
D N
the janitor
 Chapter IX

SEMANTICS

Nanik Mariani

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning; that is, the meaning of words phrase,
and sentences. Many people may have the impression that a word’s meaning is simply its
dictionary definition. A little thought should show, however, that there must be more to
meaning than just this.
It is true that when someone wants to find out what a word means, an easy and
practical way to do it is to look the word up in a dictionary. Most people in our culture accept
dictionaries as providing unquestionably authoritative accounts of the meanings of the words
they define.
The role of dictionaries as authorities on meaning leads many people to feel that the
dictionary definition of a word more accurately represents the word’s meaning than does an
individual speaker’s understanding of the word. However, we must face the fact that a word
means what people use it to mean. A word’s meaning is determined by the people who use
that word, not, ultimately, by a dictionary.
Unlike pragmatics, semantics is a part of grammar proper, the study of the internal
structure of language. (Other areas of grammar are phonology, morphology, and syntax; these
are covered in Chapters 6, 7, 8). Unfortunately, because semantics is the most poorly
understood component of grammar, it can be one of the most difficult areas of linguistics to
study. The fact is that no one has yet developed a comprehensive, authoritative theory of
linguistic meaning. Nonetheless, we can discuss some of the phenomena that have been
thought to fall within the domain of semantics and some of the theories that have been
developed to explain them. It is important to keep in mind, however, that much of what
follows is tentative and subject to a great deal of debate.
Let’s first consider some observations we can make about the meaning of words and
sentences.
(1) The word fly has more than one meaning in English. The word moth does not.
(2) The word hide can mean the same thing as conceal.
(3) The meaning of the word fear includes the meaning of the word emotion, but not vice
versa.
(4) The words sister and niece seem to be closer in meaning than the words sister and girl.
(5) In the sentence Monica believes that she is genius. She refers either to Monica or to someone
else. However, in the sentence Monica believes herself to be a genius. Herself can refer only
to Monica.

63 An Introduction to Linguistics
(6) If someone were to ask you to name a bird, you would probably think of a robin before
you would think of an ostrich.
(7) The sentences A colorless gas is blue and Oxygen is blue are both false, but they are false for
different reasons.
(8) The sentence John’s wife is six feet tall is neither true nor false, if John does not have a wife,

The observations in (1 – 8) are all essentially semantic in nature. That is, they have to
do with the meaning of words and sentences. As is standard procedure in linguistics, we will
assume that these phenomena are systematic; that is, they are rule-governed. What we will try
to do now is construct a set of categories and principles that will at least partially explain
these phenomena. Keep in mind that what follows is a (partial) theory designed to account for
the observations in (1 – 8). It may eventually be replaced by other theories, but it is the best we
have, given the present.

Meaning
Long before linguistics existed as a discipline, thinkers were speculating about the
nature of meaning. For thousands of years, this question has been considered central to
philosophy. More recently, it has come to be important in psychology as well. Contributions
to semantics have come from a diverse group of scholars, ranging from Plato and Aristotle in
ancient Greece to Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century. Our goal in this section will be to
consider in a very general way what this research has revealed about the meanings of words
and sentences in human language.
The basic repository of meaning within the grammar is the lexicon, which provides the
information about the meaning of individual words relevant to the interpretation of
sentences. We know very little about the nature of this type of meaning or how it should be
represented. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to review briefly some of the better-known
proposals and their attendant problems.
So as mentioned before that Semantics and Pragmatics are concerned with aspects of
meaning in language. Generally, work in semantics deals with the description of word-and
sentence-meaning, and, in pragmatics deals with the characterization of speaker-meaning.

