They look at the inner workings of language. Why language works like it does, in other words. Think of learning about linguistics in the same way you’d learn how an internal combustion engine works. Linguistics is what’s under the hood… you don’t need to know it to drive a car, but it helps understand what’s going on if you ever break down!
So… TEFL teachers should find these useful in providing more of a background to their teaching and students, too, will find them helpful in understanding language at a slightly deeper level.
An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a root (or stem) of a word to form another word. For example, take the word reason and add two affixes: un + reason + able Prefixes and suffixes are common types of affixes. A prefix is an affix which is […]
An Utterance is the spoken equivalent to a sentence. As a sentence is bounded by a capital letter and a period or full stop (or other punctuation) so an utterance is often (though not always) bounded by silence or a breath or pause. Having said this, there is no precise […]
Simply put, Syntax is the collection of rules which go together to form sentences and phrases in a language. For example, the rules of syntax say that an English sentence can be formed thus: {subject} + {verb} + {object} Michael + rowed + the boat The rules of syntax say […]
Punctuation is the use of different marks to show how a sentence is constructed and should be read and understood. It is, if you like, the written equivalent of pauses and emphasis. In English the following punctuation marks are used: apostrophes brackets or parentheses colon commas dashes or hyphens ellipsis […]
Inflection refers to the way we change the form of a word to show different parts of grammar such as voice, person, number, gender, mood, tense or case. A simple example is when we change I to me depending on where it is used in a sentence. The person remains […]