Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions.
Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications.Theoretical linguistics is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it. Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes, such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy.
Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives: synchronically (by describing the structure of a language at a specific point in time) or diachronically (through the historical development of a language over a period of time), in monolinguals or in multilinguals, among children or among adults, in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired, as abstract objects or as cognitive structures, through written texts or through oral elicitation, and finally through mechanical data collection or practical fieldwork.
Linguistics emerged from the field of philology, of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach. Today, philology and linguistics are variably described as related fields, subdisciplines, or separate fields of language study but, by and large, linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term. Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language, stylistics, rhetoric, semiotics, lexicography, and translation.
Major subdisciplines
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of how language changes over history, particularly with regard to a specific language or a group of languages. Western trends in historical linguistics date back to roughly the late 18th century, when the discipline grew out of philology, the study of ancient texts and oral traditions.
Historical linguistics emerged as one of the first few sub-disciplines in the field, and was most widely practised during the late 19th century. Despite a shift in focus in the 20th century towards formalism and generative grammar, which studies the universal properties of language, historical research today still remains a significant field of linguistic inquiry. Subfields of the discipline include language change and grammaticalization.
Historical linguistics studies language change either diachronically (through a comparison of different time periods in the past and present) or in a synchronic manner (by observing developments between different variations that exist within the current linguistic stage of a language).
At first, historical linguistics was the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, which involves a study of the relationship between different languages. At that time, scholars of historical linguistics were only concerned with creating different categories of language families, and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages by using both the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. Internal reconstruction is the method by which an element that contains a certain meaning is re-used in different contexts or environments where there is a variation in either sound or analogy.[better source needed]
The reason for this had been to describe well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had detailed documentation and long written histories. Scholars of historical linguistics also studied Uralic languages, another European language family for which very little written material existed back then. After that, there also followed significant work on the corpora of other languages, such as the Austronesian languages and the Native American language families.
In historical work, the uniformitarian principle is generally the underlying working hypothesis, occasionally also clearly expressed. The principle was expressed early by William Dwight Whitney, who considered it imperative, a "must", of historical linguistics to "look to find the same principle operative also in the very outset of that [language] history."
The above approach of comparativism in linguistics is now, however, only a small part of the much broader discipline called historical linguistics. The comparative study of specific Indo-European languages is considered a highly specialized field today, while comparative research is carried out over the subsequent internal developments in a language: in particular, over the development of modern standard varieties of languages, and over the development of a language from its standardized form to its varieties.[citation needed]
For instance, some scholars also tried to establish super-families, linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic, and other language families to a hypothetical Nostratic language group. While these attempts are still not widely accepted as credible methods, they provide necessary information to establish relatedness in language change. This is generally hard to find for events long ago, due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups. A limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed for the functional purpose of conducting research. It is also hard to date various proto-languages. Even though several methods are available, these languages can be dated only approximately.
In modern historical linguistics, we examine how languages change over time, focusing on the relationships between dialects within a specific period. This includes studying morphological, syntactical, and phonetic shifts. Connections between dialects in the past and present are also explored.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, constituency,agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning. There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Morphology
Morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.
The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology.
Semantics and pragmatics
Semantics and pragmatics are branches of linguistics concerned with meaning. These subfields have traditionally been divided according to aspects of meaning: "semantics" refers to grammatical and lexical meanings, while "pragmatics" is concerned with meaning in context. Within linguistics, the subfield of formal semantics studies the denotations of sentences and how they are composed from the meanings of their constituent expressions. Formal semantics draws heavily on philosophy of language and uses formal tools from logic and computer science. On the other hand, cognitive semantics explains linguistic meaning via aspects of general cognition, drawing on ideas from cognitive science such as prototype theory.
Pragmatics focuses on phenomena such as speech acts, implicature, and talk in interaction. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the structural and linguistic knowledge (grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.
Phonetics and phonology
Phonetics and phonology are branches of linguistics concerned with sounds (or the equivalent aspects of sign languages). Phonetics is largely concerned with the physical aspects of sounds such as their articulation, acoustics, production, and perception. Phonology is concerned with the linguistic abstractions and categorizations of sounds, and it tells us what sounds are in a language, how they do and can combine into words, and explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying a word.
Typology
Structures
This section does not cite any sources.(January 2019) |
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a Saussurean linguistic sign. For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns (in oral languages), movements of the hands and face (in sign languages), and written symbols (in written languages). Linguistic patterns have proven their importance for the knowledge engineering field especially with the ever-increasing amount of available data.
Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of analysis. For instance, consider the structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows that the "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone. Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how native speakers use language.
Grammar
Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language. These rules apply to sound as well as meaning, and include componential subsets of rules, such as those pertaining to phonology (the organization of phonetic sound systems), morphology (the formation and composition of words), and syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences). Modern frameworks that deal with the principles of grammar include structural and functional linguistics, and generative linguistics.
Sub-fields that focus on a grammatical study of language include the following:
- Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech sound production and perception, and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties
- Phonology, the study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning (phonemes)
- Morphology, the study of morphemes, or the internal structures of words and how they can be modified
- Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical phrases and sentences
- Semantics, the study of lexical and grammatical aspects of meaning
- Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role played by situational context and non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
- Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)
- Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors (rhetoric, diction, stress) that place a discourse in context
- Semiotics, the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication
Discourse
Discourse is language as social practice (Baynham, 1995) and is a multilayered concept. As a social practice, discourse embodies different ideologies through written and spoken texts. Discourse analysis can examine or expose these ideologies. Discourse not only influences genre, which is selected based on specific contexts but also, at a micro level, shapes language as text (spoken or written) down to the phonological and lexico-grammatical levels. Grammar and discourse are linked as parts of a system. A particular discourse becomes a language variety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose, and is referred to as a register. There may be certain lexical additions (new words) that are brought into play because of the expertise of the community of people within a certain domain of specialization. Thus, registers and discourses distinguish themselves not only through specialized vocabulary but also, in some cases, through distinct stylistic choices. People in the medical fraternity, for example, may use some medical terminology in their communication that is specialized to the field of medicine. This is often referred to as being part of the "medical discourse", and so on.
Lexicon
The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that are stored in a speaker's mind. The lexicon consists of words and bound morphemes, which are parts of words that can not stand alone, like affixes. In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabetical order, the lexicon of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. Lexicography, closely linked with the domain of semantics, is the science of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or a dictionary. The creation and addition of new words (into the lexicon) is called coining or neologization, and the new words are called neologisms.
It is often believed that a speaker's capacity for language lies in the quantity of words stored in the lexicon. However, this is often considered a myth by linguists. The capacity for the use of language is considered by many linguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar, and to be linked with competence, rather than with the growth of vocabulary. Even a very small lexicon is theoretically capable of producing an infinite number of sentences.
Style
Stylistics also involves the study of written, signed, or spoken discourse through varying speech communities, genres, and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media. It involves the study and interpretation of texts for aspects of their linguistic and tonal style. Stylistic analysis entails the analysis of description of particular dialects and registers used by speech communities. Stylistic features include rhetoric, diction, stress, satire, irony, dialogue, and other forms of phonetic variations. Stylistic analysis can also include the study of language in canonical works of literature, popular fiction, news, advertisements, and other forms of communication in popular culture as well. It is usually seen as a variation in communication that changes from speaker to speaker and community to community. In short, Stylistics is the interpretation of text.
In the 1960s, Jacques Derrida, for instance, further distinguished between speech and writing, by proposing that written language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself.Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts (as signs and symbols) in language. The formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which studies language processing in the brain; biolinguistics, which studies the biology and evolution of language; and language acquisition, which investigates how children and adults acquire the knowledge of one or more languages.
Approaches
Humanistic
The fundamental principle of humanistic linguistics, especially rational and logical grammar, is that language is an invention created by people. A semiotic tradition of linguistic research considers language a sign system which arises from the interaction of meaning and form. The organization of linguistic levels is considered computational. Linguistics is essentially seen as relating to social and cultural studies because different languages are shaped in social interaction by the speech community. Frameworks representing the humanistic view of language include structural linguistics, among others.
Structural analysis means dissecting each linguistic level: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and discourse, to the smallest units. These are collected into inventories (e.g. phoneme, morpheme, lexical classes, phrase types) to study their interconnectedness within a hierarchy of structures and layers. Functional analysis adds to structural analysis the assignment of semantic and other functional roles that each unit may have. For example, a noun phrase may function as the subject or object of the sentence; or the agent or patient.
Functional linguistics, or functional grammar, is a branch of structural linguistics. In the humanistic reference, the terms structuralism and functionalism are related to their meaning in other human sciences. The difference between formal and functional structuralism lies in the way that the two approaches explain why languages have the properties they have. Functional explanation entails the idea that language is a tool for communication, or that communication is the primary function of language. Linguistic forms are consequently explained by an appeal to their functional value, or usefulness. Other structuralist approaches take the perspective that form follows from the inner mechanisms of the bilateral and multilayered language system.
Biological
Approaches such as cognitive linguistics and generative grammar study linguistic cognition with a view towards uncovering the biological underpinnings of language. In Generative Grammar, these underpinning are understood as including innate domain-specific grammatical knowledge. Thus, one of the central concerns of the approach is to discover what aspects of linguistic knowledge are innate and which are not.
Cognitive linguistics, in contrast, rejects the notion of innate grammar, and studies how the human mind creates linguistic constructions from event schemas, and the impact of cognitive constraints and biases on human language. In cognitive linguistics, language is approached via the senses.
