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Linguistics



 
 
Linguistics is the scientific
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 study of natural language
Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is a language that is spoken, Sign language, or writing by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages and from constructed languages....
. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
) and the study of meaning
Meaning (linguistics)

Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena such as words, phrases, and sentences, each of which has a different kind of meaning. Individual words, such as the word "bachelor", refer to some abstract concept....
 (semantics
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
). Grammar encompasses morphology
Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
 (the formation and composition of word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
s), syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 (the rules that determine how words combine into phrase
Phrase

In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a Sentence .For example the house at the end of the street is a phrase....
s and sentences
Sentence (linguistics)

In linguistics, a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, et...
) and phonology
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
 (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics
Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
 is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived
Speech perception

Speech perception refers to the processes by which humans are able to interpret and understand the sounds used in language. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology....
.






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Linguistics is the scientific
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 study of natural language
Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is a language that is spoken, Sign language, or writing by humans for general-purpose communication, as distinguished from formal languages and from constructed languages....
. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure (grammar
Grammar

Grammar is the field of linguistics that covers the conventions governing the use of any given natural language. It includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics....
) and the study of meaning
Meaning (linguistics)

Linguistic strings can be made up of phenomena such as words, phrases, and sentences, each of which has a different kind of meaning. Individual words, such as the word "bachelor", refer to some abstract concept....
 (semantics
Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
). Grammar encompasses morphology
Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
 (the formation and composition of word
Word

A word is a unit of language that represents a concept which can be expressively communication with Meaning . A word consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetic value....
s), syntax
Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
 (the rules that determine how words combine into phrase
Phrase

In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a Sentence .For example the house at the end of the street is a phrase....
s and sentences
Sentence (linguistics)

In linguistics, a sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words, bearing minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it, often preceded and followed in speech by pauses, having one of a small number of characteristic intonation patterns, and typically expressing an independent statement, question, request, command, et...
) and phonology
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
 (the study of sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics
Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
 is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived
Speech perception

Speech perception refers to the processes by which humans are able to interpret and understand the sounds used in language. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonetics and phonology in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology....
. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics include: evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origin of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces....
 which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
 which explores language change; sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
 which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychology and neurobiology factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language....
 which explores the representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics

File:Gray726-Brodman.pngFile:DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpgNeurolinguistics is the study of the Neuron mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language....
 which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language acquisition
Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults....
 which considers how children acquire their first language and how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent languages; in addition, discourse analysis
Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use....
 and pragmatics
Pragmatics

Pragmatics or intent is the study of how the arrangement of words and phrases can alter the meaning of a sentence, it deals with the structural ambiguity in a sentence....
 concern the structure of texts and conversations, and their context.

Linguistics is narrowly defined as the scientific approach to the study of language, but language can, of course, be approached from a variety of directions, and a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to it and influence its study. Semiotics
Semiotics

'Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, sign and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems....
, for example, is a related field concerned with the general study of signs and symbols both in language and outside of it. Literary theorists
Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes?in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense?considerations of intellectual history, moral philosophy, social prophecy,...
 study the use of language in artistic literature
Literature

Literature is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means "acquaintance with letters" . In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and non-fiction....
. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
, speech-language pathology, informatics
Informatics

Informatics is the science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information....
, computer science
Computer science

Computer science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems....
, philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, biology
Biology

Biology is a branch of the natural sciences concerned with the study of living organisms and their interaction with each other and their environment ....
, human anatomy
Human anatomy

Human anatomy, which, with physiology and biochemistry, is a complementary basic medical science is primarily the scientific study of the morphology of the adult human body....
, neuroscience
Neuroscience

Neuroscience is a field devoted to the scientific study of the nervous system. The Society for Neuroscience was founded in 1969, but the study of the brain started a long time ago....
, sociology
Sociology

Sociology is a branch of the social sciences that uses systematic methods of Empiricism and critical theory to develop and refine a body of knowledge about human social structure and activity, sometimes with the goal of applying such knowledge to the pursuit of social welfare....
, anthropology
Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humans and humanity in its totality. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, and the humanities. In Great Britain it was originally divided into physical anthropology and cultural anthropology, which itself was divided into archaeology, technology, ethnology and sociology ....
, and acoustics
Acoustics

Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of sound, ultrasound and infrasound . A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician....
.

Someone who engages in linguistics is called a linguist, although this term is also commonly used, outside linguistics, to refer to people who speak many languages.

Names for the discipline

Before the twentieth century, the term "philology
Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
", first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Switzerland linguistics whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century....
's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition," especially in the United States, where it was never as popular as elsewhere in the sense of "science of language".

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

Fundamental concerns and divisions

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. All humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of signed languages
Sign language

A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a speaker's thoughts....
) around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. While non-humans acquire their own communication systems, they do not acquire human language in this way (although many non-human animals can learn to respond to language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree). Therefore, linguists assume, the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk. There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of this innate potential, or its domain-specificity (the degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language), with some theorists claiming that there is a very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain, while others claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however, generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic origin.

