Page "Course in General Linguistics" Paragraph 26

These two forms of relation open linguistics up to phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.

Take morphology, for example.

The signs cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat.

Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that in the English language the plural often consists of little more than adding an s to the end of the word.

Likewise, in syntax, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis, we can discover the grammatical rules for constructing sentences: the meaning of je dois (" I should ") and dois je?

(" Should I?

") differ completely simply because of word order, allowing us to note that to ask a question in French, you only have to invert the word order.