This paper will try to show how below the surface of our natural English language, lies a myriad of factors that are distinguished by linguists. For example, language was described by ‘Langacker’ who makes three fundamental assumptions: ‘that language is symbolic in nature that a linguistic community creates linguistic conventions, and that grammar is a speaker’s knowledge of linguistic conventions’. It is the linguistic community that creates language and grammar. The speaker uses sentences that are built by selecting appropriate words from their vast lexicon that are learned from his local language community. These are put in an accepted order and shaped according to morphological and phonological usages in their specific language. The rules (grammar) and word sounds (phonology) are common to the speaker and receiver. The term grammar is generally used to include syntax and morphology but may also be used in a wider sense to include rules of phonology. Grammar allows an infinite expression of ideas, makes language itself possible. A grammar is a collection of linguistic rules, which define a language.

It is the use of language that is so fascinating. We can use an infinite number of patterns from a finite amount of words. This is all molded into language. Language is a process of expressing joined and singular phonological sounds that are formulated into a meaningful expression that is understood by another. Each of the sounds is called a word. The baby first learns sounds (phonology) to make noises. Then the baby learns syntax and morphology where the language is formed into understandable words and sentences. The word-learning baby has a brain that forms all the things he sees into mental categories and lumps together objects that are of the same kind. Babies are designed to expect a language to contain words for kinds of objects and kinds of actions – nouns and verbs. There are things and kinds of things and actions out there in the world. Our mind is designed to find them and label them with words. Each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for, in their mental dictionary. The brain stores all these remembered words/phrases. These stored words/phrases are, with time when the child grows, put into an order (syntax) that is interpretable as language.

So, what is inside language? We know it is a system of human communication using words. For people to communicate language must be put into a form that both parties understand. This involves the use of syntax. Syntax is the order of words that convey meaning collectively by their connection and relation in a sentence. Most theories of language syntax assume that words are units combined by certain rules. The simplest illustration of a parameter is the choice of Headfirst or Head last; depending on which choice is made, a language can be either SOV or SVO with many associated orderings in other aspects of syntax. In the Modern English language, the order is SVO (I love you) but in Old English, it was VS (love I). Syntax has a discrete combinatorial system, building clause and phrase structures. A clause in a sentence is a distinct part of a sentence including a subject and predicate, for example, ‘The police arrested the man’. A phrase can be any syntactic unit larger than a word and smaller than a sentence, for example, a prepositional phrase ‘in the morning’. Thus in this case we have a sentence pattern that says ‘The police arrested the man in the morning’. Sentences also have the means of embedding or subordinating one sentence within another as an included clause (e.g., “the man fell” and “we helped him”: “When the man fell we helped him”; “Tony was playing football” and “Tony broke his leg”: “Tony, who was playing football, broke his leg,” or “while he was playing football, Tony broke his leg”. Linguists break these types of sentences down, they study the elements of syntax. This is the study of the rules, or “patterned relations,”. It governs the way the words in a sentence are arranged. A characteristic of a sentence is the subject that is the important word in any sentence. In the sentence ‘the police arrested the man in the morning’, ‘the police’, is the subject of the sentence. ‘The police’ can also be said to be the noun. It is known that all languages distinguish in some way, noun-like and verb-like sentence components. Using parts of speech, we can also add adjective (relieved, dangerous, early) components that are used to designate an attribute and are added to a noun. In addition, we can use adverb (quickly) components that modify the verb. Thus we have the sentence that reads ‘ The relieved police quickly arrested the dangerous man in the early morning’. This underlies the use of syntax of the sentence working in many ways, giving it new meaning. We see in a sentence that words and morphemes are put into functional constituents such as the subject (the police) of the sentence, the predicate (arrested), the direct object (the man), and so on.

Furthermore, in the following example of using syntax, the changes to these two sentences can have different meanings from a statement to a question by simple word order change. By moving the two words you and are, the first sentence says that I am sure that you are from London, but the second show that I do not know:

1. (Statement) You are from London.
2. (Question) Are you from London?

