The task of the linguist

- Linguists study the ways in which the sound meaning correlations of languages are structured and how they function.
- Linguists agree on the subdivisions of linguistic investigation (phonology – syntax - semantics – morphology – pragmatics)
- Linguists are interested in constructing linguistic theories
Eg: Generative Grammar.
Syntactic Structures.

Competence and Performance

- Competence is what we know about language.
- Performance is what we do when we speak or listen.
- Competence encompassed only people’s ability to produce and understand sentences of their language out of context.
- The notion of “grammaticality”.

Underlying and Surface structure:

- Paraphrase of the surface structure.
- The linear agreement of words and phrases which will be produced.

Application to literature:

-Linguistic analysis.
- Literary interpretation.
- Consistent analysis.

Literature as a type of discourse:

- Genre: each has a certain conventional features.
- In literature the relationship between the speaker and the reader can be called “pragmatic connection”
- The linguist has different tools of analysis, for example, poetic device like metaphor.

Cohesion

- Roman Jakobson developed the idea of cohesion.
- Coherence is the unity of logic that control the whole text.
- Cohesion supports the text by making it more smooth and organized.

 
What is a morpheme?

Morphemes are the smallest units forming the bridge between sound and meaning in language, and they are as important in linguistic analysis as words.
- Grammatical “function words”.
- Content words “roots”.
- Empty morphemes: it doesn’t have a meaning by itself, it carries another meaning.
- Morphemes are layers combination: fate
fatal
fatalist
fatalistic

Classes of Morphemes:

- Content morphemes.
- Grammatical morphemes.
Within the class of grammatical morphemes, it is useful to distinguish a number of subclasses.

A- Place:
- prefixes
- Suffixes
- Infixes: which are inserted into roots. They are rare in English except in swearwords such as damn-tastic or literary coinages such as manunkind.

B- Function:
- Inflections: in English all are suffixes and all occur at the very end of a word, after any derivative suffixes that might be present. Examples include the plural marker(trees, children), the possessive marker(children’s), the comparative and superlative markers(longer, longest), tense markers for verbs(he walks, walked).

- Derivative: derivative morphemes are so called because they are used to derive new words and meanings. In English they are of two kinds, those that change syntactic categories and those that do not. Most suffixal derivatives affect both the syntactic category and the meaning of the root to which they attach.

- Stem: a root plus one or more derivative morphemes.

Identifying Morphemes:

Morphemes cannot be identified by their surface from the location alone.
- Longer – runner – eraser.
The "er" in longer indicates the comparative form of the adjective, in runner it indicates the doer of the running, and in eraser it indicates that the thing is used as an instrument or means of action.
- Members of the morpheme class are “allomorphs”.