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Sociolinguistics
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Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including
cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. Sociolinguistics
overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics.
It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g.,
ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc., and how creation and
adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social or socioeconomic
classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage
varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by Indian and
Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the early 1900s,
but none received much attention in the West until much later. The study of the social
motivation of language change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model
of the late 19th century. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the 1960s and was
pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Applications of sociolinguistics
• 2 Sociolinguistic variables
• 3 Traditional sociolinguistic interview
• 4 Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics
o 4.1 Speech Community
o 4.2 High prestige and low prestige varieties
o 4.3 Social network
o 4.4 Internal vs. external language
• 5 Differences according to class
o 5.1 Class aspiration
o 5.2 Social language codes
 5.2.1 Restricted code
 5.2.2 Elaborated code
o 5.3 Deviation from standard language varieties
o 5.4 Covert prestige
• 6 Differences according to age groups
• 7 Differences according to geography
• 8 Differences according to gender
o 8.1 Minimal responses
o 8.2 Questions
o 8.3 Turn-taking
o 8.4 Changing the topic of conversation
o 8.5 Self-disclosure
o 8.6 Verbal aggression
o 8.7 Listening and attentiveness
o 8.8 Dominance versus subjection
o 8.9 Politeness
• 9 See also
• 10 Notes
• 11 References
• 12 Further reading
• 13 External links
[edit] Applications of sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics topics
General
Accent (linguistics)
Linguistic pragmatics
Unsolved problems in linguistics
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List of linguists
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For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that a
particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or
professional setting. Sociolinguists might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary,
and other aspects of this sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a
regional dialect.
The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining

language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of
different varieties of language in different social situations.
William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is

especially noted for introducing the quantitative study of language variation and
change,[1] making the sociology of language into a scientific discipline.
Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is
the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's
effect on the society.
[edit] Sociolinguistic variables

Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample population and interview
them, assessing the realisation of certain sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the
ideal sociolinguistic variable to
• be high in frequency,
• have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
• be an integral part of larger structures, and
• be easily quantified on a linear scale.
Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are grammatical
variables and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for phonetic variables are: the
frequency of the glottal stop, the height or backness of a vowel or the realisation of word-
endings. An example of a grammatical variable is the frequency of negative concord
(known colloquially as a double negative).
[edit] Traditional sociolinguistic interview

Sociolinguistic interviews are an integral part of collecting data for sociolinguistic
studies. There is an interviewer, who is conducting the study, and a subject, or informant,
who is the interviewee. In order to get a grasp on a specific linguistic form and how it is
used in the dialect of the subject, a variety of methods are used to elicit certain registers
of speech. There are five different styles, ranging from formal to casual. The most formal
style would be elicited by having the subject read a list of minimal pairs (MP). Minimal
pairs are pairs of words that differ in only one phoneme, such as cat and bat. Having the
subject read a word list (WL) will elicit a formal register, but generally not as formal as
MP. The reading passage (RP) style is next down on the formal register, and the interview
style (IS) is when an interviewer can finally get into eliciting a more casual speech from
the subject. During the IS the interviewer can converse with the subject and try to draw
out of him an even more casual sort of speech by asking him to recall childhood
memories or maybe a near death experience, in which case the subject will get deeply
involved with the story since strong emotions are often attached to these memories. Of
course, the most sought after type of speech is the casual style (CS). This type of speech
is difficult if not impossible to elicit because of the Observer's Paradox. The closest one
might come to CS in an interview is when the subject is interrupted by a close friend or
family member, or perhaps must answer the phone. CS is used in a completely
unmonitored environment where the subject feels most comfortable and will use their
natural vernacular without overtly thinking about it.
[edit] Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics

While the study of sociolinguistics is very broad, there are a few fundamental concepts
on which many sociolinguistic inquiries depend.
[edit] Speech Community
Main article: Speech community
Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete

group of people who use language in a unique and mutually accepted way among
themselves.
Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct

