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Common Linguistic Terms
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Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. Articulatory phonetics studies speech sound production; auditory phonetics deals with speech sound perception; acoustic phonetics focuses on physical properties of speech sounds.
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Phonology is the study of the sound system. It examines the sound inventory of a language, sound patterns, and sound changes.
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Morphology is the study of internal word structure. Morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language, combine to make words.
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Syntax is the study of the rules of sentence formation. Morphemes and words combine to make phrases and sentences.
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Semantics is the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Pragmatics is the study of language in a social context.
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Lexicon is the study of the words and underlying concepts in the speaker’s mental dictionary.
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