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[1] study of language.[2]Thereare three aspects to this study: language form, languagemeaning, and language in context.[3] The earliest activi-ties in the description of language have been attributedto Pāṇini (fl. 4th century BCE),[4] with his analysis ofSanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.[5]

Linguistics analyzes human language as a system forrelating sounds (or signs in signed languages) andmeaning.[6] Phonetics studies acoustic and articulatoryproperties of the production and perception of speechsounds and non-speech sounds. The study of languagemeaning, on the other hand, deals with how languagesencode relations between entities, properties, and otheraspects of the world to convey, process, and assign mean-ing, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. Whilethe study of semantics typically concerns itself with truthconditions, pragmatics deals with how context influencesmeanings.[7]

Grammar is a system of rules which govern the formof the utterances in a given language. It encompassesboth sound[8] and meaning, and includes phonology (howsounds and gestures function together), morphology (theformation and composition of words), and syntax (theformation and composition of phrases and sentences fromwords).[9]

In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure distin-guished between the notions of langue and parole in hisformulation of structural linguistics. According to him,parole is the specific utterance of speech, whereas languerefers to an abstract phenomenon that theoretically de-fines the principles and system of rules that govern alanguage.[10] This distinction resembles the one made byNoam Chomsky between competence and performance,where competence is individual’s ideal knowledge of alanguage, while performance is the specific way in whichit is used.[11]

The formal study of language has also led to thegrowth of fields like psycholinguistics, which exploresthe representation and function of language in the mind;neurolinguistics, which studies language processing in thebrain; and language acquisition, which investigates howchildren and adults acquire a particular language.Linguistics also includes nonformal approaches to the

study of other aspects of human language, such as so-cial, cultural, historical and political factors.[12] The studyof cultural discourses and dialects is the domain ofsociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between lin-guistic variation and social structures, as well as thatof discourse analysis, which examines the structure oftexts and conversations.[13] Research on language throughhistorical and evolutionary linguistics focuses on how lan-guages change, and on the origin and growth of languages,particularly over an extended period of time.Corpus linguistics takes naturally occurring texts or films(in signed languages) as its primary object of analysis,and studies the variation of grammatical and other fea-tures based on such corpora. Stylistics involves the studyof patterns of style: within written, signed, or spokendiscourse.[14] Language documentation combines anthro-pological inquiry with linguistic inquiry to describe lan-guages and their grammars. Lexicography covers thestudy and construction of dictionaries. Computationallinguistics applies computer technology to address ques-tions in theoretical linguistics, as well as to create appli-cations for use in parsing, data retrieval, machine transla-tion, and other areas. People can apply actual knowledgeof a language in translation and interpreting, as well as inlanguage education - the teaching of a second or foreignlanguage. Policy makers work with governments to im-plement new plans in education and teaching which arebased on linguistic research.Areas of study related to linguistics include semiotics (thestudy of signs and symbols both within language and with-out), literary criticism, translation, and speech-languagepathology.

1 Nomenclature

Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attestedin 1716,[15] was commonly used to refer to the scienceof language, which was then predominantly historical infocus.[16][17] Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence onthe importance of synchronic analysis, however, this fo-cus has shifted[18] and the term “philology” is now gener-ally used for the “study of a language’s grammar, history,and literary tradition”, especially in the United States[19]

(where philology has never been very popularly consid-ered as the “science of language”).[20]

Although the term “linguist” in the sense of “a student oflanguage” dates from 1641,[21] the term “linguistics” is

1

2 2 VARIATION AND UNIVERSALITY

first attested in 1847.[21] It is now the common academicterm in English for the scientific study of language.Today, the term linguist applies to someone who studieslanguage or is a researcher within the field, or to some-one who uses the tools of the discipline to describe andanalyze specific languages.[22]

2 Variation and Universality

While some theories on linguistics focus on the differ-ent varieties that language produces, among different sec-tions of society, others focus on the universal propertiesthat are common to all human languages. The theory ofvariation therefore would elaborate on the different us-ages of popular languages like French and English acrossthe globe, as well as its smaller dialects and regional per-mutations within their national boundaries. The theoryof variation looks at the cultural stages that a particularlanguage undergoes, and these include the following.

2.1 Lexicon

The lexicon is a catalogue of words and terms that arestored in a speaker’s mind. The lexicon consists of wordsand bound morphemes, which are words that can't standalone, like affixes. In some analyses, compound wordsand certain classes of idiomatic expressions and other col-locations are also considered to be part of the lexicon.Dictionaries represent attempts at listing, in alphabeti-cal order, the lexicon of a given language; usually, how-ever, bound morphemes are not included. Lexicography,closely linked with the domain of semantics, is the sci-ence of mapping the words into an encyclopedia or adictionary. The creation and addition of new words (intothe lexicon) are called neologisms.It is often believed that a speaker’s capacity for languagelies in the quantity of words stored in the lexicon. How-ever, this is often considered a myth by linguists. Thecapacity for the use of language is considered by manylinguists to lie primarily in the domain of grammar, andto be linked with competence, rather than with the growthof vocabulary. Even a very small lexicon is theoreticallycapable of producing an infinite number of sentences.

