What Is Linguistics.
Linguistics is the study of human language. Knowledge of linguistics, however, is different from knowledge of a language. Just as a person is able to drive a car without understanding the inner workings of the engine, so, too, can a speaker use a language without any conscious knowledge of its internal structure. And conversely, a linguist can know and understand the internal structure of a language without actually speaking it.
WHAT DO LINGUISTS STUDY?
A linguist, then, is not an individual who speaks many languages, more accurately called a "polyglot" or a "bi-" or "multilingual". Rather, linguists are concerned with the grammar of a language, with the social and psychological aspects of language use, and with the relationships among languages, both historical and in the present. As in any complex field, there are several major divisions within the field of linguistics.
Formal Linguistics
Formal linguistics is the study of grammar, or the development of theories as to how language works and is organized. Formal linguists compare grammars of different languages, and by identifying and studying the elements common among them, seek to discover the most efficient way to describe language in general. The ultimate goal of this process is a "universal grammar"--the development of a theory to explain how the human brain processes language. Within formal linguistics, there are three main schools of thought:
--Traditional. The traditional approach to grammar is the one that is probably most familiar to the majority of us. A typical definition in a traditional grammar is "A noun is a person, place, or thing." "Adjective clause," "noun clause," "complement," and "part of speech" are other familiar terms from traditional grammars.
--Structural. Structural linguistics, a principally American phenomenon of the 1940's, was heavily influenced by the work of B.F. Skinner. Of the areas of linguistic study to be described below, structuralists are principally concerned with phonology, morphology and syntax. Structuralists exclude meaning from the study of language, focusing instead on linguistic forms and their arrangement. "Phoneme," "morpheme," "form class" and "constituent" are terms typically used in structural grammars.
--Generative/transformational. The generative/transformational approach to the description of language was introduced in 1957 with the publication of Noam Chomsky's SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES. Generative approaches include meaning in the study of language, and look for patterned relationships between "deep" structures of meaning and "surface" structures of linguistic forms actually used by the speaker. Since Chomsky's original proposals in 1957, there have been numerous elaborations and alternative theories (some discussed by Newmeyer, 1980), so that today, a number of approaches are being considered.
The following are the principal areas of study within formal linguistics:
--Phonetics. Phonetics is the study of the sounds of language and their physical properties. Phonetics describes how speech sounds are produced by the vocal apparatus (the lungs, vocal cords, tongue, teeth, etc.) and provides a framework for their classification. Two practical applications of phonetics are speech synthesis, the reproduction by mechanical means of the sounds produced in human language; and speech recognition, the developing capacity of computers to comprehend spoken input.
--Phonology. Phonology is concerned with the analysis and description of the meaningful sounds uttered in the production of human language, and how those sounds function in different languages. The letter "p," for example, can be pronounced in several different ways: an English speaker interprets these different pronunciations as one sound, whereas a speaker of some other language might interpret the pronunciations as two or more sounds. It is phonological analysis such as this that allows the foreign language teacher to pinpoint and correct students' pronunciation difficulties in the foreign language classroom.
--Morphology. Morphology is the study of the structure of words. Morphologists study minimal meaning units, or morphemes, and investigate the possible combinations of these units in a language to form words. For example, the word "imperfections" is composed of four morphemes: im+perfect+ion+s. The root, "perfect," is transformed from an adjective into a noun by the addition of "ion," made negative with "im" and pluralized by "s."
--Syntax. Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences. Syntacticians describe how words combine into phrases and clauses and how these combine to form sentences. For example, "I found a coin yesterday" is embedded as a relative clause in "The coin which I found yesterday is quite valuable." Syntacticians describe the rules for converting the first sentence into the second.--Semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning in language. The goal of semantic study is to explain how sequences of language are matched with their proper meanings and placed in certain environments by speakers of the language. A demonstration of the importance of meaning to the grammar of a language is the following well-known example from Chomsky (1957): Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. This is a grammatical sentence; but because semantic components have been ignored, it is meaningless in ordinary usage.
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