Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Its goal is to find out what language is and how it works, by trying to establish what aspects of grammar are universal to all languages, how languages differ, what systematic 'rules' language users intuitively employ, and how they come to 'know' these rules in the first place. A linguist, then, here refers to a linguistics expert rather than someone who has learned several languages.

Theoretical linguists are concerned with questions about the apparent human 'instinct' to communicate, rather than authorising 'rules' of style or 'correctness' as found in grammar textbooks or popular guides. For example, *dog the is unacceptable in English, but this is not a fact that any native speaker has been taught, because children understand this well before they can follow instruction. It is implicit rules such as this, not those prescribed by an authority, that are of primary concern in linguistics.

Applied linguists may bring insights from linguistic research to approach real-life problems, in such fields as foreign language teaching, speech therapy and translation. Additionally, to find evidence for a theory or test a hypothesis, 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 study of linguistics

Core areas

Some linguists, such as theoretical syntacticians, focus on one 'core' area. Research may involve developing a model to describe and predict the workings of the system of language itself, rather than explaining how people happen to use language. These 'core' fields together constitute the grammar of a language - not a list of rules in a book, but components the system requires for communication.

• Syntax is the study of how units such as words combine into sentences. For example, why is Bill ate the fish acceptable, but Ate the Bill fish is not?

• 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. Although there are potentially infinitely many 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 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.

Fields of linguistics

To factor out circumstances that may obscure fundamental insights, many linguists may choose to focus on language as presumed to occur in an idealised, adult, monolingual native speaker - prerequisites often found in mainstream generative linguistics. In contrast, linguists whose research moves away from any of these four criteria may concentrate on fields arranged around the study of language use and learning:

• Language acquisition, theoretical or applied study of how linguistic knowledge emerges in children and adults as first or subsequent languages, whether naturalistically (without instruction) or in the classroom;

• Cognitive linguistics, the study of language as part of general cognition;

• 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;

• Stylistics, the study of how language differs according to use and context, e.g. advertising versus speechmaking;

• Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistics to speech-language pathology. This involves treating individuals whose linguistic development is atypical or impaired.

• 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 narrowly constrained, then languages must be very similar. If human linguistic ability is unconstrained, then languages might vary greatly.

• 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). This involves finding universal properties of language and accounting for a language's development and origins (see also below and comparative linguistics).

• Contextual linguistics may include the study of linguistics in interaction with other academic disciplines.

• Anthropological linguistics considers the interactions between linguistics and culture.

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

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include neurolinguistics, 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 these results 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 also used in many other areas.

Many areas of applied linguistics involve computer applications. 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 fruitful areas which have come to the forefront in recent years . They have had a great influence 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, 'applied linguistics' is sometimes used to refer to 'second language acquisition"', but these are distinct fields, in that many researchers spend more time on either theoretical or applied research.

Approach to studying language

Modern linguists' methodologies, assumptions and practices differ significantly from those of past generations.

• Linguistics is descriptive rather than prescriptive: it describes language without judging how people use it.
• As no language is known to have been written before being spoken, linguists consider spoken rather than written language to be the primary focus.
• Most researchers agree that language cannot be learned through imitation; some aspects must be innate.
• Most modern linguistics focuses on language as used today; however, historical linguistics remains an important sub-field.

Prescription and description

Main article: Linguistic prescriptivism

Linguists seek to clarify the nature of language, to describe how people use it, and to find the underlying grammar that speakers unconsciously adhere to. Linguists do not judge what speech is better or worse syntactically, correct or incorrect grammatically, and do not try to prescribe future language directions. Nonetheless, some professionals and many amateurs do try to prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard 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. Speakers of standard American English do follow subject-verb agreement, and thus if the intention is to teach that language, this rule should be taught.

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 academic discipline of linguistics. Often considering themselves speakers of the standard form 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 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" , may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects, or simple conflicts with pet theories.

Prescriptivists often also make linguistically unfounded recommendations that seem plausibly true, but which have little linguistic evidence to support them. For instance, the rule against leaving a preposition at the end of a clause or sentence (such as in I met the professor I wrote to) is commonly believed to be 'correct' English. However, speakers of English not only use final prepositions frequently, indicating that it is perfectly natural English to do so, but bringing the preposition to the front may result in a sentence that could well sound ridiculous to any native speaker of English.

Descriptive linguists, on the other hand, do not accept the prescriptivists' notion of "incorrect usage" in a general sense. They 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.

Innatism

One of the most interesting aspects of language is that normally, young children acquire whatever language is spoken (or signed, in the case of sign language) around them when they are growing up, without apparently having to be deliberately "taught" the language. By contrast, other animals, even highly intelligent primates that are closely related to humans, need very intensive teaching to be taught even a few minimal elements of human language. Therefore, it has been widely concluded that there must be some basic innate property of humans that enables them to acquire language. 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.

Historical linguistics

Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), historical linguistics (or 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 USA, 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.

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 categories.

However, modern linguistics study is largely inspired by the works of Noam Chomsky and his contemporaries. From the 1950s, they initiated new methods in linguistics. This produced explicit theories of grammar - namely, systems that required no reference to other kinds of knowledge. For example, whereas a casual definition of a noun is 'a person, place or thing', Chomsky envisaged a system that could distinguish a noun from any other sort of linguistic unit without needing to know what a person, place or thing is. This approach to uncovering the components of language, rather than investigating the history, is typical of today's research.

In addition, language 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.

History of linguistics

The questions of language, its origin and its nature have been a centre of interest in many civilizations. However, before the 20th century, insights into language mainly involved explaining the grammar of particular languages, or describing changes over time. Such work laid the foundations for an extension of linguistic inquiry into the universals of language. In the 19th century, some scholars tried to establish laws to explain the historical evolution of languages. They were the first persons to consider themselves as linguist. However, modern linguistics much differs from that of the 19th century: its primary purpose is to explain how languages work at one given moment of time, not how they evolved through the centuries, and establishing how languages works through empirical evidence.

References

• Aitchison J (2003) Teach Yourself Linguistics. London: Hodder. 6th edition. ISBN 0-07-142982-4.
• Anderson SR (1985) Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
• Chomsky N. (1966) Cartesian Linguistics: a Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
• Chomsky N, Halle M (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row.
• Cook VJ (2002) Portraits of the L2 User. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Pinker S (1994) The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0-06-095833-2 (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)

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 KR. (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 D
  • (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 W (Ed.) (2003) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Malmkjaer K (1991) The Linguistics Encyclopaedia. Routledge (ISBN 0-415-22210-9)
• Trask RL
  • (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.

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