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Levels of organization.

Language is organized hierarchically; it is made up of levels of organized structure, involving larger and larger units. We begin with the sounds of language; they are put together into meaningful units (words, morphemes), which are then organized into a higher level---the sentence or the discourse.

The level we begin at is the phonetic level, and we begin by looking at the human vocal apparatus and all the sounds it is capable of. We will later see that languages organize the infinity of phonetic detail into a finite number of sound units, and that each language has a different and discrete phonological system. So instead of looking at the phonological systems of Spanish, German etc. now, we begin by looking at all the possible sounds that languages can select from, the phonetic possibilities of the human vocal apparatus.





Harold Schiffman
Fri Jan 17 09:48:04 EST 1997