social groups like high school students or hip hop fans, or even tight-knit groups like
families and friends. Members of speech communities will often develop slang or jargon
to serve the group's special purposes and priorities.
[edit] High prestige and low prestige varieties
Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)
Crucial to sociolinguistic analysis is the concept of prestige; certain speech habits are
assigned a positive or a negative value which is then applied to the speaker. This can
operate on many levels. It can be realised on the level of the individual sound/phoneme,
as Labov discovered in investigating pronunciation of the post-vocalic /r/ in the North-
Eastern USA, or on the macro scale of language choice, as realised in the various
diglossias that exist throughout the world, where Swiss-German/High German is perhaps
most well known. An important implication of sociolinguistic theory is that speakers
'choose' a variety when making a speech act, whether consciously or subconsciously.
[edit] Social network
Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand the social
networks in which language is embedded. A social network is another way of describing
a particular speech community in terms of relations between individual members in a
community. A network could be loose or tight depending on how members interact with
each other.[2] For instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community
because all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be a
looser community because students may only interact with the instructor and maybe 1-2
other students. A multiplex community is one in which members have multiple
relationships with each other.[2] For instance, in some neighborhoods, members may live
on the same street, work for the same employer and even intermarry. A 'uniplex' social
network is the opposite - thus a person has social relationships with people from varied
backgrounds and communities.[citation needed] Research has showed that males tend to have
more 'mulitplex' social networks compared to the 'uniplex' female ones.[citation needed]
The looseness or tightness of a social network may affect speech patterns adopted by a
speaker. For instance, Dubois and Hovarth (1998:254) found that speakers in one Cajun
Louisiana community were more likely to pronounce English "th" [θ] as [t] (or [ð] as [d])
if they participated in a relatively dense social network (i.e. had strong local ties and
interacted with many other speakers in the community), and less likely if their networks
were looser (i.e. fewer local ties).[3]
A social network may apply to the macro level of a country or a city, but also to the inter-
personal level of neighborhoods or a single family. Recently, social networks have been
formed by the Internet, through chat rooms, MySpace groups, organizations, and online
dating services.
[edit] Internal vs. external language
In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal language)

and E-language (external language). In this context, internal language applies to the study
of syntax and semantics in language on the abstract level; as mentally represented
knowledge in a native speaker. External language applies to language in social contexts,
i.e. behavioral habits shared by a community. Internal language analyses operate on the
assumption that all native speakers of a language are quite homogeneous in how they
process and perceive language.[citation needed] External language fields, such as
sociolinguistics, attempt to explain why this is in fact not the case. Many sociolinguists
reject the distinction between I- and E-language on the grounds that it is based on a
mentalist view of language. On this view, grammar is first and foremost an interactional
(social) phenomenon (e.g. Elinor Ochs, Emanuel Schegloff, Sandra Thompson).
[edit] Differences according to class

Sociolinguistics as a field distinct from dialectology was pioneered through the study of
language variation in urban areas. Whereas dialectology studies the geographic
distribution of language variation, sociolinguistics focuses on other sources of variation,
among them class. Class and occupation are among the most important linguistic markers
found in society. One of the fundamental findings of sociolinguistics, which has been
hard to disprove, is that class and language variety are related. Members of the working
class tend to speak less standard language, while the lower, middle, and upper middle
class will in turn speak closer to the standard. However, the upper class, even members of
the upper middle class, may often speak 'less' standard than the middle class. This is
because not only class, but class aspirations, are important.
[edit] Class aspiration
Studies, such as those by William Labov in the 1960s, have shown that social aspirations
influence speech patterns. This is also true of class aspirations. In the process of wishing
to be associated with a certain class (usually the upper class and upper middle class)
people who are moving in that direction socio-economically will adjust their speech
patterns to sound like them. However, not being native upper class speakers, they often
hypercorrect, which involves overcorrecting their speech to the point of introducing new
errors. The same is true for individuals moving down in socio-economic status.
[edit] Social language codes
Basil Bernstein, a well-known British socio-linguist, devised in his book, 'Elaborated and
restricted codes: their social origins and some consequences,' a social code system which
he used to classify the various speech patterns for different social classes. He claimed that
members of the middle class have ways of organizing their speech which are
fundamentally very different from the ways adopted by the working class.
[edit] Restricted code
In Basil Bernstein's theory, the restricted code was an example of the speech patterns
used by the working-class. He stated that this type of code allows strong bonds between
group members, who tend to behave largely on the basis of distinctions such as 'male',
'female', 'older', and 'younger'. This social group also uses language in a way which
brings unity between people, and members often do not need to be explicit about
meaning, as their shared knowledge and common understanding often bring them
together in a way which other social language groups do not experience. The difference
with the restricted code is the emphasis on 'we' as a social group, which fosters greater
solidarity than an emphasis on 'I'.
[edit] Elaborated code
Basil Bernstein also studied what he named the 'elaborated code' explaining that in this
type of speech pattern the middle and upper classes use this language style to gain access
to education and career advancement. Bonds within this social group are not as well
defined and people achieve their social identity largely on the basis of individual
disposition and temperament. There is no obvious division of tasks according to sex or
age and generally, within this social formation members negotiate and achieve their roles,
rather than have them there ready-made in advance. Due to the lack of solidarity the
elaborated social language code requires individual intentions and viewpoints to be made
explicit as the 'I' has a greater emphasis with this social group than the working class.
[edit] Deviation from standard language varieties

A diagram showing variation in the English language by region (the bottom axis) and by
social class (the side axis). The higher the social class, the less variation.
The existence of differences in language between social classes can be illustrated by the
following table:
Bristolian Dialect (lower class) ... Standard English (higher class)