2.2 Discourse

A discourse is a way of speaking that emerges within acertain social setting and is based on a certain subjectmatter. A particular discourse becomes a language va-riety when it is used in this way for a particular purpose,and is referred to as a register.[23] There may be cer-tain lexical additions (new words) that are brought intoplay because of the expertise of the community of peoplewithin a certain domain of specialisation. Registers and

discourses therefore differentiate themselves through theuse of vocabulary, and at times through the use of styletoo. People in the medical fraternity, for example, mayuse some medical terminology in their communicationthat is specialised to the field of medicine. This is of-ten referred to as being part of the “medical discourse”,and so on.

2.3 Dialect

A dialect is a variety of language that is characteristicof a particular group among the language speakers.[24]

The group of people who are the speakers of a dialectare usually bound to each other by social identity. This iswhat differentiates a dialect from a register or a discourse,where in the latter case, cultural identity does not alwaysplay a role. Dialects are speech varieties that have theirown grammatical and phonological rules, linguistic fea-tures, and stylistic aspects, but have not been given an of-ficial status as a language. Dialects often move on to gainthe status of a language due to political and social reasons.Differentiation amongst dialects (and subsequently, lan-guages too) is based upon the use of grammatical rules,syntactic rules, and stylistic features, though not alwayson lexical use or vocabulary. The popular saying that a"language is a dialect with an army and navy" is attributedas a definition formulated by Max Weinreich.Universal grammar takes into account general formalstructures and features that are common to all dialectsand languages, and the template of which pre-exists inthe mind of an infant child. This idea is based on the the-ory of generative grammar and the formal school of lin-guistics, whose proponents include Noam Chomsky andthose who follow his theory and work.

“We may as individuals be rather fond ofour own dialect. This should not make us think,though, that it is actually any better than anyother dialect. Dialects are not good or bad, niceor nasty, right or wrong – they are just differ-ent from one another, and it is the mark of acivilised society that it tolerates different di-alects just as it tolerates different races, reli-gions and sexes.” [25]

2.4 Structures

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form.Any particular pairing of meaning and form is aSaussurean sign. For instance, the meaning “cat” is repre-sented worldwide with a wide variety of different soundpatterns (in oral languages), movements of the hands andface (in sign languages), and written symbols (in writtenlanguages).Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand therules regarding language use that native speakers know

2.5 Relativity 3

(not always consciously). All linguistic structures can bebroken down into component parts that are combined ac-cording to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels ofanalysis. For instance, consider the structure of the word“tenth” on two different levels of analysis. On the level ofinternal word structure (known as morphology), the word“tenth” is made up of one linguistic form indicating anumber and another form indicating ordinality. The rulegoverning the combination of these forms ensures that theordinality marker “th” follows the number “ten.” On thelevel of sound structure (known as phonology), structuralanalysis shows that the “n” sound in “tenth” is made dif-ferently from the “n” sound in “ten” spoken alone. Al-though most speakers of English are consciously aware ofthe rules governing internal structure of the word piecesof “tenth”, they are less often aware of the rule governingits sound structure. Linguists focused on structure findand analyze rules such as these, which govern how nativespeakers use language.Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned with particularaspects of linguistic structure. The theory that elucidateson these, as propounded by Noam Chomsky, is knownas generative theory or universal grammar. These sub-fields range from those focused primarily on form to thosefocused primarily on meaning. They also run the gamutof 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 lan-guage:

• Phonetics, the study of the physical properties ofspeech sound production and perception

• Phonology, the study of sounds as abstract ele-ments in the speaker’s mind that distinguish meaning(phonemes)

• Morphology, the study of morphemes, or the inter-nal structures of words and how they can be modi-fied

• Syntax, the study of how words combine to formgrammatical phrases and sentences

• Semantics, the study of the meaning of words(lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations(phraseology), and how these combine to form themeanings of sentences

• Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used incommunicative acts, and the role played by contextand non-linguistic knowledge in the transmission ofmeaning

• Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use intexts (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, anal-ogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and com-munication.

