They look at the inner workings of language. Why language works like it does, in other words. Think of learning about linguistics in the same way you’d learn how an internal combustion engine works. Linguistics is what’s under the hood… you don’t need to know it to drive a car, but it helps understand what’s going on if you ever break down!
So… TEFL teachers should find these useful in providing more of a background to their teaching and students, too, will find them helpful in understanding language at a slightly deeper level.
Lexicography is basically all about compiling dictionaries. It’s about sitting in a stuffy, darkened, room carefully going over words: examining them, investigating them, analyzing them. It’s about asking what exactly words are and what they mean. Perhaps even why people use one word over another. And then writing it all […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]