Linguistics
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Linguistics is the scientific
study of language, encompassing a number of sub-fields.
An important topical division is between the study of language
structure (grammar) and the study of meaning (semantics).
Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition
of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine
into phrases and sentences) and phonology (the study of
sound systems and abstract sound units). Phonetics 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.
Over the twentieth century, following the work of Noam
Chomsky, linguistics came to be dominated by the Generativist
school, which is chiefly concerned with explaining how human
beings acquire language and the biological constraints on
this acquisition. Generative theory is modularist in character.
While this remains the dominant paradigm, Chomsky's writings
have also gathered much criticism, and other linguistic
theories have increasingly gained popularity; cognitive
linguistics is a prominent example. There are many sub-fields
in linguistics, which may or may not be dominated by a particular
theoretical approach: evolutionary linguistics attempts
to account for the origins of language; historical linguistics
explores language change and sociolinguistics looks at the
relation between linguistic variation and social structures.
A variety of intellectual disciplines are relevant to the
study of language. Although certain linguists have downplayed
the relevance of some other fields, linguistics — like other
sciences — is highly interdisciplinary and draws on work
from such fields as psychology, informatics, computer science,
philosophy, biology, human anatomy, neuroscience, sociology,
anthropology, and acoustics.
Names for the discipline
Before the twentieth century (the word is first attested
1716), the term "philology" was commonly used
to refer to the science of language, which was then predominately
historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure'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
USA., where it was never as popular as elsewhere in the
sense "science of language". Though the term "linguist"
in the sense "a student of language" dates from
1641, the term "linguistics" dates from 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) 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) they are
exposed to as a child, regardless of parentage or ethnic
origin.
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form
(which may consist of sound patterns, movements of the hand,
written symbols, and so on); such pairings are known as
Saussurean signs. Linguists may specialize in some sub-area
of linguistic structure, which can be arranged in the following
terms, from form to meaning:
- Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and perception
- Phonology, the study of sounds (adjusted appropriately for signed languages) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's mind that distinguish meaning
- Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
- Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
- Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
- Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts
- Discourse analysis, the 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.
Intersecting with these domains are fields arranged around
the kind of external factors that are considered. For example:
- Linguistic typology, 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.
- Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.
- Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
- Historical linguistics or Diachronic linguistics, the study of language change.
- Language geography, the study of the spatial patterns of languages.
- Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language.
- Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
- Sociolinguistics, the study of social patterns and norms of linguistic variability.
- Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the area of Speech-Language Pathology.
- Neurolinguistics, the study of the brain networks that underlie grammar and communication.
- Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals compared to human language.
- Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
- Applied linguistics, the study of language related issues applied in everyday life, notably language. policies, planning, and education. Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.
The related discipline of semiotics 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 of generative grammar, 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, the collection of fundamental properties
all languages share are referred to as universal grammar
(UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar
are a much debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist
linguists usually refer simply to language universals, 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
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 — 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 mucho 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).
Arguments in favor of language universals have also come
from documented cases of sign languages (such as Al-Sayyid
Bedouin Sign Language) 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 include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign
Language, and Providence Island Sign Language.
Structures
 |
| Ferdinand de Saussure |
It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized
around grammatical categories such as noun and verb, nominative
and accusative, 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 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 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 became more popular
after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky’s book “Syntactic
Structures”, - that 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 augmented with transformations.
Since then, following the trend of Chomskyan linguistics,
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.
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.
In universities in the United States, the non-historic
perspective is often out of fashion. 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.
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, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic
anthropology are seen as areas that bridge the gap between
linguistics and society as a whole.
Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics relate linguistics
to the medical sciences.
Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include evolutionary
linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science.
Applied linguistics
Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing
the generalities and varieties both within particular languages
and among all language. Applied linguistics 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. "Applied linguistics" has been argued
to be something of a misnomer[who?] , 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 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 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.
Description and prescription
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, 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). An extreme version
of prescriptivism can be found among censors, 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 (or signed) language is more fundamental than written
language. This is because:
- Speech appears to be a human "universal",
whereas there have been many cultures and speech communities
that lack written communication;
- Speech evolved before human beings discovered writing;
- People learn to speak and process spoken languages more
easily and much earlier than writing;
Linguists nonetheless agree that the study of written
language can be worthwhile and valuable. For research that
relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics,
written language is often much more convenient for processing
large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of spoken
language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are
typically transcribed and written. Additionally, linguists
have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various
formats of computer-mediated communication as a viable site
for linguistic inquiry.
The study of writing systems themselves is in any case
considered a branch of linguistics.
History
Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled
from Iron Age India with the analysis of Sanskrit. 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 particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study
of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana,
the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pānini
(c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are
probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions
he occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000
rules which together form a compact generative grammar of
Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts
of the phoneme, the morpheme and the root. 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 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.
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made
a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760,
in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو,
The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of
language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics
from phonology.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with
grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus.
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common
features with classical Latin and Greek, 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 language
family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which
would uncover more language families and branches.
Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who
devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation
– known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated
Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie"
("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed
the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in
1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural
linguistics. Edward Sapir, a leader in American structural
linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations
between language studies and anthropology. His methodology
had strong influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's
formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar,
developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris,
who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield,
has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
Noam Chomsky remains a pop-linguistic figure. Linguists
(working in frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG) or Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG)) are
increasingly seen to stress the importance of formalization
and formal rigor in linguistic description, and may distance
themselves somewhat from Chomsky's more recent work (the
"Minimalist" program for Transformational grammar),
connecting more closely to his earlier works.
Other linguists working in Optimality Theory 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 and
Cognitive Linguistics 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.
Popular works and texts
- What is I-language? - Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science.
- David Crystal - Linguistics; The Stories of English; The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (1987). Cambridge University Press. ; A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (1991) Blackwell (ISBN 0-631-17871-6); An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Language and Languages (1992) Oxford: Blackwell.
- 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.
- Chomsky, Noam, (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Syntactic Structures; On Language
- 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)
- White, Lydia (1992), Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-79647-4)
- Aitchison, Jean [1995] (1999). Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd, London: Hodder & Stoughton.
- 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
- Ohio State University Department of Linguistics. (2007) Language Files (10th ed.). Ohio State University Press.
- 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)
- Sweetser, Eve (1992), From Etymology to Pragmatics, repr ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0-521-42442-9)
- 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).
- Graffi, G. 2001 - Two years of syntax (A Critical Survey), Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2001.
- Frawley, William (Ed.) (2003) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press
- Trask, R. L. - A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics (1993). Routledge. (ISBN 0-415-08628-0); Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology (1996). Routledge.; A student's dictionary of language and linguistics. (1997); 'Key Concepts in Language and Linguistics (1999). London: Routledge.
Literature and art exploring linguistic themes
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics
Published - September 2008
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