Language and Linguistics
Domain 2 - Language and Linguistics - tests how English works as a system: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, historical change, dialect variation, and language acquisition. Questions ask you to describe language accurately rather than enforce usage preferences.
Core rules and concepts
- Phonology: phonemes are contrastive sound units; allophones are nondistinctive variants. English has about 44 phonemes, but the alphabet has 26 letters, so spelling-sound correspondences are indirect.
- Morphology: free morphemes stand alone; bound morphemes attach. Inflectional affixes mark grammatical information without changing lexical category; derivational affixes often change category or meaning.
- Syntax: sentences are hierarchical, not word strings. Constituency tests include substitution, movement, and coordination. Structural ambiguity arises when one surface string has two phrase structures.
- Semantics studies denotation, connotation, and semantic relationships such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy.
- Pragmatics studies intended meaning: speech acts, presupposition, implicature, and Gricean maxims.
- Historical linguistics: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English; the Great Vowel Shift changed long vowel pronunciations; Norman French and Latin contributed vocabulary.
- Dialect variation is systematic, not deficient. AAVE has rule-governed features such as habitual be; code-switching is a skilled register shift.
- Acquisition theories: behaviorist imitation, nativist universal grammar, interactionist social input.
Worked example
In the sentence The shooting of the hunters was terrible, the phrase the hunters can be the shooters or the shot. The ambiguity is structural: the noun phrase the hunters can attach as agent or object of the nominalized shooting. A paraphrase test disambiguates: The hunters who shot were terrible versus The shooting of the hunters by someone was terrible.
Traps that cost marks
- Confusing phonemes with letters.
- Calling dialect features errors.
- Mislabeling inflectional affixes as derivational.
- Treating prescriptive rules as linguistic laws.
- Explaining ambiguity as vagueness.