What are the basic units of language?
Teachers need to know that spoken language is composed of units, the smallest of which are sounds, called phonemes if they signal meaning differences (e.g., bet and met have different meanings because they start with different phonemes). Next come morphemes, sequences of sounds that form the smallest units of meaning in a language (cat is a morpheme of English and so is s); words, consisting of one or more morphemes (cats); phrases (one or more words); and sentences. Crucial to an understanding of how language works is the notion of arbitrariness: Language units have no inherent meaning. A sequence of sounds that is meaningful in English may mean nothing at all in another language–or something quite different. Understanding the variety of structures that different languages and dialects use to show meaning can help teachers see the logic behind the errors in their students’ language use.
