The Significances of Learning Morphology and Syntax

(Sumber Gambar: holapeople.co.uk)

Morphology and syntax is one of the subjects that are studied in the first semester of the English Education magister program in State University of Makassar. The existence of this subject as the one to be mastered shows the importance of this subject for the students who study about language. It is because these parts of the linguistics include almost all the requirements and terms to form sentence that later will become the language itself. So, the students who want to study about language, especially English, better not underestimate the importance of this lesson.

In the process of learning morphology and syntax, there will usually be a controversy about this subject. The controversy itself is not about whether it is importance or not because every student believes that it is important. But the controversy that appears in the community of the students is all about the difficulty of the subject itself. Some students say it is not really hard while the other say it is too hard. For the students that think studying morphology and syntax is not really hard, maybe it is because they understand the basic concept of this thing like the relation between terms to another term. Or it is also can be caused by something else. For the students who say that it is difficult, the reason also can be various. Whether it is because they have no basic at all about it or they miss some explanation that makes them hard to understand the other terms that have relation to the other one. All the terms in this subject is related to one another. Just like what the lecturer of Morphology and Syntax in the first semester of the English Education magister program in State University of Makassar said, this subject is like chains. Once you lose something, you will lose the relation to the next thing. But, whether it is hard or not, whether the students like it or not, mastering this subject is a must.

It has been stated before that Morphology and Syntax have a very important role on the development of the student studying language that has to be understood well in order to master that language. Then, some questions appear such as: why is it so important?; and How significance are morphology and syntax to our future or career that makes them so important?; or even What is actually morphology and syntax?

So what is morphology and what is syntax?

Morphology is part of linguistics that study about the forms of words. It analyses the structure of words and also parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. In morphology, the students learn about couple of things like how the words are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. Furthermore, syntax is another part of linguistics that the study focuses on the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, for example; word order, punctuation, phrase, constituent, and many other terms. In a simpler explanation, we can say that morphology is a study of word and syntax is the study of the structure of the sentence. So, we can conclude that morphology and syntax is the study that concerns about the basic structural term to form the language.

After knowing what morphology and syntax are, the next question to answer is why is it so important to learn?

It has been stated that morphology and syntax in linguistic is the study about the word and sentence. As everyone knows, word and sentence are the main requirements that have to be used to produce the language. Furthermore, the way word and sentence are formed is different in each language. For example, it is different to say about phrase “a red carpet” in English, in Indonesian, or in Arabic. It is because all of those languages have different ways and different rules to form the phrase. So, in order to be able to use a language, that is English in this case, students who study about the language have to be able to recognise how the word or the sentence are formed. Most of the English Education students in State University of Makassar do not come from the English speaking country. Most of them are local students that come from some different cities and regencies in Indonesia. Some of them do not event use Bahasa Indonesia as their first or their mother language. So, when learning about English, these students has to have the knowledge and the information about how the words and the sentence in this language are formed remembering that English is not their first or mother language, or not even their second language.

Moreover, when learning a language, the students will also find some different contexts of situations. In every different contexts of situation in a language, usually the people who learn the language will find different forms of the sentence too. And almost in every language in the world has different ways to form the sentence even though the context of sentence that the people want to produce is same. In English, there are also some ways to arrange the word for each context of the situation. There are some words that can precede the other words and there are some words that cannot; there are some that can modify the other and there are some that cannot; there are some words that can be put into certain kinds of sentence and there are also some that cannot. Knowing all of those rules, the students will be able to form the sentence in the language, that is English in this case, and also will be able to choose which one to use when it is used in the certain kinds of situation so that they can use it correctly to its very context when they speak with the English speaking people or the native English speaker. For example, when a person that uses English in speaking wants to tell his interlocutor about what he is doing at that time, the sentence that he has to use is the progressive sentence or the present continuous tense sentence, not the simple present tense sentence. In English, the rule or way to form the present continuous tense sentence is different with the way to form the simple present. But in Bahasa Indonesia, even though the contexts of situation on those two sentences are different, the rule or the way to form those sentences is the almost the same (They are differed only by the time signal). So, learning morphology and syntax that tell us about the term and the forming of the word and sentence will help the students who learn English to know how to arrange the sentences in the correct way.

In conclusion of that, morphology and syntax is the study of linguistics that is important to be learned because it can help the people who study the second or the foreign language to form the word or the sentence that they later use whether spoken in a conversation or written. Then, how could studying the morphology and syntax be significance for me as a person and as one of the students of English Education magister program in State University of Makassar?

The first significance that we can get by studying morphology and syntax is to be able to understand the arrangement of words and sentences appropriate with correct rule of its language. The exactly correct rule is not always used in the conversation because the main aim of the language in the conversation is to make the interlocutor understand whatever we mean in the sentence. But, even though is not always needed to use the correct arrangement of the words in the conversation, people who learn English still need to master or at least know the correct rule so that they can use it in the formal situation. Also, using the formal form of the language appropriate with the rule and term that we find when learning morphology and syntax will reduce the possibility of misunderstanding or even the ambiguity of the sentence. As it is stated in the previous paragraphs, every language has their on way to form the sentence and also has their own understanding about the context of the sentences. So, by using the correct arranged sentences, the people that are in the conversation, who also have learned about the language, will be easy to understand what we have in mind.

