Linguistics

Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below:

Synchronic and diachronic – Synchronic study of a language is concerned with its form at a given moment; diachronic study covers the history of a language (group) and its structural changes over time.
Theoretical and applied – Theoretical (or general) linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and theories about universal aspects of language; applied linguistics applies these theories to other fields.
Contextual and independent – Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world: its social function, how it is acquired, how it is produced and perceived. Independent linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language. Terms for this dichotomy are not yet well established—the Encyclopædia Britannica uses macrolinguistics and microlinguistics instead.

Given these dichotomies, scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with independent, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline.

Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as Russ Rymer flamboyantly puts it:

"Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians." 1

Areas of Theoretical Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is often divided into a number of separate areas, to be studied more or less independently. The following divisions are currently widely acknowledged:

Phonetics, the study of the different sounds that are employed across all human languages
Phonology, the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds
Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words
Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences; and
Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts
Historical linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax.
Linguistic Typology, the study of the grammatical features that are employed across all human languages
Stylistics, the study of style in languages

The independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged, however, and nearly all linguists would agree that the divisions overlap considerably. Nevertheless, each sub-area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.

At the beginning of 21st century, Su Cheng Zhong gave a new answer of what is 'Linguistics'. The key issue of linguistics is how much information we can enjoyed during our life span. From the study of Neanderthal, the mystery of why the ancient Grecian had such great creativity and what is the motivation of Great Vowel Shift, he believes that the increasing of phonetic pattern is the main reason of linguistic developing. Comparing the old linguistics theory, this theory believe that all the branches of Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Historical linguistics, Linguistic Typology and Stylistics depends on one reason that is to increasing the number of phonetic patterns. A phonetic pattern does not defined by any alphabetic letters, like 'syllables'. Phonetic pattern was defined by the lasting time of one phonetic or sonic signal. As both from the sender to the hearer it needs 250msec to complete a sound, so this is the key reason to define the unit of our pronunciation. Within 250msec, one can heard only one consonant, one vowel or one consonant-vowel mixer properly. The words 'sprint' is classified as one 'syllable' but it takes more than 250msec to be heard clearly, so it is classified more than one phonetic pattern. According the International Phonetic Symbols, current English have 20 consonants and 20 vowels roughly, so the English has 20C¡Á20V+20C+20V=440, that is to say English has 440 phonetic patterns theoretically. This language will accept no phonetic pattern beyond this limit. The unit of syllable is some times a phonetic pattern, other times a combination of few phonetic patterns. So the length of time for syllables are irregular or alterable. Regular lasting time is the key concern of taking the unit of phonetic pattern. For we want to know how much information can be enjoyed during our lifetime. While the ancient Grecian stressed on that a sound should be heard by the back row in parliament. Only a vowel could fulfil this arrangement, so they separate the pronunciation as syllable that with one vowel ribbed with consonants. They didn't care how long they spend on it. We know that the Phoenician invented the alphabetic writing system. While, their alphabetic letters had no vowels. It is strange, for linguists found that without vowels, the consonants are hard to be heard. Then how can a nation, used to struggle with the wild ocean having such a language? The answer is that their speaking language did have vowels, only they didn't regard that vowels were also an information carrier, so they didn't give them any writing figure. In other word, they regard 'da', 'di', 'do', 'dai' etc. as the same 'D'. Under such an articulate system, to classify a sound is very simple. Every alphabetic letter may represent a sound in a word; it took 250msec in time. There were only 22 phonetic patterns in their language, any phonetic pattern out of this limited would not be acceptable for them. When the Grecian learned alphabetic letters from Phoenician, they invented some letter for vowels. It was a great development, for they divided a sound of 'D' into many sounds as 'da', 'di', 'do' and 'dai'. So they had phonetic patterns several times more than Phoenician had. By this means, the Grecian would have a faster information transmitting and thinking speed than the Phoenician would have. That is the reason of the great creativity of Grecian and also the reason of the disappearing of Neanderthal. With the new unit of phonetic pattern, we may introduce mathematics into linguistics and other branch of social science studies. We know that the computer use only two codes to describe the whole universe. Can people using two phonetic symbols, for instance A and B to describe the world too? Definitely, they can. The only different is that the expressing speed may be very slow. We know that English has 440 different phonetic patterns, supposing there are only 440 different things waiting to be expressed. The English speaker can easily use each phonetic pattern to indicate each of those different things. While the two phonetic patterns' speaker, some times has to use nine phonetic patterns to express one of those different things, for 2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2¡Á2>440. Just imaging, English say ' I ', correspondingly, the two phonetic patterns' speaker perhaps must say 'abbabbaaa'. While, what if the English speaker gives out four to five phonetic patterns in one second? We not say a faster expressing language is a smart language, but obviously it is a language with faster thinking speed. The reason is that as our thinking system is a sort of 'speaking in mind' so a faster expressing system means a faster thinking speed. Just imaging, English speaker using 5¡Á250=1250msec to finish a sentence, at the end, what is in his mind is the idea of this sentence. While at the same time the two phonetic patterns' speaker gets only one ninth of the same idea. From psychology we know that a word like 'abbabbaaa' is much harder to remember than 'I'. So the key issue is how to find out several thousand but 440 phonetic patterns for a language. Musician gives us some