Neither God nor Humpty Dumpty

Before we investigate these two areas, we should be clear about what aspects of ‘meaning’ we
are discussing. We cannot assume that there is some God-given, meaningful connection
between a word in a language and an object in the world. It cannot be the case that we know
the meaning of the word chair, for example, because this label has some natural, ‘God-given’
connection to the object you are sitting on. In order to hold that view, you would be forced to
claim that God is an English speaker and that labels such as chaise (French), Stuhl (German),
and sedia (Italian) are, in some senses, ‘unnatural’ ways of referring to the same object.
Instead, a more reasonable approach would lead us to see the word chair as a term which is

64 An Introduction to Linguistics
arbitrary (that is, has no natural connection to the object), but which is conventionally used by
English speakers when they wish to refer to that type of object that we sit on.
This notion of the meaning of words being based on a convention within the language
should also lead us to avoid the view of word-meaning expressed by Humpty Dumpty in
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone. “It means what I
choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
If applied generally, this suggestions is surely a recipe for chaos in human language.
Could one really say That melon is blue and choose it to mean ‘That chair is comfortable’? It
might work in some rather special, probably humorous, situation, but the notion that we can
make words mean whatever we personally choose them to mean cannot be a general feature
of linguistic meaning.

Reference
The study of reference, like the study of sense, can be divided into two areas: speaker-
reference and linguistic-reference. Speaker-reference is what the speaker is referring to by
using some linguistic expression. For example, if I utter the sentence Here comes President
Reagan, factiously, to refer to a big lady coming down the sidewalk, then the speaker-reference
of the expression President Reagan is the big lady. Speaker-reference, because it varies
according to speaker and context, is outside the domain of semantics; instead it is part of
pragmatics. Linguistic-reference, on the other hand, is the systematic denotation of some
linguistic expression as part of a language. For example, the linguistic expression President
Reagan in the sentence Here comes President Reagan refers in fact to the public figure Ronald
Reagan. Linguistic-reference, in contrast to speaker-reference, is within the domain of
semantics, since it deals with reference that is a systematic function of the language itself,
rather than of the speaker and context. Let’s now consider some concepts that seem to be
useful in thinking and talking about reference (referent, extension, prototype, and
stereotype); then we will take a look at some different types of linguistic reference
(coreference, anaphora, and deixis).

Referent
One well-known approach to semantics attempts to equate a word’s meaning with the
entities to which it refers – it referents. According to this theory, the meaning of the word dog
corresponds to the set of entities (dogs) that it picks out in the real world. Although not
inherently implausible, this idea encounters certain serious difficulties. For one thing, there is
a problem with words such as unicorn and dragon, which have no referents in the real world
even though they are far from meaningless. A problem of a different sort arises with
expressions such as the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the leader of the Conservative Party,
both of which refer (in 1989 at least) to Margaret Thatcher. Although these two expressions
may have the same referent, we would not say that they mean the same thing. No one would

65 An Introduction to Linguistics
maintain that the phrase Prime Minister of Great Britain could be defined as ‘the leader of the
Conservative Party’ or vice versa.

Extension and Intension

The impossibility of equating a word’s meaning with its referents has led to a
distinction between extension and intension. Whereas a word’s extension corresponds to the
set of entities that it picks out in the world, its intension corresponds to its inherent sense, the
concepts that it evokes. Some examples are given in Table 9.1.

Table 9.1: Extension versus intension

Phrase Extension Intension
Prime Minister of Great Margaret Thatcher Leader of the majority
Britain party in Parliament
World Series champions L.A. Dodgers Winners of the baseball
(1988) championship
Capital of Sacramento City containing the state
California legislature

Thus, the extension of woman would be a set of real word entities (women) while its
intension world involve notions like ‘female’ and ‘human’. Similarly, the phrase Prime
Minister of Great Britain would have as its extension an individual (‘Margaret Thatcher’), but
its intension would involve the concept ‘leader of the majority party in Parliament’. The
distinction between a word’s intension and its extension does not allow us to resolve the
question of meaning. It simply permits us to pose it in a new way; what is the nature of a
word’s inherent sense or intension?

 Prototype
A “typical” member of the extension of a referring expression is a prototype of the
expression. For example, a robin or a bluebird might be a prototype of bird; a pelican or an
ostrich, since each is somewhat a typical, would not be.

 Stereotype
A list of characteristics describing a prototype is said to be a stereotype. For example, the
stereotype of bird might be something like: has two legs and two wings, has feathers, is
about six to eight inches from head to tail, makes a chirping noise, lays eggs, builds nests,
and so on.