“Syntax` is literally the arrangement of words in sentences as in the example above with the four words in each sentence. It is especially the arrangement of clauses/phrases within a sentence. It specifies the grammatical rules underlying the construction of sentences. A child can make the mistake ‘me go home’ but it is our background awareness of the rules of syntax that helps us decipher and edit out the mistakes in the utterances. Language in all its forms concerns how different words such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs are combined into clauses/phrases. These, in turn, are combined into sentences. For example, a simple sentence like I love you is assembled by the rules of syntax. In English we would not say ‘Love I you’, our rules of grammar do not follow this pattern. Syntax is at the heart of grammar. Syntactic plans require knowledge of grammar rules. A person must be able to understand an utterance from another person’s mouth. The words in the sentence are not unordered they are in a sequence that is familiar to both of them. For instance, definite articles (‘the’) come before a noun, not after (‘the car’, not ‘car the’). This means the structure in the sentence must be interpreted properly. The patterning of sentence structure can also be put in a particular ‘spin’ on reality. The use of passive syntax structure can deflect attention away from other people. For example, read these two sentences;

1. The Police beat the football hooligans.
2. The rioting football hooligans were beaten by the police

In syntax these two sentences above can be symbolized by the rule (1) N1 V N2 → (2) N2 be V + en by N1. In which N stands for any noun or noun phrase, V for any transitive verb, en for the past participle morpheme, and the arrow (→) instructs one to rewrite the construction to its left as the construction to the right. Both sentences seem to say the same information. But most people find the second sentence to be sympathetic to the police. It is the use of a different syntax, not the choice of words themselves, but the syntax that changes the meaning.

To explain these sentences more linguist Noam Chomsky came up with a theory of Transformational Generative Grammar. This is a system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of a language and uses processes or rules (some of which are called transformations) to express these relationships. For example, transformational grammar relates the active sentence “The police beat the football hooligans” with its corresponding passive, “The rioting football hooligans were beaten by the police.” Although sets such as these active and passive sentences appear to be very different on the surface (i.e., in such things as word order), a transformational grammar tries to show that in the “underlying structure” (i.e., in their deeper relations to one another), the sentences are very similar.

The meaning of a sentence can also be changed by the formation of words. Inside the sentence, sounds are combined into words and parts of words into bigger words that are part of the rule system called morphology. Morphology is a combinatorial system building words. For example, in English, a suffix is used. This element is placed at the end of a word or stem to form a derivative or as an inflection (e.g. want-ed, clever-est, play-ing, kind-ly, fresh-ness). Speakers of a language make morphological changes to words that change the meaning of the sentence. For instance ‘He is the bright student’ (there could be other bright students in the class) is not the same as ‘He is the brightest student’ (he is the best in the class). These examples of building words use an adjective (bright) that can change in forms by using suffixes. They can change their form through comparative (brighter) and as shown superlative (brightest) degrees. The endings -er, -est, denoting degrees of comparison, are better regarded as non-inflectional suffixes. Likewise, we can also refer to the word, prefix, that is an element (e.g. re-write, dis-organised) placed at the beginning of a word or stem to adjust or qualify its meaning or (in some languages) as an inflection. For example ‘He is happy’ to ‘He is unhappy’. By the simple addition of the prefix ‘un’, it makes the two sentences the opposite in meaning. This is morphology at work, making these words.

Furthermore, a common instance of the morphology in practice is the past tense verbs (want+ed) and plural nouns (book+s). The examples in parentheses have morphological word inflection. English inflection indicates, as shown earlier comparatives (big, bigger, biggest), as well as third person singular present tense (I, you, we, they buy; he buys), past tense (we walk, we walked), verbals (called, calling), and plural nouns (cat, cats), Language teachers use the term ‘declension’ that is the variation of form or inflection of a noun, adjective, or pronoun. This constitutes its different cases; each of the classes into which nouns are divided on the basis of these inflections; the action of declining or of setting out in order the different forms of a noun etc. They also use the term ‘conjugation’ which is the scheme of all the inflectional forms belonging to a verb; a division of verbs according to general inflectional differences. In English, verbs can have at least 13 different roles but four forms are used in all of these. English speakers use for example:

Infinitive Verb – work
Work+s
Work+ed
Work+ing

These forms are used in their different forms with:

Present tense with subjects – she, he, it – He work+s
Past tense with all subjects– He work+ed
Present Continuous with all subjects – He is work+ing

