Linguistics is a research field devoted to
the science of language. There are broadly
three aspects to the study, which include
language form, language meaning, and language
in context. The earliest known activities
in the description of language have been attributed
to Pāṇini around 500 BCE, with his analysis
of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.
In the 20th century, language began to be
understood as an interplay of sound and meaning.
The discipline of phonetics was formulated
to study linguistic sound, and is concerned
with the actual properties of speech sounds
and non-speech sounds, and how they are produced
and perceived. The study of language meaning,
on the other hand, deals with how languages
employ logic and real-world references to
convey, process, and assign meaning, as well
as to manage and resolve ambiguity. While
the study of semantics is concerned with how
meaning is inferred from words and concepts,
pragmatics deals with how meaning is inferred
from context. This popular understanding of
language structure took off with the Prague
school and the Russian formalists, and with
Mikhail Bakhtin's structural analysis of narrative,
for instance, which became a significant landmark
as part of the ideological movement away from
historicism to structuralism.
Grammar is the system of rules which governs
the communication between members of a particular
speech community. It is influenced by both
sound and meaning, and includes morphology,
syntax, and phonology. Through corpus linguistics,
large chunks of text can be analysed for possible
occurrences of certain linguistic features
on the basis of their grammatical features,
and for their stylistic patterns, within a
written as well as spoken discourse.
The study of such cultural discourses and
dialects is the domain of sociolinguistics,
which looks at the relation between linguistic
variation and social structures, as well as
that of discourse analysis, which involves
the structure of texts and conversations.
Research on language through historical and
evolutionary linguistics focuses on how languages
change, and the origin and growth of languages,
particularly over an extended period of time.
During the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure
distinguished between the notions of langue
and parole in his formulation of structural
linguistics. According to him, parole is the
specific utterance of speech, whereas langue
refers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically
defines the principles and system of rules
that govern a language. In classical Indian
philosophy of language, the author(s) called
Patanjali distinguished between sphota and
dhvani in the creation of shabda, which literally
means "spoken word".
Katyayana, another Indian philosopher, further
distinguished between shabda and artha. In
modern-day theoretical linguistics, Noam Chomsky
distinguishes between the notions of competence
and performance, where competence is the inherent
capacity for language, while performance is
the specific way in which it is used.
The newer 20th century formalist trend to
view speech as a central signifier in language,
with writing being seen only as its reflection,
was critiqued by the French philosopher Jacques
Derrida. In his 1967 book, Of Grammatology,
he wrote against this arbitrary distinction
between speech and writing, and emphasised
on how written symbols are also legitimate
signifiers in themselves. In doing so, he
brought back a trend towards historiography
in the analysis of language, and through which
the notion of difference, which established
historical relativity, became central to the
late 20th century post-structural movement
in linguistics.
The formalistic study of language 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;
and language acquisition, which investigates
on how children and adults acquire a particular
language. During the 1970s and 1980s, research
developments took shape in the field of cognitive
linguistics through theorists such as George
Lakoff, who view language as a conceptual
function of the mind, as opposed to a pre-defined
grammatical template.
Language is also influenced by social, cultural,
historical and political factors. Semiotics,
for instance, is the study of signs and symbols
both within language and without. Literary
critics study the use of language in literature.
Translation entails the conversion of a text
from one language to another. Speech language
pathologists work on corrective measures to
remove communication disorders largely at
the phonetic level, employing a combination
of cognitive and phonological devices.
Language documentation combines anthropological
inquiry with linguistic inquiry to describe
languages and their grammars. Lexicographers
map vocabularies in languages to write dictionaries
and encyclopedias and edit other such educational
material for publishing houses. In the age
of digital technology, linguists, translators,
and lexicographers work on computer language
to facilitate and create web entities and
digital dictionaries on both mobile as well
as desktop machines, and create software through
technical and human language that enables
a large number of social functions, from designing
to even machine-based translation itself.
Actual knowledge of a language can be applied
in the teaching of it as a second or foreign
language. Research experiments in linguistics
have in the recent years, seen communities
of linguists build new constructed languages
like Esperanto, to test the theories of language
in an abstract and artificial setting. Policy
makers work with the government to implement
new plans in education and teaching which
are based on certain linguistic factors.
Nomenclature
Before the 20th century, the term philology,
first attested in 1716, was commonly used
to refer to the science 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.
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 common academic term in
English for the scientific study of language.
Today, 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 analyze
specific languages.