new idea. For in a song we can pronounce every syllable or phonetic pattern in eight or sixteen different tones. Once we recognize the tone as information carrier, then the phonetic patterns would increase several times. Some tone languages have set examples for English, although their tones are not fully exploited. Another aspect of this theory is that it gives an idea of legality of international language. Which language will be the best and legal language for a globalization age? Two points are the most concerned. The first one is that it could describe clearer idea than the rest languages. The second one is that it must easier to learn than the rest of languages. From the view of phonetic patterns, we found a language with more phonetic patterns will be the suitable language. From common sense we know that only smaller pixels could describe the information in large pixels. In language, the fact is that a language with more phonetic patterns will automatically turned to be smaller or shorter in pronunciation. Let us check the word 'pork', it was explained as 'the meat of pig', what if we use 'pig meat' instead 'pork'? It will be no different, the only thing inconvenient is that for 'pork' we use less phonetic patterns to express the same idea, therefor we may save the oral actions and energy. On the contrary, for the 'pig meat' we use more phonetic patterns. For a butcher, he may express the idea of 'pork' thousand times, that means he will save thousand phonetic patterns in one day by using 'pork' not 'pig meat'. On the other hand, rarely some one using the meat of donkey, therefor, we didn't design a single word for this idea. That means to say, when we design a language, the first thing to concern is give the high frequency idea shorter pronouncing style, while the rarely used idea, we have no choice, but give them a longer pronouncing style. If only the phonetic patterns increased sharply, then the less high frequent idea and some of the rarely used idea will turn to be shorter, for people are lazy. If only they have the chance to make the express shorter, they will not chose the longer one. A language with more phonetic pattern will always express a word in a language that have less phonetic patterns easily. The key issue is that it has shorter pronouncing system, therefor easy to put a group short word together as a compound or semantic word. Suppose a language has the word of 'pig' as 'pi' and the word of 'meat' as 'me', they could put them easily as 'pime' to indicate the idea of 'pork', while using the same phonetic patterns as English. Therefor it is unnecessary to create a word like 'pork' in English. The language user will understand it automatically, not like English speaker has to remember a new word like 'pork'. From this we know the design of word 'pork' is saving phonetic patterns or oral actions, under the condition of keeping a new word 'pork' in mind. If a language has much more phonetic patterns than English does, obviously it will not have a word like 'pork' in its dictionary, not only this, all the words that can be separated into few words could be disappeared. That means to say, in this language, they have much less words to remember than English does, while it express the same knowledge field as English and may be more. We know when people learn a word, the more times to repeat it, the clearer he remember it. A language with less word means the speaker will repeat it more times than a language with more words. If such a language has only 1/10 of the words of English has, then the speaker will repeat their words ten times as English speaker does. There are some English dictionaries that employed 5000 common words to explain all the few hundred thousands entry in it. It says that words could explain each other, but to explain all the words in a certain language, it at least has 5000 basic words. On the other hand, since every entry in such a dictionaries can be explain by a sentence that created by the 5000 words, then we can pick up all the key words in that sentence and put them together to create a self explained word for this entry. For it just like what we have done for the word 'alto'. Let lowest + female +voice = alto. If every such compound word is made by two common explaining words, then 5000 explaining words can create 5000¡Á5000=25000000 such word. Far more than any human language has. The explanation in dictionary of 'alto' is the 'lowest female voice'. Let the 'lo'=lowest, 'fe'=female and 'vo'=voice, then we can use 'lofevo' to replace the word 'alto'. Although they spend roughly the same length of time to pronounce it, yet the 'lofevo' has some property that 'alto' hasn't. Supposing, we need a word as 'lowest male voice', and the word 'male' is as short as 'ma' then, we can easily write a word as 'lomavo' without any explanation, any one will accept it, no need to create a word as English 'basso'. Imagining a language has a word as the 'lowest girl's voice' while the word 'girl' is indicated as 'gi' then we may easily write a word as 'logivo'. This demonstrated what we said before that a language with more phonetic patterns would make clearer idea easier to learn than a language with less phonetic patterns. For the language that has more phonetic patterns will always translate the words of a language with less phonetic patterns automatically, while the later could not do the same job. It gives us the legal idea that the language that has utmost phonetic patterns will be the best language for international language. Under new system, grammar is a sort of reducing oral actions or phonetic patterns. When we discussing the word 'pork' we found that we squeezed two ideas or meanings into one form; putting 'pig' and 'meat' into the form of 'pork'. Now in the tense we put an action and a time into one form. The word 'placed' is an action of 'put' and a time symbol of 'ed'. For the plural noun, we know teeth would spend less phonetic pattern than toothes. To prove it you may repeat these two words several times and watch the clock. For the irregular verb it can be proved too. The word 'took' will save phonetic pattern than the word 'taked'. Repeating these two words several times will also prove it. From the Great Vowel Shift, English had recognized tones as information carrier gradually. It started from the recognition of long and short vowels. The intention of long and short vowels was no other than the expectation of creating more phonetic patterns. Supposing some one wanted using the phonetic pattern of 'do' to indicated two different things or meanings, what could he do? The only way was make one 'do' longer and the other shorter in order to discriminate the two 'do's. Yet after a long time of practice, people found that the long vowels are not so long and the short vowels not so short, yet indeed they are some thing in different. What is the real different? It is the tone. The best way to describe it is by the help of musical notes, such as 1=do, 2=re, 3=mi etc. The tone of word 'to' roughly sounds like 55, while the tone of word 'too' sounds like 51. In the word 'aha' the first phonetic pattern 'a' sounds like 214, the second phonetic pattern 'ha' sounds like 51. In the sentences: 'Can you help me?' and 'You can come to see me.' the first 'can' sounds like 214 while the second 'can' sound like '51'.