Morphology builds complex words for past tense forms (want – wanted). A simple sentence like ‘I loved you’ uses morphological rules because the verb has been inflected to agree with the past tense rule. Inflection is the modification in the form of a word by means of affixation, vowel change, etc. In English, only nouns, pronouns, and verbs are inflected. This is the change in its formation to change the meaning. It was formerly customary to explain these as part of the verb do, as though I worked was originally I work – did. These morphological additions to the verbs and the pronunciations of them are where mistakes can happen. The child who says ‘I knowed’ is trying to form the regular past tense for verbs. The pattern past tense is mistaken because there are so many verbs in English that are inflected with the ‘ed’ ending. The sentence ‘I loved you’ has the ‘ed’ morpheme ending for past tense. The ‘ed’ ending in phonological rules is pronounced with a /d/ sound with the verb ‘love’. Furthermore, the ‘ed’ ending only has two more ways of pronouncing the ‘ed’ ending. These are the sounds /t/ (watched) and /ID/ (wanted). Morphology builds these complex words by adding to the original word.

Mostly all of the endings of verbs (wanted), nouns (cats), and adjectives (friendly) require morphological knowledge. The ‘ed’ ending is associated with regular verbs; this is different to the irregular verbs in past tense that change their form (say – said, go – went). In English, there are only 150 to 180 cases of irregular verbs. A language maven called Richard Lederer highlighted an example of verbs and all their endless pronunciation and morphological changes that sometimes do not follow patterns. He wrote a poem entitled ‘Tense Times with Verbs’:

The verbs in English are a fright.
How can we learn to read and write?
Today we speak, but first we spoke;
Some faucets leak, but never loke.
Today we write, but first we wrote;
We bite our tongues, but never bote.
Each day I teach, for years I taught,
And preachers preach, but never praught.
This tale I tell; this tale I told;
I smell the flowers, but never smold.
If knights still slay, as once they slew,
Then do we play, as once we plew?
If I still do as once I did,
Then do cows moo, as they once mid?

So, it is true that words are composed of many parts (suffix, prefix, inflection) including sound changes, some complicated as above. Words are basic units of language. A person’s brain memorizes words in all their forms in their mental lexicon. All the assembled morphological words and phrases and sentences are massaged by a set of rules into a sound pattern using pronunciation. There is an interface between the language and the mouth and ear that is called phonology. A phonological component describes the sound structure of the sentences generated by the syntactical component. Any word can be broken down into sound chunks. For instance the word ‘book’ can be broken down to a consonant phoneme in the initial position such as the /b/ in this case (i.e., what is described more technically as bilabial stop), Phonetically speaking this consonant will be at least partially voiced (i.e., there will be some vibration of the vocal cords). It will be without aspiration (i.e., there will be no accompanying slight puff of air. Following is a vowel /oo/ which can be classed as a diphthong. We then end the word with another consonant /k/ (i.e., what is described more technically as voiceless velar plosive consonant). A plosive is a stop consonant pronounced with a sudden release of air. Linguists look at all these parts of a word and find distinctions.

Moreover, In English for instance, we do not find the sound /n/ followed immediately by /g/ at the beginning of a word which is opposed to Thai which has the consonant sound /ng/ to start a word. In the English language, we can distinguish one thing from more than one, such as 1 dog (singular) and 2 dog+s (plural). Most plural nouns in English differ from the corresponding singular forms in that they have an additional final segment (2 dog+s). In the written forms of these words, it is either -s or -es (e.g., “cat” : “cats”; “dog” : “dogs”; “fish” : “fishes”). This is where the phonology of the final consonant is different. The noun+s ‘dogs’ has an /s/, at the end, the phonetic sound spoken would be a /Z/ like the initial letter in the word zoo. The plural noun actually has three phonetic sounds. The /iz/ for plural nouns like ‘bridges’ and /s/ for ‘rats’. The plural noun rule for /s/ is also seen in verbs where the 3rd person singular present simple verbs take an /s/ sound. We see verbs with /s/ like; He bats (/s/) for the cricket team, He jogs (/z/) everyday, He fishes (/iz) in the sea. But staying with nouns, there are other plural nouns in English that differ from their corresponding singular forms in other ways (e.g., “mouse” : “mice”; “criterion” : “criteria”; and so on) or not at all (e.g., “this sheep” : “these sheep”). These are examples of morphology as well as phonology change.

