PSYCH 120A Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Morpheme, Phoneme, Deep Structure And Surface Structure
Document Summary
Communicative: language permits us to communicate with one or more people. Arbitrarily symbolic: language creates an arbitrary relationship between a who share our language symbol and what it represents; an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description. Regularly structured: language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings. Structured at multiple levels: the structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level. Generative, productive: within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances; the possibilities of creating new utterances are virtually limitless. Referent: the thing or concept in the real world that a word refers to. Phoneme: the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one. Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning within a particular language utterance in a given language from another. Content morphemes: words that convey the bulk of the meaning of a language.
