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Graduate School
Morphemes may be ;
a. individual words
ex. Push
b. root words
ex. Berry in blueberry
c. prefixes
ex. Pre- in preview
d. suffixes
ex.-ness in openness
II. Sociolinguistics – is the study of patterns and variations in language within a society
or community.
- it focuses on the way people use language to express social class,
group status,gender,or ethnicity, and it looks at how they make
choices about the form of language they use.
- it also examines the way people use language to negotiate their role
in society and to achieve positions of power.
- For example, sociolinguistic studies have found that the way a New
Yorker pronounces the phonemes /r/ in an expression such as
“fourth floor” can indicate the person’s social class. According to
one study, people aspiring to move from the lower middle class to
the upper middle class attach prestige to pronouncing the/r/. Some-
times they even overcorrect their speech,pronouncing an /r/ where
those whom they wish to copy may not.
III. Applied Linguistics – employs linguistic theory and methods in teaching and in re-
search on learning a second language.
- Linguists look at the errors people make as they learn another
language and at their strategies for communicating in the new language at different
degrees of competence. In seeking to understand what happens in the mind of the
learner,applied linguists recognize that motivation,attitude,learning style,and personality
affect how well the person learns another language.