Like other social scientists, linguists are very inventive at creating new terms for the mere purpose of description. This makes their work authoritative and at the same time impenetrable to those who are outside of the field of linguistics. In this chapter, I will introduce some of the units of analysis employed by grammarians in the formal study of the structure of natural languages (phonemes, morphemes). After introducing some basic principles of structuralist linguistics, I will discuss how events and participants' roles are marked through nominal and verbal morphology. In particular, I will illustrate how the differentiated treatment received by different types of referents across languages is related to contextual features such as animacy, person, and level of involvement. Grammatical structures and choices will be shown to be related to a number of parameters, including the nature of action and the extent to which information is foregrounded or backgrounded. I will then introduce the notion of metalinguistic awareness and show that certain aspects of meaning that cannot be captured by studying speakers' intuitions can be captured when we examine spontaneous language use, especially conversational discourse. The relation between language and gender will be illustrated through the notion of indexicality, a property of a particular type of signs.