What is necessary to understand a sentence? Understanding what others have written is very interesting. A writer coverts his thoughts into a series of visible marks, and the reader converts that marks into understandable ideas. To understand the meaning of the text, the reader must identify the units of meaning, the words. But he must also apply certain rules underlying their sequence. "A writer converts his thoughts to meaningful words, the reader converts these words to thoughts." There are two major structural components: the syntax(or grammar) and the semantics. The syntax describes the forms of the strings of symbols. The words can only be combined in a certain sequence to be comprehensible. But when you are proficient in language you might not even be able to name any rule about syntax. Semantics refers to the meaning of a luinguistic utterance. The meaning of any particular sentence occurs on at least three levels: First you need to know the meaning of individual words, second, you need to combine the individual words to form propositions. And third, you need to join those propositions to form a complete sentence. What happens when you read a sentence? To explain the levels described above we use the following easy sentence as an example:"The injured student anxiously called the family doctor". First you have to look up every word in you "personal dictionary" in your head, this happens very quick. Then you have to understand the propositions in the sentence, you must know that the combination of family and doctor means something different than the the individual words, the same applies for "injured student" and "anxiously called". Now you have to combine the information collected in the stadia above and understand the whole sentence. This all happens very quickly, because the perception (reading the sentence) takes between 1 and 1.5 seconds, and in the same time, you understand the meaning of the sentence. Now we have described the understanding of one single sentence. But very often, the meaning of the sentence also depends on the context. Therefore it might be necessary to analyze larger units  Further reading:   Language 1   Language 2   Language 3 Do you have more information about Understanding language? Please share it in our database. [ TOP ]   © ThinkQuest Team 26618. All Rights Reserved.