Understanding Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics and Phonology: Sounds of Language

Place of Articulation

The location of a consonant’s obstruction in the vocal tract:

  • Bilabials: Involve closure or constriction of the two lips.
  • Labiodentals: Involve constriction of the upper teeth and lower lip.
  • Dentals: Involve constriction of the tongue tip and the upper teeth.
  • Alveolars: Involve constriction of the tongue tip and the alveolar ridge.
  • Post-alveolars: Involve constriction of the tongue tip and the palate, just behind the alveolar ridge.
  • Palatals:
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Phonemes, Syllables, and Word Classes

Phonemes and Sounds

Sounds: Are the actual emissions of each of the speakers, while the mental image of the units to meet these constant acoustic properties are phonemes.

Phonemes: These are made up of a set of distinctive features that distinguish one phoneme from the others.

  • Vowel Phonemes: Occur when air passes through the vocal cords, and these vibrate, resulting in a sound that does not encounter any barrier in its path.
  • Consonant Phonemes: The air vent is not free, but it encounters an obstacle
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Levels of Language Use and Verbal Periphrasis

Levels of Language Use

Three levels are distinguished:

  • Cultivated Level: Characterized by an elaborated code and adherence to grammatical rules (primarily written language).
    • Reflective and thoughtful language.
    • Complete and correct syntactic structures.
    • Precise and varied lexicon.
    • An original style and creativity.
  • Colloquial or Familiar Level: Employs a restricted code with common expressions (primarily oral).
    • Improvised, spontaneous, fast, and direct expression.
    • Short sentences (sometimes incomplete).
    • Less
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Morphological, Syntactic Change, and Grammaticalization

Morphological Change, Syntactic Change, Grammaticalization

Morphological Change

Morphological Typology

Languages can be classified typologically, according to their characteristics:

  1. Isolating or analytic
  2. Agglutinating or agglutinative
  3. Inflectional or inflecting

Isolating languages:

  • One (free) morpheme per word
  • Words do not use affixes
  • Word order is very important.
  • Chinese júzi wo chi le “orange I eat past”

Agglutinative languages:

  • A word may contain several morphemes (a root and a number of affixes). They
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Adjective Phrases and Adjectives: Structure, Functions, and Types

Adjectival Phrase: Structure and Functions

Constituents of the Adjective Phrase

The adjective phrase (AdjP) is a phrase whose core is an adjective. This core can have two types of modifiers:

  • Specifiers: Usually adverbs of quantity that express the degree or intensity of the adjective.
  • Complements: Prepositional phrases that modify the meaning of the adjective.

Functions of the Adjective Phrase

Adjective phrases can function as:

  • Complements within a noun phrase.
  • Attributes in a copular sentence (with verbs
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Understanding Copula Verbs: Definition and Examples

Understanding Copula Verbs

A copula (from the Latin copula, meaning ‘loop’ or ‘link’) is a type of verb used in some languages to build what is called nominal predication. This identifies a sentential subject as a member of a class given by a complementary semantic attribute (e.g., my father is a doctor). Although it doesn’t usually express an action or condition, it serves to equalize the subject and predicate, representing a state or quality of the subject.

Common Linking Verbs

The most common linking

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