What is Discourse Analysis‏‎?

Discourse Analysis – or DA – is all about examining and analyzing spoken or written language (and to a lesser extent, sign language). It’s about taking language, putting it under the microscope and looking at it closely to see how it works and then taking it out and looking at […]


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What is Collocation‏‎?

The more you use language, the more you realize that certain words tend to hang around together like best friends forever. For example, if you have a decent knowledge of English you can probably guess the missing words here: a foregone _____ _____ New Year! a _____ guess The fact […]


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What is a Morpheme‏‎?

As they say, a Morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit of language which has meaning. Putting it simply, if you take a word like unquestionable you can break it down into 3 morphemes: un = not question = ask able = able to be Each of the 3 morphemes has […]


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What is a Lexicon?

In general terms, a Lexicon is a list of words. It is almost synonymous with vocabulary. For example, we can talk about: a personal lexicon – the words which an individual knows a social class lexicon – the words used by a certain class of person; of course this can […]


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Vowels in English

The word vowel comes from the Latin word vowis meaning voice. In English we should make the distinction between spoken vowels and written vowels. In spoken English there are approximately 12 basic vowel sounds (see below); in written English, however, there are just 5 vowels. This means, obviously, that the […]


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