戴炜栋英语语言学Chapter1intro.pptVIP

1.1.2 The scope of linguistics (main branches of linguistics) Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Semantics Pragmatics * 1. Phonetics Phonetics studies speech sounds, including the production of speech, that is how speech sounds are actually made, transmitted and received, the description and classification of speech sounds, words and connected speech, etc. * We can approach it on various levels. At one level, speech is a matter of anatomy and physiology. We can study organs such as tongue and larynx and their functions in the production of speech. At another level, we can focus on the speech sounds produced by these organs by identifying and classifying the individual sounds. This is the domain of articulatory phonetics. * We can also investigate the properties of the sound waves — acoustic phonetics. As speech is intended to be heard or perceived, it is therefore possible to focus on the way in which a listener analyses or processes a sound wave — auditory phonetics. * 2. Phonology Phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. It deals with the sound system of a language by treating phoneme as the point of departure. A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning. * 3. Morphology Morphology is concerned with the internal organization of words. It studies the minimal units of meaning — morphemes and word-formation processes. Although many people think of words as the basic meaningful elements of a language，many words can be broken down into still smaller units, called morphemes. * Morphemes serve different purposes. Some derive new words by changing the meaning or the part of speech, others only refine and give extra grammatical information about the already existing meaning of a word. As morphemes are pairings of sounds with meanings, there are many complexities involved, forming a new field by the name morphophonology. *