Linguistics
This article is about the field of study.
For the journal, see Linguistics (journal).
"Linguist" redirects here.
For other uses, see Linguist (disambiguation).
Linguistics is the scientific study of language.
It involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context, as well as an analysis of the social, cultural, historical, and political factors that influence language.
Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing the relationship between sound and meaning.
Meaning can be studied in its directly spoken or written form through the field of semantics, as well as in its indirect form through body language and gestures under the discipline of pragmatics.
Each speech sound particle is called a phoneme.
How these phonemes are organised to convey meaning depends on various linguistic patterns and structures that theoretical linguists describe and analyse.
Some of these patterns of sound and meaning are found in the study of morphology (concerning how words are formulated through "morphemes"), syntax (how sentences are logically structured), and phonology (the study of sound patterns).
The emergence of historical and evolutionary linguistics has also led to a greater focus over studying how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time.
Sociolinguists also study how language develops among different communities through dialects, and how each language changes, grows, and varies from person to person and group to group.
Macrolinguistic concepts include the study of narrative theory, stylistics, discourse analysis, and semiotics.
Microlinguistic concepts, on the other hand, involve the analysis of grammar, speech sounds, palaeographic symbols, connotation, and logical references, all of which can be applied to lexicography, editing, language documentation, translation, as well as speech-language pathology (a corrective method to cure phonetic disabilities and disfunctions).
The earliest activities in the documentation and 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 back then.
Major subdisciplines
Historical linguistics
Main article: Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change, particularly with regards 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 documents).
Historical linguistics emerged as one of the first few sub-disciplines in the field, and was most widely practiced during the late 19th century.
Despite a shift in focus in the twentieth 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 grammaticalisation.
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 served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, which involves a study of the relationship between different languages.
During this time, scholars of historical linguistics were only concerned with creating different categories of language families, and reconstructing prehistoric proto languages by using 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.
The reason for this had been to describe well-known Indo-European languages, many of which used to have 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 this, there was significant work that followed on the corpora of other languages too, such as that of the Austronesian languages as well as of Native American language families.
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 specialised field today, while comparative research is carried out over the subsequent internal developments in a language.
In particular, it is carried out over the development of modern standard varieties of languages, or over the development of a language from its standardised form to its varieties.
For instance, some scholars also undertook a study attempting to establish super-families, linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic, and other language families to Nostratic.
While these attempts are still not widely accepted as credible methods, they provide necessary information to establish relatedness in language change, something that is not easily available as the depth of time increases.
The time-depth of linguistic methods is generally limited, due to the occurrence of chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed for the functional purpose of conducting research.
Difficulty also exists in the dating of various proto languages.
Even though several methods are available, only approximate results can be obtained in terms of arriving at dates for these languages.
Today, with a subsequent re-development of grammatical studies, historical linguistics studies the change in language on a relational basis between dialect to dialect during one period, as well as between those in the past and the present period, and looks at evolution and shifts taking place morphologically, syntactically, as well as phonetically.
Syntax and morphology
Main articles: Syntax and Morphology (linguistics)
Syntax and morphology are branches of linguistics concerned with the order and structure of meaningful linguistic units such as words and morphemes.
Syntacticians study the rules and constraints that govern how speakers of a language can organize words into sentences.
Morphologists study similar rules for the order of morphemes—sub-word units such as prefixes and suffixes—and how they may be combined to form words.
While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for that language.
For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality morpheme "-s", only found bound to noun phrases.
Speakers of English, a fusional language, recognize these relations from their innate knowledge of English's rules of word formation.
They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher.
By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free" morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning.
(Most words in modern Standard Chinese ["Mandarin"], however, are compounds and most roots are bound.)
These are understood as grammars that represent the morphology of the language.
The rules understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using, and how those smaller units interact in speech.
In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Phonological and orthographic modifications between a base word and its origin may be partial to literacy skills.
Studies have indicated that the presence of modification in phonology and orthography makes morphologically complex words harder to understand and that the absence of modification between a base word and its origin makes morphologically complex words easier to understand.
