Dictionary for Learning Foreign Languages

by Carsten Buus Nørgaard

Basic linguistic concepts and an introduction to sentence analysis

Foto
Students at a workshop on teaching languages.
(Photo: Jirka Matousek © CC BY 2.0. Edited.)

This is a translation from Danish of the May 2023 update of a chapter in my series, “The Quest for the Greek Language”, about learning Greek from a Danish perspective. A few changes and additions were made to accommodate English grammar, notably in the section listing various syntagmata.

Introduction

People wanting to learn a new language might easily be overwhelmed by having to consider the language’s many details and then figure out how to learn everything.

Language is many things. That’s why linguistics describes languages through different perspectives, each having its own name.

This dictionary provides you with an overview of basic concepts within central linguistic disciplines, to help you manage language learning. It also introduces you to sentence analysis.

Knowing this vocabulary makes it much easier to find and use facts about specific languages. You’ll learn to understand and make use of the descriptions found in grammar books.

Use this text as a reference while learning a foreign language. You can also read the whole thing to get a full overview of topics, or just choose the parts you’re interested in.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. How a language is pronounced: Phonology
    1. Phonemes
    2. Utterances
    3. Prosody
    4. Accent
    5. Why learn phonology? Pronunciation versus the alphabet
    6. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
  3. How words are built: Morphology
    1. Morphemes
      1. Root morphemes
        1. Word classes (parts of speech)
        2. Open and closed word classes
      2. Derivational and inflectional morphemes
    2. Affixes: Prefixes and suffixes
    3. Finite and non⁠-⁠finite verbs
    4. Analytic and synthetic languages
  4. How sentences are built: Syntax
    1. When is it a word?
    2. Sentence analysis
      1. Constituents
      2. Functions
      3. Hierarchies within syntagmata
      4. Syntagmata
      5. Nexus relations
      6. Valency grammar
  5. Language in context: Pragmatics
  6. Linguistic variety
  7. Bibliography

How a language is pronounced: Phonology

Phonology is knowledge about how speech sounds are used in a specific language. It relies on concepts from phonetics, which is knowledge about how humans produce speech sounds in general.

The concepts in this section mainly come from phonetics, but I’ve written “phonology” in the title because you’re supposed to use them to learn the phonology of the language you’re interested in.

Phonemes

The primary speech sounds are called phonemes. These are the smallest elements of language used for distinguishing between meanings.

One example could be the difference betweeen the words “red” and “rad”. We know they have different meanings because they sound different.

Phonemes don’t have their own, built⁠-⁠in meaning. They’re not “carriers of meaning”.

Phonemes are sometimes pronounced differently in specific contexts. These different varieties are called allophones. These stand in place of phonemes and, as such, are incapable of distinguishing between meanings in their own right. They just distinguish the way the original phoneme did.

Speaking is the act of using the speech organs in your mouth and throat (such as the tongue, palate, and pharynx) to produce a flow of speech enabled by the air you exhale.

A phonological or phonetic analysis consists of listening to segments of spoken language, transcribing what you hear into the phonetic alphabet, and   identifying what is going on in that pronunciation.

Speech consists of sequences of grouped phonemes known as syllables.

Phonemes are separated into 3 different categories: vowels, glides, and consonants. These play different roles within syllables:

There can be multiple consonants and glides on either side of the vowel (or combination of vowels). To summarize, within syllables, consonants and glides typically play second fiddle.

(Syllable-forming consonants do exist, but they’re an exception only found in some languages.)

Utterances

A sequence of speech is called an utterance no matter what it represents –⁠ a word, a sentence, grammatically incorrect language, etc.

Utterances are the sum of phonemes in a sequence of speech.

Prosody

Some effects in pronunciation go beyond syllables. They can occur between syllables or even groups of syllables. These phenomena are referred to as prosody.

As a field of inquiry, prosody focuses on things like how syllables are combined into rhythm groups, or when and how stress is used. These effects vary between languages.

(Grammar books will typically describe the phonemes and allophones used in a language, but not the prosody.)

Accent

An accent is a way of pronouncing a language using phonemes and prosody that don’t belong to that language.

As such, accents stand in contrast to how the ‘norm’ is idealized. Don’t worry about having an accent while learning to speak a new language. You can always change and develop it. The most important thing is that native speakers can understand you.

Why learn phonology? Pronunciation versus the alphabet

About 3,000 years ago, people in Ancient Greece adopted and modified the Phoenician abjad, which is a writing system where each character represents a consonant (Bakker 2019). It had no characters for vowels.

The characters for those Phoenician consonants that didn’t have equivalents in the Ancient Greek language were changed into representing vowels (Arndt 2009, 52⁠–⁠53). This resulted in an alphabet, which is a writing system with individual characters for both vowels and consonants.

“As far as we know, the Greek alphabet was the first to make the step towards independently indicating vowels.” (Arndt 2009, 53)

Alphabets typically lack characters for diphthongs, triphthongs, and glides. They also tend to exclusively feature phonemes, but not allophones. Moreover, the way a language is pronounced is subject to linguistic variety.

For example, Greek orthography remains “largely unchanged since antiquity, whereas the speech system has obviously changed” (Engberg 1995, 14).

The current Greek alphabet has several letters for the same vowel, [i]: η, ι, υ. These used to be three different phonemes.

The allophones [b], [d], [g] don’t have letters. These are written by combining two letters: μπ, ντ, γκ. Such combinations are called digraphs.

The discrepancies between alphabets and how languages are actually pronounced makes it important to understand the relationship between the two in the language you’re trying to learn. You can’t do this without phonology.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

A special writing system has been designed to make it easier to precisely describe speech in writing. This system is called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

A phonetic transcription is when you write down the precise pronunciation heard in a segment of speech, in IPA.

The complexity of IPA is both an advantage and a disadantage for language learners. Let me explain using an example from my time at the university:

I studied French and German as applied languages. Whenever I met linguistics majors who had chosen to minor in a specific language, they were clearly better at transcribing precisely and in great detail. I was also taught how to transcribe correctly, but with a lower degree of detail than them.

It's an advantage for linguistics majors to know phonetic script at a high level. That enables them to study pronunciation in many languages with a lot of detail.

But it would have been a disadvantage for us students of specific languages to spend much time learning all of the IPA, which can hypothetically accommodate any language in the world. Our courses only focused on the parts found in the languages we were studying.

It’s difficult to learn the rules for how a language is pronounced if you can’t understand written descriptions of the pronunciation. IPA is used everywhere in non⁠-⁠fiction about languages.

That’s why I recommend learning the basic principles of IPA, focusing on the phonemes and allophones used in the language you’re interested in. You can find these in a grammar book.

But don’t focus exclusively on IPA while learning. Imagine being asked to pronounce the “unvoiced, dental fricative consonant” /⁠θ⁠/ without having a person to help you get started.

You should also spend time on listening, practicing, learning from audiovisual content, and perhaps taking in⁠-⁠person lessons.

How words are built: Morphology

Morphology is about words and their forms, including how new words are created and how they’re inflected to convey grammatical information.

Morphemes

The basic building blocks in words are called morphemes. These are the smallest units in language that both are “carriers of meaning” and have their own, independent form.

A morphological analysis focuses on identifying and classifying the different morphemes found within a given word.

Here are the three most important types of morphemes according to Nølke (2014, 5):

Root morphemes

Roots express the word’s basic meaning. There are two types:

Word classes (parts of speech)

Root morphemes can always be classified as one of the parts of speech, which is a category of words sharing the same basic features. These categories are also called word classes, which will be the term used throughout this dictionary.

Nølke (2014, 6) has provided “a practical classification”, reproduced here with a few additions:

The items on this list aren’t defined here, but you can find definitions in online dictionaries such as The Free Dictionary. Moreover, the list above isn’t exhaustive.

Nominal units are an umbrella term for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals.

Open and closed word classes

Derivational and inflectional morphemes

There exist two central types of morpheme that can be ‘attached’ to root morphemes. These have specific purposes.

Affixes: Prefixes and suffixes

There are different terms for indicating the relative position of derivational and inflectional morphemes within a word. In English, these positions are generally known as affixes.

The two most common ones are prefixes (positioned before the root) and suffixes (positioned after it), but there are others.

Since it’s typically impossible to move the same morpheme between different positions, it’s normal to say that affixes “are” their position. You would probably say “That’s a suffix” rather than “It’s in the suffix position”.

For example, consider the words “swiftness”, “eagerness”, and “silliness”. Each root morpheme (“swift”, “eager”, “silly”) is an adjective. In English, the suffix -⁠ness is a derivational morpheme that you add to an adjective to convert the final word into a noun.

The morpheme -⁠ness cannot appear as a prefix. It would make no sense to try saying “nessswift”, “nesseager”, or “nesssilli”.

In dictionaries, suffixes are written with a hyphen in front of them to indicate that something must stand before them. Prefixes are written with a hyphen after them.

The derivational morphemes that only change the word’s meaning, but not its class, are often prefixes, such as un⁠- in the word “untamable”.

Finite and non⁠-⁠finite verbs

Within conjugation (the inflection of verbs), the  terms “finite” and “non⁠-⁠finite” refer to different subsections of the many different grammatical forms a verb can take depending on the situation.

In other words, a verb such as “(to) read” comes in both finite and non⁠-⁠finite forms.

Some non⁠-⁠finite forms are also used for creating “complex” finite forms. Consider the sentence, “The lawyers have studied the Constitution.” The two words make up a finite tense: the present perfect. But the second word is the past participle of the verb “study”. Participles are non⁠-⁠finite forms.

Much more could be said about this topic, but my purpose here is simply to inform about the difference between finite and non⁠-⁠finite forms.

Analytic and synthetic languages

This section’s topic is one of the main typological differences between languages at the morphological level.

Most languages in Europe have both analytic and synthetic (fusional/inflecting) features, but they will lean more towards one or the other.

English, French, and Danish are comparatively analytic languages. German and Greek are more synthetic than those. Getting used to these differences can be a challenge during the learning process.

How sentences are built: Syntax

Syntax is about a language’s rules for creating sentences. The way sentences are systematized determines the words and forms you can use in a given situation.

When is it a word?

Words are “carriers of meaning” and have their own form. Here, I use the word “meaning” to refer to dictionary definitions, not meaning in a broader, context⁠-⁠rooted, communicative sense.

Even so, Herslund (2015) argues that it’s  difficult to find the precise boundary for what words are and what they aren’t.

Root morphemes can stand on their own within sentences. Those always belong to a word class (part of speech), so they must surely be words.

On the other hand, derivational and inflectional morphemes depend on roots and don’t belong to a word class. Those aren’t words.

And yet the product of combining different types of morphemes into a single unit is typically referred to as a word because it can stand on its own in sentences. This is made possible by its root morpheme, which is the founding unit of the word.

The idea that words can always stand on their own is challenged by the phenomenon of enclisis. This happens when a function word “melts together” with another word within the same phrase.

Clitics are units that behave like independent words at the sentence level but are actually bound to another word at other levels of language –⁠ especially the phonological level, where the clitic word usually has a very brief pronunciation.

Examples in English include the constructs “it’s” and “you’re”. Each of these represents two independent words that have become bound to one another and have merged at the phonological level. “It” and “you” are both function words (personal pronouns), and here they have merged with a finite verb, “is” and “are”, respectively.

In these examples, the enclisis is highlighted by the use of apostrophes between the two words. This is not always the case in every language or situation.

Here’s an example from Modern Greek:

Greek has no dative case. When you want to use an indirect object with a definite article,there’s enclisis between the preposition σε and the definite article in the accusative case.

These are written without highlighting enclisis whatsoever –⁠ στο(ν), στη(ν), or στο –⁠ easily giving the (incorrect) impression that these are single words. They represent σε plus either το(ν), τη(ν), or το.

Sentence analysis

Sentences are created by combining words in specific, rule⁠-⁠bound ways.

A sentence analysis focuses on deconstructing a sentence until you have identified every constituent and every syntactic function realized by the constituents.

Broadly speaking, sentences can be broken down into three levels:

  1. The sentence as a whole
  2. A variable number of syntagmata (or phrases), including ones placed within other syntagmata
  3. Individual words

When analyzing a sentence, you identify each segment at a given level before moving on to the next level, moving from the sentence as a whole through the phrases and down to the individual words.

(Hint: You should always start by identifying the words that look like they’re semantically connected to one another so you’re aware how the words have formed groups.)

Constituents

A constituent is “the material that a segment is made from” (Hoe and Nølke 2014, 26).

This perspective sees language as a structure: How were the sentence’s “building blocks” combined into a single unit?

The best⁠-⁠known constituents are word classes, or parts of speech. Many people remember these from school.

There are also constituents that represent groups of words. These are called syntagmata, or phrases.

The words “syntagma” and “phrase” are synonymous, but the former is a technical term that avoids the potential misunderstandings and misuses found in everyday language. I use both in the overview below because of how dominant the term “phrase” remains within anglophone linguistics.

Syntagmata represent the different ways in which words can be grouped to create partial meanings within a sentence.

When analyzing, it’s also commonplace to count it as a syntagma when a segment only contains a single word. But to save time, you can just note the word itself in these cases.

Here are three main clauses featuring three syntagmata each, one per color:

The words within each syntagma are clearly connected to one another. The groups make up partial meanings within the sentence.

Congruence is the principle that there can’t be grammatical contradictions within the same phrase.

For example, it would be wrong to write “a cold ice cream cones” as that phrase marks both the singular and the plural.

This principle is particularly important in other languages, including European languages other than English that use grammatical case and⁠/⁠or nouns in multiple genders.

Syntagmata are often named after word classes. For example, the syntagma “the elderly gentleman” is a noun phrase.

(See hierarchies within syntagmata and syntagmata below.)

