What_is_linguistics?

Short answer: "The scientific study of human language".

Longer answer: Linguistics, like biology or physics or anthropology or
psychology, can be many different things.
As usual, the traditional division into named subdisciplines is partly logical and
partly historical. Most research topics are inter- or trans-disciplinary, often
reaching outside of the traditional boundaries of linguistics as well as across
traditional subdisciplines. But you should learn the traditional nomenclature -- it
will teach you something about speech and language, as well as about the history
and sociology of the people who have studied speech and language.
One way to divide linguistics into different
subdisciplines is in terms of the level of language being studied. There are six
traditional levels on the way from sound to meaning:
Phonetics : Speech as a physical process.
Phonology : Systems of linguistic sound structure.
Morphology: The structure of words.
Syntax : The structure of phrases and sentences.
Semantics : The meaning of words and phrases.
Pragmatics : How speakers and writers use language to communicate.
And then there's the lexicon , which is left out of the traditional levelology but is
worth adding: the inventory of morphemes and words and fixed phrases.
An alternative -- and larger! -- set of divisions looks at connections between
linguistics and applications or motivations:
Theoretical linguistics: Basic principles.
Historical linguistics: Language change and the reconstruction of linguistic history.
Psycholinguistics : Psychology of language; language learning and language
processing.
Computational linguistics: Algorithms for computer analysis of text and speech.
Sociolinguistics : Language in society.
Dialectology : Geographical and social variation in language.
... and so on ...
The first set of six categories -- from
phonetics to pragmatics -- divides up the study of the linguistic system itself. Each
category focuses on a different level of description and analysis. Speech
communication depends on conventional connections between sound and meaning.
To understand how it works, we need to describe and analyze the sounds, the
meanings, and the structures that connect them.
Research areas that span several levels, or deal explicitly with their relationship,
may rate a compound designator. This is especially common with morphology,
since word structure is inevitably tied both to sentence structure -- morphosyntax --
and to word-related effects on sound structure --
morphophonology .
The second list of categories -- theoretical ,
historical , socio- etc. -- tells us about the problems we use linguistic analysis to
engage. Each subdiscipline in this second set can in principle deal with any of the
six levels of description in the first set. Thus sociolinguists study the social
dimensions of pronunciation (phonetics or phonology), word and sentence
structure (morphology and syntax), conversational styles (pragmatics), and so on.
Psycholinguists have studied perception, production and learning of a similar range
of topics. The list of topics related to language or language use is open-ended, and
so the second list could be extended almost indefinitely (language planning,
language documentation , forensic linguistics , neurolinguistics , metrics , and so
on).
Theoretical linguistics is distinguished by focusing not on any external topics, but
rather on the nature of the linguistic system in and of itself. Linguistic theory again
can deal with any of the six levels of analysis. We can also cite the category of
descriptive linguistics , which aims to create systematic descriptions of the facts of
particular languages, and again deals with any or all of the analytic levels.
Follow this link for examples of the distinctions among levels of description.
Follow this one for examples of different connections to external topics.
Here's a long list of linguistics journals, in many cases with links to online
abstracts or full text. As of last year, the Annual Review of Linguistics offers
accessible review articles on many topics.
And here's a short list of a few of the hundreds of specific journals in different
areas of linguistics:
1. Language
2. Linguistic Inquiry
3. Journal of Phonetics
4. Journal of Semantics
5. Journal of Pragmatics
6. Semantics and Pragmatics
7. Computational Linguistics
8. Computer Speech and Language
9. Speech Communication
10. Language Variation and Change
11. International Journal of American Linguistics
12. Journal of Chinese Linguistics
13. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
14. International Journal of Speech, Language, and the Law
Many of these journals now offer on-line access to their content. For example, you
can browse the Journal of Semantics (courtesy of Oxford University Press) to find
the text of an
article by Temple University's Muffy Siegel on the meaning of 'like' in examples
like
She isn't like really crazy or anything, but her and her like five buddies did like
paint their hair a really fake-looking like purple color.
You can browse Computational Linguistics (courtesy of MIT Press) to find an
article by Philip Edmonds and Graeme Hirst presenting "a new computational
model for representing the fine-grained meanings of near-synonyms," which can
tell you whether to translate French
bvue as English "error, mistake, blunder, slip, lapse, boner, faux pas [or] boo-
boo."
You can browse the Journal of Phonetics (courtesy of Academic Press) to find an
article by Louis-Jean Bo, Jean-Louis Heim, Kiyoshi Honda and Shinji Maeda
arguing that Neandertals had a vowel space potentially as large as that of modern
humans, and thus were not anatomically precluded from speaking.
You can browse Language Variation and Change (courtesy of Cambridge
University Press) to find an article by Colette Moore explaining why the pattern of
subject-verb argreement in this letter from Dame Agnes Plumpton to Sir Robert
Plumpton, dated 12 April 1504, was regular and expected for her place and time:
All your servants is in good health, & prayes delygently for your good speed in
your matters. And also it is sayed qat they haue cagments for them qat hath bought
the wood, qat they dare not deals therewith . . .
For each of these articles, you can ask yourself: what levels of linguistic analysis
are discussed? what motivations and applications are intended?
