Morphology refers to the study of the internal structure of words or how they are formed

• free morphemes – can stand on own as words/ stem/ roots. (morphemes that can stand alone)
• bound morphemes – must be attached to another morpheme – ing, un, some…  (affixes – prefixes and suffixes)
• Inflectional morphemes – grammatical morphemes – grammar function – third person singular (s), past tense (ed); progressive/continuous (ing); past participle (ed); plural (s); possessives (‘s)
• Derivational morphemes – derived from and add new meaning to existing words. (happy – happiness)
• A lexicon is a person’s vocabulary; lexicology is the study of words and their meanings.
• parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, auxiliary – be, have, do –  combined with verbs to create properties of verbs such as aspect and voice)
• conjunction, determiner- the, some, my/ modals – can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, must – to show possibility, necessity, obligation.
• suffixation (such as journo, brekky, mozzie)
• Morphological patterning: (conversion of word class, creative word formation/ nominalisation) (Spoken discourse)
• Contraction: what’s…  I’m, let’s,…
• assimilation – gotta, g’day
• jargon – technical terms/ slang (yakka)

Syntax is concerned with the organization of words into phrases, clauses and sentences.

• Phrases and clauses: length of sentences (simple, compound, complex)/ subordination
• Sentences
• the basic functions in clause structure (subject, object, complement, adverbial)
• Different sentence types (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatic)
• (spoken: incomplete / truncated sentences)
• Syntactic patterning: (antithesis, listing, parallelism/repetition of grammatical structure, references: (anaphoric, cataphoric, deictic)
• Nominalization
• Various aspects of sentence structure; active/ passive
• Sentence structure: (spoken) : “and” and “but” to start a sentence. ; ellipsis (omission of words / phrase in a sentence) Source: English Works

Metalanguage review quizlet (Links to an external site.)

Metalanguage for Units 1 and 2
Each of the English Language units requires students to understand linguistic concepts and use metalanguage
appropriately to describe and analyse language in an objective and a systematic way. Metalanguage underpins the
key knowledge and key skills and provides students with the means to discuss elements of linguistic study. Students
are required to understand and use the metalanguage contained in the unit and area of study introductions, the
key knowledge and skills, and the following lists.

The subsystems of language
The subsystems of language are the essential organising tools with which students become familiar: phonetics
and phonology (the study of the sounds of language); morphology and lexicology (the study of the structure or
forms of words); syntax (the study of how words are combined into sentences); semantics (the study of meaning
in language); and discourse (the study of how written and spoken texts of two or more sentences are organised).
In Units 1 and 2, students use metalanguage associated with the following five subsystems:

Phonetics and phonology
• the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
• speech sound production: voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation
• sounds in connected speech and connected speech processes: assimilation, vowel reduction, elision, insertion
• prosodic features: pitch, stress, volume, tempo and intonation.

Morphology and lexicology
• word classes: nouns, verbs, auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns,
conjunctions, determiners, interjections
• function words and content words
• affixation: prefix, suffix, infix
• inflection and derivation
• root, bound and free morphemes
• word loss; word-formation processes: blends, acronyms, initialisms, shortenings, compounding, contractions,
collocations, neologisms, borrowing, commonisation, archaism
• morphological over-generalisation.

Syntax
• phrases, clauses and sentences
• sentence structures: sentence fragments; simple, compound, complex and compound-complex sentences;
ellipses; and coordination and subordination
• sentence types and their communicative function in texts: declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamative
• basic functions in clause structure: subject, object, complement, adverbial.

Discourse
• code-switching (the practice of alternating between two or more languages or dialects in conversation)
• paralinguistic features used in spoken texts: facial expressions, body gestures, body language, eye gaze.

Semantics
• the relation of meaning and sign
• semantic fields/domain
• semantic over-generalisation and inference
• etymology
• broadening, narrowing, elevation, deterioration, shift, denotation and changing connotation.

Other metalanguage
The following terms are not confined to one particular subsystem of language:
• function, field, mode, setting, context, relationships between participants
• register
• critical period of language development
• theories of child language acquisition including behaviourism, innatism, interactionism
• first- and additional-language acquisition, bilingualism, multi-lingualism
• Indo-European language family
• standardisation and codification
• prescriptivism and descriptivism
• Lingua franca
• linguistic relativism and determinism
• pidgins and creoles
• language maintenance, shift and reclamation.

(from the Study Design)

A summary of subsystems of language on Wikipedia 

In Units 1 and 2, students use metalanguage associated with the following five subsystems:

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) - IPA chart with sounds

(Phonetics – the study of human speech sounds. It is concerned with the actual physical sounds that human beings utter in making intelligible speech. It is concerned with the mechanics and acoustics of speech, such as where we make sounds in the mouth or the places of articulation.)

Phonetics and phonology:

• the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
• speech sound production: voicing, place of articulation and manner of articulation
• sounds in connected speech and connected speech processes: assimilation, vowel reduction, elision, insertion
• prosodic features: pitch, stress, volume, tempo and intonation​

• vocal effects: cough, laughter, breath
• ​​features of Broad, General and Cultivated accents in Australian English
• phonological patterning in texts: alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm, rhyme

​​(VCE English Language Study Design)

Semantics is the study of meaning in language – the meaning of words as well as phrases, clauses and sentences.

• Semantic fields – we categorise lexemes by organizing vocabulary into fields of meaning or groups of words that are linked in meaning.
• lexical meaning and semantic fields;
• connotation and denotation;
• Metaphor and figurative language; idioms; irony, metaphor, oxymoron, simile, personification,
• puns, slang and colloquialisms
• Lexical choice: synonyms, antonyms, collocations, idioms
• Semantic patterning: irony, metaphor, oxymoron, simile, personification, animation, lexical ambiguity;  Source: English Works