2.5 Relativity

As constructed popularly through the "Sapir-Whorf Hy-pothesis", relativists believe that the structure of a par-ticular language is capable of influencing the cognitivepatterns through which a person shapes his or her worldview. Universalists believe that there are commonali-ties between human perception as there is in the humancapacity for language, while relativists believe that thisvaries from language to language and person to person.While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an elaboration ofthis idea expressed through the writings of American lin-guists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, it wasSapir’s student Harry Hoijer who termed it thus. The 20thcentury German linguist Leo Weisgerber also wrote ex-tensively about the theory of relativity. Relativists arguefor the case of differentiation at the level of cognitionand in semantic domains. The emergence of cognitivelinguistics in the 1980s also revived an interest in lin-guistic relativity. Thinkers like George Lakoff have ar-gued that language reflects different cultural metaphors,while the French philosopher of language Jacques Der-rida's writings have been seen to be closely associatedwith the relativist movement in linguistics, especiallythrough deconstruction[26] and was even heavily criticisedin the media at the time of his death for his theory ofrelativism.[27]

2.6 Style

Stylistics is the study and interpretation of texts for as-pects of their linguistic and tonal style. Stylistic analysisentails the analysis of description of particular dialectsand registers used by speech communities. Stylistic fea-tures include rhetoric,[28] diction, stress, satire, irony, di-alogue, and other forms of phonetic variations. Stylisticanalysis can also include the study of language in canon-ical works of literature, popular fiction, news, advertise-ments, and other forms of communication in popular cul-ture as well. It is usually seen as a variation in communi-cation that changes from speaker to speaker and commu-nity to community. In short, Stylistics is the interpretationof text.

3 Approach

4 3 APPROACH

3.1 Generative vs. functional theories oflanguage

One major debate in linguistics concerns how languageshould be defined and understood. Some linguists use theterm “language” primarily to refer to a hypothesized, in-nate module in the human brain that allows people to un-dertake linguistic behavior, which is part of the formalistapproach. This "universal grammar" is considered toguide children when they learn languages and to con-strain what sentences are considered grammatical in anylanguage. Proponents of this view, which is predomi-nant in those schools of linguistics that are based on thegenerative theory of Noam Chomsky, do not necessarilyconsider that language evolved for communication in par-ticular. They consider instead that it has more to do withthe process of structuring human thought (see also formalgrammar).Another group of linguists, by contrast, use the term “lan-guage” to refer to a communication system that developedto support cooperative activity and extend cooperativenetworks. Such theories of grammar, called “functional”,view language as a tool that emerged and is adapted to thecommunicative needs of its users, and the role of culturalevolutionary processes are often emphasized over that ofbiological evolution.[29]

3.2 Methodology

Linguistics is primarily descriptive. Linguists describeand explain features of language without making subjec-tive judgments on whether a particular feature or usageis “good” or “bad”. This is analogous to practice in othersciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom with-out making subjective judgments on whether a particularspecies is “better” or “worse” than another.Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promoteparticular linguistic usages over others, often favoring aparticular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aimof establishing a linguistic standard, which can aid com-munication over large geographical areas. It may also,however, be an attempt by speakers of one language ordialect to exert influence over speakers of other languagesor dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme ver-sion of prescriptivism can be found among censors, whoattempt to eradicate words and structures that they con-sider to be destructive to society. Prescription, however,is practiced in the teaching of language, where certainfundamental grammatical rules and lexical terms need tobe introduced to a second-language speaker who is at-tempting to acquire the language.

3.3 Analysis

Before the 20th century, linguists analyzed language ona diachronic plane, which was historical in focus. This

meant that they would compare linguistic features andtry to analyze language from the point of view of howit had changed between then and later. However, withSaussurean linguistics in the 20th century, the focusshifted to a more synchronic approach, where the studywas more geared towards analysis and comparison be-tween different language variations, which existed at thesame given point of time.At another level, the syntagmatic plane of linguistic anal-ysis entails the comparison between the way words aresequenced, within the syntax of a sentence. For example,the article “the” is followed by a noun, because of the syn-tagmatic relation between the words. The paradigmaticplane on the other hand, focuses on an analysis that isbased on the paradigms or concepts that are embedded ina given text. In this case, words of the same type or classmay be replaced in the text with each other to achieve thesame conceptual understanding.

3.4 Anthropology

The objective of describing languages is to often un-cover cultural knowledge about communities. The useof anthropological methods of investigation on linguis-tic sources leads to the discovery of certain cultural traitsamong a speech community through its linguistic fea-tures. It is also widely used as a tool in language doc-umentation, with an endeavor to curate endangered lan-guages. However, now, linguistic inquiry uses the anthro-pological method to understand cognitive, historical, so-ciolinguistic and historical processes that languages un-dergo as they change and evolve, as well as general an-thropological inquiry uses the linguistic method to exca-vate into culture. In all aspects, anthropological inquiryusually uncovers the different variations and relativitiesthat underlie the usage of language.