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are known as Saussurean
Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Switzerland linguistics whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century....
 signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning:
  • Phonetics
    Phonetics

    Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
    , the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
  • Phonology
    Phonology

    Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
    , the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
  • Morphology
    Morphology (linguistics)

    Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
    , the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
  • Syntax
    Syntax

    In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing Sentence s in natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the Irish syntax"....
    , the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentence
    Sentence

    Sentence or sentencing may refer to:* Sentence , a grammatical unit of language* Sentence , a formula with no free variables* Sentence , the smallest period in a musical composition...
    s
  • Semantics
    Semantics

    Semantics is the study of meaning in communication. The word is derived from the Greek language word s??a?t???? , "significant", from s??a??? , "to signify, to indicate" and that from s??a , "sign, mark, token"....
    , the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics
    Lexical semantics

    Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistics semantics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote . Words may either be taken to denote things in the world, or concepts, depending on the particular approach to lexical semantics....
    ) and fixed word combinations (phraseology
    Phraseology

    Phraseology appeared in the domain of lexicology and is undergoing the process of segregating as a separate branch of linguistics. The reason is clear ? lexicology deals with words and their meanings, whereas phraseology studies such collocations of words , where the meaning of the whole collocation is different from the simple sum of literal...
    ), and how these combine to form the meaning
    Meaning

    Meaning may refer to:...
    s of sentences
  • Pragmatics
    Pragmatics

    Pragmatics or intent is the study of how the arrangement of words and phrases can alter the meaning of a sentence, it deals with the structural ambiguity in a sentence....
    , the study of how utterance
    Utterance

    An utterance is a complete unit of speech communication in spoken language. It is generally but not always bounded by silence.It can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways....
    s are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts
  • Discourse analysis
    Discourse analysis

    Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use....
    , the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)


Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.

Alongside these structurally-motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics, distinguished by the kinds of non-linguistic factors that they consider:
  • Applied linguistics
    Applied linguistics

    Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems....
    , the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language
    Constructed language

    A planned or constructed language?known Colloquialism or informally as a conlang?is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary have been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved natural languagely....
     fits under Applied linguistics.)
  • Biolinguistics
    Biolinguistics

    Biolinguistics is the study of the biology and evolution of language. It is a highly interdisciplinary field, including Linguistics, biologists, Neuroscience, psychologists, mathematicians, and others....
    , the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
  • Clinical linguistics
    Clinical linguistics

    Clinical Linguistics is a sub-discipline of linguistics and involves the application of Theoretical linguistics to the field of Speech-Language Pathology....
    , the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
  • Computational linguistics
    Computational linguistics

    Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
    , the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
  • Developmental linguistics
    Developmental linguistics

    Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the Language acquisition in childhood....
    , the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language
    Language acquisition

    Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults....
     in childhood.
  • Evolutionary linguistics
    Evolutionary linguistics

    Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origin of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces....
    , the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
  • Historical linguistics
    Historical linguistics

    Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
     or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
  • Language geography
    Language geography

    Language geography is the branch of human geography that studies the geographic distribution of language or its constituent elements. There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language: the "geography of languages", which deals with the distribution through history and space of languages, and "linguistic geography", whi...
    , the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
  • Linguistic typology
    Linguistic typology

    Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages....
    , the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.
  • Neurolinguistics
    Neurolinguistics

    File:Gray726-Brodman.pngFile:DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpgNeurolinguistics is the study of the Neuron mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language....
    , the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
  • Psycholinguistics
    Psycholinguistics

    Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychology and neurobiology factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language....
    , the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
  • Sociolinguistics
    Sociolinguistics

    Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
    , the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
  • Stylistics
    Stylistics (linguistics)

    Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in wiktionary:context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors, etc., or the language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a particular situation....
    , the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.


The related discipline of semiotics
Semiotics

'Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, sign and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems....
 investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.

Variation and universality

Much modern linguistic research, particularly within the paradigm
Paradigm

The word paradigm has been used in linguistics and science to describe distinct concepts.To the 1960s, the word was specific to grammar: the 1900 Merriam-Webster dictionary defines its technical use only in the context of grammar or, in rhetoric, as a term for an illustrative parable or fable....
 of generative grammar
Generative grammar

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences....
, has concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has worked on the assumption that if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.

In generativist theory
Generative grammar

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences....
, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to as universal grammar
Universal grammar

Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages....
 (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much debated topic. Typologists
Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages....
 and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language universals
Linguistic universal

A linguistic universal is a statement that is true for all natural languages. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or All spoken languages have consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to linguistic typology, and intends to reveal information about how the human brain processes language....
, or universals of language.

Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case, universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities may be due to common descent: the Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans
Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC....
 developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between languages
Language contact

Language contact occurs when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics....
 — particularly where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of structures, as well as words. Similarity may also, of course, be due to coincidence. English much and Spanish are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the other; nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate
False cognate

False cognates are pairs of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different root . That is, they appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates when in fact they are not....
).

Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign language
Sign language

A sign language is a language which, instead of acoustically conveyed sound patterns, uses visually transmitted sign patterns to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to express fluidly a speaker's thoughts....
s (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language

The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language is a sign language used by about 150 Deaf and many hearing members of the al-Sayyid Bedouin tribe in the Negev of southern Israel....
) developing in communities of congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. The properties of these sign languages conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and suspected sign language isolates
Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language....
 include Kata Kolok
Kata Kolok

Kata Kolok is the name given to a sign language of a village in northern Bali, Indonesia, that has had an extraordinarily high rate of deafness for several generations....
, Nicaraguan Sign Language
Nicaraguan Sign Language

Nicaraguan Sign Language is a sign language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s....
, and Providence Island Sign Language
Providence Island Sign Language

Providence Island Sign Language is the sign language used by the deaf community on the small island community of San Andr?s and Providencia in the Western Caribbean, off the coast of Nicaragua but belonging to Colombia....
.