Variation and Universality
While some theories on linguistics focus on
the different varieties that language produces,
among different sections of society, others
focus on the universal properties that are
common to all given languages at one given
time on the planet. The theory of variation
therefore would elaborate on the different
usages of popular languages like French and
English across the globe, as well as its smaller
dialects and regional permutations within
their national boundaries. The theory of variation
looks at the cultural stages that a particular
language undergoes, and these include the
following.
The first stage is pidgin, the contracted
word for "business", or that phase in the
creation of a language's variation when new,
non-native speakers undertake a mainstream
language and use its phrases and words in
a broken manner that often attempts to be
overly literal in meaning. At this junction,
many of the linguistic characteristics of
the native speakers' own language or mother
tongue influence their use of the mainstream
language, and that is when it arrives at the
latter stage of being called a creole. Creoles
are dialects or languages that have been nativised
after synthesizing two parent languages, because
there are people who grow up speaking a language
when it is at that stage.
For instance, when a Chinese speaker just
begins to speak English, he or she will at
first use English at the level of a pidgin
language: broken words, lack of grammatical
form and structure, and weak or negligible
vocabulary. Once the Chinese speaker begins
to learn English and use it to its full capacity,
the generations that follow and learn the
language will become a variety of English,
and this variety may be referred to as a creole
language. "Chinese English", is therefore
a creole. Hence, this process in the creation
of dialects and varieties of languages as
globally popular as English and French, as
well as others like Spanish, for instance,
is one that is rooted in the changing evolution
and growth of each language. These variating
factors are studied in order to understand
the different usages and dialects that a language
develops over time. Some of the recent research
done in this arena includes David Crystal's
analysis of the use of English, as well as
his study of changing trends in language usage
on the Internet, through his formulation of
a new field of study that has been titled
Internet linguistics.
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 words that can't stand alone, like affixes,
for example. 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 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.
Discourse
A discourse is a way of speaking that emerges
within a certain social setting and is based
on a certain subject matter. 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 that are brought
into play because of the expertise of the
community of people within a certain domain
of specialisation. Registers and discourses
therefore differentiate themselves through
the use of vocabulary, and at times through
the use of style too. People in the medical
fraternity, for example, may use some medical
terminology in their communication that is
specialised to the field of medicine. This
is often referred to as being part of the
"medical discourse", and so on.
Dialect
A dialect is a variety of language that is
characteristic of a particular group among
the language speakers. The group of people
who are the speakers of a dialect are usually
bound to each other by social identity. This
is what differentiates a dialect from a register
or a discourse, where in the latter case,
cultural identity does not always play a role.
Dialects are speech varieties that have their
own grammatical and phonological rules, linguistic
features, and stylistic aspects, but have
not been given an official status as a language.
Dialects often move on to gain the status
of a language due to political and social
reasons. Differentiation amongst dialects
is based upon the use of grammatical rules,
syntactic rules, and stylistic features, though
not always on lexical use or vocabulary. The
popular saying that a "language is a dialect
with an army and navy" is attributed as a
definition formulated by Max Weinreich.
Universal grammar takes into account general
formal structures and features that are common
to all dialects and languages, and the template
of which pre-exists in the mind of an infant
child. This idea is based on the theory of
generative grammar and the formal school of
linguistics, whose proponents include Noam
Chomsky and those who follow his theory and
work.
"We may as individuals be rather fond of our
own dialect. This should not make us think,
though, that it is actually any better than
any other dialect. Dialects are not good or
bad, nice or nasty, right or wrong – they
are just different from one another, and it
is the mark of a civilised society that it
tolerates different dialects just as it tolerates
different races, religions and sexes."
Structures
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning
and form. Any particular pairing of meaning
and form is a Saussurean sign. For instance,
the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide
with a wide variety of different sound patterns,
movements of the hands and face, and written
symbols.
Linguists focusing on structure attempt to
understand the rules regarding language use
that native speakers know. All linguistic
structures can be broken down into component
parts that are combined according toconscious
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, 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, 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.
Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned
with particular aspects of linguistic structure.
The theory that elucidates on these, as propounded
by Noam Chomsky, is known as generative theory
or universal grammar. These sub-fields range
from those focused primarily on form to those
focused primarily on meaning. They also run
the gamut of level of analysis of language,
from individual sounds, to words, to phrases,
up to cultural discourse.
Sub-fields that focus on a structure-focused
study of language:
Phonetics, the study of the physical properties
of speech sound production and perception
Phonology, the study of sounds as abstract
elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish
meaning
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 sentences
Semantics, the study of the meaning of words
and fixed word combinations, and how these
combine to form the meanings of sentences
Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are
used in communicative acts, and the role played
by context and non-linguistic knowledge in
the transmission of meaning
Discourse analysis, the analysis of language
use in texts
Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors
that place a discourse in context
Semiotics, the study of signs and sign processes,
indication, designation, likeness, analogy,
metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.