3.5 Sources

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumptionthat spoken data and signed data is more fundamental thanwritten data. This is because:

• Speech appears to be universal to all human beingscapable of producing and perceiving it, while therehave been many cultures and speech communitiesthat lack written communication;

• Features appear in speech which aren't alwaysrecorded in writing, including phonological rules,sound changes, and speech errors;

• All natural writing systems reflect a spoken language(or potentially a signed one) they are being used towrite, with even pictographic scripts like Dongbawriting Naxi homophones with the same pictogram,

4.2 Comparative philology 5

and text in writing systems used for two languageschanging to fit the spoken language being recorded;

• Speech evolved before human beings invented writ-ing;

• People learnt to speak and process spoken languagemore easily and earlier than they did with writing.

Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written lan-guage can be worthwhile and valuable. For research thatrelies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics,written language is often much more convenient for pro-cessing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora ofspoken language are difficult to create and hard to find,and are typically transcribed and written. In addition, lin-guists have turned to text-based discourse occurring invarious formats of computer-mediated communication asa viable site for linguistic inquiry.The study of writing systems themselves, graphemics, is,in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.

4 History of linguistic thought

Main article: History of linguistics

4.1 Early grammarians

Main articles: Philology and History of English gram-marsThe formal study of language began in India with Pāṇini,

Ancient Tamil inscription at Thanjavur

the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959rules of Sanskrit morphology. Pāṇini’s systematic clas-sification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants andvowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, wasthe first known instance of its kind. In the Middle EastSibawayh ( سیبویه) made a detailed description of Ara-bic in 760 AD in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw النحو) في , الكتاب The Book on Grammar), the

first known author to distinguish between sounds andphonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system). West-ern interest in the study of languages began as early asin the East,[30] but the grammarians of the classical lan-guages did not use the same methods or reach the sameconclusions as their contemporaries in the Indic world.Early interest in language in the West was a part of philos-ophy, not of grammatical description. The first insightsinto semantic theory were made by Plato in his Cratylusdialogue, where he argues that words denote concepts thatare eternal and exist in the world of ideas. This work is thefirst to use the word etymology to describe the history ofa word’s meaning. Around 280 BC, one of Alexander theGreat's successors founded a university (see Musaeum)in Alexandria, where a school of philologists studied theancient texts in and taught Greek to speakers of other lan-guages. While this school was the first to use the word"grammar" in its modern sense, Plato had used the wordin its original meaning as "téchnē grammatikḗ" (ΤέχνηΓραμματική), the “art of writing”, which is also the titleof one of the most important works of the Alexandrineschool by Dionysius Thrax.[31] Throughout the MiddleAges, the study of language was subsumed under the topicof philology, the study of ancient languages and texts,practiced by such educators as Roger Ascham, WolfgangRatke, and John Amos Comenius.[32]

4.2 Comparative philology

In the 18th century, the first use of the comparativemethod by William Jones sparked the rise of comparativelinguistics.[33] Bloomfield attributes “the first great scien-tific linguistic work of the world” to Jacob Grimm, whowrote Deutsche Grammatik.[34] It was soon followed byother authors writing similar comparative studies on otherlanguage groups of Europe. The scientific study of lan-guage was broadened from Indo-European to language ingeneral by Wilhelm von Humboldt, of whom Bloomfieldasserts:[34]

This study received its foundation at thehands of the Prussian statesman and scholarWilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), espe-cially in the first volume of his work on Kavi,the literary language of Java, entitled Über dieVerschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbauesund ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelungdes Menschengeschlechts (On the Variety of theStructure of Human Language and its Influenceupon the Mental Development of the HumanRace).

4.3 Structuralism

Main article: Structuralism (linguistics)

6 4 HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC THOUGHT

Early in the 20th century, Saussure introduced the ideaof language as a static system of interconnected units,defined through the oppositions between them. By in-troducing a distinction between diachronic to synchronicanalyses of language, he laid the foundation of the mod-ern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introducedseveral basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that arestill foundational in many contemporary linguistic the-ories, such as the distinctions between syntagm andparadigm, and the langue- parole distinction, distinguish-ing language as an abstract system (langue) from languageas a concrete manifestation of this system (parole).[35]

Substantial additional contributions following Saussure’sdefinition of a structural approach to language camefrom The Prague school, Leonard Bloomfield, Charles F.Hockett, Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste and RomanJakobson.[36][37]

4.4 Generativism

Main article: Generative linguistics

During the last half of the 20th century, following thework of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated bythe generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky inpart as a way to explain how human beings acquire lan-guage and the biological constraints on this acquisition,in practice it has largely been concerned with giving for-mal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages.Generative theory is modularist and formalist in charac-ter. Chomsky built on earlier work of Zellig Harris toformulate the generative theory of language. Accordingto this theory the most basic form of language is a setof syntactic rules universal for all humans and underlyingthe grammars of all human languages. This set of rules iscalled Universal Grammar, and for Chomsky describingit is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics.For this reason the grammars of individual languages areof importance to linguistics only in so far as they allow usto discern the universal underlying rules from which theobservable linguistic variability is generated.In the classic formalisation of generative grammars firstproposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s,[38][39] a gram-mar G consists of the following components:

• A finite setN of nonterminal symbols, none of whichappear in strings formed from G.