I ain't done nothing ... I haven't done anything
I done it yesterday ... I did it yesterday
It weren't me that done it ... I didn't do it
Any native speaker of English would immediately be able to guess that speaker 1 was
likely of a different social class than speaker 2, namely from a lower social class,
probably from a working class perigee. The differences in grammar between the two
examples of speech is referred to as differences between social class dialects or
sociolects.
It is also notable that, at least in England and Australia, the closer to standard English a
dialect gets, the less the lexicon varies by region, and vice-versa.
[edit] Covert prestige
Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)
It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. However, in

certain groups, such as traditional working class neighborhoods, standard language may
be considered undesirable in many contexts. This is because the working class dialect is a
powerful in-group marker, and especially for non-mobile individuals, the use of non-
standard varieties (even exaggeratedly so) expresses neighborhood pride and group and
class solidarity. There will thus be a considerable difference in use of non-standard
varieties when going to the pub or having a neighborhood barbecue (high), and going to
the bank (lower) for the same individual.
[edit] Differences according to age groups
There are several different types of age-based variation one may see within a population.
They are: vernacular of a subgroup with membership typically characterized by a specific
age range, age-graded variation, and indications of linguistic change in progress.
One example of subgroup vernacular is the speech of street youth. Just as street youth
dress differently from the "norm", they also often have their own "language". The reasons
for this are the following: (1) To enhance their own cultural identity (2) To identify with
each other, (3) To exclude others, and (4) To invoke feelings of fear or admiration from
the outside world. Strictly speaking, this is not truly age-based, since it does not apply to
all individuals of that age bracket within the community.
Age-graded variation is a stable variation which varies within a population based on age.
That is, speakers of a particular age will use a specific linguistic form in successive
generations. This is relatively rare. Chambers (1995) cites an example from southern
Ontario, Canada where the pronunciation of the letter 'Z' varies. Most of the English-
speaking world pronounces it 'zed'; however, in the United States, it is pronounced 'zee'.
A linguistic survey found that in 1979 two-thirds of the 12 year olds in Toronto ended the
recitation of the alphabet with the letter 'zee' where only 8% of the adults did so. Then in
1991, (when those 12 year olds were in their mid-20s) a survey showed only 39% of the
20-25 year olds used 'zee'. In fact, the survey showed that only 12% of those over 30 used
the form 'zee'. This seems to be tied to an American children's song frequently used to
teach the alphabet. In this song, the rhyme scheme matches the letter Z with V 'vee',
prompting the use of the American pronunciation. As the individual grows older, this
marked form 'zee' is dropped in favor of the standard form 'zed'.[4]
People tend to use linguistic forms that were prevalent when they reached adulthood. So,
in the case of linguistic change in progress, one would expect to see variation over a
broader range of ages. Bright (1997) provides an example taken from American English
where there is an on-going merger of the vowel sounds in such pairs of words as 'caught'
and 'cot'.[5] Examining the speech across several generations of a single family, one would
find the grandparents' generation would never or rarely merge these two vowel sounds;
their children's generation may on occasion, particularly in quick or informal speech;
while their grandchildren's generation would merge these two vowels uniformly. This is
the basis of the apparent-time hypothesis where age-based variation is taken as an
indication of linguistic change in progress.
[edit] Differences according to geography

Main article: Dialectology
This section requires expansion.
[edit] Differences according to gender

Men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles. These
differences tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, to say that women
make more minimal responses (see below) than men is akin to saying that men are taller
than women (i.e., men are on average taller than women, but some women are taller than
some men). The initial identification of a women's register was by Robin Lakoff in 1975,
who argued that the style of language served to maintain women's (inferior) role in
society ("female deficit approach").[6] A later refinement of this argument was that gender
differences in language reflected a power difference (O'Barr & Atkins, 1980)
("dominance theory"). However, both these perspectives have the language style of men
as normative, implying that women's style is inferior.
More recently, Deborah Tannen has compared gender differences in language as more
similar to 'cultural' differences ("cultural difference approach"). Comparing
conversational goals, she argued that men have a report style, aiming to communicate
factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more concerned with building
and maintaining relationships.[7] Such differences are pervasive across media, including
face-to-face conversation (e.g., Fitzpatrick, Mulac, & Dindia, 1995: Hannah &
Murachver, 1999), written essays of primary school children (Mulac, Studley, & Blau,
1990), email (Thomson & Murachver, 2001), and even toilet graffiti (Green,
2003).[8][9][10][11]
Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences
tend to be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this, is that
people accommodate their language towards the style of the person they are interacting
with. Thus, in a mixed-gender group, gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A
similarly important observation is that this accommodation is usually towards the
language style, not the gender of the person (Thomson, Murachver, & Green, 2001). That
is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be accommodated to on the basis of their being
polite and empathic, rather than their being male.[12]
[edit] Minimal responses
One of the ways in which the communicative competence of men and women differ is in
their use of minimal responses, i.e., paralinguistic features such as ‘mhm’ and ‘yeah’,
which is behaviour associated with collaborative language use (Carli, 1990).[13] Men, on
the other hand, generally use them less frequently and where they do, it is usually to show
agreement, as Zimmerman and West’s (1975) study of turn-taking in conversation
indicates.[14]
[edit] Questions
Men and women differ in their use of questions in conversations. For men, a question is
usually a genuine request for information whereas with women it can often be a rhetorical
means of engaging the other’s conversational contribution or of acquiring attention from
others conversationally involved, techniques associated with a collaborative approach to
language use (Barnes, 1971).[15] Therefore women use questions more frequently
(Fitzpatrick, et al., 1995; Todd, 1983).[8][16][17] In writing, however, both genders use
rhetorical questions as literary devices. For example, Mark Twain used them in "A War
Prayer" to provoke the reader to question his actions and beliefs.
[edit] Turn-taking
As the work of DeFrancisco (1991) shows, female linguistic behaviour characteristically

