Mighty Morpheme, Power Rangers
Morphemes, Phonemes, & The Power of Language
The phrase, “Power Rangers” is 2 words, 3 morphemes, and 12 phonemes.
But, what does all that mean?
Language Is A Powerful Tool.
It is a system of communication used by all forms of life to send and receive information. It is an essential process, allowing for the natural evolution of species. Not only does it utilize the power of a single word, but language can be demonstrated through action.
To help provide an operational definition of language, psychologists created 3 qualities (Kim, 2023). Therefore, language is:
- Regular/Rule-governed: This refers to language’s ability to maintain meaning, even when words are rearranged to satisfy grammatical obligations. This is evident in various languages such as English, where a phrase like “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” can be reorganized into “Over the lazy dog, the quick brown fox jumps” and continues to express the same sentiment.
- Arbitrary: When speaking, sounds do not need to be associated with just one meaning. For example, the English word, eight and the Mandarin word, bā share the same meaning. The only exception to this rule is onomatopoeias, which are essentially used to mimic a natural sound.
- Productive: Simply put, there are a variety of ways words can be used to describe a situation, action, and/or object. If I wanted to share how happy I was, I could express myself in almost an infinite amount of ways.
All Languages Have Morphemes & Phonemes.
All languages contain:
- Morpheme: It is the smallest unit of sound in a language that carries a meaning (Kim, 2023). For the most part, it is just a singular word like ‘the’. However, there are exceptions to this like ‘tables’, which has 2 morphemes, ‘table’ and ‘s’. The ‘s’ indicates that there is more than 1, a key piece of info.
- Phoneme: It is the smallest unit ofsound in a language (Kim, 2023). Letters can both individually make a sound or be combined to form new sounds, dependent on the context. In some languages, like Italian, letters will always make the same sound. This is known as transparent orthographies.
Human Language.
However, many psychologists decree that only human communication can be classified as language. It is due to human psychological evolution that suggests how this skill is unique to humans. Research conducted under Dr. Thomas Scott-Phillips found that we possess specific signals that, when combined, trigger language responses. However, due to the connection between a signal and its following response, complex forms of this are highly constrained. Truly, it seems as though only basic forms of communication could be achieved. However, humans have the unique ability to engage in complex communication, as a result of their intellectual ability (“Why is language unique to humans?”, 2013).
References & Resources To Learn More:
Course, C. (2020, December 4). Psycholinguistics: Crash course linguistics #11. YouTube. https://youtu.be/A5uNFKEn4_A?si=J6nH6J-jHCsBGwYX
Kim, J. (2023, October 16). Language [PowerPoint slides]. McMaster University, AvenueToLearn.
Why is language unique to humans?. The Royal Society. (2013, September 18). https://royalsociety.org/news/2013/language-unique-humans/#:~:text=Researchers%20from%20Durham%20University%20explain,language%20is%20unique%20to%20humans.
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