Frameworks

Phonology is the sound of language. Look for:

• Characteristics of speech – prosodic features, voiced pauses, fillers
• Rhetorical, literary or specialist use – rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, assonance, sibilance, consonance, harsh/soft sounds
• Elision
• Accent, recognisable by deviant spelling
• Text message phonetics – homophones of numbers

Lexis simply means vocabulary. Look out for:

• Informal lexis – slang, colloquialisms, swearing, clichés, monosyllabic words, dialect
• Formal lexis – elevated, literate, sophisticated, polysyllabic, archaisms, Latinate
• Figurative lexis – metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, hyperbole, oxymoron
• Other lexical choices – euphemisms, dysphemism, neologisms, collocations 
• Field specific lexis – semantic fields, jargon

Semantics is the meaning of language. Look for:

• Factual and objective – denotative or referential
• Personal and subjective – connotative, emotive or attitudinal
• Types of meaning – positive, negative, specific, vague, literal, figurative
• Similarities/contrasts in meaning – synonym, antonym
• Changes – amelioration, pejoration, generalisation, specialisation, weakening
• Meanings from lexis feature – semantic fields, figurative language
• Meanings from grammar feature – modality from modal auxiliaries
• Others – hyponym, hypernym, meronym, homonym, homophone

Where semantics involves the meaning of language, pragmatics centres on the force of our language. It is the practical use of language and how meaning is implied.

• Recognition of allusion – cultural allusions
• Recognition of function – use of grammatical declarative to ask a question, use of interrogative to command
• Grice’s maxims – quality, quantity, manner, relevance
• Specific features of turns in speech – utterance length, speech acts, backtracking, repairing, terms of address, repetition, minimal responses, hedging

Grammar is the structure of units of language.

• Word classes – nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions
• Sentence function – declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative
• Sentence type – minor, simple, compound, complex
• Syntax
• Other – ellipsis, active/passive voice, pronoun use, agreement, deixis