Relativity
As constructed popularly through the "Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis", relativists believe that the
structure of a particular language is capable
of influencing the cognitive patterns through
which a person shapes his or her world view.
Universalists believe that there are commonalities
between human perception as there is in the
human capacity for language, while relativists
believe that this varies from language to
language and person to person. While the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis is an elaboration of this idea
expressed through the writings of American
linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf,
it was Sapir's student Harry Hoijer who termed
it thus. The 20th century German linguist
Leo Weisgerber also wrote extensively about
the theory of relativity. Relativists argue
for the case of differentiation at the level
of cognition and in semantic domains. The
emergence of cognitive linguistics in the
1980s also revived an interest in linguistic
relativity. Thinkers like George Lakoff have
argued that language reflects different cultural
metaphors, while the French philosopher of
language Jacques Derrida's writings have been
seen to be closely associated with the relativist
movement in linguistics, especially through
deconstruction and was even heavily criticised
in the media at the time of his death for
his theory of relativism.
Style
Stylistics is 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.
Approach
One major debate in linguistics concerns how
language should be defined and understood.
Some linguists use the term "language" primarily
to refer to a hypothesised, innate module
in the human brain that allows people to undertake
linguistic behavior, which is part of the
formalist approach. This "universal grammar"
is considered to guide children when they
learn languages and to constrain what sentences
are considered grammatical in any language.
Proponents of this view, which is predominant
in those schools of linguistics that are based
on the generative theory of Noam Chomsky,
do not necessarily consider that language
evolved for communication in particular. They
consider instead that it has more to do with
the process of structuring human thought.
Another group of linguists, by contrast, use
the term "language" to refer to a communication
system that developed to support cooperative
activity and extend cooperative networks.
Such theories of grammar view language as
a tool that emerged and is adapted to the
communicative needs of its users, and the
role of cultural evolutionary processes are
often emphasised over that of biological evolution.
Methodology
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 animal is more evolved or less
evolved than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt
to promote particular linguistic usages over
others, often favouring 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. 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, is practiced
in the teaching of language, where certain
fundamental grammatical rules and lexical
terms need to be introduced to a second-language
speaker who is attempting to acquire the language.
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 Sausserean linguistics in the
20th century, the focus shifted to a more
synchronic approach, where the study was more
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.
Anthropology
The objective of describing languages is to
often uncover cultural knowledge about communities.
The use of anthropological methods of investigation
on linguistic sources leads to the discovery
of certain cultural traits among a speech
community through its linguistic features.
It is also widely used as a tool in language
documentation, with an endeavor to curate
endangered languages. However, now, linguistic
inquiry uses the anthropological method to
understand cognitive, historical, sociolinguistic
and historical processes that languages undergo
as they change and evolve, as well as general
anthropological inquiry uses the linguistic
method to excavate into culture. In all aspects,
anthropological inquiry usually uncovers the
different variations and relativities that
underlie the usage of language.
Sources
Most contemporary linguists work under the
assumption that spoken data and signed data
is 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 aren't always
recorded in writing, including phonological
rules, sound changes, and speech errors;
All natural writing system reflect a spoken
language they are being used to write, with
even pictographic languages 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;
People learnt to speak and process spoken
language more easily and earlier than they
did 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 is,
in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.
History of linguistic thought
Early grammarians
The formal study of language began in India
with Pāṇini, the 5th 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 made a detailed
description of Arabic in 760 AD in his monumental
work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw, the first known
author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes.
Western interest in the study of languages
began as early as 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 in Alexandria,
where a school of philologists studied the
ancient texts in 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",
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, practiced
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 scientific 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, 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.
Structuralism
Early in the 20th century, Saussure introduced
the idea of language as a static system of
interconnected units, defined through the
oppositions between them. By introducing a
distinction between diachronic to synchronic
analyses of language, he laid the foundation
of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure
also introduced several basic dimensions of
linguistic analysis that are still foundational
in many contemporary linguistic theories,
such as the distinctions between syntagm and
paradigm, and the langue- parole distinction,
distinguishing language as an abstract system
from language as a concrete manifestation
of this system. Substantial additional contributions
following Saussure's definition of a structural
approach to language came from The Prague
school, Leonard Bloomfield, Charles F. Hockett,
Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and Roman
Jakobson.
