Syntactic Levels In English Language

Overall

Linguistic level

Semantic level: deals with meaning

Syntactic level: deals with sentence structure

Morphological level: deals with word structure

Phonology (or phonemics): deals with sound systems

Parallelism between sentences, morphemes and phonemes is shown below:

Mayy has an unfriendly pet

Syntax

Sentences consist of words

Mayy has an unfriendly pet

Morphology

Words consist of morphemes

Un – friend – ly

Phonology

Morphemes consist of phonemes

F - r – ɛ – n – d

The morphology – phonology interaction

As regards the interaction with phonology, the selection of the form that manifests a given morpheme may be influenced by the sounds that realise neighbouring morphemes. Take the indefinite

Morphology is the study of systematic covariation in the form and meaning of words.

Morphology in different languages

Morphology is not equally prominent in all spoken languages. What one language expresses morphologically may be expressed by a separate word or left implicit in another language.

For example: English expresses the past tense of verb by means of morphology (want/ wanted, learn/ learned, …), but Vietnamese uses a separate word for expressing the same meaning.

Quite generally, English makes more use of morphology than Vietnamese. But there are many languages make more use of morphology than English. Linguists sometimes use the term analytic and synthetic to describe the degree to which morphology is made use of in a language. Languages like Vietnamese and English, where morphology plays a relatively modest role, are called analytic. Languages like Swahili (a language of East Africa) or Lezgian ( an Eastern Caucasian language), where morphology plays a more important role, would be called synthetic.

Table 2.1 gives the degree of synthesis for a small selection of languages

Language

Ratio of morphemes per world

Greenlandic