Structural layers

Translations

Livelli strutturali | - | -

Article

In general linguistics, a structural layer is an endolinguistic subsystem that possesses minimal structural elements and combinatory mechanisms. The structural layers are:

1. phonology - as opposed to the non-endolinguistic field of phonetics. The minimal element is the presemiotic phoneme, which is the abstract psychic image of a sound and carries emic oppositive value within a language;
2. morphology. The minimal element is the morpheme, which is the minimal linguistic sign and carries a meaning aribitrarily associated to a form;
3. syntax. The minimal element is a phrase (but phrases can also consist of smaller phrases combined with each other based on the rules of Universal and language-specific grammars).

Other layers that are frequently mentioned are the layer of the lexicon (that, however, lacks some formal features such as the existence of minimal elements and a close set of combinatory rules) and semantics (which, however, if defined as the general realm of meaning, exists before language encoding and is, therefore, not properly endolinguistic).