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T H E M E 2

The place of grammar in the architecture of the english language Outline

1. Conceptual categories and linguistic categories

1.1. Concepts and conceptual categories

1.2. Linguistic categories: lexical and grammatical

2. Levels of language structure and their units

2.1. Phonemic level

2.2. Morphemic level

2.3. Lexical level

2.4. Syntactic level

2.5. Textual level

3. Relation of grammar to other components of linguistic description

1. Conceptual categories and linguistic categories

1. Concepts and conceptual categories

The notion of concept may be understood as a person’s idea of what something in the world is like. The process of concept formation is called conceptualization. Concepts which slice our ideas of reality into large chunks are called conceptual categories, and the process of their formation is called categorization.

2. Linguistic categories: lexical and grammatical

Linguistics deals with categories of abstract entities through which we understand language. They are called linguistic categories.

Fig. 2.1. Conceptual world model

Conceptual categories can be laid down in words (lexical categories) or show up as grammatical categories.

The grammatical category is a unity of form and content. The content of a grammatical category is called grammatical meaning. Grammatical categories can be morphological or syntactic.

Morphological categories are of two different kinds – word classes (parts of speech) and abstract distinctions which are made by means of word classes (e.g. number, tense, etc.).

Syntactic categories are divided into phrase categories and sentence categories.

Fig. 2.2. Types of linguistic categories

2. Levels of language structure and their units

The units of language form a hierarchy of levels. Units of each higher level are formed of units of the level below. The longer (in linear progression) the unit is, the higher is its place in the hierarchy of levels. But this hierarchical relation does not amount to composition: units of a higher level necessarily exhibit such functional properties which units of a lower level do not have.

Levels of Language Structure	Units of Language (abstractions)	Units of Speech (instantiations)
Syntactic	Sentence	Utterance
Lexemic	Word	Word-Form
Morphemic	Morpheme	Morph
Phonemic	Phoneme	Phone

Fig. 2.3. Levels of language structure and their units

2.1. Phonemic level

The smallest units of language are phonemes. Each phoneme of a given language may be regarded as opposed to other phonemes in some acoustic and articulatory features which are called distinctive features. The formal definition of a distinctive feature is as follows: an articulatory feature that serves to distinguish speech sounds.

In phonology, these distinctive features are traditionally viewed as binary features. In other words, a speech sound can be described in terms of whether it has a positive or a negative value for a certain feature.

Phonemes (the units of the feature level) are unilateral (one-sided), i.e. in contrast to units of the semantic level (morphemes, words, sentences), they carry no meaning of their own. By themselves, they are incapable of denoting anything pertaining to extralinguistic reality. Yet they are important for the expression of meaning: they help to differentiate units of semantic levels.

To establish a set of phonemes in any given language we must disregard all the sounds the difference between which is accounted for by their position alone. For example [i:] in an open syllable and [i] followed by a voiceless consonant, as in see – seat. In the English language they are never found in the same environment (the sounds which immediately precede or follow). They are positional variants (allophones) of one and the same phoneme [i:].

Thus if two or more sounds never occur in the same environment, they are not different phonemes, but only positional variants (allophones) of a particular phoneme. In other terms, these sounds are found to be in complementary distribution, i.e. their distributions (sums total of their environments) complement each other to cover the whole distribution of the phoneme ([i:] in our example) of which they are allophones.

If two or more variants of one and the same phoneme do occur in the same environment, and the choice of a particular variant depends upon the speaker (to be more exact, on his individual manner of speaking) the variants are said to be in free variation (e.g. burring, lisping).