• A finite set Σ of terminal symbols that is disjointfrom N.

• A finite set P of production rules, that map from onestring of symbols to another.

A formal description of language attempts to replicate aspeaker’s knowledge of the rules of their language, andthe aim is to produce a set of rules that is minimally suf-ficient to successfully model valid linguistic forms.

4.5 Functionalism

Main article: Functional theories of grammar

Functional theories of language propose that since lan-guage is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assumethat its structures are best analyzed and understood withreference to the functions they carry out. Functional the-ories of grammar differ from formal theories of gram-mar, in that the latter seek to define the different elementsof language and describe the way they relate to each otheras systems of formal rules or operations, whereas the for-mer defines the functions performed by language and thenrelates these functions to the linguistic elements that carrythem out. This means that functional theories of gram-mar tend to pay attention to the way language is actuallyused, and not just to the formal relations between linguis-tic elements.[40]

Functional theories describe language in term of the func-tions existing at all levels of language.

• Phonological function: the function of the phonemeis to distinguish between different lexical material.

• Semantic function: (Agent, Patient, Recipient, etc.),describing the role of participants in states of affairsor actions expressed.

• Syntactic functions: (e.g. subject and Object), defin-ing different perspectives in the presentation of alinguistic expression

• Pragmatic functions: (Theme and Rheme, Topicand Focus, Predicate), defining the informationalstatus of constituents, determined by the pragmaticcontext of the verbal interaction. Functional de-scriptions of grammar strive to explain how lin-guistic functions are performed in communicationthrough the use of linguistic forms.

4.6 Cognitivism

Main article: Cognitive linguistics

In the 1950s, a new school of thought known ascognitivism emerged through the field of psychology.Cognitivists lay emphasis on knowledge and informa-tion, as opposed to behaviorism, for instance. Cogni-tivism emerged in linguistics as a reaction to generativisttheory in the 1970s and 1980s. Led by theorists likeRonald Langacker and George Lakoff, cognitive linguistspropose that language is an emergent property of basic,general-purpose cognitive processes. In contrast to thegenerativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics isnon-modularist and functionalist in character. Importantdevelopments in cognitive linguistics include cognitivegrammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor,

5.3 Developmental linguistics 7

all of which are based on the idea that form–functioncorrespondences based on representations derived fromembodied experience constitute the basic units of lan-guage.Cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms ofconcepts (sometimes universal, sometimes specific toa particular tongue) that underlie its form. It is thusclosely associated with semantics but is distinct frompsycholinguistics, which draws upon empirical findingsfrom cognitive psychology in order to explain the men-tal processes that underlie the acquisition, storage, pro-duction and understanding of speech and writing. Unlikegenerative theory, cognitive linguistics denies that thereis an autonomous linguistic faculty in the mind; it under-stands grammar in terms of conceptualization; and claimsthat knowledge of language arises out of language use.[41]

Because of its conviction that knowledge of language islearned through use, cognitive linguistics is sometimesconsidered to be a functional approach, but it differs fromother functional approaches in that it is primarily con-cerned with how the mind creates meaning through lan-guage, and not with the use of language as a tool of com-munication.

5 Areas of research

5.1 Historical linguistics

Historical linguists study the history of specific languagesas well as general characteristics of language change.The study of language change is also referred to as “di-achronic linguistics” (the study of how one particular lan-guage has changed over time), which can be distinguishedfrom “synchronic linguistics” (the comparative study ofmore than one language at a given moment in time with-out regard to previous stages). Historical linguistics wasamong the first sub-disciplines to emerge in linguistics,and was the most widely practiced form of linguistics inthe late 19th century. However, there was a shift to thesynchronic approach in the early twentieth century withSaussure, and became more predominant in western lin-guistics with the work of Noam Chomsky.

5.2 Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of how language is shapedby social factors. This sub-discipline focuses on the syn-chronic approach of linguistics, and looks at how a lan-guage in general, or a set of languages, display variationand varieties at a given point in time. The study of lan-guage variation and the different varieties of languagethrough dialects, registers, and ideolects can be tackledthrough a study of style, as well as through analysis ofdiscourse. Sociolinguists research on both style and dis-course in language, and also study the theoretical factors

that are at play between language and society.

5.3 Developmental linguistics

Developmental linguistics is the study of the developmentof linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acqui-sition of language in childhood. Some of the questionsthat developmental linguistics looks into is how childrenacquire language, how adults can acquire a second lan-guage, and what the process of language acquisition is.

