HookThe murder conviction that turned on the difference between 'my' and 'me'
In June 2005, nineteen-year-old Jenny Nicholl disappeared from Richmond in North Yorkshire — but her phone kept texting. The forensic linguist Malcolm Coulthard was asked to compare messages sent after she vanished with ones she was known to have written herself. The differences were tiny and damning. Jenny habitually wrote 'my' and 'myself'; the later texts used the northern dialect forms 'me' and 'meself'. Her texting style was consistent for years, then changed overnight — in exactly the ways that matched how the chief suspect texted. In 2008 David Hodgson was convicted of her murder, with the linguistic evidence part of the case. A vowel helped catch a killer.
That case works because language is systematic at every level — sound, spelling, word choice, grammar, implication, structure — and systems can be analysed. AQA builds the entire A-Level on this idea. The specification calls the toolkit the language levels: phonetics, phonology and prosodics; graphology; lexis and semantics; grammar including morphology; pragmatics; and discourse. They are not a topic you study once — they are the method you bring to every component: both Paper 1 questions, both halves of Paper 2, and your NEA investigation. Every AO1 mark you will ever earn (10 of the 25 on each Paper 1 analysis question, 10 of the 30 on the child language essay) is a mark for using these levels precisely. Learn them as six magnifications of one microscope.
ModelPhonetics, phonology and prosodics — the sound level
Phonetics is the physical production of speech sounds; phonology is the sound system of a language — English runs on roughly 44 phonemes, the smallest units that change meaning ('pat' vs 'bat'). Prosodics covers everything sound does above the individual phoneme: stress, intonation, pitch, pace, volume and pause.
Prosody carries meaning grammar cannot see. Take the seven words 'I never said she stole the money' and stress each word in turn: seven different accusations. Stress 'I' and someone else said it; stress 'stole' and perhaps she merely borrowed it. In spoken transcripts, this level is your richest seam — rising intonation turning a declarative into a question, micropauses signalling hesitation or turn-holding, emphatic stress doing the work of an exclamation mark.
Written texts play at this level too: non-standard spellings like 'gonna' and 'dunno' represent elision to construct informality; advertisers pattern plosives and long vowels for punch and luxury respectively. The analytical rule is always the same: name the sound feature precisely, then state what it does in this text.
ModelGraphology — the visual level
Graphology is the visual design of a text: typography, layout, colour, images, spacing, and how these direct the reader's path through the page. In multimodal and electronic texts it expands to emoji, which frequently stand in for prosody — a laughing emoji does the job tone of voice would do in speech.
This is the level students misuse most. 'The bold heading grabs the reader's attention' earns nothing, because it is true of every bold heading ever printed. Strong graphological analysis ties design to genre, audience and representation: a charity appeal built around one full-page photograph of a single named child is making a graphological argument — individual, not statistic — that the lexis then reinforces. A broadsheet's dense columns claim seriousness by inheritance; a government leaflet's numbered steps construct the reader as someone who needs a process, not a discussion.
Use graphology as a way in, then connect it to another level. On its own it is the weakest evidence you can offer; connected, it shows the integrated analysis top bands demand.
ModelLexis and semantics — the word level
Lexis is vocabulary choice; semantics is what those choices mean — and the space between denotation (dictionary meaning) and connotation (associations) is where texts do their persuading. 'Slim', 'slender' and 'scrawny' denote roughly the same body; they construct three different people.
The workhorse concept here is the semantic field: a cluster of words from the same domain of meaning. A gym advert that runs 'fight, burn, conquer, dominate' has built a combat field that reframes exercise as war — one label, four pieces of evidence, which is exactly the feature-plus-pattern shape examiners reward. Alongside fields, track register (the formality and domain a text pitches itself at), figurative language, jargon that constructs insider audiences, colloquialisms that perform friendliness, and taboo language and euphemism, which map what a culture will and will not say plainly.
At this level, precision of labelling matters: 'negative word' is Level 1; 'evaluative adjective with connotations of criminality' is analysis.
ModelGrammar and morphology — the structure level
Grammar operates at four ranks, and marks live at all of them. Word class: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions — identified accurately, in context. Phrase: especially the noun phrase, whose pre- and post-modification is the great smuggler of assumptions. Clause: subject, verb, object; active versus passive voice, which decides whether an agent is named or vanishes. Sentence: functions (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamative) and structures (simple, compound, complex, minor).
Morphology sits underneath: inflections like '-ed' and '-s' that mark grammar, and derivations like 'un-' and '-ness' that build new words. Morphological analysis becomes essential in child language data, where 'runned' tells you a rule has been learned.