The combinations of sounds are put into words and then sentences. Looking at sentences, they are concerned with how different words categorized as nouns (cat), adjectives (good), verbs (go), etc are combined into clauses, which, in turn, are combined into sentences. A speaker assembles all the words and phrases and sentences that are massaged by a set of rules into a sound pattern using pronunciation. A word is a pure symbol; the relation between its sound and meaning is utterly arbitrary, a wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. ‘Dog’ means dog only because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning. Words are in the family of phonology; phonological objects comprise units or segments called phonemes. Phonemes are idealized units of speech in that they stand-alone and need to be combined with certain effort.

The combination of a word is usually represented as a ‘sequence’ or ‘chain’ of phonemes. Some variation in the pronunciation of these sequences could be attributed to a difference of dialect or accent. Also due to the fact that the first utterances of an English language were spoken some 5000 years ago by the nomads that roamed the South Eastern European plains. After all those years it is now spoken or learnt in nearly every country in the world. This goes to show how phonology works by looking at how words have changed over the 1000’s of years of use. For example, the short vowel /e/ under certain conditions has remained since Old English times; bedd is now bed today. On the other hand, to take a fairly simple case, the /a/ in Old English stan (stone) became about 1100 a sound like /or/ in law, in central and southern England. This is all different to the present day English ‘stone’ which uses the /o/ sound as in the word ‘go’. These days the English language is a global language and phonological changes are salient from country to country where one word can have many phonological changes. A good example is the American pronunciation as compared with that of London that is noticed to be at times somewhat old-fashioned. It has qualities that were characteristic of English speech in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The preservation of the /r/ in general American and flat /a/ in fast, path etc. were abandoned in southern England at the end of the eighteenth century. In many little ways, standard American English is reminiscent of an older period in the language due to its phonological characteristics. Most Americans pronounce either and neither with the vowel of teeth or beneath, while in Britain an alternate pronunciation is now with an initial diphthong /ai/. These words still have meaning and are understood by the people using them. There is a gradual change in word phonology that cannot be noticed as it is spoken by the masses.

So, phonology can change a word in many ways. Second language students always make the mistake of saying the past participle ‘driven’ with the /i/ from the word ‘five’. They just follow on from the pronunciation of the verb drive. So in English, we have rules but they do not always follow what we think is right. For example looking at the strangeness of phonology in practice, George Bernard Shaw showed how phonological sounds vary in the English language. You can certainly see how some students get confused.

English spelling poem

A moth is not a moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth or brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose
Just look them up – and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart

A dreadful language? Man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn’t learned at fifty-five.

To conclude, it has been shown that under the surface of the English language, there is a myriad of factors. It is true that new sentences are created from all these words into syntactic processes for communication. We can see that there is a universal grammar underlying language, with auxiliaries and inversion rules, nouns and verbs, subjects and objects, phrases and clauses, cases and agreement, and so on. It seems to suggest a commonality in the brains of speakers. It is reasonable to ask if changes in English can be predicted, there will doubtless be modifications in phonology. New words will enter the lexicon. These will take forms of verbs, nouns etc. The more people talk the more we come to realize that there are many differences even in the one language that we call English. Remember, we do not all speak like the Queen of England. The global influence will also contribute toward the narrowing of the gap in languages: advanced technological education, computer programming, machine translation, and expanding mass media. Will this alter our language? I have touched on the American influence on English. This is a scratch on the surface of one variation of the English language that has millions of other English speakers around the globe. They all have their way of speaking English, using their own syntactic, phonological characteristics. The English language is no mere historical document like the bible to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past. The English language is a living entity, not constantly buried. Shakespeare and Chaucer transformed it in their time, we may fairly hope, a future still greater than its glorious past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Phonological constraints and morphological development
Joseph Paul Stemberger, University of Minnesota, Barbara Bernhardt, University of British Columbia

Chomsky’s Revolution in Linguistics
John R. Searle – The New York Review of Books, June 29, 1972
Vowel dominance and morphological processing
Joseph Paul Stemberger – University of British Columbia
Christine Setchell Middleton
Lind, Jensen, Sullivan & Peterson, P.A.
Short Title: Vowel Dominance and Morphology
Contact Address: Department of Linguistics
University of British Columbia
E270-1866 Main Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V6T 1Z1
E-mail: stemberg@interchange.ubc.ca

Grammar Puss
Steven Pinker
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

Universal Grammar and Linguistics
by Michael Albert

Words and Rules – The Ingredient of Language
Steven Pinker
Weidenfeld and Nicolson

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