|
(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.