This video we're going to be going over the units of language. So, the largest unit of language are sentences. Sentences represent complete thoughts and they follow the rules of grammar, or basically how you are allowed to combine words in that language. We'll talk about that a bit later in the video. But for example, "The hungry dog ate the muffins" is a complete sentence in English.

It has a subject, it has a verb, and it has an object. Now, right below that we have phrases. And these are essentially groups of words. You can think of them as groups of words that kind of fit together but don't make a complete sentence on their own. Often they'll be lacking a verb, a subject, or an object.

So we can take our sentence and break it down into two phrases: "the hungry dog" and "ate the muffins". And you can see how those kind of go together. Like, you can have a hungry dog, right? And you can eat the muffins. But this one lacks a verb and then this one lacks a subject.

Now, moving a bit smaller we have morphemes. And morphemes are going to be the smallest unit of language with meaning. Okay, so we're basically going to be breaking our sentence down into morphemes. And you can see how in our case, for the most part, each individual word is a morpheme. Each of these words can stand alone and has meaning.

But you may have noticed that "muffins" got split into two morphemes. We have "muffin" and then the "s" on the end. And that's because the "s" here has meaning. It adds plurality to the word "muffin". So each of those is a separate morpheme.

So keep an eye out for situations like that. Quite often each word is its own morpheme, but when you have something like, you know, a plural "s" on the end or an "ing" ending making something a continuous verb, those would be separated out and certain prefixes can also, you know, add meaning to a word and then those would be their own morphemes as well. Alright. And then finally we have the smallest unit of language which are phonemes, and phonemes are essentially sound units. So in English we have 44 phonemes.

So it's not quite as simple as just 26 letters, 26 phonemes because certain letters can make multiple sounds, particularly vowels in English can do that. And we can also have certain letter combinations that make unique sounds. For example, "ch" makes a "ch" sound. So if we were to look at the phonemes in the word "dog", and you can see how we added these little slash marks here to indicate that we're not just saying the letter, we're saying the sound. So the phonemes in the word "dog" are "d", "ah", "g".

Those individual sounds that make up the word "dog". So those sound units, those phonemes are the smallest unit of language. So you can kind of think about how morphemes have meaning, those "m's" kind of go together, and phonemes are essentially phonics or just the sounds of a language. Now like we talked about, sentences follow grammar or syntax rules, and these are basically rules that indicate how words can be combined and in what order you are allowed to combine them. Okay?

And that is going to be unique to every different language. So these units of language that we went over are pretty much universal, you'll find them in all human languages, but syntax rules are specific to each language. So just to give you some examples, you don't have to memorize these by any means, but just as an example English uses a subject verb object format. So we would say, "The dog fetched the ball". You would never say, "fetched the ball the dog".

Right? That doesn't sound right. We also have a tendency to put adjectives before the noun that they modify. So you would say the fuzzy cat. Right?

You wouldn't say the cat fuzzy. It doesn't sound right in English. So those are examples of syntax rules. Alright, so those are our units of language and I will see you guys in our next one. Bye bye.