A closely related approach is evolutionary linguistics which includes the study of linguistic units as cultural replicators. It is possible to study how language replicates and adapts to the mind of the individual or the speech community.Construction grammar is a framework which applies the meme concept to the study of syntax.
The generative versus evolutionary approach are sometimes called formalism and functionalism, respectively. This reference is however different from the use of the terms in human sciences.
Methodology
This section needs additional citations for verification.(February 2024) |
Modern linguistics is primarily descriptive. Linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature or usage is "good" or "bad". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is "better" or "worse" than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others, often favoring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also, however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society. Prescription, however, may be practised appropriately in language instruction, like in ELT, where certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical items need to be introduced to a second-language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language.[citation needed]
Sources
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken data and signed data are more fundamental than written data. This is because
- Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and perceiving it, while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
- Features appear in speech which are not always recorded in writing, including phonological rules, sound changes, and speech errors;
- All natural writing systems reflect a spoken language (or potentially a signed one), even with pictographic scripts like Dongba writing Naxi homophones with the same pictogram, and text in writing systems used for two languages changing to fit the spoken language being recorded;
- Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
- Individuals learn to speak and process spoken language more easily and earlier than they do with writing.
Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves, graphemics, is, in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.
Analysis
Before the 20th century, linguists analysed language on a diachronic plane, which was historical in focus. This meant that they would compare linguistic features and try to analyse language from the point of view of how it had changed between then and later. However, with the rise of Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach, where the study was geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations, which existed at the same given point of time.
At another level, the syntagmatic plane of linguistic analysis entails the comparison between the way words are sequenced, within the syntax of a sentence. For example, the article "the" is followed by a noun, because of the syntagmatic relation between the words. The paradigmatic plane, on the other hand, focuses on an analysis that is based on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded in a given text. In this case, words of the same type or class may be replaced in the text with each other to achieve the same conceptual understanding.
History
The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th-century-BC Indian grammarian Pāṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭādhyāyī. Today, modern-day theories on grammar employ many of the principles that were laid down then.
Nomenclature
Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the study of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term philology is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States (where philology has never been very popularly considered as the "science of language").
Although the term linguist in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term linguistics is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual term in English for the scientific study of language, though linguistic science is sometimes used.
Linguistics is a multi-disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences, social sciences, formal sciences, and the humanities. Many linguists, such as David Crystal, conceptualize the field as being primarily scientific. The term linguist applies to someone who studies language or is a researcher within the field, or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyse specific languages.
Early grammarians
An early formal study of language was in India with Pāṇini, the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini's systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. In the Middle East, Sibawayh, a Persian, made a detailed description of Arabic in AD 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fii an-naħw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system). Western interest in the study of languages began somewhat later than in the East, but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world. Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy, not of grammatical description. The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas. This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word's meaning. Around 280 BC, one of Alexander the Great's successors founded a university (see Musaeum) in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in Greek, and taught Greek to speakers of other languages. While this school was the first to use the word "grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used the word in its original meaning as "téchnē grammatikḗ" (Τέχνη Γραμματική), the "art of writing", which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax. Throughout the Middle Ages, the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology, the study of ancient languages and texts, practised by such educators as Roger Ascham, Wolfgang Ratke, and John Amos Comenius.
Comparative philology
In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. Bloomfield attributes "the first great scientific linguistic work of the world" to Jacob Grimm, who wrote Deutsche Grammatik. It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe. The study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfield asserts:
This study received its foundation at the hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi, the literary language of Java, entitled Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of the Human Race).
20th-century developments
There was a shift of focus from historical and comparative linguistics to synchronic analysis in early 20th century. Structural analysis was improved by Leonard Bloomfield, Louis Hjelmslev; and Zellig Harris who also developed methods of discourse analysis. Functional analysis was developed by the Prague linguistic circle and André Martinet. As sound recording devices became commonplace in the 1960s, dialectal recordings were made and archived, and the audio-lingual method provided a technological solution to foreign language learning. The 1960s also saw a new rise of comparative linguistics: the study of language universals in linguistic typology. Towards the end of the century the field of linguistics became divided into further areas of interest with the advent of language technology and digitalized corpora.
Areas of research
This section needs additional citations for verification.(August 2021) |
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by social factors. This sub-discipline focuses on the synchronic approach of linguistics, and looks at how a language in general, or a set of languages, display variation and varieties at a given point in time. The study of language variation and the different varieties of language through dialects, registers, and idiolects can be tackled through a study of style, as well as through analysis of discourse. Sociolinguists research both style and discourse in language, as well as the theoretical factors that are at play between language and society.
Developmental linguistics
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood. Some of the questions that developmental linguistics looks into are how children acquire different languages, how adults can acquire a second language, and what the process of language acquisition is.
Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modelling. Amongst the structures of the brain involved in the mechanisms of neurolinguistics, the cerebellum which contains the highest numbers of neurons has a major role in terms of predictions required to produce language.
Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education, lexicography, translation, language planning, which involves governmental policy implementation related to language use, and natural language processing. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer. Applied linguists actually focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, and not literally "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics. Moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g., conversation analysis) and anthropology. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics that have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.
Linguistic analysis is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English. Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved. Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done either by private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.
Language documentation
Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry (into the history and culture of language) with linguistic inquiry, in order to describe languages and their grammars. Lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary. Such a documentation of a linguistic vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary. Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. Specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation, as well as in language education – the teaching of a second or foreign language. Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education and teaching which are based on linguistic research.
Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics, linguists have been concerned with describing and analysing previously undocumented languages. Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s, this became the main focus of American linguistics until the rise of formal linguistics in the mid-20th century. This focus on language documentation was partly motivated by a concern to document the rapidly disappearing languages of indigenous peoples. The ethnographic dimension of the Boasian approach to language description played a role in the development of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, which investigate the relations between language, culture, and society.
The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has also gained prominence outside North America, with the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages becoming a focus in some university programs in linguistics. Language description is a work-intensive endeavour, usually requiring years of field work in the language concerned, so as to equip the linguist to write a sufficiently accurate reference grammar. Further, the task of documentation requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus in the language in question, consisting of texts and recordings, both sound and video, which can be stored in an accessible format within open repositories, and used for further research.
Translation
The sub-field of translation includes the translation of written and spoken texts across media, from digital to print and spoken. To translate literally means to transmute the meaning from one language into another. Translators are often employed by organizations such as travel agencies and governmental embassies to facilitate communication between two speakers who do not know each other's language. Translators are also employed to work within computational linguistics setups like Google Translate, which is an automated program to translate words and phrases between any two or more given languages. Translation is also conducted by publishing houses, which convert works of writing from one language to another in order to reach varied audiences. Cross-national and cross-cultural survey research studies employ translation to collect comparable data among multilingual populations. Academic translators specialize in or are familiar with various other disciplines such as technology, science, law, economics, etc.
Clinical linguistics
Clinical linguistics is the application of linguistic theory to the field of speech-language pathology. Speech language pathologists work on corrective measures to treat communication and swallowing disorders.
Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics is the study of linguistic issues in a way that is "computationally responsible", i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties and their implementations. Computational linguists also work on computer language and software development.
Evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics is a sociobiological approach to analyzing the emergence of the language faculty through human evolution, and also the application of evolutionary theory to the study of cultural evolution among different languages. It is also a study of the dispersal of various languages across the globe, through movements among ancient communities.
Forensic linguistics
Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic analysis to forensics. Forensic analysis investigates the style, language, lexical use, and other linguistic and grammatical features used in the legal context to provide evidence in courts of law. Forensic linguists have also used their expertise in the framework of criminal cases.
See also
- Articulatory phonetics – A branch of linguistics studying how humans make sounds
- Articulatory synthesis – Computational techniques for speech synthesis
- Axiom of categoricity – Controversial tenet of linguistic theory
- Critical discourse analysis – Interdisciplinary approach to study discourse
- Cryptanalysis – Study of analyzing information systems in order to discover their hidden aspects
- Decipherment – Rediscovery of a language or script's meaning
- Global language system – Connections between language groups
- Hermeneutics – Theory and methodology of text interpretation
- Integrational linguistics – Theory of language
- Integrationism – Approach in the theory of communication
- Interlinguistics – Subfield of linguistics
- Language engineering – Creation of language processing systems
- Language geography – Study of the geographic distribution of languages
- Linguistic rights – Right to choose one's own language
- Metalinguistics – Study of relationship between language and culture
- Metacommunicative competence – Communication about how information is meant to be interpreted
- Microlinguistics – Branch of linguistics
- Onomastics – Study of proper names
- Reading – Taking in the meaning of letters or symbols
- Speech processing – Study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals
- Stratificational linguistics – Theory of language usage and production
- Outline and lists
- Index of linguistics articles
- List of departments of linguistics
- List of summer schools of linguistics
- List of schools of linguistics
References
- Trask, Robert Lawrence (2007). Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts. Taylor & Francis. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-415-41359-6. Retrieved 21 September 2023.
- Halliday, Michael A. K.; Jonathan Webster (2006). On Language and Linguistics. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. vii. ISBN 978-0-8264-8824-4.
- "What is Linguistics? | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Archived from the original on 8 February 2022. Retrieved 8 February 2022.
- Akmajian, Adrian; Richard A. Demers; Ann K. Farmer; Robert M. Harnish (2010). Linguistics (6th ed.). The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51370-8. Archived from the original on 14 December 2012. Retrieved 25 July 2012.
- "Linguistics Program – Linguistics Program | University of South Carolina". Archived from the original on 6 June 2022. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
- "Studying Linguistics | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Archived from the original on 8 March 2022. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
- Francis, Alexandre (27 September 2013). Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. SAGE Publishing. pp. 184–187. ISBN 978-1412999632.
