abstract:In linguistics, the term double articulation, first introduced by the French linguist André Martinet, or duality of patterning refers to the way in which the stream of speech can be divided into meaningful signs, which can be further subdivided into meaningless elements. So for example, the meaningful English word "cat" is composed of the sounds [k], [æ], and [t], which are meaningless as separate individual sounds (and which can also be combined to form the separate words "tack" and "act", with distinct meanings).