Grammar frightens students, but it is the most mechanical level to revise: learn the four ranks, drill the labels, and practise the passive-agency question — who is doing what to whom, and who has the text allowed to disappear?
Noun-phrase surgery on an invented headline: 'Britain's exhausted, underpaid junior doctors deserve better.' Strip it to the head noun — 'doctors'. Now reattach the modifiers one at a time. 'Junior' is descriptive classification. 'Exhausted' and 'underpaid' are evaluative premodifiers stacked before the head, so the reader receives them as given facts rather than claims to assess — nobody argues with an adjective they were never asked to agree to. The genitive determiner 'Britain's' constructs possession: they are ours, recruiting national sympathy before the verb phrase even arrives. Six words in, the argument is already over — and not one of its claims was made in a form you could easily dispute. That is why examiners rate noun-phrase analysis so highly: it reveals persuasion hidden inside 'neutral' description.
ModelPragmatics — the level of what is meant, not said
Pragmatics studies meaning that depends on context. 'It's cold in here' is, semantically, a weather report; pragmatically, it is usually a request to close the window. The gap between the two is implicature — meaning implied and recovered rather than stated.
The toolkit: deixis, words like 'this', 'here', 'now' and 'you' whose meaning is anchored to the context of utterance (advertising leans hard on deictic 'you'); presupposition, meaning a sentence takes for granted ('When did you last treat yourself?' presupposes you should); politeness and face — we phrase requests indirectly ('Could you possibly...?') to protect the hearer's freedom of action, and the directness a text permits itself tells you about the power relationship it assumes; and speech acts, utterances that do things ('I promise', 'I now declare').
In exam texts, pragmatics is where shared values hide: what a text treats as too obvious to state is often its strongest ideological claim.
ModelDiscourse — the whole-text level, and how the levels integrate
Discourse analysis zooms out to extended stretches of language. In writing: cohesion (anaphoric reference — 'she', 'this', 'the latter' — pointing back; discourse markers like 'however' signposting; lexical chains threading a topic through a text) and whole-text architecture (problem–solution, narrative arc, list). In speech: turn-taking, adjacency pairs (question expects answer, greeting expects greeting), interruptions and overlaps, topic management. Across both: genre conventions — the learned shapes texts inherit, from recipe to eulogy to group chat.
Discourse is also where your method becomes visible. The six levels are not six paragraphs of an essay; they are six magnifications of one microscope, and top-band AO1 moves between them inside a single analytical point, because real texts create meaning at several levels at once.
Run all six levels over an invented energy-drink advert: 'STORM. Unleash the storm inside. New tropical burst — zero sugar, all bite. Grab yours before it's gone.' Graphology: brand name in block capitals, isolated as a one-word paragraph — maximum visual weight. Phonology: plosive alliteration in 'burst' and 'bite' gives the copy percussive attack. Lexis/semantics: a semantic field of violent weather ('storm', 'unleash', 'bite') constructs the drink as dangerous energy, and the metaphor 'the storm inside' relocates that energy into the consumer. Grammar: imperatives 'Unleash' and 'Grab' command rather than request; 'zero sugar, all bite' is a balanced minor sentence, information compressed to slogan. Pragmatics: 'before it's gone' implicates scarcity without asserting it; deictic 'yours' presupposes possession has already begun. Discourse: the sequence — brand, slogan, product detail, call to action — is the advertising genre's four-move convention in miniature. Six levels, forty words of text, one integrated paragraph: that is the method.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
AO1 — 'apply appropriate methods of language analysis, using associated terminology and coherent written expression' — is worth 10 marks on each Paper 1 Section A analysis question and 10 of the 30 on the child language essay, and it reappears across Paper 2 and the NEA. The mark bands climb a ladder: naming features, then describing them, then analysing patterns with precise terminology in a coherent academic register. The single biggest discriminator is the move from one feature to a pattern: 'an imperative' is identification; 'a pattern of imperatives softened by the politeness marker "just"' is analysis.
Build every analytical point the same way: quote short (three to six words), label precisely ('present-tense declarative', not 'verb'), state the local effect, then find the second instance that makes it a pattern and tie it to representation or audience. And remember that 'coherent written expression' is inside AO1 — signposted paragraphs, accurate spelling of terminology, and a tentative academic register ('constructs', 'positions', 'suggests') are themselves being marked. Examiners consistently report that middling scripts know the same terms as top scripts; the difference is whether the terms are doing analytical work or decorating description.