Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Broadly, all linguists investigate how language itself, rather than particular languages, work. For example, what is similar about the grammar of English, French and the North African language Berber? How are they different? Theoretical linguists concern themselves with such questions. By finding out, other kinds of linguists, such as those working in applied linguistics, can use this knowledge to improve language learning or other fields such as translation.

The division between theoretical and applied linguistics applies to many different fields:

Theoretical (or general) linguistics involves the study of four 'core' areas:

• Syntax is the study of how units such as the words we use combine into sentences. Why Bill ate the fish is acceptable but ate the Bill fish is evidence that this field aims to explain.

• Phonology refers to the system speakers use to represent language. For example, cat is an idea that can be expressed through the utterance [kæt], letters on a page, hand movements in a sign language, and even the dots and dashes of Morse code. Though there are a potentially infinite number of ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving a hand, phonology is interested only in how these group into abstract categories: [k] may be pronounced in several different ways, but English speakers would not consider these to be as different as [k] and [g] - though these sounds a Korean speaker would regard as very similar.
  • Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech, so often informs phonological inquiry by showing how the pronunciations of sounds are related. However, since the study of articulation (sound production through the movements of the lungs, tongue, etc.), speech perception (how the brain discerns sounds) and acoustics (the physical qualities of sounds as movement through air) do not primarily concern themselves with the study of abstract patterns in language, they complement linguistics rather than form a central component.

• Morphology examines how linguistic units such as words and their subparts (prefixes, suffixes, roots, etc.) combine together. One example of this might be the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable, *ed+walk is not.

• Syntax is the study of how linguistic items such as words combine into some arrangements of sentences but not others. Why Bill ate the fish is acceptable but not ate the Bill fish is an example that this field aims to explain.

• Semantics is studied in many other fields, such as philosophy, but within linguistics it refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. For example, English speakers typically realise that Chomsky's famous sentence colourless green ideas sleep furiously is well-formed in terms of word order, but incomprehensible in terms of meaning. Other aspects of meaning studied here include how speakers understand ambiguous sentences such as visiting relatives can be boring depending on context, and the extent to which sentences which are superficially very different, such as the wine flowed freely and much wine was consumed, mean similar things.

• Pragmatics is the study of how a particular utterance relates to the context within the discourse that it was uttered in. For instance, the one sentence "I have one pencil." can mean two very different things, depending on its context. In response to "How many pencils do you have?", it generally means that the speaker has exactly one, and no more, pencils. Whereas, in response to "If you have one pencil, tell me.", the speaker is probably only indicating that he has at least one pencil, one and possibly more. This ambiguity, in a sense, is thought to be an issue in the field of pragmatics.

The central concern of theoretical linguistics is to characterize the nature of human language ability, or competence: to explain what it is that an individual knows when said to know a language; and to explain how it is that individuals come to know languages. Hand-in-hand with theoretical linguistics is descriptive linguistics, which is the aspect of linguistic research that aims to document the particulars of individual languages.

Many linguists focus on one or more of the theoretical fields and do so in connection with one of various goals of linguistics:

• Applied linguistics puts linguistic theories into practice in areas such as foreign language teaching, speech therapy, translation and speech pathology. Increasingly, however, applied linguists have been developing their own views of language, which often focus on the language learner rather than the system itself.

• Comparative linguistics is the goal of comparing and contrasting languages, both for finding universal properties of language and to account for a language's development and origins (similar to historical linguistics).

• Language acquisition, the study of how language is acquired;

• Historical linguistics (or diachronic linguistics), the study of how languages are historically related (e.g. English, French and German are thought to be descended from a single Indo-European (language) tongue);

• Psycholinguistics, the study of language to find out about how the mind works;

• Sociolinguistics, the study of how language varies according to cultural context, the speaker's background, and the situation in which it is used;

• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistics to speech-language pathology.

One of the most interesting aspects of language is that all humans (setting aside extremely pathological cases) achieve competence in whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, with apparently little need for conscious instruction. Non-humans do not. Therefore, there is some basic innate property of humans that causes them to be able to use language. There is no discernable genetic process responsible for differences between languages: an individual will acquire whatever language(s) they are exposed to as a child, regardless of their parentage or ethnic origin.

Variation

A substantial part of linguistic investigation is into the nature of the differences among the languages of the world. The nature of variation is very important to an understanding of human linguistic ability in general: if human linguistic ability is very narrowly constrained by biological properties of the species, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.

