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Linguistics

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

   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. Someone who engages in
   this study is called a linguist. Linguistics can be theoretical or
   applied.

   Theoretical (or general) linguistics studies language structure (
   grammar), and meaning ( semantics). The study of grammar encompasses
   morphology (formation and alteration of words) and syntax (the rules
   that determine the way words combine into phrases and sentences).

   Linguistics compares languages ( comparative linguistics) and explores
   their histories, in order to find universal properties of language and
   to account for its development and origins ( historical linguistics).
   Slightly separate from general linguistics are the sub-fields of
   phonology, which studies the role of 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.

   Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may
   not all be in harmonious agreement; as Russ Rymer flamboyantly puts it:


   Linguistics

      Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the
     academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians,
   philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists,
        and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of
                               grammarians. 1


   Linguistics

Divisions, specialties, and subfields

   The central concern of theoretical linguistics is to characterize the
   nature of human language ability, or competence: to explain what it is
   that an individual knows when said to know 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, with apparently
   little need for conscious instruction. Non-humans do not. Therefore,
   there is some basic innate property of humans that causes them to be
   able to use language. There is no discernable genetic process
   responsible for differences between languages: an individual will
   acquire whatever language(s) they are exposed to as a child, regardless
   of their parentage or ethnic origin.

   Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and sound (or other
   externalization). 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 texts

   The independent significance of each of these areas is not universally
   acknowledged, however, and many linguists would agree that the
   divisions overlap considerably. Nevertheless, each area has core
   concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.

   Intersecting with these specialty domains are fields arranged around
   the kind of external factors that are considered. 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 Pathology

Variation

   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.
   For example, the Latin language spoken by the Romans developed into
   Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy. Similarities between Spanish and
   Italian are in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. 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.

   Often, the possibility of common inheritance can be essentially ruled
   out. 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). However,
   there is much debate around this topic and the term is used in several
   different ways.

   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. The challenging questions regarding universal
   grammar generally require one to control this factor. Clearly,
   experience is part of the process by which individuals learn languages.
   But experience by itself is not enough, since animals raised around
   people learn extremely little human language, if any at all.

   A more interesting example is this: suppose that all human languages
   distinguish nouns from verbs (this is generally believed to be true).
   This would require a more sophisticated explanation, since nouns and
   verbs do not exist in the world, apart from languages that make use of
   them.

   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. Too little is understood about human cognition in
   general to allow a meaningful distinction to be made. As a result,
   generalizations are often stated in theoretical linguistics without a
   stand being taken on whether the generalization could have some bearing
   on other aspects of cognition.

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. The
   vocabulary and grammar of a language are organized around these
   fundamental categories.

   In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language
   has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive
   structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another
   noun phrase (as in the chimpanzee's lips) or a clause to contain a
   clause (as in I think that it's raining). 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. Prior to this, the
   most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological
   or morphological systems, which tend to be closed and admit little
   creativity.

   Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations.
   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 requires increased power, for example transformations.

   An example of a natural-language clause involving a cross-serial
   dependency is the Dutch

          Ik denk dat Jan Piet de kinderen zag helpen zwemmen
          I think that Jan Piet the children saw help swim
          'I think that Jan saw Piet help the children swim'

   The important point is that the noun phrases before the verb cluster
   (Jan, Piet, de kinderen) are identified with the verbs in the verb
   cluster (zag, helpen, zwemmen) in left-right order.

   This means that natural language formalisms must be relatively powerful
   in terms of generative capacity. The models currently used ( LFG, HPSG,
   Minimalism) are very powerful, in general too powerful to be
   computationally tractable in principle. Implementations of them are
   scaled down.

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. 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
   extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the
   forefront in recent years with increasing computing power. Their
   influence has had a great effect on theories of syntax and semantics,
   as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains
   the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous
   mathematical basis.

   Today, the term 'applied linguistics' is used mostly to refer to
   "second language acquisition." Top applied linguistics programs are
   usually the ones that have good emphasis on second language acquisition
   either from linguistic or cognitive point of view.

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.

   In universities in the United States, the non-historic perspective
   seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes,
   for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorily. The shift in
   focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became
   predominant with Noam Chomsky.

   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.
   Nonetheless, there are many professionals and amateurs who also
   prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard out for all
   to follow.

   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. The reasons for
   their intolerance of "incorrect usage" may include distrust of
   neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects (i.e.,
   basilects), or simple conflicts with pet theories. An extreme version
   of prescriptivism can be found among censors, whose personal mission is
   to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive
   to society.

   Descriptivists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists'
   notion of "incorrect usage." They might describe the usages the other
   has in mind simply as "idiosyncratic," or they may discover a
   regularity (a rule) that the usage in question follows (in contrast to
   the common prescriptive assumption that "bad" usage is unsystematic).
   Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the
   study of language using a descriptivist approach. Descriptivist
   methodology more closely resembles scientific methodology in other
   disciplines.

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. Reasons for this perspective include:
     * Speech appears to be a human universal, whereas there have been
       many cultures and speech communities that lack written
       communication;
     * 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. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to
   create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written.
   Additionally, 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 linguistics

   Early Indian Vedic texts ( Rig Veda 1:164:45; 4:58:3; 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). The sentences are composed of words that have two distinct
   forms of existence (vocal form, the word, and perceptional form, the
   meaning). These words are recognized mainly as verbs that represent
   real world acts and nouns that take on seven* cases (depending on their
   mode of participation in real world acts). (* The number, seven, here
   is not very critical; the message is that the nouns are inflected into
   appropriate cases to indicate their mode of participation in concerned
   acts).

   The Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC) is the earliest known
   linguist and is often acknowledged as the founder of linguistics. He is
   most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in
   the text Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is still in use today. Pāṇini's grammar of
   Sanskrit is highly systematised and technical. Inherent in its analytic
   approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root,
   only recognized by Western linguists some two millennia later. His
   rules fully describe Sanskrit morphology without any redundance. 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). His sophisticated logical
   rules and technique have been widely influential in ancient and modern
   linguistics.

   The South Indian linguist Tolkāppiyar (c. 3rd century BC) wrote the
   Tolkāppiyam, the grammar of Tamil, which is also still in use today.
   Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) was another important author on Indic
   linguistic theory. He theorized the act of speech as being made up of
   four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its
   verbalization and sequencing and third, delivery of speech into
   atmospheric air, all these by the speaker and last, the comprehension
   of speech by the listener, the interpreter. The work of Pāṇini, and the
   later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many
   of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor
   of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural
   linguistics.

   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. In his book he
   distinguished phonetics from phonology.

   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. Ferdinand de
   Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics. Edward
   Sapir, a leader in American structural linguistics, was one of the
   first who explored the relations between language studies and
   anthropology. His methodology had strong influence on all his
   successors. 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.

   Chomsky remains by far the most influential linguist in the world
   today. Linguists working in frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase
   Structure Grammar (HPSG) or Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) stress the
   importance of formalization and formal rigor in linguistic description,
   and may distance themselves somewhat from Chomsky's more recent work
   (the "Minimalist" program for Transformational grammar), connecting
   more closely to earlier work of Chomsky's. 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.
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