Functions

It’s important to know what functions are because the internal anatomy of syntagmata is typically described by referring to those.

Functions represent a perspective that sees language as a system: Which roles are played by the “building blocks” within a sentence?

(Functions are often called grammatical relations in English.)

To describe this, you’ll need a different vocabulary than the one used for constituents. Here’s an overview based on Hoe and Nølke (2014, 10):

To save space, these aren’t defined here. See chapters 4 and 5 in Hoe and Nølke (2014, 11⁠-⁠23). This list isn’t exhaustive.

Hierarchies within syntagmata

Syntagmata can be classified according to the hierarchical relationship between the segments within them:

It’s possible to have parataxis between two main clauses, such as: “You went into town, and I stayed at home.” This is called a sentence paratagma.

Verb phrases are an umbrella term for syntagmata that look like sentences (minus the subject). There are two types:

Syntagmata

This section contains an overview of the most important syntagmata and their segments, based on Hoe and Nølke (2014, 41, 29⁠-⁠38).

See also constituents, functions, and hierarchies within syntagmata.

Overview
Main clause

Examples:

Subordinate clause

Examples:

Below you will find the major verb phrases built around finite and non⁠-⁠finite verbs.

Verb phrases are where you’ll typically find major functions such as direct objects, indirect objects, and adverbials. The verbal function is the core of these phrases, but the other half of the nexus relation (the subject) is analyzed separately at a higher level, in main clauses and subordinate clauses.

This is what it means when the descriptions below say that these phrases are “analyzed in the same way as the contents of the predicate in main clauses”. They have a verbal function as their core, but are otherwise analyzed like sentences (minus the subject).

Finite verb phrase

Example:

Non⁠-⁠finite verb phrases

The range of phrases found in this category varies depending on which non⁠-⁠finite forms are available in a given language and how the phrases are constructed.

For example, Greek verbs have no infinitive among their non-finite forms and so cannot establish infinitive phrases, while the infinitive does exist in English, French, and German, among many others.

Always refer to a quality grammar book for information about specific syntagmata used in your language of interest.

Infinitive phrase
Example:
Past participle phrase

Example:

Present participle phrase

Examples:

Gerund phrase

Examples:

Perfect participle phrase

Example:

Below you will find the major hypotactic syntagmata:

Noun phrase

Examples:

Pronominal phrase

Example:

Adjective phrase

Examples:

Adverb phrase

Example:

Below you will find the major catatactic syntagmata:

Nominal phrase

This is sometimes used as an additional step when analyzing languages that strictly require that a determiner must always be present, such as French.

In other languages where such a step isn’t necessary, noun phrases are sometimes called nominal phrases. I haven’t seen real nominal phrases used in the analysis of sentences in Danish, English, or German.

Here’s how this step is taken in the analysis:

  1. The segments typically found within a noun phrase are split into two parts.
  2. The determiner and pre⁠-⁠determiner are placed within the nominal phrase.
  3. The nominal phrase’s complement is then realized by a noun phrase containing the remaining segments.

An example in French:

Prepositional phrase

Example:

Conjunctional phrase

Example:

Below you will find the major paratactic syntagmata:

Paratagma

Examples:

Sentence paratagma

Examples:

Nexus relations

A nexus is a special relation connecting the verbal function and subject (functions) in a sentence. See Hoe and Nølke (2014, 29). There exist two types:

Certain languages, such as Greek, leave out the subject when there’s a primary nexus but the subject is realized by a personal pronoun and can be identified from the verb’s conjugation or the general context. These pronoun-dropping languages are known as pro⁠-⁠drop languages.

This phenomenon is typically limited to a specific word class. When the subject is realized by other word classes, it still has to be made explicit.

Valency grammar

A sentence’s valency represents a special relation between the main verbal function and the nominal segments (or functions) associated with it, which are called agents. See Herslund 2020b.

The number of agents depends on the meaning of the verb. “One might say that the meaning of the verb is incomplete without these agents” (Hoe and Nølke 2014, 11).

Language in context: Pragmatics

The linguistic discipline of pragmatics describes language in practice, meaning within communicative contexts.

This is a vast field with many sub⁠-⁠specializations. The following branches may be of particular interest to language learners:

Linguistic variety

No language in the world exists in a frozen, permanent, universal state of being.

The language researcher Rosina Lippi⁠-⁠Green (2004, 293) has described standard language ideology as “a bias toward an abstracted, idealized, non⁠-⁠varying spoken language that is imposed and maintained by dominant institutions” (emphasis in original).

This and other normative patterns of thought are widespread but don’t align with the empirical reality of language in use.

Here are some terms to describe different types of linguistic variation based on Gadet (2003, 9⁠–⁠12):

Translation published 13 June 2023.

Bibliography

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