Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Broadly, all linguists investigate language itself, rather than simply describe how particular languages work. For example, what generalisations can be established to account for the similarities between languages as diverse as English, Japanese and Zulu? How do they differ? What aspects of language are universal for all humans? Theoretical linguists concern themselves with questions about this apparent 'instinct' to communicate, and explain what it is that we intuitively 'know' about language.

Other kinds of linguists can use attempts at answering these questions, to improve practice in fields including foreign language teaching, speech therapy and translation. The use of linguistics to approach real-life problems is known as applied linguistics. Furthermore, when evidence is needed or an idea must be tested, theoretical and applied research often draw on descriptive linguistics, which documents the facts of individual languages; examples include information on a language's tenses or its range of speech sounds.

The division between theoretical and applied linguistics holds for several 'core' fields, which together constitute the grammar of a language.

• Syntax is the study of how units such as words combine into sentences. Why Bill ate the fish is acceptable but Ate the Bill fish is not is evidence that this field aims to explain.

• Phonology refers to the system speakers use to represent language. For example, cat 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, phonologists are interested only in how these group into abstract categories: for example, how and why [k] is often perceived as distinctly different from [t], whereas in many languages, other sounds as different as those are not.
  • Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech, so often informs phonological inquiry by showing how pronunciations are related. However, since this does not primarily concern itself with the study of abstract patterns in language, phoneticians' work usually complements linguistics, rather than describes a central component.

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

• Semantics, within linguistics as opposed to other subjects such as philosophy, refers to the study of how language conveys meaning. For example, English speakers typically realise that Chomsky's famous sentence Colorless 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 utterances relate to the context they are spoken in. For instance, the sentence I have one pencil can mean two very different things, depending on whether the speaker has been asked how many pencils they have, or are just confirming that they have at least one. This sort of understanding is not predictable just by knowledge of language; speakers must also know something about the intentions and assumptions of others to co-operate in communication.

The Study of Linguistics

Some linguists, such as theoretical syntacticians, predominantly focus on one of the above 'core' areas in themselves. Research may involve developing a model to describe and predict the workings of the system of language itself, rather than explain how people happen to use language. To factor out circumstances that may obscure these fundamental insights, many linguists may choose to focus on language presumed to occur in an idealised, adult, monolingual native speaker. In contrast, linguists whose research moves away from any of these four criteria have concentrated on fields arranged around the study of language use and learning:

• 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).

• The study of language acquisition recognises that the way that language comes to children as a first language and adults as a second language may provide extra insights into the system itself. As this involves all kinds of learning, including in the classroom, this field is highly varied in the range of linguists, both theoretical and applied, who want to know how language emerges from infancy onwards.

• 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 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.

• Linguistic variation, the study of the differences among the languages of the world. This has implications for linguistics in general: if human linguistic ability is very narrowly constrained, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.

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.

It is claimed that there is a Universal Grammar (UG) that underlies all language and is biologically unique to humans, although precisely what is in UG, where it comes from, and whether a UG exists in any interesting sense are controversial issues in the field.

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 Otto 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, especially in English, 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, which is to say that they must be able to account for very complex word orders and relations between the words. On the other hand, formalisms must not be too powerful so as to predict word orders that do not occur in any language. Some of the commonly studied formalisms include LFG, HPSG, Minimalism, Tree Adjoining Grammar, and Categorial Grammar. The formalisms all tend to be too weak or too powerful in various ways, and an important concern for theoretical syntax is to find how to constrain the formalisms to match the languages that we see.

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 performed the academic field of "linguistics" is purely descriptive. Linguists seek to clarify the nature of language, to describe how people use the language and to find the actual underlying grammar that speakers are unconsciously adhering to, without passing judgment over what speech is inherently better or worse than others, and without 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.

Prescription comes in two flavors, those that are linguistically founded and those that are not. For instance, the rule of English that subjects and verbs must agree (i.e. that when the subject is third-person singular, the verb takes an "s" ending, like "I/you/they run" but "he runs") can be the basis of linguistically founded prescription, so long as the speaker is intending to speak standard American English. It is a fact that speakers of standard American English do follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention of the speaker is to speak that language, they ought to follow that rule too.

However, prescriptivists often stray from this type of linguistically founded recommendation. These prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators and journalists, and not in the actual academic discipline of linguistics. Often the acrolect of a particular language, they may hold clear notions of what is right and wrong and what variety of language is most likely to lead the next generation of speakers to "success". For example, they may believe that all speakers of what they would call English should follow the same rule of subject-verb agreement, while in fact some varieties of English, which are in a very true sense distinct languages in their own right, do not do subject-verb agreement the same way. The reasons for their intolerance of non-standard dialects, treating them as "incorrect" use of the standard language, 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.

Prescriptivists all too often also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true, but which aren't. For instance, the rule against stranding a preposition (often at the end of a sentence, such as in "I met the professor I wrote to.") is commonly believed to be a true rule of English. However, it is a rule only in the sense that prescriptive grammarians want it to be. Speakers of English not only leave prepositions stranded regularly, indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but moreover often obeying the rule by pied-piping the preposition to the front results in a sentence that would sound ridiculous to any native speaker of English. The rule, then, is simply linguistically unfounded.

Descriptive linguists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of "incorrect usage" in a general sense. They would aim to describe the usages the prescriptivist has in mind, either as common or deviant from some linguistic norm, as an idiosyncratic variation, or as regularity (a rule) followed by speakers of some other dialect (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.

References

• Aitchison, J. (2003). Teach Yourself Linguistics. London: Hodder. 6th edition. ISBN 0-07-142982-4.
• Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
• Cook, V.J. (2002). Portraits of the L2 User. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0060958332 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics reprint, 2000).
• Pinker, S. (1999). How the Mind Works. New York: Norton.
• Scovel, T. (1997). Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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.

Other 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