ANTH 1150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Isolating Language, Phoneme, Sociolinguistics
29 Mar 2016
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Document Summary
Morphology: a second level of complexity of linguisics. The study of morphemes: the smallest unit of language that mean something (phonemes don"t mean anything on their own) Pin + z (root noun and plural component) component. Syntax: a third level of complexity of linguisics. English is someimes called an isolaing language because words contain very few morphemes. Example: the dog chased the cat has ive words, four of them have only one morpheme, chased has two. The words dog and cat can be switched with each other which would completely change the context of the sentence. Word order is extremely important in english, but is not as important in other languages. In other languages, you may inlect some words or add a phoneme to determine which animal is in front of the other, or you may have to tell a longer story to establish this. Anthropologists frequently work with indigenous peoples who oten speak languages that are not writen down.