 Coreference
Two linguistics expressions that have the same extra linguistic referent are said to
be coreferential. Consider, for example, the sentence The Earth is third planet from the Sun.
The expressions The Earth and the third planet from the Sun are coreferential because they

66 An Introduction to Linguistics
 both refer to the same extralinguistic object, namely the heavenly body that we are
spinning around on right now. Note, however, that the expressions the Earth and the third
planet from the Sun do not “mean” the same thing. Suppose, for example, a new planet
were discovered between Mercury (now the first planet from the Sun) and Venus (now the
second planet from the Sun). If so, then the Earth would become the fourth planet from the
Sun, and Venus would become the third. Thus, the linguistic expressions the Earth and the
fourth planet from the Sun would become coreferential. Note, moreover, that if we were to
claim that these two expressions “mean” the same thing, then we should be able to
substitute the third planet from the Sun for the Earth in a sentence like The Earth is the fourth
planet from the Sun, assuming of course, our discovery of a new planet between Mercury
and Venus. This substitution procedure would give us the third planet from the Sun is the
fourth planet from the Sun. (Recall that an asterisk indicates an unacceptable form). As this
example illustrates quite clearly, the fact is that the Earth and the third planet from the Sun
each have separate meanings in English, even though they now happen to be coreferential.
This notion that coreference is distinct from meaning is slippery, so let’s look at
another example. Consider the following questions: (a) Does a likeness of Andrew Jackson
appear on a $20 bill?; (b) Does a likeness of the seventh president of the United States appear on a
$20? The fact is that Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. Thus,
Andrew Jackson and the seventh president of the United States are coreferential. However, if
the two expressions had the same “meaning”, then it would be impossible to explain the
fact that there are fluent speakers of English who can answer question (a) correctly, but not
question (b).

 Anaphora
A linguistic expression that refers to another linguistic expression is said to be
anaphoric or an anaphor. Consider the sentence Mary wants to play whoever thinks himself
capable of beating her. In this sentence the linguistic expression himself necessarily refers to
whoever, thus himself is being used anaphorically in this case. Note, moreover, that it would
be inaccurate to claim that whoever and himself are coreferential (i.e. that they have the
same extralinguistic referent). This is because there may in fact not be anyone who thinks
himself of capable of beating Mary, that is, there may not be any extralinguistic referent for
whoever and himself.
It is common, however, for coreference and anaphora to coincide. Consider, for example,
the sentence Roger Mudd thinks that President Reagan believes himself to be invincible. The
expressions President Reagan and Himself are coreferential since they refer to the same
extralinguistic object, namely Ronald Reagan. At the same time, himself is an anaphora
since it necessarily refers to the expression President Reagan. Note that there is no reading of
this sentence such that himself can be constructed as referring to the expression Roger
Mudd. In sum, coreference deals with the relation of a linguistic expression to some entity
in the real world, past, present, or future; anaphora deals with the relation between two
linguistic expressions.

67 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Deixis
An expression that has one meaning but refers to different entities as the
extralinguistics context change every 24 hours. If, on November 28, 1946, X says to Y: I’ll see
you tomorrow, then the referent for tomorrow is November 299, 1946. If, on the other hand, X
says the same thing to Y on June 6, 1965, then the referent for tomorrow is June 7, 1965; and
so on. Among the most interesting deictic expressions in English are the personal
pronouns: I, me, you, he, him, and so on. If, for example, I say to my cat Midnight Muffaletta.
I see you, then I refers to the writer and you refers to Midnight Muffaletta. If, however,
President Reagan says to the same thing to his wife, then I refers to Ronald Reagan, and
you refers to Nancy Reagan; and so on. In other words, deictic expressions have a
“pointing” function; the point to entities within the context of the utterance.
Note, however, that anaphora and deixis can intersect. Consider, for example, the
sentence President Reagan believes that he is invicible. The expression he can refer either to the
expression President Reagan or to some other male in the context of the utterance. When, as
in the first case, a pronoun refers to another linguistic expression, it is used anaphorically;
when, as in the second case, it refers to some entity in the extralinguistic context, it is used
deictically.

