Five Elements of Language

Phonology – The sound system of a language and the rules for combining sounds (or phonemes) to produce meaningful units of speech. For example, in English, there are 26 letters in the alphabet but many more phonemes. For example, the letter “a” makes a different sound in the word “rat” than in “rate”.

Morphology – Rules that specify how meaningful words are formed from sounds. A morpheme is the smallest part of a word which provides meaning in that word. For example, the word “shoes” includes the morpheme “shoe” and the morpheme “s”, which provides additional meaning by making the noun plural. Thus, the morphology rule for many English nouns is to add the letter “s” to indicate plurality.

Semantics – Expressed meaning of words or sentences. Many English words have more than one meaning but voice inflection or the way words are combined in a sentence can indicate meaning. For example, the word “pit” can refer to a hole in the ground or the centre of a piece of fruit. In the sentence: “The rabbit fell into the pit”, the intended meaning is clear.

Syntax – Structure of a language or the rules specifying how words and grammatical markers can be combined to produce sentences. In English, for example, word order can change meaning. Compare the meaning of the statement: “You did finish the work” to the meaning of the question: “Did you finish the work?”

Pragmatics – Rules or principles for the appropriate use of language in a social context. This includes being aware of subtle differences between words and how different words or sentence structures can be interpreted. These subtleties can indicate the intention of the person speaking. For example, saying to someone, “you may not open that door” might sound aggressive, but changing one word and saying, “you should not open that door” might sound like a helpful warning.