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Linguistics
Linguistics is the study of language. People who study
language are called linguists.
There are five main parts of linguistics: phonology (the
study of sounds, or phonemes), morphology (the study of
parts of words, like "un-" and "-ing"), syntax (the
study of word order and how sentences are made),
semantics (the study of the meaning of words), and
pragmatics (the study of the unspoken meaning of speech
that is separate from the literal meaning of what is
said; for example if you were to say "I'm cold" when
what you actually want is for someone to turn off the
fan).
There are many ways to use linguistics every day. Some
linguists are theoretical linguists, meaning they study
the theory and ideas behind language, such as historical
linguistics (the study of the history of language, and
how it has changed), or sociolinguistics (the study of
how different groups of people may use language
differently). Some linguists are applied linguists,
meaning they use linguistics to do things, such as
forensic linguistics (which is used in crime
investigations), or computational linguistics (which is
used to help make computers understand languages, such
as the iPhone's Siri application). |
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Linguistics 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 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. Discourse analysis is the study of entire
conversations or texts. |
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Linguistics studies one language next to another to find
similar properties. Doing that makes it possible to find
things shared by all the languages of the world, and
also find out which languages are related to each other.
Linguists who study how languages are structured and how
they work are said to study theoretical linguistics.
Another part of linguistics is involved in understanding
how languages are used in society or in the world.
Sociolinguistics studies how language is used in
society, and historical linguistics studies how
languages change over time and how languages were in the
past. One part of historical linguistics is known as
etymology, where people study the history of words.
The part of linguistics which aims to find out how
languages works in the mind is known as
psycholinguistics. |
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History of Linguistics
Early linguists
The study of language began in India with Pāṇini, the
5th century BC grammarian who wrote about the 3,959
rules of Sanskrit morphology, which described the
different kinds of vowels and consonants Sanskrit had,
as well as verb and noun classes. In the Middle East,
Sibawayh (سیبویه) wrote a book about Arabic in 760 AD
called Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on
Grammar); he was the first known author to talk about
the difference between sounds and phonemes.
Linguistics started in the western world as early as it
did in the East, but western linguistics at that time
was more like philosophy, and less the study of
language. Plato was the first western philosopher to
write about semantics in his Cratylus dialogue, where he
argues that words represent concepts that are eternal
and exist in the world of ideas, and the word etymology
is first used to talk about the history behind a word's
meaning. |
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