Semantic Features
Still another approach to meaning tries to equate a word’s intension with an abstract
concept consisting of smaller components called semantic features. So, how would a
semantic approach help us to understand something about the nature of language? One way
it might be helpful would be as a means of accounting for the ‘oddness’ we experience when
we read ‘English’ sentences such as the following:
The hamburger ate the man
My cat studied linguistics
A table was listening to some music
Notice that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their syntactic structure.
According to some basic syntactic rules for forming English sentences (such as those
presented in syntax), we have well-structured sentences:
The hamburger ate the man
NP V NP

This sentence is syntactically good, but semantically odd. Since the sentence The man
ate the hamburger is perfectly acceptable, what is the source of the oddness we experience?
One answer may relate to the components of the conceptual meaning of the noun hamburger
which differ significantly from those of the noun man, especially when those nouns are used
as subjects of the verb ate. The kinds of nouns which can be subjects of the verb ate must
denote entities which are capable of ‘eating’. The noun hamburger does not have this property
(and man does), hence the oddness of the first sentence above.

68 An Introduction to Linguistics
 We can, in fact, make this observation more generally applicable by trying to
determine the crucial component of meaning which a noun must have in order to be used as
the subject of the verb ate. Such a component may be as general as ‘animate being’. We can
then take this component and use it to describe part of the meaning of words as either
+animate (= denotes an animate being) or –animate (= does not denote an animate being).
This procedure is a means of analyzing meaning in terms of semantic features.
Features such as +animate, -animate; +human, -human; +male, -male, for example, can be treated
as the basic features involved in differentiating the meanings of each word in the language
from every other word. If you were asked to give the crucial distinguishing features of the
meanings of this set of English words (table, cow, girl, woman, boy, man), you could do so by
means of the following diagram:
Table cow girl woman boy man
Animate - + + + + +
Human - - + + + +
Male - - - - + +
Adult - + - + - +

From a feature analysis like this, you can say that at least part of the basic meaning of the
word boy in English involves the components ( +human, +male, -adult ). You can also
characterize that feature which is crucially required in a noun in order for it to appear as the
subject of a verb, supplementing the syntactic analysis with semantic features:

The is reading a book

N ( +human )

This approach then gives us the ability to predict what nouns would make the above sentence
semantically odd. Examples would be table, or tree, or dog, because they all have the feature ( -
human ).

Lexical relations
The approach which has just been outlined is not without problems. For many words in a
language it may not be so easy to come up with neat components of meaning. If you try to
think of which components or features you would use to distinguish the nouns advice, threat
and warning, for example, you will have some idea of the scope of the problem. Part of the
problem seems to be that the approach involves a view of words in a language as some sort of
‘containers’, carrying meaning-components. Of course, this is not the only way in which we
can think of the meaning of words in our language. If you were asked to give the meaning of
the word conceal, for example, you might simply reply “it’s the same as hide”, or give the
meaning of shallow as “the opposite of deep” , or the meaning of daffodil as “it’s a kind of
flower”. In doing so, you are not characterizing the meaning of a word in terms of its
component features, but in terms of its relationship to other words. This procedure has also

69 An Introduction to Linguistics
been used in the semantic description of languages and is treated as the analysis of lexical
relations. The types of lexical relations which are usually appealed to are defined and
exemplified in the following sections.

 Synonymy
Synonyms are two or more forms, with very closely related meanings, which are often, but
not always, intersubstitutable in sentences. Examples of synonyms are the pairs broad –
wide, hide – conceal, almost – nearly, cab – taxi, liberty – freedom, answer – reply.
It should be noted that the idea of ‘sameness of meaning’ used in discussing synonymy is
not necessarily ‘total sameness’. There are many occasions when one word is appropriate
in a sentence, but its synonym would be odd. For example, whereas the word answer fits in
this sentence: Karen had only one answer correct on the test, its near-synonym, reply, would
sound odd.