5.4 Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics is the study of the structures in the hu-man brain that underlie grammar and communication.Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety ofbackgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimentaltechniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspec-tives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by mod-els in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and isfocused on investigating how the brain can implementthe processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics pro-pose are necessary in producing and comprehending lan-guage. Neurolinguists study the physiological mecha-nisms by which the brain processes information relatedto language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistictheories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysi-ology, and computer modeling.

6 Applied linguistics

Main article: Applied linguistics

Linguists are largely concerned with finding anddescribing the generalities and varieties both withinparticular languages and among all languages. Appliedlinguistics takes the results of those findings and “applies”them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly ap-plied to areas such as language education, lexicography,translation, language planning, which involves govern-mental policy implementation related to language use,and natural language processing. “Applied linguistics”has been argued to be something of a misnomer.[42]

Applied linguists actually focus on making sense of andengineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems,and not literally “applying” existing technical knowledgefrom linguistics. Moreover, they commonly applytechnical knowledge from multiple sources, such associology (e.g., conversation analysis) and anthropology.(Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)Today, computers are widely used in many areas of ap-plied linguistics. Speech synthesis and speech recognitionuse phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voiceinterfaces to computers. Applications of computational

8 7 INTER-DISCIPLINARY FIELDS

linguistics in machine translation, computer-assistedtranslation, and natural language processing are areas ofapplied linguistics that have come to the forefront. Theirinfluence has had an effect on theories of syntax and se-mantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories oncomputers constraints.Linguistic analysis is a sub-discipline of applied linguis-tics used by many governments to verify the claimednationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold thenecessary documentation to prove their claim.[43] Thisoften takes the form of an interview by personnel inan immigration department. Depending on the country,this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker’snative language through an interpreter or in an interna-tional lingua franca like English.[43] Australia uses theformer method, while Germany employs the latter; theNetherlands uses either method depending on the lan-guages involved.[43] Tape recordings of the interview thenundergo language analysis, which can be done either byprivate contractors or within a department of the govern-ment. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylumseeker are used by analysts to make a determination aboutthe speaker’s nationality. The reported findings of the lin-guistic analysis can play a critical role in the government’sdecision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.[43]

7 Inter-disciplinary fields

Within the broad discipline of linguistics, various emerg-ing sub-disciplines focus on a more detailed descriptionand analysis of language, and are often organized on thebasis of the school of thought and theoretical approachthat they pre-suppose, or the external factors that influ-ence them.

7.1 Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or sig-nification and communication, signs, and symbols, bothindividually and grouped into sign systems, including thestudy of how meaning is constructed and understood.Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to linguisticcommunication when studying the use of signs but extendthe meaning of “sign” to cover all kinds of cultural sym-bols. Nonetheless, semiotic disciplines closely related tolinguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text lin-guistics, and philosophy of language. Semiotics, withinthe linguistics paradigm, is the study of the relationshipbetween language and culture. Historically, Edward Sapirand Ferdinand De Saussure's structuralist theories influ-enced the study of signs extensively until the late partof the 20th century, but later, post-modern and post-structural thought, through language philosophers includ-ing 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 early21st century.[44] These theories emphasise the role of lan-guage variation, and the idea of subjective usage, depend-ing on external elements like social and cultural factors,rather than merely on the interplay of formal elements.

7.2 Language documentation

Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics, lin-guists have been concerned with describing and analysingpreviously undocumented languages. Starting with FranzBoas in the early 1900s, this became the main focus ofAmerican linguistics until the rise of formal structurallinguistics in the mid-20th century. This focus on lan-guage documentation was partly motivated by a concernto document the rapidly disappearing languages of in-digenous peoples. The ethnographic dimension of theBoasian approach to language description played a rolein 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 documenta-tion has also gained prominence outside North Amer-ica, with the documentation of rapidly dying indigenouslanguages becoming a primary focus in many universityprograms in linguistics. Language description is a work-intensive endeavour, usually requiring years of field workin the language concerned, so as to equip the linguist towrite a sufficiently accurate reference grammar. Further,the task of documentation requires the linguist to collecta substantial corpus in the language in question, consist-ing of texts and recordings, both sound and video, whichcan be stored in an accessible format within open repos-itories, and used for further research.[45]

7.3 Translation

The sub-field of translation includes the translation ofwritten and spoken texts across mediums, from digi-tal to print and spoken. To translate literally means totransmute the meaning from one language into another.Translators are often employed by organisations, suchas travel agencies as well as governmental embassies tofacilitate communication between two speakers who donot know each other’s language. Translators are alsoemployed to work within computational linguistics se-tups like Google Translate for example, which is anautomated, programmed facility to translate words andphrases between any two or more given languages. Trans-lation is also conducted by publishing houses, which con-vert works of writing from one language to another inorder to reach varied audiences. Academic Translators,specialize and semi specialize on various other disciplinessuch as; Technology, Science, Law, Economics etc.

