OSSA 7 THE NUMBER 3: The Trivium

The Trivium - GLR

The Trivium is the first half of the 7 Liberal Arts. Sister Miriam Joseph described the three parts of the Trivium thus:

Grammar is the art of inventing symbols and combining them
to express thought

Logic is the art of thinking

Rhetoric is the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance.

Another description is:

Grammar is concerned with the thing as-it-is-symbolized
Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known
Rhetoric is concerned with the thing as-it-is-communicated.

Caveat:

Morphology - is the identification, analysis and description of the
structure of a given language’s morphemes and other linguistic units. In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language.

Phonology - is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. The phoneme can be described as “The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning”.

Syntax - In linguistics, syntax is “the study of the principles and
processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages”

Semantics - Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, like words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotation.

Syntax has to do with the form and order of words within the sentence.

Semantics has to do with the meaning.