 Antonymy
Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms, and commonly used examples
are the pairs quick – slow, big – small, long – short, old – young, above – below, male – female,
alive – dead.
Antonyms are usually divided into two types, those which are ‘gradable’, and those which
are ‘non – gradable’. Gradable antonyms are pairs that describe opposite ends of a
continuous scale, such as the pair big – small, can be used in comparative constructions
bigger than – smaller than, and the negative of one member of the pair does not necessarily
imply the other. For example, if you say that dog is not old, you do not have to mean that dog
is young. Another example is hot and cold. Not everything that can be hot or cold is, in fact,
either hot or cold. A liquid, for example, may be neither hot nor cold; it can be in between,
say, warm or cool. These antonyms do not constitute contradiction but contrary
relationships. Non-gradable antonyms, on the other hand, which also called
‘complementary pairs’ or Binary antonyms, are pairs that exhaust all possibilities along
some scale. Dead and alive are examples of binary antonyms. This is the familiar
relationship of contradiction, where something and its negation concur. Dead and alive
constitute a contradiction, because dead means not alive. There is no middle ground
between the two. All men, for example, are either dead or alive. Non-gradable antonyms or
binary antonyms can also say that comparative constructions are not normally used (the
expressions deader or more dead sound strange), and the negative of one member does
imply the other. For example, that person is not dead does indeed mean that person is alive.

 Hyponymy
When the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of another, the relationship is
described as hyponymy, and some typical example pairs are daffodil – flower, dog – animal,
poodle – dog, carrot – vegetable, banyan – tree. The concept of ‘inclusion’ involved here is the

70 An Introduction to Linguistics
 idea that if any object is a daffodil, then it is necessarily a flower, so the meaning of flower is
‘included’ in the meaning of daffodil. Or, daffodil is a hyponym of flower.
When we consider hyponymous relations, we are essentially looking at the meaning of
words in some type of hierarchical relationship. You could, in fact, represent the
relationships between a set of words such as animal, ant, asp, banyan, carrot, cockroach,
creature, daffodil, dog, flower, horse, insect, living things, pine, plant, snake, tree and vegetable as a
hierarchical diagram in the following way:

Figure 9.1: Illustration of hyponymy

Living things

Creature plant

animal insect vegetable flower tree

horse dog snake cockroach ant carrot daffodil banyan pine

asp

From this diagram, we can say that ‘horse is a hyponym of animal’ or that ‘ant is a hyponym of
insect’. We can also say that two or more terms which share the same superordinate (higher
up) terms are co-hyponyms. So, horse and dog are co-hyponyms, and the superordinate term
is animal.
The relation of hyponymy captures the idea of ‘is a kind of, as when you give the meaning of
a word by saying “an asp is a kind of snake”. It is often the case that the only think some
people know about the meaning of a word in their language is that it is a hyponym of another
term. That is, you may know nothing more about the meaning of asp other than that it is a
kind of snake.

 Homophony, Homonymy, and Polysemy

There are three other, less well-known terms which are often used to describe
relationships between words in a language. The first of these is homophony. When two or
more different (written) forms have the same pronunciation, they are described as
homophones. Some examples are, bare – bear, meat – meet, flour – flower, pail – pale, sew – so.
The term homonymy is used when one form (written and spoken) has two or more unrelated
meanings. Examples of homonyms are the pairs bank (of a river) – bank (financial institution),
pupil (at school) – pupil (in the eye) and mole (on skin) – mole (small animal). The temptation is

71 An Introduction to Linguistics
 to think that the two types of bank must be related in meaning, but they are not. Homonyms
are words which have quite separate meanings, but which have accidentally come to have
exactly the same form.
Relatedness of meaning accompanying identical form is technically known as polysemy,
which can be defined as one form (written or spoken) having multiple meanings which are all
related by extension. Examples are the word head, used to refer to the object on top of your
body, on top of a glass of beer, on top of a company or department; or foot (of person, of bed,
of mountain), or run (person does, water does, colors do).
The distinction between homonymy and polysemy is not always clear cut. However, one
indication of the distinction can be found in the typical dictionary entry for words. If a word
has multiple meanings (polysemic), then there will be a single entry, with a numbered list of
the different meanings of the word. If two words are treated as homonyms, they will typically
have two separate entries. You could check in your dictionary and probably find that the
different meanings of words like head, get, run, face and foot are treated as examples of
polysemy, whereas mail, bank, sole and mole are treated as examples of homonymy.
These last three lexical relations are, of course, the basis of a lot of word-play, particularly
used for humorous effect. The Pillsbury Flour Company once took advantage of homophony
to promote a brand of flour with the slogan Everybody kneads it. And if you have come across
this riddle: Why are trees often mistaken for dogs?, then you will have encountered the used of
homonymy in the answer: Because of their bark.

