By the way, in what I'm saying, I oversimplify by supposing that the basic unit of language is a word.

因为我想说的是，我们现在是把语言的基本单位简单化了。

耶鲁公开课 - 文学理论导论课程节选

Linguists can work at different levels of abstraction with language.

根据不同层面的基本单位，语言学家有不同的研究。

耶鲁公开课 - 文学理论导论课程节选

The linguists know that that's not at all necessarily the case.

语言学家认为语言的基本单位不一定是词。

耶鲁公开课 - 文学理论导论课程节选

It could be the letter understood either graphically or audibly, and the variety of ways in which one can choose a basic unit in the study of linguistics means that you need a special word for that unit, which is characteristically "the tagmeme."

它既可以以图像的方式理解，也可以以声音的方式，因为每个人研究时选取的,基本的语言学单位不一样,所以需要一个特殊的名词来指代这个单位，这就是，法位“

耶鲁公开课 - 文学理论导论课程节选