The importance of language
How many spoken languages are there ?
7,000 spoken languages
Phoneme
basic unit of
spoken language
Syntax
grammatical rules that govern how
we organize words into sentences
Estimated vocabulary?
20,000 to 100,000 words
Morpheme
basic unit of
meaning
Grammar
examines word structure
(morphology) and sentence structure (syntax)
How long would it take to generate all possible 20-
word English sentences?
10 trillion years
Morphology
examines
how we create words by
combining morphemes
Semantics
examines meanings of words and
sentences
What Psycholinguistics do?
An interdisciplinary field that examines how
people use language to communicate ideas
What's an example of Phoneme?
Sounds of a, k, th
Pragmatics
knowledge about the rules that
govern language
Name one society that doesn't have some form of language?
None
What's an example of Morpheme
re
What does Pragmatics involves?
Involves social interactions: factors in listener