Chapter 2—The Form of the Message

Chapter Outcomes
After reading this chapter and completing related assignments students should be able to:
1. Understand the focus of study for each of the following subfields in linguistics:
phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics
2. Understand the phonetic description of sounds.
3. Understand the concepts of the phoneme and the allophone.
4. Recognize how stress, pitch, and length are used in languages.
5. Understand and identify morphemes and allomorphs.
6. Explain the rules that govern the allomorphs of the English plural suffix.
7. Describe the differences between isolating, agglutinating, and synthetic morphological
systems.
8. Explain how noun classes work in Navajo and Swati. LCC 21

9. Explain how the case system works in Russian. (LCC 22)

10. Understand how phrases represent hierarchical structure in sentences and how phrase
structure rules determine how constituents can fit together to create sentences.
11. Understand Word-Order in languages (SVO, SOV, VSO)
12. Understand semantics and semantic features.
13. Explain how hand configuration, place of articulation, hand movement, and orientation
are important for ASL signs.
14. Describe some basics of ASL vocabulary and grammar, such as compounding and word
order.
15. Discuss the different approaches to the study of nonverbal communication and findings
related to language acquisition.
16. Understand the labels applied to certain aspects of nonverbal communication, such as
proxemics, kinesics, emblems, iconic gestures, beat gestures, and pointing.
17. Explain how nonverbal communication can be misinterpreted in cross-cultural
interactions.
18. Discuss gender differences in nonverbal communication.
19. Discuss how silence is used in different cultures.

Chapter Overview
This chapter introduces the student to many of the major subfields of linguistics. First, the
student is introduced to the field of phonology, starting with an explanation of articulatory
phonetics. The reader is instructed on how sounds are produced in the vocal apparatus as well as
how these sounds are described by linguists in terms of voicing, place of articulation, and
manner of articulation. Next, the chapter moves on to phonemic analysis, defining phonemes and
allophones and providing examples to illustrate these definitions. In addition, the prosodic
features of stress, pitch, and length are described with examples.

4
After the discussion of phonology, the chapter covers the basics of morphology. The author
begins by focusing on morphological analysis, introducing the concept of the morpheme,
describing the differences between roots and various affixes, and discussing the concept of
allomorphy. Following the discussion of morphological analysis is a description of
morphological typologies, where students are introduced to isolating, agglutinating, and
polysynthetic morphological systems. Finally, the grammatical concepts of case, number,
gender, noun classes, tense, aspect, and mode are described.
The discussion of syntax in this chapter begins with information about word order in the world’s
languages. It goes on to discuss phrases, phrase structure rules, how phrase structure rules can be
used to create tree diagrams to illustrate constituent structure, and how these rules can be used to
generate all the possible sentences in a language. Chomsky’s transformational grammar is also
described as this section comes to a close.
Next, the field of semantics is introduced. In this section, the author differentiates between
referential meaning, cultural meaning, situational relevance, and affective meaning before
moving on to discuss semantic features and semantic roles.
In the section on manual language, students are introduced to the grammatical system of
American Sign Language. First, they are exposed to the contrastive features of signs: hand
configuration, place of articulation, hand movement, and orientation. Examples and minimal
pairs are provided to illustrate these articulatory parameters. The chapter also describes the
vocabulary of ASL, including the morphological rules for word formation. Finally, syntactic
features of ASL are described, including word order and aspect distinctions.
The final section of the chapter focuses on nonverbal communication, starting with the
definitions of kinesics and proxemics. The two basic approaches to the study of nonverbal
communication are described, followed by a discussion of findings regarding the acquisition of
nonverbal behaviors and the cross-cultural miscommunications that can arise as the result of
misinterpretation of nonverbal cues. A range of cultural beliefs about silence are described as the
chapter comes to a close.

semantic features, semantic roles, semantics, situational relevance, source, states, stem, stops,
stress, subject, suffix, surface structure, syllable, syntax, synthetic, temporal, tense, tone,
transformational grammar, transformations, tree diagram, unaspirated, unrounded vowel, velum,
Verb Phrase, vocal apparatus, vocal cords, voiced, voiceless

Chapter Outline
I. Phonology-‐the study of sound systems in language

A.Phonetics describe the production of sound in terms of place (where in the vocal
apparatus) and manner (how) of articulation.