Generativism
During the last half of the 20th century,
following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics
was dominated by the generativist school.
While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way
to explain how human beings acquire language
and the biological constraints on this acquisition,
in practice it has largely been concerned
with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena
in natural languages. Generative theory is
modularist and formalist in character. Chomsky
built on earlier work of Zellig Harris to
formulate the generative theory of language.
According to this theory the most basic form
of language is a set of syntactic rules universal
for all humans and underlying the grammars
of all human languages. This set of rules
is called Universal Grammar, and for Chomsky
describing it is the primary objective of
the discipline of linguistics. For this reason
the grammars of individual languages are of
importance to linguistics only in so far as
they allow us to discern the universal underlying
rules from which the observable linguistic
variability is generated.
In the classic formalisation of generative
grammars first proposed by Noam Chomsky in
the 1950s, a grammar G consists of the following
components:
A finite set N of nonterminal symbols, none
of which appear in strings formed from G.
A finite set of terminal symbols that is disjoint
from N.
A finite set P of production rules, that map
from one string of symbols to another.
A formal description of language attempts
to replicate a speaker's knowledge of the
rules of their language, and the aim is to
produce a set of rules that is minimally sufficient
to successfully model valid linguistic forms.
Functionalism
Functional theories of language propose that
since language is fundamentally a tool, it
is reasonable to assume that its structures
are best analysed and understood with reference
to the functions they carry out. Functional
theories of grammar differ from formal theories
of grammar, in that the latter seek to define
the different elements of language and describe
the way they relate to each other as systems
of formal rules or operations, whereas the
former defines the functions performed by
language and then relates these functions
to the linguistic elements that carry them
out. This means that functional theories of
grammar tend to pay attention to the way language
is actually used, and not just to the formal
relations between linguistic elements.
Functional theories describe language in term
of the functions existing at all levels of
language.
Phonological function: the function of the
phoneme is to distinguish between different
lexical material.
Semantic function:, describing the role of
participants in states of affairs or actions
expressed.
Syntactic functions:, defining different perspectives
in the presentation of a linguistic expression
Pragmatic functions:, defining the informational
status of constituents, determined by the
pragmatic context of the verbal interaction.
Functional descriptions of grammar strive
to explain how linguistic functions are performed
in communication through the use of linguistic
forms.
Cognitivism
In the 1950s, a new school of thought known
as cognitivism emerged through the field of
psychology. Cognitivists lay emphasis on knowledge
and information, as opposed to behaviorism,
for instance. Cognitivism emerged in linguistics
as a reaction to generativist theory in the
1970s and 1980s. Led by theorists like Ronald
Langacker and George Lakoff, cognitive linguists
propose that language is an emergent property
of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes.
In contrast to the generativist school of
linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist
and functionalist in character. Important
developments in cognitive linguistics include
cognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual
metaphor, all of which are based on the idea
that form–function correspondences based
on representations derived from embodied experience
constitute the basic units of language.
Cognitive linguistics interprets language
in terms of concepts that underlie its form.
It is thus closely associated with semantics
but is distinct from psycholinguistics, which
draws upon empirical findings from cognitive
psychology in order to explain the mental
processes that underlie the acquisition, storage,
production and understanding of speech and
writing. Unlike generative theory, cognitive
linguistics denies that there is an autonomous
linguistic faculty in the mind; it understands
grammar in terms of conceptualisation; and
claims that knowledge of language arises out
of language use. Because of its conviction
that knowledge of language is learned through
use, cognitive linguistics is sometimes considered
to be a functional approach, but it differs
from other functional approaches in that it
is primarily concerned with how the mind creates
meaning through language, and not with the
use of language as a tool of communication.
Areas of research
Historical linguistics
Historical linguists study the history of
specific languages as well as general characteristics
of language change. The study of language
change is also referred to as "diachronic
linguistics", which can be distinguished from
"synchronic linguistics". Historical linguistics
was among the first sub-disciplines to emerge
in linguistics, and was the most widely practiced
form of linguistics in the late 19th century.
However, there was a shift to the synchronic
approach in the early twentieth century with
Saussure, and became more predominant in western
linguistics with the work of Noam Chomsky.
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
ideolects can be tackled through a study of
style, as well as through analysis of discourse.
Sociolinguists research on both style and
discourse in language, and also study 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 at is how do children acquire
language? How does an adult acquire a second
language? What is the process of language
acquisition?
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
modeling.
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 with governmental level 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 and
anthropology.
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 modeling 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.
