ABSTRACT
Modern linguistics is primarily concerned with the study of language structures. These structures consist of linguistic units of various sizes and the relations among them. The entities and relations linguists deal with are ultimately social in the sense that they are connected with aspects of communal human cognition and behavior. Elements such as words and grammatical constructions are social in the sense that they are shared conventions members of a community use to interact. There is a conventional simplification widely employed in linguistics which will make clearer the connection between semantic primitives as studied in linguistics and as studied in other disciplines. In either an analytic or a synthetic approach to language, linguists assume that there are important hierarchic entities and relations. In an analytic approach, one can start with a text, analyze it into its constituent parts such as paragraphs, analyze these into sentences, and then analyze the sentences progressively into their minimal constituents, the morphs or morphemes.