9

7.4 Biolinguistics

Biolinguistics is the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared tohuman language. Researchers in the field of biolinguis-tics have also over the years questioned the possibility andextent of language in animals.

7.5 Clinical linguistics

Clinical linguistics is the application of linguistic theoryto the fields of Speech-Language Pathology. Speech lan-guage pathologists work on corrective measures to curecommunication disorders and swallowing disorders.

7.6 Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is the study of linguistic issuesin a way that is 'computationally responsible', i.e., tak-ing careful note of computational consideration of algo-rithmic specification and computational complexity, sothat the linguistic theories devised can be shown to ex-hibit certain desirable computational properties and theirimplementations. Computational linguists also work oncomputer language and software development.

7.7 Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the interdisciplinary study ofthe emergence of the language faculty through humanevolution, and also the application of evolutionary the-ory to the study of cultural evolution among different lan-guages. It is also a study of the dispersal of various lan-guages across the globe, through movements among an-cient communities.[46]

7.8 Forensic linguistics

Forensic linguistics is the application of linguistic analy-sis to forensics. Forensic analysis investigates on the style,language, lexical use, and other linguistic and grammati-cal features used in the legal context to provide evidencein courts of law. Forensic linguists have also contributedexpertise in criminal cases.

8 See also

Main articles: Outline of linguistics and Index oflinguistics articles

• 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

• Anthroponymy

• Articulatory phonology

• Articulatory synthesis

• Asemic writing

• Axiom of categoricity

• Biolinguistics

• Biosemiotics

• Concept Mining

• Corpus linguistics

• Critical discourse analysis

• Cryptanalysis

• Decipherment

• Developmental linguistics

• Embodied cognition

• Endangered languages

• Global language system

• Glottometrics

• Grammarian (Greco-Roman world)

• Integrational linguistics

• Integrationism

• Intercultural competence

• International Linguistic Olympiad

• Language acquisition

• Language attrition

• Language engineering

• Language geography

• Linguistic typology

• Machine translation

• Metacommunicative competence

10 9 REFERENCES

• Microlinguistics

• Natural language processing

• Onomastics

• Orthography

• Philology

• Reading

• Rhythm in linguistics

• Second language acquisition

• Sign languages

• Speaker recognition

• Speech processing

• Speech recognition

• Speech synthesis

• Speech-Language Pathology

• Stratificational linguistics

• Text linguistics

• Writing systems

9 References[1] Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books. ISBN

9780140135312.

[2] Halliday, Michael A.K.; Jonathan Webster (2006). OnLanguage and Linguistics. Continuum International Pub-lishing Group. p. vii. ISBN 0-8264-8824-2.

[3] Martinet, André (1960). Elements of General Linguistics.Tr. Elisabeth Palmer Rubbert (Studies in General Lin-guistics, vol. i.). London: Faber. p. 15.

[4] Sanskrit Literature The Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 2(1909), p. 263.

[5] S.C. Vasu (Tr.) (1996). The Ashtadhyayi of Panini (2Vols.). Vedic Books. ISBN 9788120804098.

[6] Jakobson, Roman (1937). Six Lectures on Sound andMeaning. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN0262600102.

[7] Chierchia, Gennaro and Sally McConnell-Ginet (2000).Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Seman-tics. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ISBN9780262531641.

[8] All references in this article to the study of sound shouldbe taken to include the manual and non-manual signs usedin sign languages.

[9] Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers, Ann K. Farmer,Robert M. Harnish (2010). Linguistics (6th ed.). The MITPress. ISBN 0-262-51370-6. Retrieved 25 July 2012.

[10] de Saussure, F. (1986). Course in general linguistics (3rded.). (R. Harris, Trans.). Chicago: Open Court Publish-ing Company. (Original work published 1972). p. 9-10,15.

[11] Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syn-tax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[12] Journal of Language and Politics

[13] Raymond Mougeon and Terry Nadasdi (1998).Sociolinguistic Discontinuity in Minority LanguageCommunities pp. 40-55. Linguistic Society of America.

[14] “Stylistics” by Joybrato Mukherjee. Chapter 49. Encyclo-pedia of Linguistics.

[15] Online Etymological Dictionary Definition of Philology

[16] JSTOR preview: Introduction: Philology in a ManuscriptCulture by Stephen G. Nichols.

[17] McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding LanguageChange. Cambridge University Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-521-44665-1.

[18] McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding LanguageChange. Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 0-521-44665-1.

[19] A. Morpurgo Davies Hist. Linguistics (1998) 4 I. 22.

[20] Online Etymological Dictionary of Philology

[21] Online Etymological Dictionary Definition of Linguist

[22] “Linguist”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the En-glish Language. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2000. ISBN978-0-395-82517-4.

[23] Helen Leckie-Tarry, Language and Context: a FunctionalLinguistic Theory of Register, Continuum InternationalPublishing Group, 1995, p6. ISBN 1-85567-272-3

[24] Oxford English dictionary.