5
• •No language contains all sounds or makes use of all possible human sound production
capability.
• •Articulatory phonetics-‐focus on the vocal apparatus in regard to where the sounds are being
articulated
• -The letters of the alphabet are the names given to sounds, but the actual sounds are different
in quality (what they are in the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA))
• Minimal Pairs- two words composed of sounds that are identical except for one feature of
significant difference (Example: pit – voiceless vs. bit – voiced)

• Voiced sounds-‐constrain air flow through the vocal cords thus produces vibration [+voiced].
Most vowels are voiced
• Voiceless sounds -‐allow air flow without constriction of the vocal cords [-‐voiced]
• Oral Sounds- sounds produced by raising the velum to the back of the throat and expelling air
only through the mouth.
• Nasal Sounds- sounds produced by relaxing the velum and allowing air to pass through the nose
• Manner of Articulation- refers to the degree of interference or modification made of the airstream
as it passes through the oral cavity.
For example, fricatives sound production is achieved by constricting the air pass through the
vocal tract, thus creating some friction in the air quality. On the hand, stops are produced by
blocking the air at the place of articulation and then releasing it while maintaining the form of
articulation.
•

6
 • Phonemic Analysis
Phoneme- minimal unit of sound that functions to differentiate the meanings of words

Allophones- contains two or more sounds that occur in predictable linguistic environments based on the
rules of allophonic patterning. Sound changes when it’s plural (Ex: bus – buses not buss)

Aspirated sounds are produced with a strong release of air (Ex: allophones for English voiceless stops, /p/,
/t/, are produced with aspiration when they occur at the beginning of a syllable, where there seems to be a
/h/ associated with that sound production as in pen /phen/, ten /then/ whereas they are unaspirated (=)
following in the same symbol spent /sp=ent/, stand /st=end/.

Prosodic features or suprasegmental features are often used in a language to alter and differentiate among
the sounds or rhythms of speech. Three prosodic features that often affect meaning are stress, pitch, and
length. They affect the meaning of a word

Stress- or accent refers to the degree of emphasis placed on the syllables of words.

Example: present /prƐz’Ɛnt/ (verb) and present /prƐ’zƐnt/(noun)

Pitch- or tone refers to the voice pitch accompanying a syllables articulation. Pitch signals emotional state
whereas tone is grammatical. (See p.15)

Length- refers to the continuation of a sound during its production

II. Morphology: The Study of the Structure of Words

Morphemes are minimal units of sound that carry a meaning. E.g. cat, dog, -s, -ing, ly, ness.

Two morpheme words: More than two morphemes

cat-s un-happi-ly
sing-ing un-comfort-ably
good-ness book-store

Longer and more complex sequences of words can be formed by adding morphemes to a word. For
example:
act
active (act-ive), inactive(in-act-ive), inactivity (in-act-iv-ity).

7
 A root or stem is a morpheme, which represents basic lexical meaning of words such as cat, sing, and
good, and happy. Other elements called affixes can be attached to a root or stem. Affixes generally convey
grammatical or relational meaning, such as tense, aspect, person, gender and case.

There are three types of affixes: Let's consider the stem happy, for example:
•Prefixes precede the stems (un-happy)
•Suffixes follow the stems (happi-ness)
•Infixes: This type of affix does not occur in English but is present in Malayo-Polynesian languages
spoken in parts of Asia and the pacific. Let's consider these words from Tagalog (a language of the
Philippines)

•stem {-basa-}‘read’ with infix {-um-}:

•/ bumasa akó naŋ libró
read I the book
"I read the book" (completed)
•Morphemes may have one representation, or they may have two or more alternants, called allomorphs.
Allomorphs of each morpheme have the same meaning but vary in phonological form. They occur in
predictable conditioned environments. For example, the English plural suffix {-s} has three allomorphs
following these rules.
•{-s} becomes /-iz/ following sibilants
•bus-buses. quiz-quizzes voyage-voyages
•(s) becomes /-s/ following voiceless consonants (except sibilants)

•(s) becomes /-z/ following voiced consonants (except sibilants); following all vowels e.g. tub-tubs; bee-
bees,
•There are some exceptions to the rule of plural formation in English:
•e.g. mouse-mice, foot-feet, tooth-teeth, woman-women, etc....
•Also, in English, there are nouns which take restricted suffixes: child/children, ox/oxen...

Free morpheme- are morphemes like true, mother, and orange that can stand alone as words without
the need of another morpheme to license them.
Bound morpheme- others that cannot stand alone such as un-, tele-, -ness, and -er. They function
only as parts of words.
III. Derivational Morpheme-
Derivational morphemes can produce new words from existing words in two ways:
•They can change the meaning of a word. e.g. true and untrue have opposite meanings; paint
and repaint have different meanings.
•They can change the part of speech of a word, thereby permitting it to function differently in
a sentence: true is an adjective, truly an adverb, truth a noun.

