Crash Course Linguistics

There are many theories of syntax and different ways to represent grammatical structures, but one of the simplest is tree structure diagrams! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we use tree structure diagrams to keep track of words and groups of words within sentences, and we’ll break down what roles different types of words and phrases play within a sentence.

Grammar sometimes gets a bad reputation, but we're actually doing grammar all the time! And we're pretty good at it! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we began the discussion of syntax by learning how we can take words and morphemes and turn them into sentences, questions, and stories.

What even is a word? Well… linguists don’t really know! But that’s ok! When linguists want to get super specific, we don’t even talk about words, we talk about morphemes instead. In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’re diving into the topic of morphology and what makes up these things we call words.

Language is everywhere. Linguistics is the study of language, but what does that even mean? In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we'll begin talking about some of the features and levels of structure of language, and introduce some of the other topics we'll be covering throughout this series.