[25] Trudgill, P. (1994). Dialects. Ebooks Online Routledge.Florence, KY.

[26] Jacques Derrida (Author) and Alan Bass (translator)(1978). Writing and Difference. University of ChicagoPress. ISBN 9780226143293.

[27] “Relative Thinking.” The Guardian. November 2004.

[28] IA Richards (1965). The Philosophy of Rhetoric. OxfordUniversity Press (New York).

[29] Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2013). I-language: An In-troduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science, 2nd edition.Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199660179.

[30] Bloomfield 1914, p. 307.

[31] Seuren, Pieter A. M. (1998). Western linguistics: An his-torical introduction. Wiley-blackwell. pp. 2–24. ISBN0-631-20891-7.

11

[32] Bloomfield 1914, p. 308.

[33] Bloomfield 1914, p. 310.

[34] Bloomfield 1914, p. 311.

[35] Clarke, David S. (1990). Sources of semiotic: readingswith commentary from antiquity to the present. Carbon-dale: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 143–144.

[36] Holquist 1981, pp. xvii-xviii.

[37] de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics.McGraw Hill, New York. ISBN 9780802214935.

[38] Chomsky, Noam (1956). “Three Models for the Descrip-tion of Language”. IRE Transactions on Information The-ory 2 (2): 113 123. doi:10.1109/TIT.1956.1056813.

[39] Chomsky, Noam (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague:Mouton.

[40] Nichols, Johanna (1984). “Functional Theories of Gram-mar”. Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 97–117.doi:10.1146/annurev.an.13.100184.000525. [Functionalgrammar] “analyzes grammatical structure, as do for-mal and structural grammar; but it also analyses the en-tire communicative situation: the purpose of the speechevent, its participants, its discourse context. Functional-ists maintain that the communicative situation motivates,constrains, explains, or otherwise determines grammaticalstructure, and that a structural or formal approach is notmerely limited to an artificially restricted data base, but isinadequate as a structural account. Functional grammar,then, differs from formulae and structural grammar in thatit purports not to model but to explain; and the explanationis grounded in the communicative situation.”

[41] Croft, William and D. Alan Cruse (2004). Cognitive Lin-guistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 1.

[42] Barbara Seidlhofer (2003). Controversies in Applied Lin-guistics (pp. 288). Oxford University Press. ISBN0194374440.

[43] Eades, Diana (2005). “Applied Linguistics and LanguageAnalysis in Asylum Seeker Cases” (PDF). Applied Lin-guistics 26 (4): 503–526. doi:10.1093/applin/ami021.

[44] Paul Allen Miller (1998). “The Classical Roots of Post-Structuralism: Lacan, Derrida and Foucault in the In-ternational Journal of the Classical Tradition (Volume 5,Number 2.)". Springer. JSTOR 30222818

[45] Himmelman, Nikolaus Language documentation: What isit and what is it good for? in P. Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus PHimmelmann & Ulrike Mosel. (2006) Essentials of Lan-guage documentation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & NewYork.

[46] Croft, William (October 2008). “EvolutionaryLinguistics”. Annual Review of Anthro-pology (Annual Reviews) 37: 219–234.doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.37.081407.085156.

10 Bibliography• Akmajian, Adrian; Demers, Richard; Farmer, Ann;

Harnish, Robert (2010). Linguistics: An Introduc-tion to Language and Communication. Cambridge,MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51370-6.

• Isac, Daniela; Charles Reiss (2013). I-language:An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science,2nd edition. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199660179.

• Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language In-stinct. William Morrow and Company. ISBN9780140175295.

• Chomsky, Noam (1998). On Language. The NewPress, New York. ISBN 978-1565844759.

• Derrida, Jacques (1967). Of Grammatology.The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN0801858305.

• Crystal, David (1990). Linguistics. Penguin Books.ISBN 9780140135312.

11 External links• The Linguist List, a global online linguistics com-

munity with news and information updated daily

• Glossary of linguistic terms by SIL International(last updated 2004)

• Language Log, a linguistics blog maintained byprominent (popular science) linguists

• Glottopedia, MediaWiki-based encyclopedia of lin-guistics, under construction

• Linguistic sub-fields – according to the LinguisticSociety of America

• Linguistics and language-related wiki articles onScholarpedia and Citizendium

• “Linguistics” section – A Bibliography of LiteraryTheory, Criticism and Philology, ed. J. A. GarcíaLanda (University of Zaragoza, Spain)

• An Academic Linguistics Forum (currently sometechnical problems, Feb 2013)

• Linguistics Contents for Non-English World

• Computerized comparative linguistics Calculator tocompare the relatedness (genetic proximity) for over160 languages (from Afar to Zulu)

• Linguistics at DMOZ

12 12 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

12 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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