- Crystal, David (1981). Clinical linguistics. Wien: Springer-Verlag. p. 3. ISBN 978-3-7091-4001-7. OCLC 610496980.
What are the implications of the term "science" encountered in the definition on p. 1? Four aims of the scientific approach to language, often cited in introductory works on the subject, are comprehensiveness, objectivity, systematicness and precision. The contrast is usually drawn with the essentially non-scientific approach of traditional language studies—by which is meant the whole history of ideas about language from Plato and Aristotle down to the nineteenth century study of language history (comparative philology).
- "Philosophy of Linguistics". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2022. Archived from the original on 14 December 2022. Retrieved 3 June 2022.
- Campbell, Lyle (1998). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 391. ISBN 978-0-7486-4601-2.
- "The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians." Amsterdamska, Olga (1987). "The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians". Schools of Thought: The Development of Linguistics from Bopp to Saussure. Springer, Dordrecht. pp. 32–62. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-3759-8_2. ISBN 978-94-009-3759-8. Archived from the original on 15 April 2021. Retrieved 12 December 2020.
- Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics (PDF) (Third ed.). p. 101. Retrieved 23 October 2024.
- "Editors' Introduction: Foundations of the new historical linguistics." In: The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics Routledge p. 25.
- Labov, William (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 21–23.
- Whitney, William Dwight (1867). Language and the Study of Language. Scribener. p. 428.
- Quiles, Carlos (29 December 2019). "Early Uralic – Indo-European contacts within Europe". Indo-European.eu. Archived from the original on 7 July 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
- Baldi, Philip (2012). "Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science" (PDF). Rheis, International Journal of Linguistics, Philology and Literature. 3 (1): 5–27. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 July 2022. p. 11.
- Benj (11 August 2019). "History of Historical Linguistics Essay on History, Linguistics". Essay Examples. Archived from the original on 2 October 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
- Fábregas, Antonio (January 2005). "The definition of the grammatical category in a syntactically oriented morphology". Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma. Archived from the original on 10 February 2023. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
- Luuk, Erkki (2015). "Syntax–Semantics Interface". In Wright, James D. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 900–905. doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.57035-4. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5.
- Anderson, Stephen R. (n.d.). "Morphology". Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan Reference, Ltd., Yale University. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
- Aronoff, Mark; Fudeman, Kirsten (n.d.). "Morphology and Morphological Analysis" (PDF). What is Morphology?. Blackwell Publishing. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 February 2020. Retrieved 30 July 2016.
- Mey, Jacob L. (1993). Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
- "Meaning (Semantics and Pragmatics) | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Archived from the original on 24 September 2017. Retrieved 25 August 2017.
- Shaozhong, Liu. "What is pragmatics?". Archived from the original on 7 March 2009. Retrieved 18 March 2009.
- Szczegielniak, Adam, Introduction to Linguistic Theory – Phonology: The Sound Patterns of Language (PDF), Harvard University, archived (PDF) from the original on 22 March 2023, retrieved 11 May 2023
- Ferguson, Charles A. (1959). "Diglossia". WORD (Worcester). 15 (2): 325–340. doi:10.1080/00437956.1959.11659702. ISSN 0043-7956. S2CID 239352211 – via Tandfonline-com.
- Plungyan, V. A. (2011). Modern linguistic typology. Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 81(2), 101-113. doi:10.1134/S1019331611020158
- All references in this article to the study of sound should be taken to include the manual and non-manual signs used in sign languages.
- Syntax: A Generative Introduction (2nd ed.), 2013. Andrew Carnie. Blackwell Publishing.
- Chierchia, Gennaro & Sally McConnell-Ginet (2000). Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN 978-0-262-53164-1.
- Ariel, Mira (2009). "Discourse, grammar, discourse". Discourse Studies. 11 (1): 5–36. doi:10.1177/1461445608098496. JSTOR 24049745. S2CID 62686879.
- Leckie-Tarry, Helen (1995). Language and Context: a Functional Linguistic Theory of Register, Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 6. ISBN 1-85567-272-3
- Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 2ff. ISBN 978-1-4039-1723-2. Archived from the original on 27 August 2016. Retrieved 15 August 2016.
- ""Stylistics" by Joybrato Mukherjee. Chapter 49. Encyclopedia of Linguistics" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 4 October 2013.
- Richards, I. A. (1965). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Oxford University Press (New York).
- Derrida, Jacques (1967). Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology.
- Chapter 1, section 1.1 in Antonsen, Elmer H. (2002). Trends in Linguistics: Runes and Germanic Linguistics (6th ed.). Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-017462-5.
- Nöth, Winfried (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-20959-7.
- Hjelmslev, Louis (1969) [First published 1943]. Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-02470-9.
- de Saussure, Ferdinand (1959) [First published 1916]. Course in General Linguistics (PDF). New York: The Philosophical Library, Inc. ISBN 978-0-231-15727-8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 August 2019.
- Austin, Patrik (2021). "Theory of language: a taxonomy". SN Social Sciences. 1 (3). doi:10.1007/s43545-021-00085-x. hdl:10138/349772.
- Schäfer, Roland (2016). Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen (2nd ed.). Berlin: Language Science Press. ISBN 978-1-537504-95-7. Archived from the original on 28 July 2017. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
- Halliday, M. A. K.; Matthiessen, Christian M. I. M. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.) (PDF). London: Hodder. ISBN 0-340-76167-9. Archived (PDF) from the original on 3 March 2021. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
- Daneš, František (1987). "On Prague school functionalism in linguistics". In Dirven, R.; Fried, V. (eds.). Functionalism in Linguistics. John Benjamins. pp. 3–38. ISBN 978-90-272-1524-6.
- Everaert, Martin; Huybregts, Marinus A. C.; Chomsky, Noam; Berwick, Robert C.; Bolhuis, Johan J. (2015). "Structures, not strings: linguistics as part of the cognitive sciences". Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 19 (12): 729–743. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2015.09.008. hdl:1874/329610. PMID 26564247. S2CID 3648651. Archived from the original on 26 April 2021. Retrieved 5 January 2020.
- Chomsky, Noam (2015). The Minimalist Program (2nd ed.). MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52734-7.
- Arbib, Michael A. (2015). "Language evolution – an emergentist perspective". In MacWhinney and O'Grady (ed.). Handbook of Language Emergence. Wiley. pp. 81–109. ISBN 978-1-118-34613-6.
- Tobin, Vera (2014). "Where do cognitive biases fit into cognitive linguistics?" (PDF). In Borkent (ed.). Language and the Creative Mind. Chicago University Press. pp. 347–363. ISBN 978-90-272-8643-7.[permanent dead link ]
- Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide (2002). "MIND-AS-BODY as a Cross-linguistic Conceptual Metaphor". Miscelánea. 25 (1): 93–119. doi:10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200210526. Archived from the original on 27 April 2021. Retrieved 15 July 2020.
- Gibbs, R. W.; Colston, H. (1995). "The cognitive psychological reality of image schemas and their transformations". Cognitive Linguistics. 6 (4): 347–378. doi:10.1515/cogl.1995.6.4.347. S2CID 144424435.
- Pleyer, Michael; Winters, James (2014). "Integrating cognitive linguistics and language evolution research". Theoria et Historia Scientiarum. 11: 19–44. doi:10.12775/ths-2014-002. Archived from the original on 9 March 2021. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
- Evans, Vyvyan; Green, Melanie (2006). Cognitive Linguistics. An Introduction. Routledge. ISBN 0-7486-1831-7.
- Croft, William (2008). "Evolutionary linguistics" (PDF). Annual Review of Anthropology. 37: 219–234. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085156. Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 February 2021. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
- Cornish, Hanna; Tamariz, Monica; Kirby, Simon (2009). "Complex adaptive systems and the origins of adaptive structure: what experiments can tell us" (PDF). Language Learning. 59: 187–205. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00540.x. S2CID 56199987. Archived (PDF) from the original on 12 November 2020. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
- Sinnemäki, Kaius; Di Garbo, Francesca (2018). "Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment, but It Matters What and How You Count: A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity". Frontiers in Psychology. 9: 187–205. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01141. PMC 6102949. PMID 30154738.
- Dahl, Östen (2001). "Grammaticalization and the life cycles of constructions". RASK – Internationalt Tidsskrift for Sprog og Kommunikation. 14: 91–134.
- Kirby, Simon (2013). "Transitions: The Evolution of Linguistic Replicators". In Binder; Smith (eds.). The Language Phenomenon (PDF). The Frontiers Collection. Springer. pp. 121–138. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-36086-2_6. ISBN 978-3-642-36085-5. Archived (PDF) from the original on 26 June 2021. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
- Zehentner, Eva (2019). Competition in Language Change: the Rise of the English Dative Alternation. De Gruyter Mouton. ISBN 978-3-11-063385-6.
- MacWhinney, Brian (2015). "Introduction – language emergence". In MacWhinney, Brian; O'Grady, William (eds.). Handbook of Language Emergence. Wiley. pp. 1–31. ISBN 978-1-118-34613-6.
- Nettle, Daniel (1999). "Functionalism and its difficulties in biology and linguistics". In Darnell (ed.). Functionalism and Formalism in linguistics, 1. Studies in Language Companion Series. Vol. 41. John Benjamins. pp. 445–468. doi:10.1075/slcs.41.21net. ISBN 978-1-55619-927-1.
- Croft, William (2015). "Functional Approaches to Grammar". International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 9 (2nd ed.). Elsevier. pp. 6323–6330. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.53009-8. ISBN 978-0-08-097087-5.
- Martinet, André (1960). Elements of General Linguistics. Studies in General Linguistics, vol. i. Translated by Elisabeth Palmer Rubbert. London: Faber. p. 15.
- Rens Bod (2014). A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-966521-1.
- "Chapter VI: Sanskrit Literature". The Imperial Gazetteer of India. Vol. 2. 1908. p. 263.
- "Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0". panini.phil.hhu.de. Archived from the original on 15 April 2021. Retrieved 27 February 2021.
- S.C. Vasu (Tr.) (1996). The Ashtadhyayi of Panini (2 Vols.). Vedic Books. ISBN 978-81-208-0409-8. Archived from the original on 27 March 2014. Retrieved 17 September 2012.
- Penn, Gerald; Kiparski, Paul. "On Panini and the Generative Capacity of Contextualised Replacement Systems" (PDF). Proceedings of COLING 2012: 943–950. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 April 2021.
- Harper, Douglas. "philology". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
- Nichols, Stephen G. (1990). "Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture". Speculum. 65 (1): 1–10. doi:10.2307/2864468. JSTOR 2864468. S2CID 154631850.
- McMahon, A.M.S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press. pp. 9, 19. ISBN 978-0-521-44665-5.
- Morpurgo Davies, A. (1998). Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. History of Linguistics. Vol. 4.
- Harper, Douglas. "linguist". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
- Shahhoseiny, Hajar (2013). "Differences between Language and Linguistic in the ELT Classroom" (PDF). Theory and Practice in Language Studies. Retrieved 10 December 2023.
- "What is Linguistics?". Birmingham City University. Retrieved 10 December 2023.
- Spolsky, Bernard; Hult, Francis M. (February 2010). The Handbook of Educational Linguistics. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-1-4443-3104-2.
- Berns, Margie (20 March 2010). Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Elsevier. pp. 23–25. ISBN 978-0-08-096503-1.
- "The Science of Linguistics". Linguistic Society of America. Archived from the original on 17 April 2018. Retrieved 17 April 2018.
Modern linguists approach their work with a scientific perspective, although they use methods that used to be thought of as solely an academic discipline of the humanities. Contrary to previous belief, linguistics is multidisciplinary. It overlaps each of the human sciences including psychology, neurology, anthropology, and sociology. Linguists conduct formal studies of sound structure, grammar and meaning, but they also investigate the history of language families, and research language acquisition.
- Behme, Christina; Neef, Martin. Essays on Linguistic Realism (2018). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 7–20
- Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013531-2.
- "Linguist". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2000. ISBN 978-0-395-82517-4.
- Bloomfield 1983, p. 307.
- Seuren, Pieter A. M. (1998). Western linguistics: An historical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 2–24. ISBN 978-0-631-20891-4.
- Bloomfield 1983, p. 308.
- Bloomfield 1983, p. 310.
- Bloomfield 1983, p. 311.
- Jensen, Kim Ebensgaard (19 December 2014). "Linguistics in the digital humanities: (computational) corpus linguistics". Mediekultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research. 30 (57). doi:10.7146/mediekultur.v30i57.15968. Retrieved 10 December 2023.
- McEnery, Tony (2019). "Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use". Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. 39. Cambridge University Press: 74–92. doi:10.1017/S0267190519000096.
- Hunston, S. (1 January 2006), "Corpus Linguistics", in Brown, Keith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 234–248, doi:10.1016/b0-08-044854-2/00944-5, ISBN 978-0-08-044854-1, retrieved 31 October 2023
- Bailey, Charles-James N. (1 January 1981). "Developmental Linguistics". Folia Linguistica. 15 (1–2): 29–38. doi:10.1515/flin.1981.15.1-2.29. ISSN 1614-7308.
- Mariën, Peter; Manto, Mario (25 October 2017). "Cerebellum as a Master-Piece for Linguistic Predictability". Cerebellum (London, England). 17 (2): 101–03. doi:10.1007/s12311-017-0894-1. ISSN 1473-4230. PMID 29071518.
- Barbara Seidlhofer (2003). Controversies in Applied Linguistics (pp. 288). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-437444-6.
- Eades, Diana (2005). "Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases" (PDF). Applied Linguistics. 26 (4): 503–26. doi:10.1093/applin/ami021. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 March 2009. Retrieved 31 January 2009.
- Himmelman, Nikolaus "Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for?" in P. Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P Himmelmann & Ulrike Mosel. (2006) Essentials of Language documentation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York.
- Behr, Dorothée; Sha, Mandy (25 July 2018). "Introduction: Translation of questionnaires in cross-national and cross-cultural research". Translation & Interpreting. 10 (2): 1–4. doi:10.12807/ti.110202.2018.a01. ISSN 1836-9324.
- Pan, Yuling; Sha, Mandy (9 July 2019). The Sociolinguistics of Survey Translation. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429294914. ISBN 978-0-429-29491-4. S2CID 198632812.
- Croft, William (October 2008). "Evolutionary Linguistics". Annual Review of Anthropology. 37: 219–34. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085156.
- Olsson, John. "What is Forensic Linguistics?" (PDF). Forensic Linguistics Intelligence.
- "what is forensic linguistics?". CFL at Aston University. Archived from the original on 27 September 2010. Retrieved 1 February 2024.
Bibliography
- Akmajian, Adrian; Demers, Richard; Farmer, Ann; Harnish, Robert (2010). Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51370-8.
- Aronoff, Mark; Rees-Miller, Janie, eds. (2000). The handbook of linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Bloomfield, Leonard (1983) [1914]. An Introduction to the Study of Language (New ed.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. ISBN 978-90-272-8047-3.
- Chomsky, Noam (1998). On Language. The New Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-56584-475-9.
- Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013531-2.
- Derrida, Jacques (1967). Of Grammatology. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5830-7.
- Hall, Christopher (2005). An Introduction to Language and Linguistics: Breaking the Language Spell. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-8264-8734-6.
- Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2013). I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-966017-9. Archived from the original on 6 July 2011. Retrieved 17 May 2013.
- McShane, Marjorie; Nirenburg, Sergei (2021). Linguistics for the Age of AI. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262363136.
External links
- The Linguist List, a global online linguistics community with news and information updated daily
- Glossary of linguistic terms Archived 10 February 2013 at the Wayback Machine by SIL International (last updated 2004)
- Glottopedia, MediaWiki-based encyclopedia of linguistics, under construction
- Linguistic sub-fields – according to the Linguistic Society of America
- Linguistics and language-related wiki articles on Scholarpedia and Citizendium
- "Linguistics" section – A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology, ed. J.A. García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
- Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2013). I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-953420-3.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax rules governing the structure of sentences semantics meaning morphology structure of words phonetics speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages phonology the abstract sound system of a particular language and analogous systems of sign languages and pragmatics how the context of use contributes to meaning Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics the study of the biological variables and evolution of language and psycholinguistics the study of psychological factors in human language bridge many of these divisions Linguistics encompasses many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications Theoretical linguistics is concerned with understanding the universal and fundamental nature of language and developing a general theoretical framework for describing it Applied linguistics seeks to utilize the scientific findings of the study of language for practical purposes such as developing methods of improving language education and literacy Linguistic features may be studied through a variety of perspectives synchronically by describing the structure of a language at a specific point in time or diachronically through the historical development of a language over a period of time in monolinguals or in multilinguals among children or among adults in terms of how it is being learnt or how it was acquired as abstract objects or as cognitive structures through written texts or through oral elicitation and finally through mechanical data collection or practical fieldwork Linguistics emerged from the field of philology of which some branches are more qualitative and holistic in approach Today philology and linguistics are variably described as related fields subdisciplines or separate fields of language study but by and large linguistics can be seen as an umbrella term Linguistics is also related to the philosophy of language stylistics rhetoric semiotics lexicography and translation Major subdisciplinesSwiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is regarded as the creator of semioticsHistorical linguistics Historical linguistics is the study of how language changes over history particularly with regard to a specific language or a group of languages Western trends in historical linguistics date back to roughly the late 18th century when the discipline grew out of philology the study of ancient texts and oral traditions Historical linguistics emerged as one of the first few sub disciplines in the field and was most widely practised during the late 19th century Despite a shift in focus in the 20th century towards formalism and generative grammar which studies the universal properties of language historical research today still remains a significant field of linguistic inquiry Subfields of the discipline include language change and grammaticalization Historical linguistics studies language change either diachronically through a comparison of different time periods in the past and present or in a synchronic manner by observing developments between different variations that exist within the current linguistic stage of a language At first historical linguistics was the cornerstone of comparative linguistics which involves a study of the relationship between different languages At that time scholars of historical linguistics were only concerned with creating different categories of language families and reconstructing prehistoric proto languages by using both the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction Internal reconstruction is the method by which an element that contains a certain meaning is re used in different contexts or environments where there is a variation in either sound or analogy better source needed The reason for this had been to describe well known Indo European languages many of which had detailed documentation and long written histories Scholars of historical linguistics also studied Uralic languages another European language family for which very little written material existed back then After that there also followed significant work on the corpora of other languages such as the Austronesian languages and the Native American language families In historical work the uniformitarian principle is generally the underlying working hypothesis occasionally also clearly expressed The principle was expressed early by William Dwight Whitney who considered it imperative a must of historical linguistics to look to find the same principle operative also in the very outset of that language history The above approach of comparativism in linguistics is now however only a small part of the much broader discipline called historical linguistics The comparative study of specific Indo European languages is considered a highly specialized