Structures

Ferdinand De Saussure
It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative
Nominative case

The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments....
 and accusative
Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions....
, or present and past, though, importantly, not exclusively so. The grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some Bantu languages
Bantu languages

The Bantu languages constitute a grouping belonging to the Niger-Congo languages family. This grouping is deep down in the genealogical tree of the Bantoid grouping, which in turn is deep down in the Niger-Congo tree....
 for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).

In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive
Recursion

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining Function in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition....
 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
Otto Jespersen

Jens Otto Harry Jespersen or Otto Jespersen was a Denmark linguistics who specialized in the grammar of the English language language.He was born in Randers in northern Jutland and attended Copenhagen University, earning degrees in English, French language, and Latin....
), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures is the name of an influential book by Noam Chomsky first published in 1957. Widely regarded as one of the most important texts in the field of linguistics, this work laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar....
, 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.

Chomsky used a context-free grammar
Context-free grammar

In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is a formal grammar in which every Production rule is of the formwhere V is a single nonterminal symbol, and w is a string of Terminal and nonterminal symbolss and/or nonterminals ....
 augmented with transformations
Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....
. Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG
Generalised phrase structure grammar

Generalised phrase structure grammar is a framework for describing the syntax and semantics of natural languages. GPSG was initially developed in the late 1970s by Gerald Gazdar....
, for English). It has been demonstrated, however, that human languages include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.

Some selected sub-fields


Diachronic linguistics


Studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present) is "synchronic", while diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. It enjoys both a rich history and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change
Language change

Language change is the manner in which the Phonetics, Morphology , Semantics, Syntax, and other features of a language are modified over time. All languages are continually changing....
.

In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of fashion. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Switzerland linguistics whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century....
 and became predominant with Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
.

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics
Historical-Comparative Linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
 and etymology
Etymology

Etymology is the study of the roots and history of words; and how their form and meaning have changed over time.In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time....
.

Contextual linguistics

Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines. The interdisciplinary areas of linguistics consider how language interacts with the rest of the world.

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
, anthropological linguistics
Anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language....
, and linguistic anthropology
Linguistic anthropology

Linguistic anthropology is that branch of anthropology that brings Linguistics methods to bear on anthropological problems, linking the analysis of semiotic and particularly linguistic forms and processes to the interpretation of sociocultural processes....
 are seen as areas that bridge the gap between linguistics and society as a whole.

Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychology and neurobiology factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language....
 and neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics

File:Gray726-Brodman.pngFile:DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpgNeurolinguistics is the study of the Neuron mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language....
 relate linguistics to the medical sciences.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origin of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces....
, computational linguistics
Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
 and cognitive science
Cognitive science

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
.

Applied linguistics

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing
Descriptive linguistics

Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be....
 the generalities and varieties both within particular languages and among all language. Applied linguistics
Applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems....
 takes the result of those findings and "applies" them to other areas. The term "applied linguistics" is often used to refer to the use of linguistic research in language teaching only, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas as well, such as lexicography
Lexicography

The pursuit of lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionary....
 and translation
Translation

Translation is the hermeneutics of the Meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an Dynamic and formal equivalence text, likewise called a "translation," that communicates the same message in another language....
. "Applied linguistics" has been argued to be something of a misnomer, since applied linguists focus on making sense of and engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple sources, such as sociology (e.g. conversation analysis) and anthropology.

Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human Speech communication. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware....
 and speech recognition
Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to machine-readable input . The term "voice recognition" is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to speech recognition, when actually referring to speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said....
 use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics
Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
 in machine translation
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
, computer-assisted translation
Computer-assisted translation

Computer-assisted translation, computer-aided translation, or CAT is a form of translation wherein a human translator translates texts using computer Computer software designed to support and facilitate the translation process....
, and natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
 are areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis

Linguistic analysis is used by many governments to verify the claimed nationality
Nationality

Nationality is a the relationship between a person and their state of origin, culture, association, affiliation and/or loyalty. Nationality affords the state jurisdiction over the person and affords the person the protection of the state....
 of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation to prove their claim. This often takes the form of an interview
Interview

An interview is a conversation between two or more people where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee....
 by personnel in an immigration department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted in either the asylum seeker's native language through an interpreter
Interpreting

Language interpreting or interpretation is the intellectual activity of facilitating oral and sign-language communication, either simultaneously or consecutively, between two or more users of different languages....
, or in an international langua franca like English. Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either method depending on the languages involved. Tape recordings of the interview then undergo language analysis, which can be done by either private contractors or within a department of the government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum seeker.

Description and prescription

Main articles: Descriptive linguistics
Descriptive linguistics

Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be....
, Linguistic prescription
Linguistic prescription

In linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used. These rules can cover such topics as standards for spelling and grammar or syntax, or rules for what is deemed Etiquette or Political correctness correct....


Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to practice in other sciences: a zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective judgments on whether a particular animal 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
Standard language

A standard language is a particular variety of a language that has been given either legal or quasi-legal status. As it is usually the form promoted in schools and the media, it is usually considered by speakers of the language to be more "correct" in some sense than other dialects....
, 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
Linguistic imperialism

Linguistic imperialism, or language imperialism, "involves the transfer of a dominant language to other peoples. The transfer is essentially a demonstration of Power in international relations?traditionally, military power but also, in the modern world, economic power?and aspects of the dominant culture are usually transferred along wit...
). An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors
Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of freedom of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor....
, who attempt to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.

Speech and writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken
Spoken language

A spoken language is a human natural language in which the words are uttered through the mouth. Most human languages are spoken languages.Speech communication stands in contrast to sign language and written language....
 (or signed) language is more fundamental than written language
Written language

A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken language or sign language languages....
. This is because:
  • Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it, while there have been many culture
    Culture

    Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
    s and speech communities that lack written communication;
  • Speech evolved before human beings invented writing;
  • People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than writing
    Writing

    Writing is the representation of language in a textual Media through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and the recording of language via a non-textual medium such as Magnetic tape sound recording....
    ;


Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that relies on corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language....
 and computational linguistics
Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
, 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
Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing....
 and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication

Computer-Mediated Communication is defined as any communicative transaction which occurs through the use of two or more networked computers. While the term has traditionally referred to those communications that occur via computer-mediated formats it has also been applied to other forms of text-based interaction such as text messaging....
 as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.

The study of writing systems themselves is in any case considered a branch of linguistics.

History


Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age India
Iron Age India

The Iron Age in the Indian subcontinent succeeds the Late Harappan culture, also known as the last phase of the Indus Valley Tradition....
 with the analysis of Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus
Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language....
 particular to a given Vedic school
Shakha

A shakha , is a Hindu theological school that specializes in learning certain Vedas texts, or else the traditional texts followed by such a school....
. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga
Vedanga

The Vedanga are six auxiliary disciplines for the understanding and tradition of the Vedas.#Shiksha : phonetics and phonology #Chandas : Meter ...
 discipline of Vyakarana
Vyakarana

The Sanskrit grammatical tradition of is one of the six Vedanga disciplines. It has its roots in late Vedic India, and includes the famous work, ....
, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. formulates close to 4,000 rules which together form a compact generative grammar
Generative grammar

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences....
 of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
, the morpheme
Morpheme

In morpheme-based morphology, a is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantics Meaning .In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes ....
 and the root
Root

In vascular plants, the root is the organ of a plant body that typically lies below the surface of the soil. This is not always the case, however, since a root can also be aerial root or aerating ....
. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to "human readable" programming languages).

Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali
Mahabha?ya

The , attributed to Pata?jali, is a commentary on selected rules of Sanskrit grammar from 's treatise, the Panini#Ashtadhyayi, as well as Katyayana 's Varttika, an elaboration of Panini's grammar....
 in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Panini. In the later centuries BC, however, Panini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartrihari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation) and third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.

Western
Western culture

File:Clash of Civilizations map.pngWestern culture are terms which are used to refer to cultures of European origin. This terminology originated as a way of describing what was different about the Graeco-Roman culture and its descendants, in contrast to the older neighboring civilizations of the Middle East, which in many ways continued...
 linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity
Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity is a broad term for a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome....
 with grammatical speculation such as Plato
Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greece Greeks philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Platonic Academy in Ancient Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world....
's Cratylus
Cratylus

Cratylus was an History of Athens philosopher from late 5th century BC, mostly known through his portrayal in Plato's dialogue Cratylus . Little is known of Cratylus or his mentor Heraclitus ....
. The first important advancement of the Greeks
Ancient Greece

The term Ancient Greece refers to the period of History of Greece lasting from the Greek Dark Ages ca. 1100 BC and the Dorian invasion, to 146 BC and the Roman Republic conquest of Greece after the Battle of Corinth ....
 was the creation of the alphabet
Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology
Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
 and critic
Critic

The word critic comes from the Greek language ' , "able to discern", which in turn derives from the word ' , meaning a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, value judgment, interpretation, or observation....
. The sophists and Socrates
Socrates

Socrates was a Classical Greece Philosophy. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known only through the classical accounts of his students....
 introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle
Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
 defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle works on rhetoric
Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of using language as a means to persuade. Along with logic and dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse....
 and poetics
Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics aims to give an account of what he calls 'poetry' . Aristotle attempts to explain 'poetry' through 'first principles' and by discerning its different genres and component elements....
 were of utmost importance for the understating of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus
Apollonius Dyscolus

Apollonius Dyscolus is considered one of the greatest of the Greek language grammarians. He was born at Alexandria, son of Mnesitheus. The dates for his life are not known....
. Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus
Aelius Donatus

Aelius Donatus was a Ancient Rome grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. The only fact known regarding his life is that he was the tutor of St. Jerome....
 compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages. In De vulgari eloquentia
De vulgari eloquentia

De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist of four books, but abandoned in the middle of the second....
 ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri , commonly known as Dante Alighieri, was a Florence poet of the Middle Ages. His Magnum opus, the Divine Comedy , is often considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature....
 expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.

