The scientific study of language. The discipline is concerned with such matters as providing systematic descriptions of languages, investigating the properties of language structures as communicative systems, exploring the possibility that there are universals of language structure, and accounting for the historical development of linguistic systems. Applied linguistics is the application of linguistics to the study of such language-based fields as foreign language teaching and learning, speech pathology, translation, and dictionary writing.
The 19th-c saw the flowering of comparative philology, which studied the historical development of language families. Modern linguistics is generally said to have begun with the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale (1916, Course in General Linguistics), which introduced the essential distinction between diachronic (historical) linguistics, and synchronic (descriptive) linguistics, and laid the foundation for the era of structural linguistics, which dominated the first half of the 20th-c. Structuralists (notably US linguist Leonard Bloomfield (18871949)) stressed the uniqueness of language systems, and the need to base structural descriptions on observed evidence alone. The major development in the second half of the 20th-c was the emergence of generative grammar, originally proposed by linguist Noam Chomsky in Syntactic Structures (1957), and since elaborated in a wide range of works. Since the 1960s, several developments of and alternatives to Chomsky's original model have been proposed. Also, many points of contact between linguistics and other academic areas have been explored, leading to the growth of such hybrid fields as sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics.
| Linguistics |
| Theoretical linguistics |
| Phonetics |
| Phonology |
| Morphology |
| Syntax |
| Semantics |
| Lexical semantics |
| Statistical semantics |
| Structural semantics |
| Prototype semantics |
| Stylistics |
| Prescription |
| Pragmatics |
| Applied linguistics |
| Psycholinguistics |
| Sociolinguistics |
| Generative linguistics |
| Cognitive linguistics |
| Computational linguistics |
| Descriptive linguistics |
| Historical linguistics |
| Comparative linguistics |
| Etymology |
| History of linguistics |
| List of linguists |
| Unsolved problems |
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. In semantics, autonomous linguistics explores the nature of language abstracted away from the many aspects of usage, and contextual linguistics combines linguistics with other fields, such as philosophy or sociology, to explain language's social functions.
Linguistics also compares languages and explores their histories, in order to find universal properties of language and to account for its development and origins. Slightly separate from general linguistics are the sub-fields of phonology, which studies the role of language's sounds in particular languages, and phonetics, the study of how sounds are produced and perceived.
Applied linguistics puts linguistic theories into practice in areas such as foreign language teaching, speech therapy, translation and speech pathology.
Divisions, specialties, and subfields
The central concern of autonomous theoretical linguistics is to characterize the nature of human linguistic ability, or competence: to explain what it is that an individual knows when an individual knows a language, and to explain how it is that individuals come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, without formal instruction being necessary. Since children learn whatever language is spoken around them, there is no genetic basis for the differences between one language and another. Linguists may specialize in some subpart of the linguistic structure, which can be arranged in the following terms, from sound to meaning:
Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human language Phonology (or phonemics), the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts Discourse analysis, the study of sentences organised into textsThe independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged, however, and many linguists would agree that the divisions overlap considerably. For example
Language acquisition, the study of how language is acquired Historical linguistics or Diachronic linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use Sociolinguistics, the study of social patterns of linguistic variability Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the area of Speech-Language PathologyVariation
A substantial part of linguistic investigation is into the nature of the differences among the languages of the world. The nature of variation is very important to an understanding of human linguistic ability in general: if human linguistic ability is very narrowly constrained by biological properties of the species, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.
But there are different ways to interpret similarities among languages. So in principle, if two languages share some property, this property might either be due to common inheritance or due to some property of the human language faculty. Given the fact that learning language comes quite easily to humans, it can be assumed that languages have been spoken at least as long as there have been biologically modern humans, probably at least fifty thousand years. Independent measures of language change (for example, comparing the language of ancient texts to the daughter languages spoken today) suggest that change is rapid enough to make it impossible to reconstruct a language that was spoken so long ago; as a consequence of this, common features of languages spoken in different parts of the world are not normally taken as evidence for common ancestry.
Even more striking, there are documented cases of sign languages being developed in communities of congenitally deaf people who could not have been exposed to spoken language. The properties of these sign languages have been shown to conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages, strengthening the hypothesis that those properties are not due to common ancestry but to more general characteristics of the way languages are learned.
Loosely speaking, the collection of properties which all languages share can be referred to as "universal grammar" (or UG).
Universal properties of language may be partly due to universal aspects of human experience; for example all humans experience water, and the fact that all human languages have a word for water is probably not unrelated to this fact.
A more interesting example is this: suppose that all human languages distinguish nouns from verbs (this is generally believed to be true).
In general, a property of UG could be due to general properties of human cognition, or due to some property of human cognition that is specific to language.
Properties of language
It has been understood since the time of the ancient Greeks that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past.
In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language was only fully realized after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures, which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Since then, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English), but it has been demonstrated that human languages include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by Context-free grammars.
This means that natural language formalisms must be relatively powerful in terms of generative capacity.
Details on selected divisions and subfields
Contextual linguistics
Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines. Whereas in core theoretical linguistics language is studied for its own sake, the interdisciplinary areas of linguistics consider how language interacts with the rest of the world.
Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are social sciences that consider the interactions between linguistics and society as a whole.
Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.
Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics combine medical science and linguistics.
Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science.
Applied linguistics
Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas, as well.
Many areas of applied linguistics today involve the explicit use of computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront in recent years with increasing computing power.
Diachronic linguistics
Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily.
Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.
Prescription and description
Research currently performed under the name "linguistics" is purely descriptive; linguists seek to clarify the nature of language without passing value judgments or trying to chart future language directions.
Prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the actual academic discipline of linguistics. They hold clear notions of what is right and wrong, and may assign themselves the responsibility of ensuring that the next generation use the variety of language that is most likely to lead to "success," often the acrolect of a particular language. Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist approach.
Speech versus writing
Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study than written language. People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing; A number of cognitive scientists argue that the brain has an innate "language module", knowledge of which is thought to come more from studying speech than writing, particularly since language as speech is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention.
Of course, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.
History of linguistics
Early Indian Vedic texts (Rig Veda 1:164:45; 10:125) suggest a structure for languages: Language is composed of sentences with four stages of evolution that are expressed in three tenses (past, present and future). A consequence of his grammar's focus on brevity is its highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light.
Other early scholars of linguistics include Jakob Grimm, who devised the principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation known as Grimm's Law in 1822, Karl Verner, who discovered Verner's Law, August Schleicher who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" and Johannes Schmidt who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872. Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant one from the 1960s. Linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable rules, which is a greater departure from mainstream linguistics, and linguists working in various kinds of functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus departing importantly from the Chomskian paradigm.
User Comments Add a comment…