field today while comparative research is carried out over the subsequent internal developments in a language in particular over the development of modern standard varieties of languages and over the development of a language from its standardized form to its varieties citation needed For instance some scholars also tried to establish super families linking for example Indo European Uralic and other language families to a hypothetical Nostratic language group While these attempts are still not widely accepted as credible methods they provide necessary information to establish relatedness in language change This is generally hard to find for events long ago due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups A limit of around 10 000 years is often assumed for the functional purpose of conducting research It is also hard to date various proto languages Even though several methods are available these languages can be dated only approximately In modern historical linguistics we examine how languages change over time focusing on the relationships between dialects within a specific period This includes studying morphological syntactical and phonetic shifts Connections between dialects in the past and present are also explored Syntax Syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences Central concerns of syntax include word order grammatical relations constituency agreement the nature of crosslinguistic variation and the relationship between form and meaning There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals Morphology Morphology is the study of words including the principles by which they are formed and how they relate to one another within a language Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word For example in English the root catch and the suffix ing are both morphemes catch may appear as its own word or it may be combined with ing to form the new word catching Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number tense and aspect Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts which evolves over the history of a language The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology Semantics and pragmatics Semantics and pragmatics are branches of linguistics concerned with meaning These subfields have traditionally been divided according to aspects of meaning semantics refers to grammatical and lexical meanings while pragmatics is concerned with meaning in context Within linguistics the subfield of formal semantics studies the denotations of sentences and how they are composed from the meanings of their constituent expressions Formal semantics draws heavily on philosophy of language and uses formal tools from logic and computer science On the other hand cognitive semantics explains linguistic meaning via aspects of general cognition drawing on ideas from cognitive science such as prototype theory Pragmatics focuses on phenomena such as speech acts implicature and talk in interaction Unlike semantics which examines meaning that is conventional or coded in a given language pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the structural and linguistic knowledge grammar lexicon etc of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance any pre existing knowledge about those involved the inferred intent of the speaker and other factors Phonetics and phonology Phonetics and phonology are branches of linguistics concerned with sounds or the equivalent aspects of sign languages Phonetics is largely concerned with the physical aspects of sounds such as their articulation acoustics production and perception Phonology is concerned with the linguistic abstractions and categorizations of sounds and it tells us what sounds are in a language how they do and can combine into words and explains why certain phonetic features are important to identifying a word Typology This paragraph is an excerpt from Linguistic typology edit Linguistic typology or language typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world s languages Its subdisciplines include but are not limited to phonological typology which deals with sound features syntactic typology which deals with word order and form lexical typology which deals with language vocabulary and theoretical typology which aims to explain the universal tendencies StructuresThis section does not cite any sources Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed January 2019 Learn how and when to remove this message Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form Any particular pairing of meaning and form is a Saussurean linguistic sign For instance the meaning cat is represented worldwide with a wide variety of different sound patterns in oral languages movements of the hands and face in sign languages and written symbols in written languages Linguistic patterns have proven their importance for the knowledge engineering field especially with the ever increasing amount of available data Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native speakers know not always consciously All linguistic structures can be broken down into component parts that are combined according to sub conscious rules over multiple levels of analysis For instance consider the structure of the word tenth on two different levels of analysis On the level of internal word structure known as morphology the word tenth is made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality The rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker th follows the number ten On the level of sound structure known as phonology structural analysis shows that the n sound in tenth is made differently from the n sound in ten spoken alone Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal structure of the word pieces of tenth they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound structure Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these which govern how native speakers use language Grammar Grammar is a system of rules which governs the production and use of utterances in a given language These rules apply to sound as well as meaning and include componential subsets of rules such as those pertaining to phonology the organization of phonetic sound systems morphology the formation and composition of words and syntax the formation and composition of phrases and sentences Modern frameworks that deal with the principles of grammar include structural and functional linguistics and generative linguistics Sub fields that focus on a grammatical study of language include the following Phonetics the study of the physical properties of speech sound production and perception and delves into their acoustic and articulatory properties Phonology the study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker s mind that distinguish meaning phonemes Morphology the study of morphemes or the internal structures of words and how they can be modified Syntax the study of how words combine to form grammatical phrases and sentences Semantics the study of lexical and grammatical aspects of meaning Pragmatics the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts and the role played by situational context and non linguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning Discourse analysis the analysis of language use in texts spoken written or signed Stylistics the study of linguistic factors rhetoric diction stress that place a discourse in context Semiotics the study of signs and sign processes semiosis indication designation likeness analogy metaphor symbolism signification and communicationDiscourse Discourse is language as social practice Baynham 1995 and is a multilayered concept As a social practice discourse embodies different ideologies through written and spoken texts Discourse analysis can examine or expose these ideologies Discourse not only influences genre which is selected based on specific contexts but also at a micro level shapes language as text spoken or written down to the phonological and lexico grammatical levels Grammar and discourse are linked as parts of a system A particular discourse becomes a language variety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose and is referred to as a register There may be certain lexical additions new words that are brought into play because of the expertise of the community of people within a certain domain of specialization Thus registers and discourses distinguish themselves not only through specialized vocabulary but also in some cases through distinct stylistic choices People in the medical fraternity for example may use some medical terminology in their communication that is specialized to the field of medicine This is often referred to as being part of the medical discourse and so on Lexicon The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that are stored in a speaker s mind The lexicon consists of words and bound morphemes which are parts of words that can not stand alone like affixes In some analyses compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other collocations are also considered to be part of the lexicon Dictionaries represent attempts at listing in alphabetical order the lexicon of a given language usually however bound morphemes are not included Lexicography closely linked with the domain of semantics is the science of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or a dictionary The creation and addition of new words into the lexicon is called coining or neologization and the new words are called neologisms It is often believed that a speaker s capacity for language lies in the quantity of words stored in the lexicon However this is often considered a myth by linguists The capacity for the use of language is considered by many linguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar and to be linked with competence rather than with the growth of vocabulary Even a very small lexicon is theoretically capable of producing an infinite number of sentences Style Stylistics also involves the study of written signed or spoken discourse through varying speech communities genres and editorial or narrative formats in the mass media It involves the study and interpretation of texts for aspects of their linguistic and tonal style Stylistic analysis entails the analysis of description of particular dialects and registers used by speech communities Stylistic features include rhetoric diction stress satire irony dialogue and other forms of phonetic variations Stylistic analysis can also include the study of language in canonical works of literature popular fiction news advertisements and other forms of communication in popular culture as well It is usually seen as a variation in communication that changes from speaker to speaker and community to community In short Stylistics is the interpretation of text In the 1960s Jacques Derrida for instance further distinguished between speech and writing by proposing that written language be studied as a linguistic medium of communication in itself Palaeography is therefore the discipline that studies the evolution of written scripts as signs and symbols in language The formal study of language also led to the growth of fields like psycholinguistics which explores the representation and function of language in the mind neurolinguistics which studies language processing in the brain biolinguistics which studies the biology and evolution of language and language acquisition which investigates how children and adults acquire the knowledge of one or more languages ApproachesHumanistic The fundamental principle of humanistic linguistics especially rational and logical grammar is that language is an invention created by people A semiotic tradition of linguistic research considers language a sign system which arises from the interaction of meaning and form The organization of linguistic levels is considered computational Linguistics is essentially seen as relating to social and cultural studies because different languages are shaped in social interaction by the speech community Frameworks representing the humanistic view of language include structural linguistics among others Structural analysis means dissecting each linguistic level phonetic morphological syntactic and discourse to the smallest units These are collected into inventories e g phoneme morpheme lexical classes phrase types to study their interconnectedness within a hierarchy of structures and layers Functional analysis adds to structural analysis the assignment of semantic and other functional roles that each unit may have For example a noun phrase may function as the subject or object of the sentence or the agent or patient Functional linguistics or functional grammar