In the Middle East
Middle East

File:GreaterMiddleEast1.pngThe Middle East is a region that spans southwestern Asia, western Asia, and northeastern Africa. It has no clear boundaries, often used as a synonym to Near East, in opposition to Far East....
, the Persian
Persian language

name=Persian|nativename=|pronunciation=[f??r'si]|image=|caption=Farsi in Perso-Arabic script |states= Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain....
 linguist Sibawayh
Sibawayh

Sibawayh was a linguistics of Persian origin born ca. 760 in the town of Bayza in the Fars province of Iran, died in Shiraz, Iran, also in the Fars, around ....
 made a detailed and professional description of Arabic
Arabic language

Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages languages such as Hebrew language and Aramaic language....
 in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (?????? ?? ?????, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics
Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
 from phonology
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
.

Sir William Jones
William Jones (philologist)

Sir William Jones was an England Philology and student of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages....
 noted that Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
 shared many common features with classical Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 and Greek
Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European
Indo-European

Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages* Indo-European people, peoples speaking an Indo-European language** Aryan race, a 19th-century term for Indo-European speakers...
 language family
Language family

A language family is a group of languages related Genetic from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family.As with Alpha taxonomy, the evidence of relationship is observable shared characteristics....
. He began the study of comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their history relatedness....
, which would uncover more language families and branches.

In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law
Grimm's law

Grimm's law named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European language stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC....
 – in 1822; Karl Verner
Karl Verner

Karl Verner was a Denmark linguistics. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he discovered in 1875.Verner, whose interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Christian Rask, began his university studies in 1864....
, who formulated Verner's Law
Verner's law

Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *?, *s, *h , when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z, *g ....
; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt
Johannes Schmidt (linguist)

Johannes Schmidt was a Germany linguistics. He developed the Wellentheorie of language development.Schmidt was born in Prenzlau, Province of Brandenburg....
, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Switzerland linguistics whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century....
 was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. non-historical) explanations for language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the bible) and Anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology
Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humans and humanity in its totality. Anthropology has origins in the natural sciences, and the humanities. In Great Britain it was originally divided into physical anthropology and cultural anthropology, which itself was divided into archaeology, technology, ethnology and sociology ....
 in the United States, linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.

Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir

Edward Sapir , was a Jewish-Germany-United States anthropologist-linguistics and a leader in American structuralism. He was one of the creators of what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis....
, 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
Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris
Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbetai Harris was a renowned American linguistics, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semitic languages, he is best known for his work in Structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language, all achieved in the first 10 y...
, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield was an United States linguistics, whose influence dominated the development of structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s....
, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
 remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar
Transformational grammar

In linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar , is a generative grammar, especially of a natural language, that has been developed in a Noam Chomsky tradition....
, Generative Semantics
Generative semantics

Generative semantics is a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later James McCawley....
, Relational Grammar
Relational grammar

In linguistics, Relational Grammar is a syntactic theory which argues that grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state transformational rules in universal terms....
, Generalized Phrase-structure Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar

Head-driven phrase structure grammar is a highly lexicalized, non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag ....
 (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar
Lexical functional grammar

Lexical functional grammar is a grammar framework in theoretical linguistics, a variety of generative grammar. The development of the theory was initiated by Joan Bresnan and Ronald Kaplan in the 1970s, in reaction to the direction research in the area of transformational grammar had begun to take....
 (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory
Optimality theory

Optimality Theory is a Linguistics model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints....
 state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar
Functional grammar

A range of grammatical function-based approaches to the scientific study of language have been termed "functional". The grammar model developed by Simon C....
 and Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics

In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general....
 tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the Chomskyan school. They reject Chomskyan intuitive introspection as a scientific method, relying instead on typological evidence.

Schools of Study


There are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion
Recursion

Recursion, in mathematics and computer science, is a method of defining Function in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition....
 might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.

Generative Grammar


Over the twentieth century, following the work of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
, formal linguistics came to be dominated by the Generativist school
Generative grammar

In theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of syntax. A generative grammar of a language attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form grammatical sentences....
. While formulated by Chomsky as a way to explain how human beings acquire language
Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults....
 and the biological constraints on this acquisition, its application to natural languages rarely explores that aspect of the theory. Generative theory is modularist
Language module

Language module refers to a hypothesized structure in the human brain or cognitive system that some psycholinguists claim contains innate capacities for language....
 in character. While this remains the dominant paradigm, Chomsky's writings have also gathered much criticism
Criticism of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is widely known for his critique of Government of the United States Foreign relations of the United States, beginning with The Responsibility of Intellectuals of the Vietnam War in the 1960s....
.

See also

  • Cognitive science
    List of cognitive science topics

    Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence .Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal spec...
  • Speech-Language Pathology
  • History of linguistics
    History of linguistics

    Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language.In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar by , or by the development of logic and rhetoric among ancient Greece....
  • International Linguistics Olympiad
  • Linguistics Departments at Universities
    List of departments of linguistics

    ** Brock University** Carleton University, Ottawa ** McGill University, Montr?al ** McMaster University** Memorial University of Newfoundland...
  • Summer schools for linguistics
    List of summer schools of linguistics

    : European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information - Hamburg : Summer School on Corpus Phonology - Augsburg : European Summer School in Generative Grammar - Debrecen : Summer Institute "Languages and Cultures in Contact / in Contrast" - Zakopane...
  • List of linguists
    List of linguists

    A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies linguistics. Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a Polyglot , or a grammarian, but these two uses of the word are distinct ....


