Linguistics - What is Linguistics ?

What is liguistics ?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics ams to understand how the language faculty of the mind works and to escribe how language itself works. Linguist observe patterns within a language and across language to try to understand what principle drive our brains’ cpmprehension and production of language.

The art of linguistics that is concerned iwth the structure of language is divided into a number of subfields :

Phonetics – Phonetics focuses on the physical sounds of speech. Phonetics covers speech perception (how the brain discerns sounds), acoustics (the physical qualities of sounds as moveent through air ), and articulation (voice production through the movements of the lungs, tongue, lips, and other articulators), This research plays  a large part in computer speech recognition and synthesis.

Phonology – Phonology is the study of the grammatical system speakers use to represent language in the real world, which organises syllable structure, intonation, tone, and – in sign language – hand movements. A phonologist divides an example, English of language into its phonological components : for example, English cat appears as single syllable arranging the segments [k[,[æ][6] and [t].[7] Although there are potentially infenitely many ways of producing a sound, shaping a letter or moving a hand, phonlogist 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.

Morphology – Morphology examines how linguistics units such as words anfd their subparts ( such as prefixes and suffixes ) combine. One example of this is the observation that while walk+ed is acceptable, *ed+walk is not, in English, while in toher languages such affixes can be found wholly inside the stems they attach to.

Syntax – the study of sentence structure English and many western European languages habe a phenomenon called “wh – movement.” Wh-words are the question words who, which, what, where, when,why, and how. Think about the sentence “ I eat an apple” as a possible response to the question “what do you eat ?” The word wat coresponds to apple, but t shows up at the beginning of the sentence.

In many languages, thought, the wh-word corresponds to the  same position as the word it refers to. For example, in chinese you would say “I eat apple” in response to “ you eat what ?” We say then that in languages like English, wh-movement has occured and the structure is : “what do you eat what ?” A lotof other properties of a language are predicted by whther it has wh – movement pr not, ut we’ll have to leaave those to another time!

Semantics - the study of meaning and formalizing it into a logical form

English and many western European languages have a phenomenon called “wh-movement.” wh-words are the question words who, which, what, where, when, why, and how. Think about the sentence “I eat an apple” as a possible response to the question “What do you eat?” The word what corresponds to apple, but it shows up at the beginning of the sentence. In many languages, though, the wh-word corresponds to the same position (called in-situ) as the word it refers to. For example, in Chinese you would say “I eat apple” in response to “You eat what?” We say then that in languages like English, wh-movement has occurred and the structure is:

 In other hand, the part of linguistics also called as Pure Linguistics

Linguists also study the way that language is used, and this can cover a very broad range of subjects, since language enters almost every area of human activity. Examples include:

Psycholinguistics - the study of how language manifests in the brain

Psycholinguists carry out experiments to observe the reaction of the brain’s different areas to different stimuli, and they’ll try to relate the findings to the more abstract linguistic theories.

An example is tracking people’s eye movements when they read the sentence “The old man the boat.” This is known as a garden path sentence, because readers are led down a “false path.” The reader does a double take once s/he reaches “the”, having expected a verb to appear. The second time around, the reader realizes that “man” is a verb and then parses the sentence correctly. These garden path sentences provide insight into how sentence parsing occurs in the brain.

Historical Linguistics - the study of how languages change across time

Historical linguists may work in language specific areas, carrying out what is calledreconstruction. Just as evolutionary biologists compare features of related organisms to reconstruct their common ancestor, historical linguists do the same with related languages, under the important fact that languages change regularly.

As a simple example, f’s at the beginning of English words correspond to p’s at the beginning of Latin words if neither is borrowed from another language (father : pater,fish : pisces, pellis : felt, pes : foot). Using reconstructions, historical linguists will try to trace migration patterns and make inferences about the prehistoric culture, triangulating with results by geneticists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Historical linguists might also look at what patterns exist in language change and seek to explain why these patterns exist.

 and the history of languages;

Applied linguistics (using linguistic knowledge to help in real-world situations like language teaching); Applied linguistics - the study of applying linguistics to real-life situations

An applied linguistic will likely work in fields such as such as language education, translation, or language policy. For example, an applied linguist may also carry out research in first and second language acquisition in order to figure out effective and efficient ways to teach language in school settings.

Sociolinguistics - the study of the intersection of language with society .Sociolinguists might look at attitudes toward different linguistic features and its relation to class, race, sex, etc. For example, one of the fathers of sociolinguistics, William Labov, carried out an experiment in New York City in which he visited three department stores--a low end one (S. Klein), a mid-end one (Macy’s), and a high-end one (Saks Fifth Avenue)--and inquired where a department was in order to prompt the answer “fourth floor.”

The higher end the store, the more likely the “r” was pronounced, and when asked to repeat, it was only Saks Fifth Avenue and Macy’s where the “r” became much more likely to be pronounced the second time around. The study also had implications for the ability in different communities to code switch to a prestige dialect.




Sources :

https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics-2013-release/branches/syntax
https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/all-about-linguistics-2013-release/branches
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Linguistics

http://blog.cambridgecoaching.com/what-is-linguistics-intro-to-branches-of-linguistics