Furthermore, the knowledge that we get after learning about the morphology and syntax like morphemes, suffixes, prefixes, root words, sentence structure, rules of phrase such as Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Prepositional Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Adverbial Phrase, and even about the ambiguity can be our ammunition when writing a text. Different with the condition in speaking, writing always requires the use of the good arranged sentence. In speaking, especially in the informal condition, the most important thing is to make the other people in the conversation understand about what we are saying. So, the sentences that we are using do not always have to be the good arranged sentences according to the rules because as long as our interlocutor in the conversation understands what we mean, the conversation will still be able to keep running. But in writing, we always have to write good forming the sentence according to the grammatical rule. Why? Because speaking sometimes provides the context of the situation so what the speaker means in the sentences can be understood not only from the sentence itself, but also from the context of situation within the conversation. In the other hand, when writing something, the context of the situation does not appear. So, to be able to make people who read the writing understand about what exactly we mean by our sentences, we have to use good sentences that is arranged using the very rule. For example, in the conversation someone asked what his friend is doing. His friend can answer by saying “I do my homework” instead of saying “I am doing my homework” as the one that appropriate with the context. But, even if his friend does not use the one that appropriate with the context, the person who asked the question will not find any problem to understand what his friend means as he can see the situation before his eyes. This kind of thing does not work in writing. When we write “I do my homework” to tell about what we are doing at the moment, the people who read it can be led to misunderstanding. They may think that we are telling about the fact or about an activity that we usually do, not the activity that we are doing at the moment. That is why it is really important to know the very rule of the language form and we can get some knowledge about it by learning morphology and syntax.

The other significance that we can get from learning this subject is having able to analyse the utterance. As the student of the English Education magister program, we are expected to do research whether about the about the education itself or about language. In doing the research about language, the knowledge about morphology and syntax will help us to analyse the sentence within the language. We can use the theories that we get from learning morphology and syntax to make a deeper analysis about the subject. For example, we can use our knowledge about ambiguity in a discourse of the language. The knowledge about two kinds of ambiguity in syntax such as the lexical ambiguity, that means a word can have more than one meaning, and the semantic ambiguity, that means the sentence can have more than one meaning, to analyse about everything related to the ambiguity in the language. So that the knowledge about, phrase, precedence, domination, anaphor, antecedence, binding, or any other information and knowledge from studying morphology and syntax.

Other than those significances that have been explained before, learning morphology and syntax also can give us some other good profit that can help us in developing our career. One of them is helping us in answering test. Nowadays, in the globalisation era, English has become a very important requirement that the people should have to be able to compete with other people. There are many institutions nowadays that use English as one of the requirements that has to be owned by the people who want to register there. To measure the English competence of those people, the institutions mostly used written test such as TOEFL (Test of English as Foreign Language), IELTS (International English Language Testing System), or TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication). By learning about morphology and syntax, we will have a better opportunity to get a high score than the people who never learn about the subject. It is because almost all the questions in those tests were made to test our ability to form the sentence according to the rule and in morphology and syntax, we learn about the sentence and the word to its very basic. We learn about how to form the word and the sentence by its very rule. So, I can guarantee that the people who have studied about morphology and syntax will get the better score than the people who have not. By getting a better score, of course, the chance to get accepted by the institution where we register will be higher too and it will give us a better chance to get a better career.

 Finally, as the students of the educational program, I do think that the knowledge we get from studying about morphology and syntax will be very useful for our career as English teachers in the future. In morphology, we have studied about the study of forms of word and in syntax; we have studied about the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. These two parts of linguistics, along with phonology, semantic, and pragmatic, are the components that are needed to be mastered in order to be a good English teacher in the future. How can you teach someone about English if you do not at least have the basic knowledge about English itself? Of course it will be bad for you and for the students. Imagine giving the students the wrong way of forming a phrase! Then the students use it in their conversation in their life, use it when they are writing something, or even use that wrong knowledge as the reference to answer a test, it will be very bad for them. So, knowing about the language, if not mastering it, will be a must for the teacher before teaching the students. In Bahasa Indonesia; there is a proverb which say “guru kencing berdiri, murid kencing berlari, in English; people know “monkey see, monkey do”, those are the illustration that can tell how important it is to be well-educated people before educating the other people.

All those reason are only a few from many reasons on why studying morphology and syntax can be very significance in our life and career. After all, those reasons just come from my point of few. There are thousand students, if not more, who study about morphology and syntax in this world. So, the reasons that I have stated above is like nothing. There must be even more and I can guarantee that.

Categories: Bahasa Inggris, Pengetahuan