Branches and fields

Anthropological linguistics
Anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistics is the study of the relations between language and culture, and the relations between human biology, cognition and language....
, Semiotics
Semiotics

'Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, sign and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems....
, Philology
Philology

Philology, derived from the Greek language considers both morphology and Meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies....
, Discourse
Discourse

Discourse means either "written or spoken communication or debate" or "a formal discussion or debate." The term is often used in semantics and discourse analysis....
, Structuralism
Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure....
, Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of continental philosophy and critical theory who wrote with tendencies of French philosophy#20th century....
, Cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics

In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation, learning, and usage as best explained by reference to human cognition in general....
, Cognitive science
Cognitive science

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
, Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics

Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their history relatedness....
, Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used....
, Varieties
Variety (linguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called a lect, is a language or dialect considered as a variety or development of another language or dialect....
, Developmental linguistics
Developmental linguistics

Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the Language acquisition in childhood....
, Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use....
, Descriptive linguistics
Descriptive linguistics

Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be....
, Ecolinguistics
Ecolinguistics

Ecolinguistics emerged in the 1990?s as a new paradigm of linguistic research which took into account not only the social context in which language is embedded, but also the ecology context in which societies are embedded....
, Embodied cognition, Endangered languages.

History of linguistics
History of linguistics

Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language.In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar by , or by the development of logic and rhetoric among ancient Greece....
, Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;...
, Intercultural competence
Intercultural competence

Intercultural competence is the ability of successful communication with people of other cultures.A person who is interculturally competent captures and understands, in interaction with people from foreign cultures, their specific concepts in perception, thinking, feeling and acting....
, Lexicography
Lexicography

The pursuit of lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:*Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionary....
/Lexicology
Lexicology

is that part of linguistics which studies words, their nature and meaning, words' elements, relations between words , words groups and the whole lexicon....
, Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages....
, Evolutionary linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origin of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves no traces....
.

Articulatory phonology
Articulatory phonology

Articulatory phonology is a linguistics theory originally proposed in 1986 by Catherine Browman of Haskins Laboratories and Louis M. Goldstein of Yale University and Haskins....
, Biolinguistics
Biolinguistics

Biolinguistics is the study of the biology and evolution of language. It is a highly interdisciplinary field, including Linguistics, biologists, Neuroscience, psychologists, mathematicians, and others....
, Computational linguistics
Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the Statistics and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective....
, Biosemiotics
Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics is a growing field that studies the production, action and interpretation of Sign in the Biology realm. Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of scientific biology and semiotics, representing a paradigmatic shift in the occidental scientific view of life, demonstrating that semiosis is its imminent feature....
, Articulatory synthesis
Articulatory synthesis

Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for speech synthesis based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there....
, Machine translation
Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translation text or speech from one natural language to another....
, Natural language processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
, Speaker recognition
Speaker recognition

Speaker recognition is the computing task of validating a user's claimed identity using characteristics extracted from their human voice.There is a difference between speaker recognition and speech recognition ....
 (authentication), Speech processing
Speech processing

Speech processing is the study of Speech communication Signal_ and the processing methods of these signals.The signals are usually processed in a digital representation whereby speech processing can be seen as the intersection of digital signal processing and natural language processing....
, Speech recognition
Speech recognition

Speech recognition converts spoken words to machine-readable input . The term "voice recognition" is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to speech recognition, when actually referring to speaker recognition, which attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said....
, Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human Speech communication. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware....
, Concept Mining
Concept Mining

Concept mining is an activity that results in the extraction of concepts from artifacts. Solutions to the task typically involve aspects of artificial intelligence and statistics, such as data mining and text mining....
, Corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics

Corpus linguistics is the study of language as expressed in samples or "real world" text. This method represents a digestive approach to deriving a set of abstract rules by which a natural language is governed or else relates to another language....
, Critical discourse analysis
Critical discourse analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse, which views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination is reproduced by text and talk....
, Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis

Cryptanalysis is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information which is normally required to do so....
, Decipherment
Decipherment

Decipherment is the analysis of documents written in ancient languages, where the language is unknown, or knowledge of the language has been lost....
, Asemic writing
Asemic writing

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content".Illegible, invented, or primal manuscripts are all influences upon asemic writing....
, Grammar Writing.

Forensic linguistics
Forensic linguistics

Forensic linguistics is a field of applied linguistics involving the relationship between language, the law, and crime....
, Global language system
Global language system

According to Netherlands sociologist Abram de Swaan, a sociological classification of languages according to their large scale social role for its speakers:...
, Glottometrics
Glottometrics

Sorry, no overview for this topic
, Integrational linguistics
Integrational linguistics

Integrational linguistics or integrationism is an approach in the theory of communication that emphasizes the importance of context and rejects rule-based models of language....
, International Linguistic Olympiad
International Linguistic Olympiad

The International linguistics Olympiad is one of the newest in a group of twelve International Science Olympiads. The setup differs from other science olympiads, in that the program contains both individual and team contests....
, Language acquisition
Language acquisition

Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults....
, Language attrition
Language attrition

Language attrition is the loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language by individuals; it should be distinguished from language loss within a community ....
, Language engineering
Language engineering

Language engineering is the creation of natural language processing systems whose cost and outputs are measurable and predictable as well as establishment of language regulators, such as formal or informal agencies, committees, societies or academies as language regulators....
, Language geography
Language geography

