- syntax is the study of the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. - Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages. While phonetics analyzes all the possible sounds in human languages, phonology analyzes the sound pattern of a particular language to determine which sounds are phonemes and which are just allophones in a specific language (allophone is a variant of a sound that cannot be used to distinguish meaning- for example, [pʰ] and [p] are allophones of the phoneme /p/ in english because you never found two words in english that have different meaning only because of these two sounds.). - semantics is the study of meaning.