But there are different ways to interpret similarities among languages. For example, the Latin language spoken by the Romans developed into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy. Similarities between Spanish and Italian are in many cases due to both being descended from Latin. So in principle, if two languages share some property, this property might either be due to common inheritance or due to some property of the human language faculty.

Often, the possibility of common inheritance can be essentially ruled out. Given the fact that learning language comes quite easily to humans, it can be assumed that languages have been spoken at least as long as there have been biologically modern humans, probably at least fifty thousand years. Independent measures of language change (for example, comparing the language of ancient texts to the daughter languages spoken today) suggest that change is rapid enough to make it impossible to reconstruct a language that was spoken so long ago; as a consequence of this, common features of languages spoken in different parts of the world are not normally taken as evidence for common ancestry.

Even more striking, there are documented cases of sign languages being developed in communities of congenitally deaf people who could not have been exposed to spoken language. The properties of these sign languages have been shown to conform generally to many of the properties of spoken languages, strengthening the hypothesis that those properties are not due to common ancestry but to more general characteristics of the way languages are learned.

Loosely speaking, the collection of properties which all languages share can be referred to as "universal grammar" (or UG). However, there is much debate around this topic and the term is used in several different ways.

Universal properties of language may be partly due to universal aspects of human experience; for example all humans experience water, and the fact that all human languages have a word for water is probably not unrelated to this fact. The challenging questions regarding universal grammar generally require one to control this factor. Clearly, experience is part of the process by which individuals learn languages. But experience by itself is not enough, since animals raised around people learn extremely little human language, if any at all.

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

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

Properties of language

It has been understood since the time of the ancient Greeks that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past. The vocabulary and grammar of a language are organized around these fundamental categories.

In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to contain another noun phrase (as in the chimpanzee's lips) or a clause to contain a clause (as in I think that it's raining). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier (for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language was only fully realized after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures, which presented a formal grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic systems were of phonological or morphological systems, which tend to be closed and admit little creativity.

Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, context-free grammars have been written for substantial fragments of various languages (for example GPSG, for English), but it has been demonstrated that human languages include cross-serial dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by Context-free grammars. This requires increased power, for example transformations.

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

Ik denk dat Jan Piet de kinderen zag helpen zwemmen

I think that Jan Piet the children saw help swim

'I think that Jan saw Piet help the children swim'

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

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

Details on selected divisions and subfields

Contextual linguistics

Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines. Whereas in core theoretical linguistics language is studied for its own sake, the interdisciplinary areas of linguistics consider how language interacts with the rest of the world.

Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are social sciences that consider the interactions between linguistics and society as a whole.

Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics combine medical science and linguistics.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science.

Applied linguistics

Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas, as well.

Many areas of applied linguistics today involve the explicit use of computers. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront in recent years with increasing computing power. Their influence has had a great effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.

Today, the term 'applied linguistics' is sometimes used to refer to 'second language acquisition"', but these remain distinct fields in that many researchers spend more time on either theoretical or applied research.

Diachronic linguistics

Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out of historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.

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

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.

Prescription and description

Main article: Prescription and description.

Research currently performed under the name "linguistics" is purely descriptive; linguists seek to clarify the nature of language without passing value judgments or trying to chart future language directions. Nonetheless, there are many professionals and amateurs who also prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard out for all to follow.

Prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the actual academic discipline of linguistics. They hold clear notions of what is right and wrong, and may assign themselves the responsibility of ensuring that the next generation use the variety of language that is most likely to lead to "success," often the acrolect of a particular language. The reasons for their intolerance of "incorrect usage" may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects (i.e., basilects), or simple conflicts with pet theories. An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, whose personal mission is to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.

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

Speech versus writing

Languages have only been written for a few thousand years, but have been spoken (or signed) for much longer. The written word may therefore provide less of a window onto how language works than the study of speech, even assuming that the culture which the language forms part of has a writing system - the majority of the world's languages remain unwritten. Furthermore, the study of written language can play no part in investigating first language acquisition, since infants are obviously yet to become literate. Overall, language is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention. Spoken and signed language, then, may tell us much about human evolution and the structure of the mind.

Of course, linguists also agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry. Writing, however, brings with it a number of problems; for example, it often acts as a historical record, preserving words, phrases, styles and spellings of a previous era. This may be of limited use for studying how language is used at the present time.