Language geography is the branch of human geography that studies the geographic distribution of language or its constituent elements. There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language: the "geography of languages", which deals with the distribution through history and space of languages, and "linguistic geography", whi...
, Metacommunicative competence
Metacommunicative competence

Metacommunicative competence is the ability to intervene within difficult conversations and to correct communication problems by utilizing the different ways of practical communication:...
, Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing

Natural language processing is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language....
, Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics

File:Gray726-Brodman.pngFile:DTI-sagittal-fibers.jpgNeurolinguistics is the study of the Neuron mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language....
, Orthography
Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek language ????? orth?s and ???fe?? gr?phein ....
, Reading, Second language acquisition
Second language acquisition

Second language acquisition is the process by which people learn a second language in addition to their first language. The term second language is used to describe the acquisition of any language after the acquisition of the mother tongue....
, Sociocultural linguistics
Sociocultural linguistics

Sociocultural linguistics is a term used to encompass a broad range of theories and methods for the study of language in its sociocultural context....
, Stratificational linguistics
Stratificational linguistics

Stratificational Linguistics is a view of linguistics advocated by Sydney Lamb. His theories advocate that language usage and production is stratificational in nature....
, Text linguistics
Text linguistics

Text linguistics is a branch of linguistics that deals with Textualitys as communication systems. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars....
, Writing system
Writing system

A writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language....
s, Xenolinguistics.

Popular works and texts
  • Aronoff, Mark & Janie Rees-Miller (Eds.) (2003) The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers. (ISBN 1-4051-0252-7)
  • Asher, R. (Ed.) (1993) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press. 10 vols.
  • Bloomfield, Leonard
    Leonard Bloomfield

    Leonard Bloomfield was an United States linguistics, whose influence dominated the development of structuralism#Structuralism in linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s....
     (1933,1984) Language, University of Chicago Press. (ISBN 0-226-06067-5)
  • Bright, William (Ed.) (1992) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press. 4 Vols.
  • Brown, Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, (2nd ed.) Elsevier. 14 vols.
  • Burgess, Anthony
    Anthony Burgess

    John Burgess Wilson was an England author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic.His Utopian and dystopian fiction satire A Clockwork Orange, widely considered to be his magnum opus, is by far his most famous novel, and was adapted into a famous, if highly controversial, A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick....
     Language Made Plain
    Language Made Plain

    Language Made Plain by Anthony Burgess is a brief overview of the field of linguistics. Without dealing specifically with any one language, it provides an introduction to semantics, phonetics, and the development of language....
     (1964);
    A Mouthful of Air
    A Mouthful of Air

    A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English is a work on the subject of linguistics by Anthony Burgess. It was first published in August 1993....
     (1992)
  • Bussmann, H. (1996) Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, Routledge (translated from German).
  • Chakrabarti, Byomkes
    Byomkes Chakrabarti

    Dr. Byomkes Chakrabarti was a Bengali language research worker on ethnic languages. He was also a renowned educationist and a poet....
    (India, 1923–1981), Santali language
    Santali language

    Santali is a language in the Santali subfamily of Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho language and Mundari language. It is spoken by about six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan ....
    , Bengali language
    Bengali language

    Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-European languages language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages....
    , comparative linguistics
  • Chomsky, Noam
    Noam Chomsky

    Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
     (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Syntactic Structures; On Language
  • Chomsky, Noam
    Noam Chomsky

    Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
     On Language
  • Comrie, Bernard (1989) Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, University of Chicago Press. (ISBN 9780226114330)
  • David Crystal
    David Crystal

    David Crystal, Order of the British Empire is a linguistics, academic and author. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales Wales, and Liverpool, England where he attended St Mary's College, Sefton from 1951....
     (1987) Linguistics; The Stories of English
    The Stories of English

    The Stories of English is a 2004 book by United Kingdom linguistics David Crystal; it traces the history of the English language from the invasion of Great Britain by the Angles and Saxons in the 5th Century to the modern splintering of the language into its modern British English, American English, Indian English, Australian English, and...
    ; The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge University Press; (1991) A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Blackwell. (ISBN 0-631-17871-6); (1992) An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Language and Languages, Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Deacon, Terrence (1998) The Symbolic Species, WW Norton & Co. (ISBN 0-393-31754-4)
  • Deutscher, Guy (2005) The Unfolding of Language, Metropolitan Books. (ISBN 0-8050-7907-6) (ISBN 978-0-8050-7907-4)
  • Fauconnier, Gilles
    Gilles Fauconnier

    Gilles Fauconnier is a France linguistics, researcher in cognitive science, and author, currently working in the United States. He is a professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Cognitive Science....
     (1995) Mental Spaces, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-44949-9); (1997)Mappings in Thought and Language, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-59953-9); & Mark Turner
    Mark Turner (cognitive scientist)

    Mark Turner is a Cognitive science, linguistics, and author. He is Institute Professor and Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University, where he was for two years Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences....
     (2003) The Way We Think, Basic Books. (ISBN 0-465-08786-8); Rymer, p. 48, quoted in Fauconnier and Turner, p. 353
  • Frawley, William (Ed.) (2003) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press.
  • Graffi, G. (2001) Two years of syntax (A Critical Survey), Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Harrison, K. David (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, New York and London: Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0-195-18192-1)
  • Hayakawa, Alan R & S. I. (1990) Language in Thought and Action, Harvest. (ISBN 0-15-648240-1)
  • Hudson, G. (2000) Essential Introductory Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Jackson, Howard (2007) Key Terms in Linguistics, Continuum. (ISBN 0-82-648742-4)
  • Johnson, Keith & Helen (1998) Encyclopedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics, Oxford: Blackwell. (ISBN 0-631-21482-2)
  • Kafka, Franz
    Franz Kafka

