Kinds of Linguistic Knowledge
- Phonetic knowledge
- You know how to translate abstract linguistic categories into articulatory gestures.
- You know how to classify particular acoustic patterns as belonging to particular linguistic categories.
- You know how to use the patterns of loudness and pitch in your language to help you find boundaries between units.
- Units: phonetic features
- Phonological knowledge
- You know what sounds can legally follow what other sounds in your language.
- You know how the same abstract sound gets realized in different ways in different environments.
- You know how units at one level (for example, phonemes) combine to form units at a higher level (for example, syllables).
- Units: phonemes, moras, syllables, metrical feet, phonological phrases
- Morphological knowledge
- You know what order to put, or expect, the morphemes in in a polymorphemic word.
- You know how the sounds in a morpheme change when it combines with another.
- You know how to interpret or produce a word consisting of a novel combination of familiar morphemes.
- Units: morphemes
- Syntactic (and semantic) knowledge
- You know what order to put the constituents of a sentence in to signal a particular meaning.
- You know what roles the constituents of a sentence play in the state or event referred to by the sentence.
- You know where to expect gaps in particular patterns.
- Units: phrases, clauses, sentences
- Semantic knowledge
- You know how words and sentences relate to objects and relations in the world.
- You know how to interpret the scope of negation.
- You know how to "find" the thing that is referred to by a definite noun phrase (such as the guy who always parks in front of my driveway).
- Units: semantic features, objects, relations, variables, worlds, mental spaces
- Pragmatic knowledge
- You know how get somebody to do something for you using language.
- You know how the meanings of words such as go and come change with the context.
- You know how to begin and end a phone conversation without offending the hearer.
- Units: utterances, discourses, turns
- Knowledge of varieties of language
- You know what forms sound more formal than others and how to select the forms that are appropriate to the situation.
- You know when somehow has said something that is politically incorrect.