How to Teach Basic Linguistic Units

Words are likely the first and most commonly thought of linguistic units, but there are many additional linguistic units, each as important as the next. When teaching about linguistic units, it is best to start at the roots and work upwards. In fact, in the study of linguistics, when diagramming words and sentences, individual units are called "branches" and the diagram is called a "tree."

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. The morpheme is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit which may or may not be a word. Examples of morphemes that do not stand alone, or are not words on their own include prefixes like "re," "un" and "non," and suffixes like "er," "ing" and "tion."
   
   Examples of morphemes that do stand alone would be "house" and "boat" in the word "houseboat."

2. The word is a complete linguistic unit that has meaning on its own. For example, "unfriendly" is a word that is made up of the morphemes "un," "friend" and "ly."

3. The phrase is a string of words that form one of the main parts of a sentence. For example, "the unfriendly ghost" is a phrase that can become part of a sentence.

4. The sentence is a string of words that contains a subject and a predicate. The predicate is generally something that is said about the subject and usually contains a verb. For example, "The unfriendly ghost scared me" is a sentence consisting of the subject phrase "the unfriendly ghost" and the predicate phrase "scared me".

5. The paragraph pertains to written matter and is made up of at least one sentence, though usually more. As a rule, paragraphs focus on a single point or idea. A paragraph could be written by adding sentences detailing how and why "the unfriendly ghost scared me."

Tips & Warnings

• There are also linguistic units of sound including the phoneme and syllable, which I have not covered as they detailed knowledge of the phonetic alphabet.

Resources

• Definition of Linguistic Unit