 Overlap
Two words overlap in meaning if they have the same value for some (but not all) of the
semantic features that constitute their meaning. For example, the word sister, niece, aunt, and
mother overlap in meaning. This phenomenon can be accounted for by stating that part of the
meaning of each of these words is characterized as ( +human/ -male/ +kin ). If we were to
add the words nun and mistress to the list above, then the meanings of this set of words would
overlap by virtue of the fact that they all marked (+human/ -male). If we were to further add
mare and sow to this list, then the meanings of this would overlap by being marked (-male),
and so on. This relationship is displayed in the following diagram.
Sister niece aunt mother nun mistress mare sow
(human) + + + + + + - -
(male) - - - - - - - -
(kin) + + + + - - - -

It is important, however, to distinguish overlap from hyponymy. With hyponymy, the

meaning of one word is entirely included in the meaning of another. (The meaning of pig is
entirely included in the meaning of sow; i.e., all sows are pigs, but not all pigs are sown). With
overlap, on the other hand, the meanings of two words intersect, but neither one includes the
other. The meanings of sister and niece intersect, but neither includes the other: Not all sisters
are nieces, and not all nieces are sisters. Overlap is schematized in Figure 9.2. below:

72 An Introduction to Linguistics
 Figure 9.2.: Illustration of overlap

Meaning
[+human] of niece
Meaning [-male]
of sister [+kin]

Truth
The study of truth or truth condition in semantics falls into two basic categories: the
study of different types of truth embodied in individual sentences (analytic, contradictory,
and synthetic) and the study of different types of truth relations that hold between sentences
(entailment and presupposition).
 Analytic Sentences
An analytic sentence is one that necessarily true as a result of the words in it. For example,
the sentence A bachelor is an unmarried man is true not because the world is the way it is, but
because the English language is the way it is. Part of our knowledge of ordinary English is
that bachelor “means” an unmarried man; thus to say that one is the other must necessarily be
true. We do need to check on the outside world to verify the truth of this sentence. We might
say that analytic sentences are “true by definition”. Analytic sentences are sometimes referred
to as linguistic truths, because they are true by the virtue of the language itself.

 Synthetic Sentences
Sentences that may be true or false depending upon how the world is are called
synthetic. In contrast to analytic and contradictory sentences, synthetic sentences are not true
or false because of the words that comprise them, but rather because they do or do not
accurately describe some state of affairs in the world. For example, the sentence My next door
neighbor, Bud Brown, is married is a synthetic sentence. Note that you cannot judge its truth or
falsity by inspecting the words in the sentence. Rather, you must verify the truth or falsity of
this sentence empirically, for example, by checking the marriage records at the courthouse.
Other examples of synthetic sentences include Nitrous oxide is blue, Nitrous oxide is not blue, Bud
Brown’s house has five sides, and Bud Brown’s house does not have five sides . In each case, the truth

73 An Introduction to Linguistics
 or falsity of the sentence can be verified only by consulting the state of affairs that holds in the
world. Thus, synthetic sentences are sometimes referred to as empirical truths or falsities,
because they are true or false by virtue of the state of the extralinguistic world.
The examples that we have considered so far seem fairly straight forward. Analytic
and contradictory sentences are true and false respectively, by definition. Synthetic sentences,
however, are not – they must be verified or falsified empirically. Nevertheless, some sentences
do not fall neatly into one of these groups. Consider, for example, the sentence Oxygen is not
blue. It is true. But is it analytic – true by virtue of the words that make it up (i.e., because it
just so happens that oxygen has no color)? This can get to be a thorny issue and the experts
don’t always have a uniform answer to such questions. However, it would be probably be
reasonable to treat such cases as synthetic truths rather than analytic truths, at least for the
time being. This is because it is easy to imagine conditions under which the sentence Oxygen is
not blue would be false. For example, suppose scientist froze oxygen and found that solid
oxygen is in fact blue. Such a finding would not cause a change in the meaning of the word
oxygen, but rather a change in our understanding of the substance oxygen. In contrast,
consider the sentence A colorless gas is not blue. It is impossible to imagine a situation in which
this sentence would be false. If a gas is colorless, it cannot be blue, if it is blue, it cannot be
colorless. Thus it seems reasonable at least until more light can be shed on the subject, to
consider sentences like Oxygen is not blue as synthetically true.