History of linguistics

People have studied language in one way or another for thousands of years. However, until the 20th century, many of the most famous insights into the way language works involved explaining the grammar of particular languages, or describing sound changes over time. However, such work laid the foundations for an extension of linguistic inquiry into the universals of language. For example, the early grammarian Pāṇini's (c. 520 – 460 BC) examination of Sanskrit produced several insights into the nature of grammar, such as the morpheme, which remain highly relevant in modern research. However, until the 1950s, few scholars had sought to identify the properties of the system of language itself - those parts common to all languages and all speakers.

Today, theoretical linguistics has resulted very much from the work of Noam Chomsky and his contempories. This produced explicit theories of grammar - namely, systems that required no reference to other kinds of knowledge. For example, whereas a casual and inexact definition of a noun is 'a person, place or thing', Chomsky's syntactic theories could distinguish a noun from any other sort of linguistic unit without recourse to the prior knowledge of what a person, place or thing is. This sort of approach to uncovering the components of language as distinct from other kinds of knowledge, rather than investigating the history of and relationships between particular languages, is one way of separating modern linguistics from its precursors.

Footnotes

Further reading

• Aitchison, Jean [1995] (1999). Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 
• Adrian, Akmajian (2001). Linguistics, et al. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-51123-1. 
• Griniewicz, Sergiusz; Elwira M. Dubieniec (2004). Introduction To Linguistics, 2nd. Białystok, WSFiZ, 91. 
• Hudson, G. (2000) Essential Introductory Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Lyons, John (1995), Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-43877-2)
• 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
• Taylor, John R. (2003), Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0-19-870033-4)
• Trask, R. L. (1995) Language: The Basics. London: Routledge.
• Ungerer, Friedrich & Hans-Jorg Schmid (1996), An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0-582-23966-4)

Advanced texts

• Fauconnier, Gilles
  • (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 (2003), The Way We Think, Basic Books. (ISBN 0-465-08786-8)
    • Rymer, p. 48, quoted in Fauconnier and Turner, p. 353
• Sampson, Geoffrey (1982), Schools of Linguistics, Stanford University Press. (ISBN 0-8047-1125-9)
• Sweetser, Eve (1992), From Etymology to Pragmatics, repr ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-42442-9)

Popular books about linguistics

• Bloomfield, Leonard. Language.
• Burgess, Anthony
  • (1964), Language Made Plain
  • (1992), A Mouthful of Air
• Deacon, Terrence (1998), The Symbolic Species, WW Norton & Co. (ISBN 0-393-31754-4)
• Deutscher, Guy, Dr. (2005), The Unfolding of Language, Metropolitan Books (ISBN 0-8050-7907-6) (ISBN 978-0-8050-7907-4
• 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.
• Hayakawa, Alan R & S. I. (1990), Language in Thought and Action, Harvest. (ISBN 0-15-648240-1)
• Pinker, Steven
  • (2000), The Language Instinct, 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 "The New Yorker", 13th April
• Sapir, Edward. Language.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale.
• White, Lydia (1992), Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition.

References

• 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.
• 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.
• Bussmann, H. (1996) Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Routledge (translated from German).
• Crystal, David
  • (1987) 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.
• Frawley, William (Ed.) (2003) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Malmkjaer, Kirsten (1991) The Linguistics Encyclopaedia. Routledge (ISBN 0-415-22210-9)
• Trask, R. L.
  • (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.
• Pinker, S. (1999). How the Mind Works. New York: Norton.
• Scovel, T. (1997). Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

External links

• Subfields according to the Linguistic Society of America
• Glossary of linguistic terms and French<->English glossary at SIL International
• "Linguistics" section of A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology, ed. J. A. García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)

See also

• List of basic linguistic topics
• List of cognitive science topics
• List of linguistic topics
• Anthropological linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics
• Cognitive science
• Computational linguistics
  • Machine translation
  • Natural language processing
  • Speaker recognition (authentication)
  • Speech processing
  • Speech recognition
  • Speech synthesis
• Concept Mining
• Corpus linguistics
• Critical discourse analysis
• Cryptanalysis
• Decipherment
• Descriptive linguistics
• Ecolinguistics
• Evolutionary linguistics
• Forensic linguistics
• Glottometrics

• History of linguistics
• Historical-comparative linguistics
• Integrational linguistics
• Intercultural competence
• Language acquisition
• Language attrition
• Language engineering
• Lexicography/Lexicology
• Linguistic typology
• Metacommunicative competence
• Neurolinguistics
• Orthography
• Second language acquisition
• Semiotics
• Sociocultural linguistics
• Stratificational linguistics
• Structuralism
• Text linguistics
• Writing systems