Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields: the study of language form, of language meaning, and of language in context.
The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the systems of rules that are followed by speakers or a language. It encompassesmorphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds, nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.
The study of language meaning is concerned with how language users make the inferences required to understand another's speech, how meaning is assigned and processed, and ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).
Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language change;sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.
Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and influence its study. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on work from such diverse fields as psychology, speech-language pathology, informatics, computer science, philosophy, biology, human anatomy,neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, and acoustics.
Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studied
Alongside the structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics. These fields are distinguished by the kinds of nonlinguistic factors that they consider:
- Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)
- Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.
- Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.
- Computational linguistics, the study of computational implementations of linguistic structures.
- Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
- Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.
- Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
- Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.
- 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.
- Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.
- Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.
- Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
- Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.
Semiotics is not a discipline within linguistics; rather, it investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.
History
Main article: History of linguistics
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 Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to.Pāṇini 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 Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, however, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (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.
Western linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and critic. The sophists and Socratesintroduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography,dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). 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"); andJohannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e. nonhistorical) explanations for language form.
In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field ofanthropology in the United States,[20][21] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia and much of Europe.
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 byLeonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 60s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such asTransformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and Lexical Functional Grammar(LFG). 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 formal approaches.
[edit]Schools of study
There are a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion might be attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists by contrast view the structure of language as being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new information in discourse.
[edit]Generative grammar
Main article: Generative grammar
During the last half of the 20th century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural languages. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. Formal linguistics remains the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,[22] though Chomsky's writings have also gathered much criticism.
[edit]Cognitive linguistics
Main article: Cognitive linguistics
In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff, linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics posit that language is an emergent property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been the subject of much criticism.[23] In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive linguistics includecognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from embodied experienceconstitute the basic units of language.
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