Linguistics is the scientific
study of the nature and structure of languages, founded and organized in the
mid-nineteenth century. Although it is generally acceptable to refer to someone
who knows several languages as 'a good linguist', it is not a precise use of
the word. A linguist is a trained scientist who studies how languages work.
We can divide the study of the linguistic system itself into six categories,
with each category focusing on a different level of description and analysis:
- Phonetics
- the physical nature of speech
- Phonology
- the study of language sounds
- Morphology
- the study of various changes in the individual word to alter its meaning
(prefixes, internal changes)
- Syntax
- the arrangement of words in a sentence or word group
- Pragmatics
- the effect of situation on language use
- Vocabulary
- the study of individual words and their origins; includes the subgroups etymology
(the history of individual words) and semantics (the study of word
meanings)
We can also break up the study of linguistics into
categories based on the possible connections between linguistics and external
topics. Since the list of topics related to language or language use is
open-ended, this list could be extended almost indefinitely (forensic
linguistics, neurolinguistics, preventive linguistics, etc.)
- Theoretical
linguistics - how languages work
- Descriptive
linguistics - the phenomena of language through the
study of the sound and structure of spoken language
- Historical
linguistics - the development of language and how
it changes over the course of time
- Geolinguistics
- the study of the effects of historical factors on language, including
spheres of influence, multilingualism, class language, jargon, and slang
- Psycholinguistics
- how language is implemented in the brain
- Sociolinguistics
- language and the structure of society
- Applied
linguistics - teaching, translation, etc.
- Computational linguistics - computer processing of human language
- Comparitive linguistics - compares the structures of two or more languages
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