Inter-disciplinary fields
Within the broad discipline of linguistics,
various emerging sub-disciplines focus on
a more detailed description and analysis of
language, and are often organized on the basis
of the school of thought and theoretical approach
that they pre-suppose, or the external factors
that influence them.
Semiotics
Semiotics is the study of sign processes,
or signification and communication, signs,
and symbols, both individually and grouped
into sign systems, including the study of
how meaning is constructed and understood.
Semioticians often do not restrict themselves
to linguistic communication when studying
the use of signs but extend the meaning of
"sign" to cover all kinds of cultural symbols.
Nonetheless, semiotic disciplines closely
related to linguistics are literary studies,
discourse analysis, text linguistics, and
philosophy of language. Semiotics, within
the linguistics paradigm, is the study of
the relationship between language and culture.
Historically, Edward Sapir and Ferdinand De
Saussure's structuralist theories influenced
the study of signs extensively until the late
part of the 20th century, but later, post-modern
and post-structural thought, through language
philosophers including Jacques Derrida, Mikhail
Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and others, have
also been a considerable influence on the
discipline in the late part of the 20th century
and early 21st century. These theories emphasise
the role of language variation, and the idea
of subjective usage, depending on external
elements like social and cultural factors,
rather than merely on the interplay of formal
elements.
Language documentation
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 structural 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 primary
focus in many 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
mediums, from digital to print and spoken.
To translate literally means to transmute
the meaning from one language into another.
Translators are often employed by organisations,
such as travel agencies as well as 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 for example, which is
an automated, programmed facility to translate
words and phrases between any two or more
given languages. Translation is also conducted
by publishing houses, who convert works of
writing from one language to another in order
to reach varied audiences. Academic Translators,
specialize and semi specialize on various
other disciplines such as ; Technology, Science,
Law, Economics etc.
Biolinguistics
Biolinguistics is the study of natural as
well as human-taught communication systems
in animals, compared to human language. Researchers
in the field of biolinguistics have also over
the years questioned the possibility and extent
of language in animals.
Clinical linguistics
Clinical linguistics is the application of
linguistic theory to the fields of Speech-Language
Pathology. Speech language pathologists work
on corrective measures to cure communication
disorders 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.
Ecolinguistics
Ecolinguistics is connected with a paradigm
that views language to have an ecological
context, and not just a historical, social
or cultural context. Michael Halliday's 1990
paper New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to
Applied Linguistics is often credited as a
seminal work which provided the stimulus for
linguists to consider the ecological context
and consequences of language. Among other
things, the challenge that Halliday put forward
was to make linguistics relevant to the issues
and concerns of the 21st century, particularly
the widespread destruction of ecosystems.
Since Halliday's initial comments, the field
of ecolinguistics has developed considerably,
primarily in the direction of analysing the
ecological impact of specific discourses rather
than languages in general. Linguistic ecology,
on the other hand, looks at how languages
interact with each other and the places they
are spoken in, and frequently argues for the
preservation of endangered languages as an
analogy of the preservation of biological
species. Many have argued that separation
of the metaphorical 'linguistic ecology' from
ecolinguistics would be reductionist, because
high linguistic diversity is associated with
high biological diversity. Many linguists
work as activists in connection to ecolinguistics
and linguistic ecology, as they actively work
at documenting not only endangered languages
but also tribal languages, and work with environmentalists
to use the linguistic corpora collected to
gain knowledge of a community and its land,
and solve environmental problems.
Evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics is the interdisciplinary
study of 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 on 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 contributed expertise in criminal
cases.
See also
Cognitive science
History of linguistics
International Linguistics Olympiad
International Congress of Linguists
Linguistics Departments at Universities
Summer schools for linguistics
List of linguists
Other Terms and Concepts
References
Bibliography
Akmajian, Adrian; Demers, Richard; Farmer,
Ann; Harnish, Robert. Linguistics: An Introduction
to Language and Communication. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51370-6. 
Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss. I-language:
An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive
Science, 2nd edition. Oxford University Press.
ISBN 978-0199660179. 
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William
Morrow and Company. ISBN 9780140175295. 
Chomsky, Noam. On Language. The New Press,
New York. ISBN 978-1565844759. 
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. The Johns
Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801858305. 
Crystal, David. Linguistics. Penguin Books.
ISBN 9780140135312. 
External links
The Linguist List, a global online linguistics
community with news and information updated
daily
Glossary of linguistic terms by SIL International
Language Log, a linguistics blog maintained
by prominent linguists
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
An Academic Linguistics Forum
Linguistics Contents for Non-English World
[1]
Linguistics at DMOZ
