PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 28: Social Dance, Like Life
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PSYC 1010 Full Course Notes
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Psyc 1010: module 28 language and thinking. Morphemes are the smallest language units that carry meaning. In english, a few morphemes are also phonemes the article a, for instance. But most morphemes combine two or more phonemes. Others like the prefix pre- in preview or the suffix -ed in adapted are parts of words. Grammar is the system of rules that enables us to communicate with one another. Grammatical rules guide us in deriving meaning from sounds (semantics) and in ordering words into sentences (syntax). Like life constructed from the genetic code"s simple alphabet, language is complexity built of simplicity. In english, for example, 40 or so phonemes can be combined to form more than 100,000 morphemes, which alone or in combination produce the 616,500 word forms in the oxford english dictionary. Using those words, we can then create an infinite number of sentences, most of which (like this one) are original.
