Anthropological linguistics - Essay Example

Phonemes, Morphemes and Grammar Phoneme is considered to be the first building slab of language. These are the most fundamental unit of our speech; an individual sound. Phoneme is the common feature of all languages. English uses around forty phonemes. They can have further distinctive classifications and features like voiced or unvoiced components. Phonemes are so fundamental that they do not convey any meaning until put together. (Kendon, 2000) Morpheme is the second building slab of language.

A morpheme, as defined by linguists, is the smallest meaningful unit of language, produced from an arrangement of phonemes. As far as their further classifications are concerned, morphemes are of two types, the first ones are content morphemes and the second ones are function morphemes. The basic meanings of a word are held by content morphemes while prefixes and suffixes work as function morphemes. The main characteristic of function morphemes is this that they add a little additional meaning to the word.

Grammar is considered to be the last and final building slab of language. According to grammarians, grammar is the collection of set rules of language that stipulate how phonemes, morphemes, phrases and words should be arranged and combined to communicate meaningful thoughts. Besides this, grammar also governs how to employ different classes of words and their inflections. Grammar is a combination of two ingredients; syntax and semantics. (Kendon, 2000) Syntax is the set of grammatical rules that state in what order the words and phrases should be arranged in a sentence in order to convey meaning.

In human life development, by the time one is proficient to read, his or her syntactical perceptive sense is exceedingly developed. Furthermore, this makes it sound like even sentences that are composed or based on of unfit or apparently odd words make sense because they follows appropriate syntax. Syntax and syntactical rules are different and diverse in every language. (Kendon, 2000) For example, English speaking people place adjectives prior to nouns while many other languages place the adjective after the noun.

Another important field of linguistics is semantics. Semantics are the meaning itself or study of meaning derived from morphemes, words and sentences. Semantics depend upon a variety of relevant factors such as word choice, context and whether the speaker’s intent is figurative or literal. All these are building slabs of human language and are integral part of all human languages in anthropological linguistics. Without these building slabs humans, speaking any language of the world, would not be able to converse with each other.

These are the core rules and units of speech which are all significant components to help convey our opinions, thoughts, ideas, feelings and personal experiences through language. Non Verbal Communication Non-verbal communication is used so often that we actually forget that we are using it. We do not realize how much we rely on non-verbal communication; the reason for this is due to the fact that most non-verbal communication transpires on a level that is below our conscious awareness. (Kendon, 2000) While many aspects of nonverbal communication are culturally specific, some, e.g. facial expressions and gestures, appear to have near universal levels of recognition.

Non-verbal messages are also viewed as more authentic because behavior cannot be restricted as effortlessly as spoken words. (Kendon, 2000) Perhaps the most