hello and welcome to english learn we're back and we're starting the new school year of strong with a video that will help you understand the study of language better and prepare you for your a level english studies today's video is all about language frameworks and forms the basis of everything you will study in your a level course so to start off let's figure out what language frameworks are and why they are important you see language is a very complex system and trying to understand it all at once would be a very difficult task this is why people long ago understood that language has several different levels or frameworks that can be used to analyze it these frameworks are important because they make the task of finalizing language much easier and they help us look at language from several different perspectives there are different divisions of language frameworks but for the purposes of today's video we'll look at the six most important ones that will be the most useful for your a level studies those are phonetics and phonology lexus semantics grammar orthography and pragmatics we'll look at what each of these frameworks is and we'll also look into some of the most important concepts related to each of them first let's look at phonetics and phonology there are some difference between these two terms but they're not very important for us what we need to know is that phonetics and phonology deal with the production of speech sounds and their patterns so phonetics and phonology are all about how words and sentences are pronounced and what language sounds like now let's take a look at some key terms we need to know to understand phonology first we have consonants and vowels those are the different types of sounds that exist in the english language consonants of course are sounds like ba pa ma de orza vowels are sounds like e or o in simple terms the difference between consonants and vowels is that for consonants to be formed there has to be an obstruction of the airflow and there is no obstruction when making vowel sounds another important term in phonetics is elision this is when you omit a sound or a syllable when speaking for example when speaking very carefully if you want to say that you don't know something you will say i don't know carefully pronouncing every sound however in everyday speech we rarely speak like that so it's much more likely that we'll say i don't know i don't know do you hear the difference between i don't know and i don't know that's a legend and it's very common in spoken language you'll refer to it a lot when discussing spoken language features and child language acquisition intonation is another important concept this refers to how your voice falls or rises when speaking listen to these two sentences is she a wedding planner and yes she is a wedding planner did you hear how my intonation rose at the end of the first sentence that's because that was a question and questions usually have rising intonation at the end accent is another important term accent is the particular way of speaking characteristic for a certain country or region or a certain social group accent can be an important factor in one's language identity which is why understanding it will be very useful in your a level studies lexis is the next framework simply put lexis are the words of the language in linguistics they are often referred to as lexical items so when we talk about lexus or lexical items what we're really talking about are words here again we have several key terms a lexi is a word or a set of words that have a certain meaning when discussing lexis you will often have to look at different word choices the author or the speaker uses this can refer to many different things but some of the things you may wish to consider are the use of slang jargon and archaisms slang is very informal non-standard language jargon is specialist language used by people who belong to a certain profession so for example we can speak of legal or medical jargon archaisms are words that have fallen out of use and now sound extremely old-fashioned derivation is another important term in lexis it refers to the process of creating new words from existing ones and is therefore very important for language change register is language used depending on the situation so we usually speak about formal and informal register finally a lexical field is a group of words related to a particular topic for example the words apple orange and peach all belong to the lexical field of fruit lexical fields are also sometimes called semantic fields which brings us to our next framework semantics semantics deals with the meaning of words and phrases in your as level studies two terms you've definitely come across are denotation and connotation denotation is the dictionary meaning of the word and connotation is additional more symbolic meaning in the word red the denotation is the color red but connotative meaning can range from love and passion to blood and anger depending on the context other important semantic terms include synonyms antonyms and homonyms synonyms are words that have the same or nearly the same meaning for example the words big and large are synonyms they have the same meaning on the other hand antonyms are words that have the opposite meaning of each other for example big and small homonyms are words that have the same pronunciation or spelling but a different meaning for example the word bark can have two different meanings you can say dogs can bark or the bark on this tree is very rough these two words are written and pronounced the same but have different meanings they're homonyms semantic change refers to how the meaning of a word changes you will discuss this a lot when learning about how to respond to the first question of paper 3. the next level of language is the dreaded grammar grammar deals with phrases clauses and sentences all of which are created by combining words a phrase is a group of two or more words that express a certain idea but do not form a complete sentence for example a beautiful house is a phrase there are several different types of phrases such as noun phrases adjective phrases verb phrases and adverbial phrases the type of phrase is defined by the head word in the phrase a beautiful house the head word is house which is a noun so this is a noun phrase clauses are groups of words which contain a subject and a predicate they are usually combined together to form compound or complex sentences sentences are groups of words which contain a subject and a predicate and express a complete idea they can be statements questions commands or exclamations grammar studies different sentence types as well as sentence complexity it also studies individual words but it's not concerned with the meaning of words but their grammatical properties it also studies word order which is the way words are ordered in clauses and sentences the next language framework orthography deals with the conventions of written language this essentially means that when analyzing orthography you are looking at how words are spelled are words capitalized and what words are capitalized and why and how the author uses punctuation especially when analyzing language change we also pay attention to hyphenation we analyze whether compounds words are written with a hyphen as one word or as separate words finally the last level of language we'll look at is pragmatics pragmatics deals with language use in social contexts that is how we use language especially spoken language in the real world pragmatics will be most useful when analyzing spoken language features context or the situation in which language is spoken will be of primary importance infographics pragmatics also looks at the differences between written and spoken language and knowing about those differences is one of the most important things you will need to learn in your a level studies the basic unit studied in spoken language is an utterance simply put we can say that in spoken language an utterance is the equivalent of a sentence in written language when learning about spoken language and pragmatics you will also learn about different politeness strategies and how language is used to threaten or preserve the speaker's face or their public self-image all of these terms will be dealt with in much more depth over the course of your studies but for now i hope you've gotten a better understanding of the frameworks of language and some of the most important concepts related to them i'm looking forward to delving more deeply into a level studies with you which a-level topic do you need the most help with let me know in the comments below and i'll try to help and as always subscribe and like the video for more videos like this