encompasses a desire to take turns in conversation with others, which is opposed to men’s
tendency towards centering on their own point or remaining silent when presented with
such implicit offers of conversational turn-taking as are provided by hedges such as "y’
know" and "isn’t it".[18] This desire for turn-taking gives rise to complex forms of
interaction in relation to the more regimented form of turn-taking commonly exhibited by
men (Sacks et al., 1974).[19]
[edit] Changing the topic of conversation
According to Dorval (1990), in his study of same-sex friend interaction, males tend to
change subject more frequently than females. This difference may well be at the root of
the conception that women chatter and talk too much, and may still trigger the same
thinking in some males. In this way lowered estimation of women may arise.[20]
Incidentally, this androcentric attitude towards women as chatterers arguably arose from
the idea that any female conversation was too much talking according to the patriarchal
consideration of silence as a womanly virtue common to many cultures.
[edit] Self-disclosure
Female tendencies toward self-disclosure, i.e., sharing their problems and experiences
with others, often to offer sympathy (Dindia & Allen, 1992; Tannen, 1991:49), contrasts
with male tendencies to non-self disclosure and professing advice or offering a solution
when confronted with another’s problems.[7][21]
[edit] Verbal aggression
Men tend to be more verbally aggressive in conversing (Labov, 1972), frequently using
threats, profanities, yelling and name-calling.[22] Women, on the whole, deem this to
disrupt the flow of conversation and not as a means of upholding one’s hierarchical status
in the conversation. Where women swear, it is usually to demonstrate to others what is
normal behaviour for them.[23]
[edit] Listening and attentiveness
It appears that women attach more weight than men to the importance of listening in
conversation, with its connotations of power to the listener as confidant of the speaker.
This attachment of import by women to listening is inferred by women’s normally lower
rate of interruption — i.e., disrupting the flow of conversation with a topic unrelated to
the previous one (Fishman, 1980) — and by their largely increased use of minimal
responses in relation to men (Zimmerman and West, 1975).[14][24] Men, however, interrupt
far more frequently with non-related topics, especially in the mixed sex setting
(Zimmerman and West,1975) and, far from rendering a female speaker's responses
minimal, are apt to greet her conversational spotlights with silence, as the work of
DeFrancisco (1991) demonstrates.[18]
[edit] Dominance versus subjection
This, in turn, suggests a dichotomy between a male desire for conversational dominance
– noted by Leet-Pellegrini (1980) with reference to male experts speaking more verbosely
than their female counterparts – and a female aspiration to group conversational
participation.[25] One corollary of this is, according to Coates (1993: 202), that males are
afforded more attention in the context of the classroom and that this can lead to their
gaining more attention in scientific and technical subjects, which in turn can lead to their
achieving better success in those areas, ultimately leading to their having more power in a
technocratic society.[26]
[edit] Politeness
Politeness in speech is described in terms of positive and negative face.[27] Positive face
refers to one's desire to be liked and admired, while negative face refers to one's wish to
remain autonomous and not to suffer imposition. Both forms, according to Brown’s study
of the Tzeltal language (1980), are used more frequently by women whether in mixed or
single-sex pairs, suggesting for Brown a greater sensitivity in women than have men to
face the needs of others.[28] In short, women are to all intents and purposes largely more
polite than men. However, negative face politeness can be potentially viewed as weak
language because of its associated hedges and tag questions, a view propounded by
O’Barr and Atkins (1980) in their work on courtroom interaction.[29]
See also Complimentary language and gender.
Semantics

Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
Prescription
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
v•d•e
Semantics is the study of meaning. The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas,
from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a
problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This
problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long
period of time. The word is derived from the Greek word σημαντικός (semantikos),
"significant",[1] from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σήμα
(sema), "sign, mark, token".[2] In linguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or
symbols as used by agents or communities within particular circumstances and
contexts.[3] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, proxemics have
semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written
language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in
other forms of language, there is other semantic content.[4]
The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including
proxemics, lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others, although semantics is a
well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.[5] In philosophy of
language, semantics and reference are related fields. Further related fields include
philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore
complex.
The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in French as
sémantique in Michel Bréal's 1897 book, Essai de sémantique'. In International Scientific
Vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The discipline of Semantics is distinct
from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which is a system for looking at the
semantic reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event,
symbolic or otherwise.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Linguistics
o 1.1 The dynamic turn in semantics
o 1.2 Prototype theory
• 2 Computer science
• 3 Psychology
• 4 References
• 5 See also
o 5.1 Major contributors in the field of Semantics
o 5.2 Linguistics and semiotics
o 5.3 Logic and mathematics
o 5.4 Computer science
[edit] Linguistics
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please
improve this article if you can. (August 2008)
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as

inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (referred
to as texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations
between different linguistic units: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy,
paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentricity /
endocentricity, linguistic compounds. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger
chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning.
Traditionally, semantics has included the study of sense and denotative reference, truth
conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all
of these to syntax.
Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the
semantics of logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel can be broken down into its
constituents (signs), of which the unit loves may serve as both syntactic and semantic
head.
In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in
the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus. In these terms, the syntactic parse of the sentence
above would now indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to
the arguments as the agent, John, and the object, bagel, with a special role for the article
"a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated
with the logical predicate loves (John, bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial
grammar models of syntax. The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated
further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of
Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms
or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.
Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent

variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:
• situation semantics ('80s): Truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based
on context
• generative lexicon ('90s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned
based on context
[edit] The dynamic turn in semantics
In the Chomskian tradition in linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of
semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus,
even novel concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This traditional
view was also unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings,
and semantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time,
and qualia or subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model
was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.[6]
This traditional view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit
that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being
fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics[7] and also in the non-
Fodorian camp in Philosophy of Language.[8] The challenge is motivated by:
• factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or

anaphora (e.g. this x, him, last week). In these situations "context" serves as the
input, but the interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the
output. Thus, the interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the meaning of
sentences is viewed as context change potentials instead of propositions.
• factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but
"a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather
than their attachments to things."[8] This view reflects the position of the later
Wittgenstein and his famous game example, and is related to the positions of
Quine, Davidson, and others.
A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification — meanings

are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word,
"red", its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can
be viewed as compositional.[9] However, the colours implied in phrases such as "red
wine" (very dark), and "red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different.
Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These
instances are contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison with the other
kind of wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons). This view goes back to de
Saussure:
Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir
peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast
with one another. No word has a value that can be identified independently of
what else is in its vicinity.[10]
and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words
as indicators and not carriers of meaning.[11]
An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic

underspecification can be found in the Generative Lexicon model of James Pustejovsky,
who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus
meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.
[edit] Prototype theory
Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The

work of Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff in the 1970s led to a view that natural
categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are
graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent
members.
Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are rooted in
people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world —
meaning is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and
language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment
and bodily experience".[12] A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the
lexicon) will not be identical for different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the
same culture. This leads to another debate (see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis or Eskimo
words for snow).
English nouns are found by language analysis to have 25 different semantic features, each
associated with its own pattern of fMRI brain activity. The individual contribution of
each parameter predicts the fMRI pattern when nouns are considered thus supporting the
view that nouns derive their meaning from prior experience linked to a common
symbol.[13]
[edit] Computer science

In computer science, where it is considered as an application of mathematical logic,
semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.
In this regard, semantics permits programs to be separated into their syntactical part
(grammatical structure) and their semantic part (meaning). For instance, the following
statements use different syntaxes (languages), but result in the same semantic:
• x += y (C, Java, etc.)

• x := x + y (Pascal)
• Let x = x + y (early BASIC)
• x = x + y (most BASIC dialects, Fortran)
• (incf x y) (Common Lisp)
Generally these operations would all perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and
store the result in a variable called 'x'.
Semantics for computer applications falls into three categories:[14]
• Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the

computation it induces when it is executed on a machine. In particular, it is of
interest how the effect of a computation is produced.
• Denotational semantics: Meanings are modelled by mathematical objects that
represent the effect of executing the constructs. Thus only the effect is of interest,
not how it is obtained.
• Axiomatic semantics: Specific properties of the effect of executing the constructs
as expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are
ignored.
The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web through the embedding
of additional semantic metadata; s.a. Web Ontology Language (OWL).
[edit] Psychology
In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of
memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience,
while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or
the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they
keep; the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. In a network
created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links
and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind; and include
"part of", "kind of", and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed
vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to
compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines as
well as natural language processing, neural networks and predicate calculus techniques.
Pragmatics