is a branch of structural linguistics In the humanistic reference the terms structuralism and functionalism are related to their meaning in other human sciences The difference between formal and functional structuralism lies in the way that the two approaches explain why languages have the properties they have Functional explanation entails the idea that language is a tool for communication or that communication is the primary function of language Linguistic forms are consequently explained by an appeal to their functional value or usefulness Other structuralist approaches take the perspective that form follows from the inner mechanisms of the bilateral and multilayered language system Biological Approaches such as cognitive linguistics and generative grammar study linguistic cognition with a view towards uncovering the biological underpinnings of language In Generative Grammar these underpinning are understood as including innate domain specific grammatical knowledge Thus one of the central concerns of the approach is to discover what aspects of linguistic knowledge are innate and which are not Cognitive linguistics in contrast rejects the notion of innate grammar and studies how the human mind creates linguistic constructions from event schemas and the impact of cognitive constraints and biases on human language In cognitive linguistics language is approached via the senses A closely related approach is evolutionary linguistics which includes the study of linguistic units as cultural replicators It is possible to study how language replicates and adapts to the mind of the individual or the speech community Construction grammar is a framework which applies the meme concept to the study of syntax The generative versus evolutionary approach are sometimes called formalism and functionalism respectively This reference is however different from the use of the terms in human sciences MethodologyThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed February 2024 Learn how and when to remove this message Modern linguistics is primarily descriptive Linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature or usage is good or bad This is analogous to practice in other sciences a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular species is better or worse than another Prescription on the other hand is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others often favoring a particular dialect or acrolect This may have the aim of establishing a linguistic standard which can aid communication over large geographical areas It may also however be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of other languages or dialects see Linguistic imperialism An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to be destructive to society Prescription however may be practised appropriately in language instruction like in ELT where certain fundamental grammatical rules and lexical items need to be introduced to a second language speaker who is attempting to acquire the language citation needed Sources Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken data and signed data are more fundamental than written data This is because Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and perceiving it while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication Features appear in speech which are not always recorded in writing including phonological rules sound changes and speech errors All natural writing systems reflect a spoken language or potentially a signed one even with pictographic scripts like Dongba writing Naxi homophones with the same pictogram and text in writing systems used for two languages changing to fit the spoken language being recorded Speech evolved before human beings invented writing Individuals learn to speak and process spoken language more easily and earlier than they do with writing Nonetheless linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find and are typically transcribed and written In addition linguists have turned to text based discourse occurring in various formats of computer mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry The study of writing systems themselves graphemics is in any case considered a branch of linguistics Analysis Before the 20th century linguists analysed language on a diachronic plane which was historical in focus This meant that they would compare linguistic features and try to analyse language from the point of view of how it had changed between then and later However with the rise of Saussurean linguistics in the 20th century the focus shifted to a more synchronic approach where the study was geared towards analysis and comparison between different language variations which existed at the same given point of time At another level the syntagmatic plane of linguistic analysis entails the comparison between the way words are sequenced within the syntax of a sentence For example the article the is followed by a noun because of the syntagmatic relation between the words The paradigmatic plane on the other hand focuses on an analysis that is based on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded in a given text In this case words of the same type or class may be replaced in the text with each other to achieve the same conceptual understanding HistoryThe earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 6th century BC Indian grammarian Paṇini who wrote a formal description of the Sanskrit language in his Aṣṭadhyayi Today modern day theories on grammar employ many of the principles that were laid down then Nomenclature Before the 20th century the term philology first attested in 1716 was commonly used to refer to the study of language which was then predominantly historical in focus Since Ferdinand de Saussure s insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis however this focus has shifted and the term philology is now generally used for the study of a language s grammar history and literary tradition especially in the United States where philology has never been very popularly considered as the science of language Although the term linguist in the sense of a student of language dates from 1641 the term linguistics is first attested in 1847 It is now the usual term in English for the scientific study of language though linguistic science is sometimes used Linguistics is a multi disciplinary field of research that combines tools from natural sciences social sciences formal sciences and the humanities Many linguists such as David Crystal conceptualize the field as being primarily scientific The term linguist applies to someone who studies language or is a researcher within the field or to someone who uses the tools of the discipline to describe and analyse specific languages Early grammarians An early formal study of language was in India with Paṇini the 6th century BC grammarian who formulated 3 959 rules of Sanskrit morphology Paṇini s systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels and word classes such as nouns and verbs was the first known instance of its kind In the Middle East Sibawayh a Persian made a detailed description of Arabic in AD 760 in his monumental work Al kitab fii an naħw الكتاب في النحو The Book on Grammar the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes sounds as units of a linguistic system Western interest in the study of languages began somewhat later than in the East but the grammarians of the classical languages did not use the same methods or reach the same conclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world Early interest in language in the West was a part of philosophy not of grammatical description The first insights into semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue where he argues that words denote concepts that are eternal and exist in the world of ideas This work is the first to use the word etymology to describe the history of a word s meaning Around 280 BC one of Alexander the Great s successors founded a university see Musaeum in Alexandria where a school of philologists studied the ancient texts in Greek and taught Greek to speakers of other languages While this school was the first to use the word grammar in its modern sense Plato had used the word in its original meaning as techne grammatikḗ Texnh Grammatikh the art of writing which is also the title of one of the most important works of the Alexandrine school by Dionysius Thrax Throughout the Middle Ages the study of language was subsumed under the topic of philology the study of ancient languages and texts practised by such educators as Roger Ascham Wolfgang Ratke and John Amos Comenius Comparative philology In the 18th century the first use of the comparative method by William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics Bloomfield attributes the first great scientific linguistic work of the world to Jacob Grimm who wrote Deutsche Grammatik It was soon followed by other authors writing similar comparative studies on other language groups of Europe The study of language was broadened from Indo European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt of whom Bloomfield asserts This study received its foundation at the hands of the Prussian statesman and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt 1767 1835 especially in the first volume of his work on Kavi the literary language of Java entitled Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts On the Variety of the Structure of Human Language and its Influence upon the Mental Development of the Human Race 20th century developments There was a shift of focus from historical and comparative linguistics to synchronic analysis in early 20th century Structural analysis was improved by Leonard Bloomfield Louis Hjelmslev and Zellig Harris who also developed methods of discourse analysis Functional analysis was developed by the Prague linguistic circle and Andre Martinet As sound recording devices became commonplace in the 1960s dialectal recordings were made and archived and the audio lingual method provided a technological solution to foreign language learning The 1960s also saw a new rise of comparative linguistics the study of language universals in linguistic typology Towards the end of the century the field of linguistics became divided into further areas of interest with the advent of language technology and digitalized corpora Areas of researchThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Linguistics news newspapers books scholar JSTOR August 2021 Learn how and when to remove this message Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shaped by social factors This sub discipline focuses on the synchronic approach of linguistics and looks at how a language in general or a set of languages display variation and varieties at a given point in time The study of language variation and the different varieties of language through dialects registers and idiolects can be tackled through a study of style as well as through analysis of discourse Sociolinguists research both style and discourse in language as well as the theoretical factors that are at play between language and society Developmental linguistics Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals particularly the acquisition of language in childhood Some of the questions that developmental linguistics looks into are how children acquire different languages how adults can acquire a second language and what the process of language acquisition is Neurolinguistics Neurolinguistics is the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories using aphasiology brain imaging electrophysiology and computer modelling Amongst the structures of the brain involved in the mechanisms of neurolinguistics the cerebellum which contains the highest numbers of neurons has a major role in terms of predictions required to produce language Applied linguistics Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all languages Applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas Linguistic research is commonly applied to areas such as language education lexicography translation language planning which involves governmental policy implementation related to language use and natural language processing Applied linguistics has been argued to be something of a misnomer Applied linguists actually focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real world linguistic problems and not literally applying existing technical knowledge from linguistics Moreover they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources such as sociology e g conversation analysis and anthropology Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics Today computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation computer assisted translation and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics that have come to the forefront Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints Linguistic analysis is a sub discipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration department Depending on the country this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker s native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English Australia uses the former method while Germany employs the latter the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis which can be done either by private contractors or within a department of the government In this analysis linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker s nationality The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government s decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker Language documentation Language documentation combines anthropological inquiry into the history and culture of language with linguistic inquiry in order to describe languages and their grammars Lexicography involves the documentation of words that form a vocabulary Such a documentation of a linguistic vocabulary from a particular language is usually compiled in a dictionary Computational linguistics is concerned with the statistical or rule based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective Specific knowledge of language is applied by speakers during the act of translation and interpretation as well as in language education the teaching of a second or foreign language Policy makers work with governments to implement new plans in education and teaching which are based on linguistic research Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics linguists have been concerned with describing and analysing previously undocumented languages Starting with Franz Boas in the early 1900s this became the main focus of American linguistics until the rise of formal linguistics in the mid 20th century This focus on language documentation was partly motivated by a concern to document the rapidly disappearing languages of indigenous peoples The ethnographic dimension of the Boasian approach to language description played a role in the development of disciplines such as sociolinguistics anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology which investigate the relations between language culture and society The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has also gained prominence outside North America with the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages becoming a focus in some university programs in linguistics Language description is a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work in the language concerned so as to equip the linguist to write a sufficiently accurate reference grammar Further the task of documentation requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus in the language in question consisting of texts and recordings both sound and video which can be stored in an accessible format within open repositories and used for further research Translation The sub field of translation includes the translation of written and spoken texts across media from digital to print and spoken To translate literally means to transmute the meaning from one language into another Translators are often employed by organizations such as travel agencies and governmental embassies to facilitate communication between two speakers who do not know each other s language Translators are also employed to work within computational linguistics setups like Google Translate which is an automated program to translate words and phrases between any two or more given languages Translation is also conducted by publishing houses which convert works of writing from one language to another in order to reach varied audiences Cross national and cross cultural survey research studies employ translation to collect comparable data among multilingual populations Academic translators specialize in or are familiar with various other disciplines such as technology science law economics etc Clinical linguistics Clinical linguistics is the application of linguistic theory to the field of speech language pathology Speech language pathologists work on corrective measures to treat communication and swallowing disorders Computational linguistics Computational linguistics is the study of linguistic issues in a way that is computationally responsible i e taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic specification and computational complexity so that the linguistic theories devised can be shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties and their implementations Computational linguists also work on computer language and software development Evolutionary linguistics Evolutionary linguistics is a sociobiological approach to analyzing the emergence of the language faculty through human evolution and also the application of evolutionary theory to the study of cultural evolution among different languages It is also a study of the dispersal of various languages across the globe through movements among ancient communities Forensic linguistics Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic analysis to forensics Forensic analysis investigates the style language lexical use and other linguistic and grammatical features used in the legal context to provide evidence in courts of law Forensic linguists have also used their expertise in the framework of criminal cases See alsoLinguistics portalLanguage portalArticulatory phonetics A branch of linguistics studying how humans make sounds Articulatory synthesis Computational techniques for speech synthesis Axiom of categoricity Controversial tenet of linguistic theory Critical discourse analysis Interdisciplinary approach to study discourse Cryptanalysis Study of analyzing information systems in order to discover their hidden aspects Decipherment Rediscovery of a language or script s meaning Global language system Connections between language groups Hermeneutics Theory and methodology of text interpretation Integrational linguistics Theory of language Integrationism Approach in the theory of communication Interlinguistics Subfield of linguistics Language engineering Creation of language processing systems Language geography Study of the geographic distribution of languages Linguistic rights Right to choose one s own language Metalinguistics Study of relationship between language and culture Metacommunicative competence Communication about how information is meant to be interpretedPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets Microlinguistics Branch of linguistics Onomastics Study of proper names Reading Taking in the meaning of letters or symbols Speech processing Study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals Stratificational linguistics Theory of language usage and productionPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets Outline and lists Index of linguistics articles List of departments of linguistics List of summer schools of linguistics List of schools of linguisticsReferencesTrask Robert Lawrence 2007 Language and Linguistics The Key Concepts Taylor amp Francis p 156 ISBN 978 0 415 41359 6 Retrieved 21 September 2023 Halliday Michael A K Jonathan Webster 2006 On Language and Linguistics Continuum International Publishing Group p vii ISBN 978 0 8264 8824 4 What is Linguistics Linguistic Society of America www linguisticsociety org Archived from the original on 8 February 2022 Retrieved 8 February 2022 Akmajian Adrian Richard A Demers Ann K Farmer Robert M Harnish 2010 Linguistics 6th ed The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 51370 8 Archived from the original on 14 December 2012 Retrieved 25 July 2012 Linguistics Program Linguistics Program University of South Carolina Archived from the original on 6 June 2022 Retrieved 3 June 2022 Studying Linguistics Linguistic Society of America www linguisticsociety org Archived from the original on 8 March 2022 Retrieved 1 April 2022 Francis Alexandre 27 September 2013 Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology An Encyclopedia SAGE Publishing pp 184 187 ISBN 978 1412999632 Crystal David 1981 Clinical linguistics Wien Springer Verlag p 3 ISBN 978 3 7091 4001 7 OCLC 610496980 What are the implications of the term science encountered in the definition on p 1 Four aims of the scientific approach to language often cited in introductory works on the subject are comprehensiveness objectivity systematicness and precision The contrast is usually drawn with the essentially non scientific approach of traditional language studies by which is meant the whole history of ideas about language from Plato and Aristotle down to the nineteenth century study of language history comparative philology Philosophy of Linguistics The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Metaphysics Research Lab Stanford University 2022 Archived from the original on 14 December 2022 Retrieved 3 June 2022 Campbell Lyle 1998 Historical Linguistics An Introduction Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press p 391 ISBN 978 0 7486 4601 2 The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians Amsterdamska Olga 1987 The Idea System of the Early Comparative Grammarians Schools of Thought The Development of Linguistics from Bopp to Saussure Springer Dordrecht pp 32 62 doi 10 1007 978 94 009 3759 8 2 ISBN 978 94 009 3759 8 Archived from the original on 15 April 2021 Retrieved 12 December 2020 Saussure Ferdinand Course in General Linguistics PDF Third ed p 101 Retrieved 23 October 2024 Editors Introduction Foundations of the new historical linguistics In The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics Routledge p 25 Labov William 1994 Principles of Linguistic Change Volume 1 Internal Factors Malden MA Blackwell pp 21 23 Whitney William Dwight 1867 Language and the Study of Language Scribener p 428 Quiles Carlos 29 December 2019 Early Uralic Indo European contacts within Europe Indo European eu Archived from the original on 7 July 2022 Retrieved 10 June 2022 Baldi Philip 2012 Historical Linguistics and Cognitive Science PDF Rheis International Journal of Linguistics Philology and Literature 3 1 5 27 Archived from the original PDF on 17 July 2022 p 11 Benj 11 August 2019 History of Historical Linguistics Essay on History Linguistics Essay Examples Archived from the original on 2 October 2022 Retrieved 10 June 2022 Fabregas Antonio January 2005 The definition of the grammatical category in a syntactically oriented morphology Unpublished Ph D Dissertation Madrid Universidad Autonoma Archived from the original on 10 February 2023 Retrieved 10 June 2022 Luuk Erkki 2015 Syntax Semantics Interface In Wright James D ed International Encyclopedia of the Social amp Behavioral Sciences 2nd ed Amsterdam Elsevier pp 900 905 doi 10 1016 b978 0 08 097086 8 57035 4 ISBN 978 0 08 097087 5 Anderson Stephen R n d Morphology Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science Macmillan Reference Ltd Yale University Retrieved 30 July 2016 Aronoff Mark Fudeman Kirsten n d Morphology and Morphological Analysis PDF What is Morphology Blackwell Publishing Archived from the original PDF on 27 February 2020 Retrieved 30 July 2016 Mey Jacob L 1993 Pragmatics An Introduction Oxford Blackwell 2nd ed 2001 Meaning Semantics and Pragmatics Linguistic Society of America www linguisticsociety org Archived from the original on 24 September 2017 Retrieved 25 August 2017 Shaozhong Liu What is pragmatics Archived from the original on 7 March 2009 Retrieved 18 March 2009 Szczegielniak Adam Introduction to Linguistic Theory Phonology The Sound Patterns of Language PDF Harvard University archived PDF from the original on 22 March 2023 retrieved 11 May 2023 Ferguson Charles A 1959 Diglossia WORD Worcester 15 2 325 340 doi 10 1080 00437956 1959 11659702 ISSN 0043 7956 S2CID 239352211 via Tandfonline com Plungyan V A 2011 Modern linguistic typology Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences 81 2 101 113 doi 10 1134 S1019331611020158 All references in this article to the study of sound should be taken to include the manual and non manual signs used in sign languages Syntax A Generative Introduction 2nd ed 2013 Andrew Carnie Blackwell Publishing Chierchia Gennaro amp Sally McConnell Ginet 2000 Meaning and Grammar An Introduction to Semantics MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts ISBN 978 0 262 53164 1 Ariel Mira 2009 Discourse grammar discourse Discourse Studies 11 1 5 36 doi 10 1177 1461445608098496 JSTOR 24049745 S2CID 62686879 Leckie