Question # 2: What are the levels or aspects of Linguistics?

Levels or Aspects of Linguistic

Following are levels of Linguistic Analysis
i. Phonetics
ii. Phonology
iii. Morphology
iv. Lexicology
v. Syntax
vi. Semantics
vii. Pragmatics
viii. Discourse
1: Phonetics
Phonetics is the study of production, transmission and perception of
speech sound. It is concerned with the sounds of languages, how these
sounds are articulated and how the hearer perceives them. Phonetics
is related to science of acoustics in that it uses much the same
techniques in the analysis of sounds that acoustics does. There are
three branches of Phonetics
i. Articulatory phonetics
It is the study of production of speech sounds.
ii. Acoustic Phonetic
It is the study of physical production and transmission of speech
sounds.
iii. Auditory Phonetics
It is the study of perception of speech sounds.
2: Phonology
It is the study of the patterns of language. It is concerned with how
sounds are organized in a language. It examines what occurs to speech
sounds when they are combined to form a word and how these speech
sounds interact with each other it endeavors to explain what these
phonological processes are in terms of formal rules.
The Phonemes of particular language are those minimal distinct units
of sound that can distinguish meaning in that English .e.g. in English
the /p/ sound is phoneme b/c it is the smallest unit of sounds of bill, till
or drill making the word pill. The vowel sound of pill is also a phoneme

b/c its distinctness in sound makes pill, which means one thing, sound
different from pal, which means another.
3: Morphology
It is study of word formation and structure. It studies how words are
put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this
process. The elements that are combining to form words are called
Morpheme. A morpheme is the smallest unit of syntax you can have in
language the cats e.g. contains the morphemes cat and the plurals.
4: Lexicology
It is study of words. We study word-formation and world classes.
Lexeme is the smallest unit of Lexis.
5: Syntax
It is the study of sentence structure. It attempts to describe what
grammatical rules are in particular languages. These rules detail an
underlying structure and a transformational process. The underlying
structure of English e.g. would have a subject -verb - object sentence
order. For example: John hit the ball
The transformational process would allow a change of word order,
which could give us something like; the ball was hit by John.
6: Semantics
It is the study of meaning in language. It is concerned with describing
how we represent the meaning of word in our mind how we use this
representation in constructing sentence. It is based largely on the
study logic in philosophy.
7: Pragmatics
It studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social
interaction and the effects of our choices on others. In theory, we can
say anything we like. In practice we follow a large no. of social rules
(some of them unconsciously) that constrain the way we like we speak
e.g. there is now law that says we must not tell jokes during a funeral,
but it is generally not done.
8: Discourse

It is the study of stretches of spoken and written language above the

sentence
OR
The way sentences work in sequence to produce coherent stretches of
language