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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context

contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational
implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy,
sociology, and linguistics.[1] It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only
on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but
also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the
inferred intent of the speaker, and so on.[2] In this respect, pragmatics explains how
language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the
manner, place, time etc. of an utterance.[1] The ability to understand another speaker's
intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic
function is described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the
most challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through experience.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Structural ambiguity
• 2 Origins
• 3 Areas of interest
• 4 Referential uses of language
• 5 Non-referential uses of language
o 5.1 Silverstein's "Pure" Indexes
o 5.2 The Performative
o 5.3 Jakobson's Six Functions of Language
• 6 Related fields
• 7 Pragmatics in philosophy
• 8 Significant works
• 9 See also
• 10 Footnotes
• 11 References
• 12 See also
[edit] Structural ambiguity

The sentence "You have a green light" is ambiguous. Without knowing the context, the
identity of the speaker, and their intent, it is not possible to infer the meaning with
confidence. For example:
• It could mean you are holding a green light bulb.

• Or that you have a green light to drive your car.
• Or it could be indicating that you can go ahead with the project.
Similarly, the sentence "Sherlock saw the man with binoculars" could mean that Sherlock
observed the man by using binoculars; or it could mean that Sherlock observed a man
who was holding binoculars. [3] The meaning of the sentence depends on an
understanding of the context and the speaker's intent. As defined in linguistics, a sentence
is an abstract entity — a string of words divorced from non-linguistic context — as
opposed to an utterance, which is a concrete example of a speech act in a specific context.
The cat sat on the mat is a sentence of English; if you say to your sister on Tuesday
afternoon: "The cat sat on the mat", this is an example of an utterance. Thus, there is no
such thing as a sentence with a single true meaning; it is underspecified (which cat sat on
which mat?) and potentially ambiguous. The meaning of an utterance, on the other hand,
is inferred based on linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the non-linguistic context of
the utterance (which may or may not be sufficient to resolve ambiguity).
[edit] Origins
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article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be
challenged and removed. (April 2009)
Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure.

In many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure,
composed of parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only
in synchronic study, as opposed to examining the historical development of language.
However, it rejected the notion that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the
abstract space of langue. Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being.
While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological

linguistics[clarification needed], pragmatics continues its tradition. Also influential were Franz
Boas, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf.
[edit] Areas of interest

• The study of the speaker's meaning, not focusing on the phonetic or grammatical
form of an utterance, but instead on what the speaker's intentions and beliefs are.
• The study of the meaning in context, and the influence that a given context can
have on the message. It requires knowledge of the speaker's identities, and the
place and time of the utterance.
• The study of implicatures, i.e. the things that are communicated even though they
are not explicitly expressed.
• The study of relative distance, both social and physical, between speakers in order
to understand what determines the choice of what is said and what is not said.
[edit] Referential uses of language

When we speak of the referential uses of language we are talking about how we use signs
to refer to certain items. Below is an explanation of, first, what a sign is, second, how
meanings are accomplished through its usage.
A sign is the link or relationship between a signified and the signifier. The signified is
some entity or concept in the world. The signifier represents the signified. An example
would be:
Signified: the concept cat
Signifier: the word 'cat'"
The relationship between the two gives the sign meaning. This relationship can be further
explained by considering what we mean by "meaning." In pragmatics, there are two
different types of meaning to consider: semantico-referential meaning and indexical
meaning. Semantico-referential meaning refers to the aspect of meaning, which describes
events in the world that are independent of the circumstance they are uttered in. An
example would be propositions such as:
"Santa Claus eats cookies."
In this case, the proposition is describing how Santa Claus eats cookies. The meaning of
this proposition does not rely on whether or not Santa Claus is eating cookies at the time
of its utterance. Santa Claus could be eating cookies at any time and the meaning of the
proposition would remain the same. The meaning is simply describing something that is
the case in the world. In contrast, the proposition, "Santa Claus is eating a cookie right
now," describes events that are happening at the time the proposition is uttered.
Semantico-referential meaning is also present in meta-semantical statements such as:

Tiger: omnivorous, a mammal
If someone were to say that a tiger is an omnivorous animal in one context and a mammal
in another, the definition of tiger would still be the same. The meaning of the sign tiger is
describing some animal in the world, which does not change in either circumstance.
Indexical meaning, on the other hand, is dependent on the context of the utterance and
has rules of use. By rules of use, it is meant that indexicals can tell you when they are
used, but not what they actually mean.
Example: "I"
Whom "I" refers to depends on the context and the person uttering it.
As mentioned, these meanings are brought about through the relationship between the
signified and the signifier. One way to define the relationship is by placing signs in two
categories: referential indexical signs, also called "shifters," and pure indexical signs.
Referential indexical signs are signs where the meaning shifts depending on the context
hence the nickname "shifters." 'I' would be considered a referential indexical sign. The
referential aspect of its meaning would be '1st person singular while the indexical aspect
would be the person who is speaking (refer above for definitions of semantico-referential
and indexical meaning). Another example would be:
"This"
Referential: singular count
Indexical: Close by
A pure indexical sign does not contribute to the meaning of the propositions at all. It is an
example of a ""non-referential use of language.""
A second way to define the signified and signifier relationship is C.S. Peirce's Peircean
Trichotomy. The components of the trichotomy are the following:
1. Icon: the signified resembles the signifier (signified: a dog's barking noise, signifier:
bow-wow)
2. Index: the signified and signifier are linked by proximity or the signifier has meaning
only because it is pointing to the signified
3. Symbol: the signified and signifier are arbitrarily linked (signified: a cat, signifier: the
word cat)
These relationships allow us to use signs to convey what we want to say. If two people
were in a room and one of them wanted to refer to a characteristic of a chair in the room
he would say "this chair has four legs" instead of "a chair has four legs." The former
relies on context (indexical and referential meaning) by referring to a chair specifically in
the room at that moment while the latter is independent of the context (semantico-
referential meaning), meaning the concept chair.
[edit] Non-referential uses of language

[edit] Silverstein's "Pure" Indexes
Michael Silverstein has argued that "nonreferential" or "pure" indexes do not contribute
to an utterance's referential meaning but instead "signal some particular value of one or
more contextual variables."[4] Although nonreferential indexes are devoid of semantico-
referential meaning, they do encode "pragmatic" meaning.
The sorts of contexts that such indexes can mark are varied. Examples include:
• Sex indexes are affixes or inflections that index the sex of the speaker, e.g. the
verb forms of female Koasati speakers take the suffix "-s".
• Deference indexes are words that signal social differences (usually related to
status or age) between the speaker and the addressee. The most common example
of a deference index is the V form in a language with a T-V distinction, the
widespread phenomenon in which there are multiple second-person pronouns that
correspond to the addressee's relative status or familiarity to the speaker.
Honorifics are another common form of deference index and demonstrate the
speaker's respect or esteem for the addressee via special forms of address and/or
self-humbling first-person pronouns.
• An Affinal taboo index is an example of avoidance speech and produces and
reinforces sociological distance, as seen in the Aboriginal Dyirbal language of
Australia. In this language and some others, there is a social taboo against the use
of the everyday lexicon in the presence of certain relatives (mother-in-law, child-
in-law, paternal aunt's child, and maternal uncle's child). If any of those relatives
are present, a Dyirbal speaker has to switch to a completely separate lexicon
reserved for that purpose.
In all of these cases, the semantico-referential meaning of the utterances is unchanged

from that of the other possible (but often impermissible) forms, but the pragmatic
meaning is vastly different.
[edit] The Performative
Main articles: Performative utterance, Speech act theory
J.L. Austin introduced the concept of the Performative, contrasted in his writing with
"constative" (i.e. descriptive) utterances. According to Austin's original formulation, a
performative is a type of utterance characterized by two distinctive features:
• It is not truth-evaluable (i.e. it is neither true nor false)

• Its uttering performs an action rather than simply describing one
However, a performative utterance must also conform to a set of felicity conditions.
Examples:
• "I hereby pronounce you man and wife."

• "I accept your apology."
• "This meeting is now adjourned."
[edit] Jakobson's Six Functions of Language
Roman Jakobson, expanding on the work of Karl Bühler, described six "constitutive
factors" of a speech event, each of which represents the privileging of a corresponding
function, and only one of which is the referential (which corresponds to the context of
the speech event). The six constitutive factors and their corresponding functions are
diagrammed below.
The Six Constitutive Factors of a Speech Event
Context
Message
Addresser---------------------Addressee
Contact
Code
The Six Functions of Language
Referential
Poetic
Emotive-----------------------Conative
Phatic
Metalingual
• The Referential Function corresponds to the factor of Context and describes a

situation, object or mental state. The descriptive statements of the referential
function can consist of both definite descriptions and deictic words, e.g. "The
autumn leaves have all fallen now."
• The Expressive (alternatively called "emotive" or "affective") Function relates to
the Addresser and is best exemplified by interjections and other sound changes
that do not alter the denotative meaning of an utterance but do add information
about the Addresser's (speaker's) internal state, e.g. "Wow, what a view!"
• The Conative Function engages the Addressee directly and is best illustrated by
vocatives and imperatives, e.g. "Tom! Come inside and eat!"
• The Poetic Function focuses on "the message for its own sake"[5] and is the
operative function in poetry as well as slogans.
• The Phatic Function is language for the sake of interaction and is therefore
associated with the Contact factor. The Phatic Function can be observed in
greetings and casual discussions of the weather, particularly with strangers.
• The Metalingual (alternatively called "metalinguistic" or "reflexive") Function is
the use of language (what Jakobson calls "Code") to discuss or describe itself.
[edit] Related fields