Tarry Helen 1995 Language and Context a Functional Linguistic Theory of Register Continuum International Publishing Group p 6 ISBN 1 85567 272 3 Zuckermann Ghil ad 2003 Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew Palgrave Macmillan pp 2ff ISBN 978 1 4039 1723 2 Archived from the original on 27 August 2016 Retrieved 15 August 2016 Stylistics by Joybrato Mukherjee Chapter 49 Encyclopedia of Linguistics PDF Archived from the original PDF on 4 October 2013 Retrieved 4 October 2013 Richards I A 1965 The Philosophy of Rhetoric Oxford University Press New York Derrida Jacques 1967 Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology Chapter 1 section 1 1 in Antonsen Elmer H 2002 Trends in Linguistics Runes and Germanic Linguistics 6th ed Mouton de Gruyter ISBN 978 3 11 017462 5 Noth Winfried 1990 Handbook of Semiotics Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 253 20959 7 Hjelmslev Louis 1969 First published 1943 Prolegomena to a Theory of Language University of Wisconsin Press ISBN 0 299 02470 9 de Saussure Ferdinand 1959 First published 1916 Course in General Linguistics PDF New York The Philosophical Library Inc ISBN 978 0 231 15727 8 Archived from the original PDF on 8 August 2019 Austin Patrik 2021 Theory of language a taxonomy SN Social Sciences 1 3 doi 10 1007 s43545 021 00085 x hdl 10138 349772 Schafer Roland 2016 Einfuhrung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen 2nd ed Berlin Language Science Press ISBN 978 1 537504 95 7 Archived from the original on 28 July 2017 Retrieved 16 January 2020 Halliday M A K Matthiessen Christian M I M 2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar 3rd ed PDF London Hodder ISBN 0 340 76167 9 Archived PDF from the original on 3 March 2021 Retrieved 16 January 2020 Danes Frantisek 1987 On Prague school functionalism in linguistics In Dirven R Fried V eds Functionalism in Linguistics John Benjamins pp 3 38 ISBN 978 90 272 1524 6 Everaert Martin Huybregts Marinus A C Chomsky Noam Berwick Robert C Bolhuis Johan J 2015 Structures not strings linguistics as part of the cognitive sciences Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19 12 729 743 doi 10 1016 j tics 2015 09 008 hdl 1874 329610 PMID 26564247 S2CID 3648651 Archived from the original on 26 April 2021 Retrieved 5 January 2020 Chomsky Noam 2015 The Minimalist Program 2nd ed MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 52734 7 Arbib Michael A 2015 Language evolution an emergentist perspective In MacWhinney and O Grady ed Handbook of Language Emergence Wiley pp 81 109 ISBN 978 1 118 34613 6 Tobin Vera 2014 Where do cognitive biases fit into cognitive linguistics PDF In Borkent ed Language and the Creative Mind Chicago University Press pp 347 363 ISBN 978 90 272 8643 7 permanent dead link Ibarretxe Antunano Iraide 2002 MIND AS BODY as a Cross linguistic Conceptual Metaphor Miscelanea 25 1 93 119 doi 10 26754 ojs misc mj 200210526 Archived from the original on 27 April 2021 Retrieved 15 July 2020 Gibbs R W Colston H 1995 The cognitive psychological reality of image schemas and their transformations Cognitive Linguistics 6 4 347 378 doi 10 1515 cogl 1995 6 4 347 S2CID 144424435 Pleyer Michael Winters James 2014 Integrating cognitive linguistics and language evolution research Theoria et Historia Scientiarum 11 19 44 doi 10 12775 ths 2014 002 Archived from the original on 9 March 2021 Retrieved 16 January 2020 Evans Vyvyan Green Melanie 2006 Cognitive Linguistics An Introduction Routledge ISBN 0 7486 1831 7 Croft William 2008 Evolutionary linguistics PDF Annual Review of Anthropology 37 219 234 doi 10 1146 annurev anthro 37 081407 085156 Archived PDF from the original on 25 February 2021 Retrieved 16 January 2020 Cornish Hanna Tamariz Monica Kirby Simon 2009 Complex adaptive systems and the origins of adaptive structure what experiments can tell us PDF Language Learning 59 187 205 doi 10 1111 j 1467 9922 2009 00540 x S2CID 56199987 Archived PDF from the original on 12 November 2020 Retrieved 16 January 2020 Sinnemaki Kaius Di Garbo Francesca 2018 Language Structures May Adapt to the Sociolinguistic Environment but It Matters What and How You Count A Typological Study of Verbal and Nominal Complexity Frontiers in Psychology 9 187 205 doi 10 3389 fpsyg 2018 01141 PMC 6102949 PMID 30154738 Dahl Osten 2001 Grammaticalization and the life cycles of constructions RASK Internationalt Tidsskrift for Sprog og Kommunikation 14 91 134 Kirby Simon 2013 Transitions The Evolution of Linguistic Replicators In Binder Smith eds The Language Phenomenon PDF The Frontiers Collection Springer pp 121 138 doi 10 1007 978 3 642 36086 2 6 ISBN 978 3 642 36085 5 Archived PDF from the original on 26 June 2021 Retrieved 4 March 2020 Zehentner Eva 2019 Competition in Language Change the Rise of the English Dative Alternation De Gruyter Mouton ISBN 978 3 11 063385 6 MacWhinney Brian 2015 Introduction language emergence In MacWhinney Brian O Grady William eds Handbook of Language Emergence Wiley pp 1 31 ISBN 978 1 118 34613 6 Nettle Daniel 1999 Functionalism and its difficulties in biology and linguistics In Darnell ed Functionalism and Formalism in linguistics 1 Studies in Language Companion Series Vol 41 John Benjamins pp 445 468 doi 10 1075 slcs 41 21net ISBN 978 1 55619 927 1 Croft William 2015 Functional Approaches to Grammar International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Vol 9 2nd ed Elsevier pp 6323 6330 doi 10 1016 B978 0 08 097086 8 53009 8 ISBN 978 0 08 097087 5 Martinet Andre 1960 Elements of General Linguistics Studies in General Linguistics vol i Translated by Elisabeth Palmer Rubbert London Faber p 15 Rens Bod 2014 A New History of the Humanities The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 966521 1 Chapter VI Sanskrit Literature The Imperial Gazetteer of India Vol 2 1908 p 263 Aṣṭadhyayi 2 0 panini phil hhu de Archived from the original on 15 April 2021 Retrieved 27 February 2021 S C Vasu Tr 1996 The Ashtadhyayi of Panini 2 Vols Vedic Books ISBN 978 81 208 0409 8 Archived from the original on 27 March 2014 Retrieved 17 September 2012 Penn Gerald Kiparski Paul On Panini and the Generative Capacity of Contextualised Replacement Systems PDF Proceedings of COLING 2012 943 950 Archived from the original PDF on 15 April 2021 Harper Douglas philology Online Etymology Dictionary Retrieved 5 March 2018 Nichols Stephen G 1990 Introduction Philology in a Manuscript Culture Speculum 65 1 1 10 doi 10 2307 2864468 JSTOR 2864468 S2CID 154631850 McMahon A M S 1994 Understanding Language Change Cambridge University Press pp 9 19 ISBN 978 0 521 44665 5 Morpurgo Davies A 1998 Nineteenth Century Linguistics History of Linguistics Vol 4 Harper Douglas linguist Online Etymology Dictionary Retrieved 5 March 2018 Shahhoseiny Hajar 2013 Differences between Language and Linguistic in the ELT Classroom PDF Theory and Practice in Language Studies Retrieved 10 December 2023 What is Linguistics Birmingham City University Retrieved 10 December 2023 Spolsky Bernard Hult Francis M February 2010 The Handbook of Educational Linguistics John Wiley amp Sons ISBN 978 1 4443 3104 2 Berns Margie 20 March 2010 Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics Elsevier pp 23 25 ISBN 978 0 08 096503 1 The Science of Linguistics Linguistic Society of America Archived from the original on 17 April 2018 Retrieved 17 April 2018 Modern linguists approach their work with a scientific perspective although they use methods that used to be thought of as solely an academic discipline of the humanities Contrary to previous belief linguistics is multidisciplinary It overlaps each of the human sciences including psychology neurology anthropology and sociology Linguists conduct formal studies of sound structure grammar and meaning but they also investigate the history of language families and research language acquisition Behme Christina Neef Martin Essays on Linguistic Realism 2018 Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing Company pp 7 20 Crystal David 1990 Linguistics Penguin Books ISBN 978 0 14 013531 2 Linguist The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2000 ISBN 978 0 395 82517 4 Bloomfield 1983 p 307 Seuren Pieter A M 1998 Western linguistics An historical introduction Wiley Blackwell pp 2 24 ISBN 978 0 631 20891 4 Bloomfield 1983 p 308 Bloomfield 1983 p 310 Bloomfield 1983 p 311 Jensen Kim Ebensgaard 19 December 2014 Linguistics in the digital humanities computational corpus linguistics Mediekultur Journal of Media and Communication Research 30 57 doi 10 7146 mediekultur v30i57 15968 Retrieved 10 December 2023 McEnery Tony 2019 Corpus Linguistics Learner Corpora and SLA Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 39 Cambridge University Press 74 92 doi 10 1017 S0267190519000096 Hunston S 1 January 2006 Corpus Linguistics in Brown Keith ed Encyclopedia of Language amp Linguistics Second Edition Oxford Elsevier pp 234 248 doi 10 1016 b0 08 044854 2 00944 5 ISBN 978 0 08 044854 1 retrieved 31 October 2023 Bailey Charles James N 1 January 1981 Developmental Linguistics Folia Linguistica 15 1 2 29 38 doi 10 1515 flin 1981 15 1 2 29 ISSN 1614 7308 Marien Peter Manto Mario 25 October 2017 Cerebellum as a Master Piece for Linguistic Predictability Cerebellum London England 17 2 101 03 doi 10 1007 s12311 017 0894 1 ISSN 1473 4230 PMID 29071518 Barbara Seidlhofer 2003 Controversies in Applied Linguistics pp 288 Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 437444 6 Eades Diana 2005 Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum Seeker Cases PDF Applied Linguistics 26 4 503 26 doi 10 1093 applin ami021 Archived from the original PDF on 27 March 2009 Retrieved 31 January 2009 Himmelman Nikolaus Language documentation What is it and what is it good for in P Gippert Jost Nikolaus P Himmelmann amp Ulrike Mosel 2006 Essentials of Language documentation Mouton de Gruyter Berlin amp New York Behr Dorothee Sha Mandy 25 July 2018 Introduction Translation of questionnaires in cross national and cross cultural research Translation amp Interpreting 10 2 1 4 doi 10 12807 ti 110202 2018 a01 ISSN 1836 9324 Pan Yuling Sha Mandy 9 July 2019 The Sociolinguistics of Survey Translation London Routledge doi 10 4324 9780429294914 ISBN 978 0 429 29491 4 S2CID 198632812 Croft William October 2008 Evolutionary Linguistics Annual Review of Anthropology 37 219 34 doi 10 1146 annurev anthro 37 081407 085156 Olsson John What is Forensic Linguistics PDF Forensic Linguistics Intelligence what is forensic linguistics CFL at Aston University Archived from the original on 27 September 2010 Retrieved 1 February 2024 BibliographyAkmajian Adrian Demers Richard Farmer Ann Harnish Robert 2010 Linguistics An Introduction to Language and Communication Cambridge MA The MIT Press ISBN 978 0 262 51370 8 Aronoff Mark Rees Miller Janie eds 2000 The handbook of linguistics Oxford Blackwell Bloomfield Leonard 1983 1914 An Introduction to the Study of Language New ed Amsterdam John Benjamins Publishing ISBN 978 90 272 8047 3 Chomsky Noam 1998 On Language The New Press New York ISBN 978 1 56584 475 9 Crystal David 1990 Linguistics Penguin Books ISBN 978 0 14 013531 2 Derrida Jacques 1967 Of Grammatology The Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN 978 0 8018 5830 7 Hall Christopher 2005 An Introduction to Language and Linguistics Breaking the Language Spell Routledge ISBN 978 0 8264 8734 6 Isac Daniela Charles Reiss 2013 I language An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science 2nd ed Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 966017 9 Archived from the original on 6 July 2011 Retrieved 17 May 2013 McShane Marjorie Nirenburg Sergei 2021 Linguistics for the Age of AI MIT Press ISBN 9780262363136 External linksLibrary resources about Linguistics Resources in your library Resources in other libraries The Linguist List a global online linguistics community with news and information updated daily Glossary of linguistic terms Archived 10 February 2013 at the Wayback Machine by SIL International last updated 2004 Glottopedia MediaWiki based encyclopedia of linguistics under construction Linguistic sub fields according to the Linguistic Society of America Linguistics and language related wiki articles on Scholarpedia and Citizendium Linguistics section A Bibliography of Literary Theory Criticism and Philology ed J A Garcia Landa University of Zaragoza Spain Isac Daniela Charles Reiss 2013 I language An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science 2nd ed Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 953420 3 Linguistics at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from CommonsQuotations from WikiquoteTextbooks from WikibooksData from Wikidata