8
 IV. Inflectional Morpheme-

These morphemes behave differently from derivational morphemes in that they alter the form
of a word, without changing either its parts of speech or its meaning (generally speaking).
•e.g. cats, collected, sleeps, and louder.
•Inflectional morphemes create variant forms of a word to conform to different functional
roles in a sentence or in discourse.

Knowing a word requires having at least four kinds of information:

- What sounds the word contains and their sequencing (phonological information).
- The meaning of the word (this is semantic information)
- How related words such as plurals (for nouns) and past tenses (for verbs) are formed (this
is morphological information)
- What category the word belongs to and how to use it in a sentence (this is syntactic
information).

Knowing even the simplest word requires that phonological, morphological, syntactic, and
semantic information be stored in the brain's dictionary (or lexicon) as part of that word's
structure.
e.g. pàtàpá(forceful argument), kòklô(chicken) you don't obviously know these words
because they are from Mina.

V. Morphological Typologies

Languages do not use the same methods in the creation of words out of morphemes.

a. Mandarin Chinese, English (Isolating Languages)

b. Swahili, Turkish (Agglutinating Languages)
c. Mohawk (A Polysynthetic Language)
d. Inuktitut (A Polysynthetic Language of Arctic Canada)

VI. Grammatical Concepts

III. Syntax: The study of the structure of Sentences

Every language has rules as to how those words in a sentence should be combined. This is
what syntax deals with; the rules that describes possibilities of co-occurrence and order of
constituents.
•Consider these sentences.,
•1. The cat chased the dog.
•2. The dog chased the cat.
•* The cat the dog
•*The chased the dog

In sentence (1), the subject the cat precedes the verb chased and the complement the dog.

9
 S= NP (Determiner and Noun) +VP (Verb and NP) languages that have these characteristics are
referred to as SVO languages (Subject + Verb + Object).
Other languages such as Japanese have the SOV word order. In addition, languages such as Hausa have
the VSO word order. (pp. 23-24)

VII. Semantics: The Analysis of Meaning

Semantics is the study of the systematic ways in which languages structure meaning, especially in words
and sentences.

A. Semantic Analysis-
Semantic analysis, the study of meaning, is complex because meaning entails many kinds of input. Just as
we have many everyday notions of what semantics is, we use the words to mean and meaning in many
contexts and for different purposes

Synonymous Sentence- sentences that paraphrase one another other.

Ambiguous Sentence- a sentence that contains an ambiguous phrase but has only one interpretation

E.g. “Flying airplanes can be dangerous”

Vague Sentence- a sentence that lacks a precise meaning or enough information to contextualize its
meaning.

Anomalous Sentence- a sentence that is syntactically correct but semantically meaningless (E.g.: colorless
green dreams sleep furiously)

Contradictory Sentence- is a sentence which is necessarily false, because of the senses of the words in the
sentence (Ex: cats are fish)

Nouns play different semantic roles in a sentence; i.e.- agent, theme, instrument, experiencer, location,
source, goal (end point of action)

Semantic Roles: Agent- performer of an action

Semantic Roles: Experiencer- entity experiencing some action or state

Semantic Roles: Patient- entity affected by an action

Verbs can be characterized as actions as in eat, processes as in grow, states as in asleep.

10
 B. Referential Meaning

Very loosely, referential meaning is the object, notion, or state of affairs described by a word or
sentence. A word has referential sense, labeling persons, objects, and events in the world or in
thought and imagination.
In addition, words have cultural meaning, reflecting attitudes, values or shared symbols (e.g. apple
pie, Santa Claus).

C. Social meanings are signaled by linguistic alternatives chosen by different groups of people
within a community.

VIII. Manual Language

• Formation of signs
Various combinations composed of distinct features are used in ASL signs. Composition of sign
is similar to phonological structure of oral languages. There are four basic kinds of articulatory
parameters in the production or articulation of signs:
• •Hand configuration: how the hands are shaped.
• •Place of articulation includes where a sign is formed in relation to signer's body.
• Movement of hands in space.
There are several complex possibilities in hand movement: vertical (upward, downward, up and
down); horizontal-depth axis movements: rightward, leftward, side to side.

o Orientation of hands in relation to the body.