 Entailment
One sentence entails another. If the meaning of the first sentence includes the meaning
of the second. (Note the similarity between entailment and hyponymy. Just as hyponymy
describe an inclusive relation between two words, so entailment describes an inclusive
relation between two sentences. The test for entailment is as follows: Sentence (a) entails
sentence (b) if the truth of sentence (a) insures the truth of sentence (b) and if the falsity of
sentence (b) insures the falsity of sentence (a). Consider the following sentences: (a) Bill
suffered a fatal heart attack and (b) Bill is dead. In this case, sentence (a) entails sentence (b)
because the truth of (a) insures the truth of (b) (if Bill suffered a fatal heart attack, he
necessarily is dead) and the falsity of (b) insures the falsity of (a) (if Bill is not dead, he
necessarily didn’t suffer a fatal heart attack). The relationship of entailment is represented
schematically Figure 9.3. That is, sentence (a) entails sentence (b) if the truth of (a) insures the
truth of (b) and the falsity of (b) insures the falsity of (a).
Note, however, that the relation of entailment is undirectional. For instance, consider
our example sentences again, but in the opposite order: (b) Bill is dead and (a) Bill suffered a
fatal heart attack. In this case, sentence (b) does not entail (a) (if Bill is dead, he did not
necessarily die of heart attack – he may have died of kidney failure or he may have been hit
by a bolt lightning), and the falsity of (a) does not insure the falsity of (b) (if Bill did not suffer
a fatal heart attack, it is not necessarily the case that he is not dead – he may , once again, have
died of kidney failure or he might have been hit by a bolt of lightning). In short then, it should
be clear that the relation of entailment is uninderictional.

74 An Introduction to Linguistics
 This is not to say, however, that there cannot be a pair of sentences such that
each entails the other. Rather when such a relation holds, it is called paraphrase. For
example, the sentences Biff and Tammy are good scouts and Tammy and Biff are good scouts
are paraphrases of each other. Likewise, Tammy was driven home by Biff is a paraphrase
of Biff drove Tammy home.

Figure 9.3. Representation of entailment

Sentence (a) T F

ENTAILS
Sentence (b) T F

 Presupposition
One sentence presupposes another if the falsity of the second renders the first without
a truth value. A sentence without a trurh value is one that cannot be judged true or false.
Questions, for example, are typical of sentences without truth values. What sense would it
make to say that a sentence like Do you have blue eyes? Is true or false? Likewise, imperatives
have no truth value. It wouldn’t make any sense to say that a sentence like Shut up! Is either
true or false.
Now, let’s consider an example of presupposition and examine how this concept relies
on the notion of “sentence without a truth value”. As stated before, one sentence presupposes
another if the falsity of the second renders the first without a truth value. Consider the
following sentences (a) Unicorns have horns and (b) There are unicorns. Sentence (a)
presupposes (b) because if (b) is false, then (a) has no truth value. Note that if (b) is false – that
is, if there are no unicorns – then it doesn’t make sense to say that (a) Unicorns have horns is
true or false. For (a) to be true, there would have to be such things as unicorns and they would
have to have horns. On the other hand, for (a) to be false, there would have to be such things
as unicorns and they would have to not have horns. Consider another example: The sentence
The King of Canada is tall presupposes the sentence There is a King of Canada (or some other
sentences expressing the same proposition: The King of Canada exists). Note that if There is a
King of Canada is false, then The King of Canada is tall cannot be judged true or false.
Another property of presupposition is that a sentence and its denial (i.e., the negative
version of sentence) have the same set of presuppositions. Thus if sentence (a) unicorns, then
the denial of sentence (a) Unicorns do not have horns also presupposes sentence (b). If there are
no unicorns, then Unicorns do not have horns also presupposes sentence (b). If there are no
unicorns, then Unicorns do not have horns cannot be judged true or false.
It might be of some comfort to know that presupposition is a much more slippery
concept than entailment. Consequently, more investigators agree on the semantic concept of
entailment than on that of presupposition.

75 An Introduction to Linguistics