Linguistics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)
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Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.
The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the users of a language. It includes the study of morphology (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 and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.
The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This category includes the study of semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).
Linguistics also looks at the broader context in which language is influenced by social, cultural, historical and political factors. This includes the study of evolutionary linguistics, which investigates into questions related to the origins and growth of languages; 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, on 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 intersect with it. 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 and informs work from such diverse fields as acoustics, anthropology, biology, computer science, human anatomy, informatics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech-language pathology.
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definition - context - connotation - communication - conversation - denotation - dictionary - discourse - etymology - expression - euphemism - genre theory - glossary - grammar - language - literature - meaning - mouth - name - metonymy - phrase - political correctness - prefix - printing - proverb - saying - semantics - speech - suffix - text - thesaurus - tongue - term - verbal - vocabulary - writing - word
Linguists
Sapir-Whorf - Noam Chomsky - George Lakoff - Gregory Bateson
See also
See also
- Cognitive science
- Speech-Language Pathology
- History of linguistics
- International Linguistics Olympiad
- Linguistics Departments at Universities
- Summer schools for linguistics
- List of linguists
Branches and fields
Anthropological linguistics, Semiotics, Philology, Discourse, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Cognitive linguistics, Cognitive science, Comparative linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Varieties, Developmental linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Descriptive linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Embodied cognition, Endangered languages.
History of linguistics, Historical linguistics, Intercultural competence, Lexicography/Lexicology, Linguistic typology, Evolutionary linguistics.
Articulatory phonology, Biolinguistics, Computational linguistics, Biosemiotics, Articulatory synthesis, Machine translation, Natural language processing, Speaker recognition (authentication), Speech processing, Speech recognition, Speech synthesis, Concept Mining, Corpus linguistics, Critical discourse analysis, Cryptanalysis, Decipherment, Asemic writing, Grammar Writing.
Forensic linguistics, Global language system, Glottometrics, Integrational linguistics, International Linguistic Olympiad, Language acquisition, Language attrition, Language engineering, Language geography, Metacommunicative competence, Microlinguistics, Natural Language Processing, Neurolinguistics, Orthography, Reading, Second language acquisition, Sociocultural linguistics, Stratificational linguistics, Text linguistics, Writing systems, Xenolinguistics.