• ASL Vocabulary and Grammar

Like oral languages, sign languages have a lexicon which consists of thousands of distinct signs.
Most signs are arbitrary in the sense that their forms do not correlate with their meaning

IX. Nonverbal Communication

A. Nonverbal Actions

Spoken language is not the only means of conveying meaning. Other channels include gestures,
facial expressions, body posture ("can you see his/her body language?"), and use of space. Some
nonverbal behaviors are universal while others differ from one culture to another.
•The term kinesics refers to gesture, facial expression, eye contact, and body posture. Proxemics
includes uses of touch and definitions of personal space.

• Nonverbal behavior reveals both universal and cultural-specific patterns. However, as we have
seen with human languages, only some possible human gestures and facial expressions are
selected by a system of nonverbal communication.
• In addition, nonverbal actions that look the same in different system may have very different
meanings, because meanings are culturally constructed.
11
 Broken Communication due to the absence of the same emblem in both ethnic groups. This is the
least serious problem.
A more serious problem arises when the emblem is present in both encounters ethnic groups but has a
different meaning.
-What happens when someone is confronted with an unfamiliar nonverbal act or gesture?
The act is usually ignored by the sender.
-What happens when the addressee is familiar with the act or gesture? The gesture is interpreted by
the addressee according to her or his own cultural norms without realizing that the intended meaning
may be different.
•Schneller(1988:115-6) points out that "while a strange gesture will cause discommunication, the
false decoding of familiar gestures will produce miscommunication, i.e. misunderstanding".

Nancy Henley (1977) states that men touch women as twice as women touch men and men initiate
eye contact twice as often with women as women did with men.
•Also, women returned smiles of men nearly all the time, whereas men returned only two-thirds of
the smiles given by women.

X. The Meaning of Silence

Use of silence as communication depends on culture, situation and the circumstance.
It can be used in a negative or positive way and be interpreted differently raising miscommunication.
Different cultures interpret silence differently. Silence is not an absence of communication of message;
quite the contrary as the article “To Give Up on Words: Silence in the Western Apache Culture”

Technical Terms: accent, action verbs, affix, agent, agglutinating, allomorph, allophone,
alveolar ridge, American Sign Language, aspirated, Auxiliaries, cultural meaning, deep structure,
definite, deletion, Determiners, diphthongs, direct object, emblems, experiencer, fricative,
generative grammar, hand configuration, hand movement, hand orientation, iconic gesture,
indefinite article, infix, instrument, International Phonetic Alphabet, isolating language, kinesics,
locative, manner of articulation, manual language, minimal pair, monophthong, morpheme,
morphology, noun class, Noun Phrase, patient, pharynx, phoneme, phonemics, phonetics,
phonology, phrase structure rule, pitch, place of articulation, prefix, prosodic feature, proxemics,
referential meaning, root, semantic analysis, semantic features, semantic roles, semantics,
situational relevance, state verbs, stem, stops, stress, subject, suffix, surface structure, syllable,
syntax, tense, tone, transformational grammar, transformations, tree diagram, unaspirated, Verb
Phrase, vocal apparatus, vocal cords, voiced sounds, voiceless sounds.

12
Other Readings:
de Lacy, Paul, (Ed.). 2007. The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. A Course in Phonetics, 4th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt.
Lass, Roger. 1984. Phonology: An Introduction to Basic Concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Morphology
Aronoff, Mark and Kirsten Fudeman. 2011. What is Morphology? Malden, MA: Blackwell
Bauer, Laurie. 2003. Introducing Linguistic Morphology. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.
Minkova, Donka and Robert Stockwell. 2001. English Words: Structure and History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Syntax
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Valin, Robert. 2001. An Introduction to Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Semantics
Blake, Barry. 1994. Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cruse, D. A. 1986. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosch, Eleanor and Carolyn Mervis. 1975. Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure
of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7, no. 4:573-605
Manual Language
Lucas, Ceil, (Ed.). 2002. Turn-Taking, Fingerspelling, and Contact in Signed Languages.
Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Lucas, Ceil, Robert Bayley, and Clayton Valli. 2003. What’s Your Sign for Pizza?: An
Introduction to Variation in American Sign Language. Washington DC: Gallaudet University
Press.
Valli, Clayton, Ceil Lucas, and Kristin J. Mulrooney. 2005. Linguistics of American Sign
Language: An Introduction, 4th ed. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.

13
Nonverbal Communication
Ekman, Paul and Erika Rosenberg, (Eds.). 2005. What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied
Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Henley, Nancy. 1977. Body Politics: Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Guerrero, Laura and Michael Hecht. 2007. The Nonverbal Communication Reader: Classic and
Contemporary Readings, 3rd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Knapp, Mark and Judith Hall. 2009. Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction, 7th ed.
Boston: Wadsworth Publishing.

14