ABSTRACT
Syntax, morphology, and phonology provide structures for linguistic meaning. This chapter offers a quick introduction to formal linguistics, including the basics of sound, word, and sentence structure. It covers in one chapter the basic concepts included in a standard formal linguistics course (in far less detail, of course). It begins with a discussion of the Chomskyan revolution, in which innate structures are seen as providing a template for swift language acquisition by children. Students are then introduced to phonetics and phonology – the sounds of language and how they are organized in a systematic and rule-governed way in each language. They then learn how words are structured, and how these structures relate to sound structures. This is followed by a discussion of syntactic structures and their relation to sentence meaning. Tree structures are introduced as a way of showing how words and sentences are built up from smaller parts.