Much of the time, the answer to such questions will be complicated. This shouldn't
be surprising. If we pick a random article (or news story) in some other science, we
won't be surprised to find that it deals with DNA and RNA and proteins, or plants
and animals and climate, or networking and cryptography and complexity theory.
We don't therefore conclude that the distinctions are meaningless or useless -- it's
just that the world is a complicated place.
What is language?
For most linguists, language is the pattern of human speech, and the (implicit)
systems that speaking and listening rely on.
Other phenomena come to be called "language" because of more or less close
connections or analogies to this central case: writing, sign languages, computer
languages, the language of dolphins or bees. The ordinary-language meaning of the
word reflects this process of extension from a speech-related core . The etymology
of the word, from Fr. langue "tongue," makes the same point.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
[lan-guage] (NOUN).
1. a. The use by human beings of voice sounds, and often of written symbols that
represent these sounds, in organized combinations and patterns to express and
communicate thoughts and feelings.
1. b. A system of words formed from such combinations and patterns, used by the
people of a particular country or by a group of people with a shared history or set
of traditions.
2. A nonverbal method of communicating ideas, as by a system of signs, symbols,
or gestures: ``the language of algebra.''
3. Body language.
4. The special vocabulary and usages of a scientific, professional, or other group.
5. A characteristic style of speech or writing: ``ribald language.''
6. a. Abusive, violent, or profane utterance: ``language that would make your hair
curl (W.S. Gilbert).''
6. b. A particular manner of utterance: ``gentle language.''
7. The manner or means of communication between living creatures other than
humans: ``the language of dolphins.''
8. Language as a subject of study.
9. The wording of a legal document or statute as distinct from the spirit.
10. Computer Science. Machine language.
Note that the phenomena named by the extended senses are quite different from
one another. Writing is a system of transcription for speech. Deaf sign languages
are an expression in a different medium of the same underlying human capabilities
and needs as spoken language. Computer languages are artificial systems with
some formal analogies (of debatable significance) to the systems underlying
human speech.
Some linguists think that the boundary between the patterns of spoken language
and other modes of communication is not a sharp one, or even that it is entirely
artificial. For them, the extended senses of the word "language" belong to the same
subject matter as the core sense. A larger proportion of poets, philosophers and
religious thinkers have historically agreed with them, often going on to view
language as magically connected to the world it describes: In the beginning was the
word. ..
But the core of the field of linguistics has always been the analysis of linguistic
structure, and this course will introduce the basic concepts of this disciplinary core.
However, there is much intellectual, practical and human interest in other aspects
of the study of language, and we'll survey these as well.
Connections to other disciplines
Linguistics has many more or less obvious connections with other disciplines,
some of which we've just mentioned. Psychologists study how language is learned
and used. Anthropologists and sociologists examine the role of language in culture
and society. Philosophers are interested in the nature of sense and reference.
Computer scientists try to develop artificial models of the structures and processes
involved in language use. Physiologists want to understand how language is
produced and perceived by the brain, mouth and ear. Criminologists and literary
scholars face the problem of determining the authorship of a particular spoken or
written document.
Some of these connections are made within linguistics itself. For instance, the Penn
linguistics department includes specialists in sociolingustics, psycholinguistics,
historical linguistics and computational linguistics. In other cases, the work may be
carried out within another field, or at least another department -- neurology,
psychology, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, history -- perhaps in
consultation with a card-carrying linguist.
We could continue the list of connections almost indefinitely, and could also
expand each item at length. During the course, we'll point out numerous
connections of this kind.
Some wider conceptual and mathematical connections
In addition to these direct connections of subject matter, linguistics shares
terminology, conceptual approaches, practical techniques and mathematical
methods with other disciplines, often in ways that are less obvious.
We will give only a few illustrative examples here.
Semiotics is the study of signs and signalling systems. It was developed around the
turn of the 20th century by the philosopher C.S. Peirce, the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure
and others. It provides a general framework for thinking about meaning and
communication, and many technical terms for expressing such thoughts. As a
result, semiotic concepts and terminology are used in fields as diverse as
anthropology, computer science and the history of art.
One example of useful semiotic terminology is the opposition among syntax (the
relations among signs in combination), semantics (the relations between signs and
the things they refer to), and pragmatics (the relations between signs and their
users or circumstances of use). These concepts are important in computer science,
as in this book on the semantics of programming languages, as well as in work that
deals with communication among humans.
Another example is the provided by the categories of index (a sign that alludes to
what it signifies through some sort of causal link), icon (a sign that ressembles
what it signifies) and symbol (a sign connected to what it signifies by arbitrary
convention).
Some of the key concepts and techniques of formal language theory were
originally developed by Noam Chomsky , who was a graduate student in
linguistics at Penn in the 1950s, in order to reason about the problems involved in
(natural) language learning. This field has since become part of the standard
curriculum in computer science, where it is applied to the design and analysis of
computer languages, and to other problems in areas ranging from pattern
recognition to DNA analysis. Computational linguistics proper remains a diverse
and lively field, and Penn has always been one of the most active research centers.
The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) has a useful
digital archive of research papers.
Models of speech production and perception are developed both for scientific and
technological reasons. Speech technology has become a large field, with
increasingly broad applications. Much of speech technology involves particular
applications of very general techniques, such as signal processing or statistical
pattern recognition.