1. School Kids Investigating Language & Life in Society 3 February 2015 Lesson 4: Levels of Linguistic Structure, History of English Teaching Fellows Anna Bax and Katie Jan

2. Levels of Linguistic Structure  Phonology  Morphology  Lexicon  Syntax  Intonation / Prosody

3. Phonology  Phonology = all the patterns in a language that directly involve sounds. Rules for “sound systems” of languages.  Phoneme = a single sound of a language.  Phonemes are contrastive if they can change the meaning of the words they belong to.  Kill vs. kiss vs. kick  Cat vs. rat vs. bat

4. Morphology  Morphology = rules for how “chunks” of meaning get combined into words  Morpheme = a meaningful unit of language than cannot be further divided into smaller parts.  Prefix, suffix, root.  Free morphemes can stand on their own.  Bound morphemes have to be attached to other morphemes.

5. Syntax  Syntax = the rules for combining words into sentences. Also known as “grammar.”  These rules are so natural we don’t even need to learn them - babies learn to speak their native language perfectly without ever taking an English class.

6. Lexicon  Lexicon = differences in vocabulary

7. Intonation / Prosody  Intonation = the patterns of stress and rhythm; the rise and fall of a voice  Friends clip  Say the following sentence, each time stressing a different word:  I didn’t say we should kill him. How you say something affects its meaning!

8. History of English  Sociolinguistics: the study of language in relation to social patterns  Register: a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting  Language change does not happen randomly – it follows patterns!