LINGUISTICS

what is linguistics

Human language, that unique characteristic of our species, has been of interest throughout history. The scientific study of human language is called linguistics. A linguist, then, is not someone who speaks many languages (although many linguists do); such individuals are polyglots. A linguist is a scientist who investigates human language in all its facets, its structure, its use, its history, its place in society.

The form and structure of the kinds of linguistic knowledge speakers possess is the concern of theoretical linguistics. This theory of grammar – the mental representation of linguistic knowledge – is what this textbook is about. But the field of linguistics is not limited to grammaticaltheory; it includes a large number of subfields, which is true of most sciences concerned with phenomena as complex as human language.

Phonetics and phonology

Speakers’ knowledge of their language also includes knowledge of the sounds and sound patterns which occur. We know what sounds are in the language and what sounds are not. Speakers of English know, unconsciously for the most part, that there are more than five vowel sounds in the language, as shown by the vowel sounds which differentiate the following words from each other: bit, beat, bet, bait, bat, boot, but, boat, bought, put, pot. We use five letters – a, e, i, o, u – to represent these different vowel sounds in our writing system. We see that there is no one-to-one mapping between alphabetic symbols and the sounds they represent.

The lexicon

Every speaker of language has a dictionary or lexicon in their head, with all the words which they know, words like cat, witch, cauldron, Macbeth, jester, vocabulary, slay, betray, love, hate. It has been estimated that the average person knows from 45,000 to 60,000 words; these must be stored in the mental lexicon

Morphology and Syntax

Morphology is the study of words and their structure. What is a word? Words are meaningful linguistic units that can be combined to form phrases and sentences. When a speaker hears a word in his language, he has an immediate association with a particular meaning.

Part of our linguistic knowledge tells us what constitutes a well-formed string of words, how to put words together to form phrases and sentences.

Theoretical Linguistics

Theoretical Linguistics (the concern of this textbook), often referred to as generative linguistics, has its basis in views first put forth by Chomsky’s 1955 The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. In this and the subsequent books and articles by Chomsky and those that embraced these views, a major aim was to characterize the nature of human linguistic knowledge or competence (represented in the mind as a mental grammar); that is, to explain or account for what speakers know which permits them to speak and comprehend speech or sign (the languages of the deaf). The production and comprehension of speech is referred to as performance, distinct from competence but dependent on it.

Descriptive linguistics

Descriptive linguistics provides analyses of the grammars of languages such as Choctaw, Arabic, Zulu. ‘Indo-European-linguistics,’ ‘Romance linguistics,’ ‘African linguistics,’ refer to the studies of particular languages and language families, from both historical and synchronic points of view.

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is concerned with a theory of language change – why and how languages develop. The comparative method, developed in the nineteenth century by such philologists as the brothers Grimm and Hermann Paul, is a method used to compare languages in the attempt to determine which languages are related and to establish families of languages and their roots.

sociolinguistics

Anthropological or ethno-linguistics and sociolinguistics focus on languages as part of culture and society, including language and culture, social class, ethnicity, and gender. The study of language variation and the different varieties of language through dialects, registers, and idiolects can be tackled through a study of style, as well as through analysis of discourse. Sociolinguists research both style and discourse in language, as well as the theoretical factors that are at play between language and society.

Dialectology

Dialectology investigates how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics are interested in language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second language acquisition. Applied linguistics also covers such areas as discourse and conversational analysis, language assessment, language pedagogy.

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is concerned with natural language computer applications, e.g. automatic parsing, machine processing and understanding, computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If viewed as a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computational linguistics has the goal of modeling human language as a cognitive system.

Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics is concerned with the biological basis of language acquisition and development and the brain/mind/language interface. It brings linguistic theory to bear on research on aphasia (language disorders following brain injury) and research involving the latest technologies in the study of brain imaging and processing (CT, PET, fMRI, MEG, ERP).