Language Structure
Language is compositional but not flat. Physical signals become contrastive categories, categories combine into words and hierarchical phrases, and conventional meanings are interpreted inside context.
Language builds larger patterns from smaller contrasts.
The layers interact rather than forming a one-way pipeline, but each introduces a different unit of analysis. Moving upward changes what counts as a meaningful pattern.
A sentence is hierarchical, not merely a row of words.
Words form constituents that behave as units. The tree makes grouping explicit, so the same linear sequence can be analyzed in terms of nested phrases and grammatical relationships.
Linear order is visible. Constituent structure has to be inferred.
The sentence “the book on the table fell” is a row of words on the page, but its interpretation depends on grouping: “on the table” modifies “book,” and the whole noun phrase functions as the subject of “fell.” Syntax represents those nested relationships explicitly.
Small units combine into larger constituents with their own grammatical behavior.
Relationships can hold between words or phrases that are not adjacent in the surface string.
One word sequence can permit more than one structure, producing more than one interpretation.
Languages differ in ordering, marking, and construction while still organizing expressions hierarchically.
Phonetics ≠ phonology
Phonetics describes physical articulation, acoustics, and perception. Phonology asks how a particular language organizes those possibilities into contrastive patterns.
Semantics ≠ pragmatics
Semantics studies conventional meaning contributed by expressions and composition. Pragmatics studies how context and inference add what a speaker communicates in a situation.