What linguistics is all about

Levels of modelling of language

As we saw, language is speech. Thus, the first level is a phonetic signal. We shall not be concerned with this level, for which signal processing is relevant. We assume that the signal has already been discretized as a stream of phonemes. Phonetics is universal, since all Homo Sapiens have the same mouth/nose/throat organs of speech. However, ways of coding information in speech admits lots of variations (accents, tones, clicks, etc.) Phonemics varies from language to language - the faculty of differentiating certain sounds is cultural. Whence two distinct uses of the international phonetics alphabet. Euphony, prosody.

The next level is morphology. One distinguishes generative morphology, which explains how to derive stem words from roots and affix morphemes, and flexional morphology, which explains how to revide inflected forms. Then there are compounds, etc.

Then we have syntax of sentences. This is where a lot of the formalisation effort took place.

Then we have semantics, then pragmatics.

This model in slices is rather naive - layers communicate in subtle ways.