Diachronic Linguistics

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

Applied Linguistics

Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within languages and among all languages, as a group, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Usually applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but linguistics is used in other areas, as well. Speech synthesis and speech recognition, for example, use linguistic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers.

Contextual Linguistics

Contextual linguistics is that realm where linguistics interacts with other academic disciplines. Whereas core theoretical linguistics studies languages for their own sake, the interdisciplinary areas of linguistic consider how language interacts with the rest of the world. However, that rather depends upon their world-view.

Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are where the social sciences that consider societies as whole and linguistics interact.

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

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics is the where the medical sciences meets linguistics.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, stratificational linguistics, and cognitive science.

Individual Speakers, Language Communities, and Linguistic Universals

Linguists also differ in how broad a group of language users they study. Some analyze a given speaker's language or language development in great detail. Some study language pertaining to a whole speech community, such as the language of all those who speak Black English Vernacular. Others try to find linguistic universals that apply, at some abstract level, to all users of human language everywhere. This latter project has been most famously advocated by Noam Chomsky, and it interests many people in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is thought that universals in human language may reveal important insight into universals about the human mind.

Prescription and Description

Main article: Prescription and description.

Most work currently done under the name "linguistics" is purely descriptive; the linguists seek to clarify the nature of language without passing value judgments or trying to chart future language directions. Nonetheless, there are many professionals and amateurs who also prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard out for all to follow.

Whereas prescriptivists might want to stamp out what they perceive as "incorrect usage", descriptivists seek to find the root of such usage; they might describe it simply as "idiosyncratic", or they may discover a regularity that the prescriptivists do not like because it is perhaps too new or from a dialect they do not approve of.

Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) approach.

Speech versus Writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study, than writing. Reasons for this standpoint include:

Speech appears to be a human universal, whereas there are and have been many cultures that lack written communication;
People learn to speak and process oral language more easily and earlier than writing;
A number of cognitive scientists argue that the brain has an innate "language module", knowledge of which is thought to come more from studying speech than writing.

Of course, linguists agree that 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 corpuses of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find.

Furthermore, the study of writing systems themselves falls under the aegis of linguistics.

Research Areas of Linguistics

Interdisciplinary Linguistic Research

Important Linguists and Schools of Thought

Early scholars of linguistics include Jakob Grimm, who devised the principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation known as Grimm's Law in 1822, Karl Verner, who discovered Verner's Law, August Schleicher who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" and Johannes Schmidt who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872. Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics. 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 by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant one from the 1960s.

Other important linguists and schools include Michael Halliday, whose systemic functional grammar is pursued widely in the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, and Japan; Dell Hymes, who developed a pragmatic approach called The Ethnography of Speaking; George Lakoff, Leonard Talmy, and Ronald Langacker, who were pioneers in cognitive linguistics; Charles Fillmore and Adele Goldberg, who are associated with construction grammar; and linguists developing several varieties of what they call functional grammar, including Talmy Givon and Robert Van Valin, Jr..

Representation of Speech

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a system used to write down and reproduce the sounds of human speech.
SAMPA, an ASCII-only transcription for the IPA used by some authors. See also the SAMPA home page.

Narrower Conceptions of "Linguistics"

"Linguistics" and "linguist" may not always be meant to apply as broadly as above. In some contexts, the best definitions may be "what is studied in a typical university's department of linguistics", and "one who is a professor in such a department." Linguistics in this narrow sense usually does not refer to learning to speak foreign languages (except insofar as this helps to craft formal models of language.) It does not include literary analysis. Only sometimes does it include study of things such as metaphor. It probably does not apply to those engaged in such prescriptive efforts as found in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style; "linguists" usually seek to study what people do, not what they should do. One could probably argue for a long while about who is and who is not a "linguist".

Relevant Wikipedia Articles

History of linguistics
Linguistics basic topics, a page designed to organize information about linguistics on Wikipedia
List of linguistic topics
List of linguists
Philology, the study of ancient texts and languages
Structuralism

References

Textbooks

Akmajian, Adrian et al (2001), Linguistics, 5th ed., MIT Press. (ISBN 0262511231)
Lyons, John (1995), Linguistic Semantics, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0521438772)
O'Grady, William D., Michael Dobrovolsky & Francis Katamba [eds.] (2001), Contemporary Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0582246911) – Lower Level
Taylor, John R. (2003), Cognitive Grammar, Oxford University Press. (ISBN 0198700334)
Ungerer, Friedrich & Hans-Jorg Schmid (1996), An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics, Longman. (ISBN 0582239664)

Academic works

Fauconnier, Gilles
- (1995), Mental Spaces, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0521449499)
- (1997), Mappings in Thought and Language, Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0521599539)
- & Mark Turner (2003), The Way We Think, Basic Books. (ISBN 0465087868)
  - Rymer, p. 48, quoted in Fauconnier and Turner, p. 353
Sampson, Geoffrey (1982), Schools of Linguistics, Stanford University Press. (ISBN 0804711259)
Sweetser, Eve (1992), From Etymology to Pragmatics, repr ed., Cambridge University Press. (ISBN 0521424429)

Popular Works

Deacon, Terrence (1998), The Symbolic Species, WW Norton & Co. (ISBN 0393317544)
Pinker, Steven
- (2000), The Language Instinct, repr ed., Perennial. (ISBN 0060958332)
- (2000), Words and Rules, Perennial. (ISBN 0060958405)
Rymer, Russ (1992), Annals of Science in "The New Yorker", 13th April

Reference Books

Aronoff, Mark & Janie Rees-Miller [eds.] (2003), The Handbook of Linguistics, Blackwell Publishers. (ISBN 1405102527)
Malmkjaer, Kirsten [ed.] (2004), The Linguistics Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Routledge. (ISBN 0415222109)
Skeat, Walter W. (2000), The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology, repr ed., Diane. (ISBN 0788191616)