Morphologically complex words are easier to comprehend when they include a base word.
Polysynthetic languages, such as Chukchi, have words composed of many morphemes.
The Chukchi word "təmeyŋəlevtpəγtərkən", for example, meaning "I have a fierce headache", is composed of eight morphemes t-ə-meyŋ-ə-levt-pəγt-ə-rkən that may be glossed.
The morphology of such languages allows for each consonant and vowel to be understood as morphemes, while the grammar of the language indicates the usage and understanding of each morpheme.
The discipline that deals specifically with the sound changes occurring within morphemes is morphophonology.
Semantics and pragmatics
Main articles: Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics and pragmatics are branches of linguistics concerned with meaning.
These subfields have traditionally been divided by the role of linguistic and social context in the determination of meaning.
Semantics in this conception is concerned with core meanings and pragmatics concerned with meaning in context.
Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.
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 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.
In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.
Phonetics and phonology
Main articles: 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 acoustics, production, and perception.
Phonology is concerned with the linguistic abstractions and categorizations of sounds.
Language varieties
Further information: Variety (linguistics)
Languages exist on a wide continuum of conventionalization with blurry divisions between concepts such as dialects and languages.
Languages can undergo internal changes which lead to the development of subvarieties such as linguistic registers, accents, and dialects.
Similarly, languages can undergo changes caused by contact with speakers of other languages, and new language varieties may be born from these contact situations through the process of language genesis.
Contact varieties
Further information: Creolistics
Contact varieties such as pidgins and creoles are language varieties that often arise in situations of sustained contact between communities that speak different languages.
Pidgins are language varieties with limited conventionalization where ideas are conveyed through simplified grammars that may grow more complex as linguistic contact continues.
Creole languages are language varieties similar to pidgins but with greater conventionalization and stability.
As children grow up in contact situations, they may learn a local pidgin as their native language.
Through this process of acquisition and transmission, new grammatical features and lexical items are created and introduced to fill gaps in the pidgin eventually developing into a complete language.
Not all language contact situations result in the development of a pidgin or creole, and researchers have studied the features of contact situations that make contact varieties more likely to develop.
Often these varieties arise in situations of colonization and enslavement, where power imbalances prevent the contact groups from learning the other's language but sustained contact is nevertheless maintained.
The subjugated language in the power relationship is the substrate language, while the dominant language serves as the superstrate.
Often the words and lexicon of a contact variety come from the superstrate, making it the lexifier, while grammatical structures come from the substrate, but this is not always the case.
Dialect
A dialect is a variety of language that is characteristic of a particular group among the language's 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.
Other times, dialects remain marginalized, particularly when they are associated with marginalized social groups.
Differentiation amongst dialects (and subsequently, languages) 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.
Standard language
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, especially about deconstruction, have been seen to be closely associated with the relativist movement in linguistics, for which he was heavily criticized in the media at the time of his death.
Structures
Approaches
See also: Theory of language
Humanistic
The fundamental principle of humanistic linguistics 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 organisation 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
Other linguistics frameworks take as their starting point the notion that language is a biological phenomenon in humans.
Generative Grammar is the study of an innate linguistic structure.
In contrast to structural linguistics, Generative Grammar rejects the notion that meaning or social interaction affects language.
Instead, all human languages are based on a crystallised structure which may have been caused by a mutation exclusively in humans.
The study of linguistics is considered as the study of this hypothesised structure.
Cognitive Linguistics, in contrast, rejects the notion of innate grammar, and studies how the human brain creates linguistic constructions from event schemas, and the impact of cognitive constraints and biases on human language.
Similarly to neuro-linguistic programming, language is approached via the senses.
Cognitive linguists study the embodiment of knowledge by seeking expressions which relate to modal schemas.
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
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 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 (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.
Anthropology
The objective of describing languages is often to 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 endeavour to curate endangered languages.
However, linguistic inquiry now 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.
Credits to the contents of this page go to the authors of the corresponding Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics.