Linguistic units: summary
- Linguistic analyses abstract over utterances to consider sentences.
- Sentences are associations between (abstracted) Forms and (abstracted) Meanings.
- Forms and Meanings consist of linguistic units (words, morphemes, phrases) and the relations between the units
(order, agreement, valency).
- Language is largely compositional
- Given knowledge about
- the associations between lexical units (words, lexemes) and their meanings and
- the associations between grammatical patterns and their meanings,
- addressees can use the associations to understand novel sentences/utterances, and
- speakers/writers/signers can use the associations to produce novel sentences/utterances.
- What counts as a unit of a particular, especially "word", may be very different from one
language to another.
- In synthetic (morphologically complex) languages, words often consist of many smaller meaningful units (morphemes).
Morphology in such languages does much of the work of syntax in isolating languages.
Synthetic languages have many more possible wordforms than isolating languages do.
- Synthetic languages may make do with a relatively small set of morphemes, producing words through
combination of these units which correspond to monomorphemic words in other languages.
So what?
- One language and two languages
- Systems that deal with more than one language
associate units of one language with units of another.
- Systems differ mainly in terms of the abstractness of the
relations between units that are extracted/associated.
- A more abstract possibility is to associate the two languages
through a (universal?) Meaning level (interlingua).
