Language and Linguistics
Domain 1, Language and Linguistics, tests how English works as a system and how that system differs from students’ first languages. Expect items on phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse, and contrasts between English and common L1s.
Core rules and concepts
- Phonetics and phonology: phonemes are contrastive sounds; allophones are variants. Minimal pairs such as ship/sheep (/ɪ/ vs /iː/) show phonemic status. English has about 24 consonants and roughly 20 vowels and diphthongs, depending on dialect. Count sounds, not letters.
- Morphology: free versus bound morphemes; inflectional morphemes (plural -s, past -ed, comparative -er) versus derivational morphemes (un-, -ness, -tion). English has eight inflectional morphemes.
- Syntax: phrase structure (NP, VP, PP), constituency, embedding, and agreement. English is basically SVO, and adjectives normally precede nouns.
- Semantics: synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, homonymy, reference, and entailment.
- Pragmatics and discourse: speech acts, implicature, cohesion, coherence, and register.
Contrastive analysis predicts difficulty where L1 and L2 differ, but not every error is transfer; developmental errors also occur.
Worked example
A Spanish-speaking student says “I have 25 years” instead of “I am 25 years old.” Reasoning: this is lexical-semantic and syntactic transfer from Spanish tener … años; English uses be plus age. It is not a phonology error, and it is not random. The teacher names the pattern, contrasts the two structures, and gives communicative practice with ages and birthdays. By contrast, a Japanese speaker’s “He go to school” may reflect developmental omission of third-person -s rather than direct transfer, because the same pattern appears across many L1 groups.
Traps
Do not confuse letters with phonemes: thought has three phonemes, not six. Do not call every L1-influenced form interference without evidence. Do not confuse morphology (word formation) with syntax (sentence structure). Dialect features such as AAVE habitual be are rule-governed, not deficits. Avoid treating English spelling as a reliable sound map; correspondences are probabilistic.