(on verbs) the third person singular –s as in Anakin kills younglings, (on verbs) the preterite (and participial) -ed as in Ron kissed Hermione, (on verbs) the progressive –ing as in Han is falling into the sarlacc pit, (on verbs) the past participle –en in  the Emperor has fallen and cannot get up, (on nouns) the plural –s in vampires make the worst boyfriends, (on nouns) the possessive -‘s in that’s Luke’s hand isn’t it, (on adjectives) the comparative –er in the car is cooler than Kirk, and (on adjectives) the superlative –est in that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.

The sounds of a word can be broken down into phonemes, the smallest units of sound that distinguish meaning.  These basic sounds can be arranged into syllables and a metrical phonological tree can be used to simplify breaking up a syllable  (AAL Alumnae, Gussenhoven & Haike).

Semantics: Meaning. Semantics sometimes refers to meaning independent of any particular context, and is distinguished from pragmatics, or how meaning is affected by the context in which it is uttered. For the purposes of this book, we will work under the assumption that there really is no such thing as completely decontextualized meaning.

While linguists argue first and foremost for a descriptive approach, there is an argument to be made that there is a place for both description and prescription in language study. For example, when adults learn a foreign language, they typically want someone to tell them how to speak, or in other words, to prescribe a particular set of rules to follow, and expect a teacher or book to set forth those rules. But how do teachers know what rules to prescribe? At some point in time, someone had to describe the language and infer those rules. Prescription, in other words, can only occur after the language has been described, and reasonable prescription depends on adequate description.