    Franz Kafka was one of the major fiction writers of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class German language-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Austria-Hungary, presently the Czech Republic....
     in his Diaries
  • Lyons, John (1995) Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-43877-2)
  • Malmkjaer, Kirsten (1991) The Linguistics Encyclopaedia, Routledge. (ISBN 0-415-22210-9)
  • Napoli, Donna J. (2003) Language Matters. A Guide to Everyday Questions about Language, Oxford University Press.
  • O'Grady, William D., Michael Dobrovolsky & Francis Katamba [eds.] (2001) Contemporary Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0-582-24691-1) - Lower Level
  • Ohio State University Department of Linguistics (2007) Language Files (10th ed.), Ohio State University Press.
  • Pinker, Steven
    Steven Pinker

    Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychology, cognitive science, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind....
     (2000) The Language Instinct
    The Language Instinct

    The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker for a general audience, published in 1994. In it, Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language....
    , repr ed., Perennial. (ISBN 0-06-095833-2); (2000) Words and Rules, Perennial. (ISBN 0-06-095840-5)
  • Rymer, Russ (1992) Annals of Science in "", 13 April
  • Sampson, Geoffrey (2006) The Language Instinct Debate, Continuum International. (ISBN 0-8264-7385-7) - challenges the fundamental assumptions of Pinker's The Language Instinct, the two together illustrate one of the most significant debates within the field of theoretical linguistics in the early 21st century.
  • Sampson, Geoffrey
    Geoffrey Sampson

    Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing in the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex.He produces annotation standards for compiling corpus linguistics of ordinary usage of the English language....
     (1982) Schools of Linguistics, Stanford University Press. (ISBN 0-8047-1125-9)
  • Sapir, Edward
    Sapir

    Sapir means sapphire in Hebrew.It may refer to:*Places**Sapir, Israel, a moshav in Israel*People**Edward Sapir, American anthropologist-linguist...
     (1921) "", New York: Harcourt, Brace.
  • Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916,1998) Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics)
    Course in General Linguistics

    Course in General Linguistics is the influential book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, that is based on notes taken from Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva between the years 1906 and 1911....
    , Open Court. (ISBN 0-812-69023-0)
  • Skinner, B.F. (1957) Verbal Behavior, Copley Publishing Group. (ISBN 0-87411-591-4)
  • Sweetser, Eve (1992) From Etymology to Pragmatics, repr ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-42442-9)
  • Taylor, John R. (2003) Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0-19-870033-4)
  • Trask, R. L. (1995) Language: The Basics, London: Routledge.
  • Trask, R. L.
    Larry Trask

    Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics....
     (1993) A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics, Routledge. (ISBN 0-415-08628-0); (1996) Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology, Routledge.; (1997) A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics; (1999) Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics, London: Routledge.
  • Ungerer, Friedrich & Hans-Jorg Schmid (1996) An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0-582-23966-4)
  • Van Orman Quine, Willard (1960) Word and Object, MIT Press. (ISBN 0-262-67001-1)
  • Watts, Richard J. (2003)Politeness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 978-0-521-79406-0).
  • White, Lydia (1992) Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-79647-4)
  • - Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.


Literature and art exploring linguistic themes
  • Midnight's Children
    Midnight's Children

    Midnight's Children is a 1981 novel by Salman Rushdie. It centres on the author's native India and was acclaimed as a major milestone in postcolonial literature....
     - Salman Rushdie
    Salman Rushdie

    Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children , which won the Booker Prize in 1981....
  • Night and Day
    Night and Day (play)

    Night and Day is a 1978 play by Tom Stoppard. The sets and costumes were designed by Carl Toms and it ran for two years at the Phoenix Theatre in central London, UK....
     (1979) - Tom Stoppard
    Tom Stoppard

    Sir Tom Stoppard Order of Merit , Order of the British Empire, FRSL is a British screenwriter and playwright. He has written plays such as The Coast of Utopia, Arcadia , Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and Rock 'n' Roll ....
  • The Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghosh
    Amitav Ghosh

    Amitav Ghosh , is an Indian-Bengali people author known for his work in the English language....
  • Pygmalion
    Pygmalion (play)

    Pygmalion is a Play by George Bernard Shaw loosely inspired by Pygmalion . It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a refined society lady by teaching her how to speak with an upper class...
     - George Bernard Shaw
    George Bernard Shaw

    George Bernard Shaw, was an Irish people playwright.Although Shaw's first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, his talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays....
  • Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
    Umberto Eco

    Umberto Eco is an Italy medievalist, Semiotics, philosopher, Literary criticism and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory....


External links

  • An Academic Forum
  • , MediaWiki-based encyclopedia of linguistics, under construction
  • - according to the Linguistic Society of America
  • Linguistics and language-related wiki
    Wiki

    A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content , using a simplified markup language....
     articles on and
  • - A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology, ed. J. A. García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
  • , a global online linguistics community with news and information updated daily.