There is considerable overlap between pragmatics and sociolinguistics, since both share
an interest in linguistic meaning as determined by usage in a speech community.
However, sociolinguists tend to be more interested in variations within such
communities.
Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social

phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics
describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power,
gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the
study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a
shift in pragmatic force.[6]
According to Charles W. Morris, pragmatics tries to understand the relationship between

signs and their users, while semantics tends to focus on the actual objects or ideas to
which a word refers, and syntax (or "syntactics") examines relationships among signs.
Semantics is the literal meaning of an idea whereas pragmatics is the implied meaning of
the given idea.
Speech Act Theory, pioneered by J.L. Austin and further developed by John Searle,
centers around the idea of the performative, a type of utterance that performs the very
action it describes. Speech Act Theory's examination of Illocutionary Acts has many of
the same goals as pragmatics, as outlined above.
[edit] Pragmatics in philosophy

Pragmatics (more specifically, Speech Act Theory's notion of the performative) underpins
Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender Trouble, she claims that gender
and sex are not natural categories, but socially constructed roles produced by "reiterative
acting."
In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech and
censorship, arguing that censorship necessarily strengthens any discourse it tries to
suppress and therefore, since the state has sole power to define hate speech legally, it is
the state that makes hate speech performative.
Jaques Derrida remarked that some work done under Pragmatics aligned well with the
program he outlined in his book Of Grammatology.
Émile Benveniste argued that the pronouns "I" and "you" are fundamentally distinct from
other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A
Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three
conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance doesn't communicate information
about an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics,
syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The
distinction between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to
refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between
surface structure and deep structure simultaneously. [7]
Psycholinguistics

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challenged and removed. (November 2008)
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and

neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce
language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due
mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research
makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study
how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as
non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become
more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a

grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as
well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.
[edit] Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of
fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several
subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up
human language.
Linguistic-related areas:
• Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within
psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands
these sounds.
• Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between
related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules
(such as plural formation).
• Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined
together to form sentences.
• Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is
concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual
meaning of sentences.
• Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.
Psychology-related areas:
• The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the
extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic
information from patterns in printed text.
• Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn
language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed
to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on
the development of children).
[edit] Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among
other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how
we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and
understand the strings of words we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating
sound with meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in
which animal and human communication have at least some things in common (See
animal communication). Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of
the discussion that follows.
There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic
sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over
time and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (2)
language exists because humans possess an innate ability, an access to what has been
called a "universal grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is "hard-
wired" in the brain. This view claims, for example, that complex syntactic features such
as recursion are beyond even the potential abilities of the most intelligent and social non-
humans. (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer back to
earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I
planted last year is my friend.") The innate view claims that the ability to use syntax like
that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the
grammatical rules that produce recursion. Children acquiring a language, thus, have a
vast search space to explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the
language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such syntax is,
according to the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it
different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.
The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic
theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of
psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts
forth the point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The
second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have begun with Noam
Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959 in the pages of the journal
Language.[1] That review started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in
psychology.
The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro
and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is qualitatively
different from any sort of animal communication. That ability might have resulted from a
favorable mutation (extremely unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills
evolved for other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group needs;
better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion, cooperation, and potential for
survival, BUT precise syntax can only have developed from rudimentary—or no—
syntax, which would have had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at all.
Thus, one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have later been useful
for syntax. In the terminology of modern evolutionary biology, these skills would be said
to be "pre-adapted" for syntax (see also exaptation). Just what those skills might have
been is the focus of recent research—or, at least, speculation.
The con view still holds that language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds
of thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands of years of human
interaction. From that view, syntax in language gradually increased group cohesion and
potential for survival. Language—syntax and all—is a cultural artifact. This view
challenges the "innate" view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested;
the fact that a particular, conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the
world's finite repertoire of languages is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a
genetic constraint on possible forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn't exist or
couldn't be learned.
Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of
psycholinguistics include George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello.
[edit] Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral experiments
incorporating a lexical decision task. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with
some form of linguistic input and asked to perform a task (e.g. make a judgment,
reproduce the stimulus, read a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on
the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often
employed measures of performance. Such experiments often take advantage of priming
effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up
the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.[2]
Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs;
e.g., "book" suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to drink," and so on. Another
experiment might present an active sentence such as "Bob threw the ball to Bill" and a
passive equivalent, "The ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and then ask the question,
"Who threw the ball?" We might then conclude (as is the case) that active sentences are
processed more easily (faster) than passive sentences. More interestingly, we might also
find out (as is the case) that some people are unable to understand passive sentences; we
might then make some tentative steps towards understanding certain types of language
deficits (generally grouped under the broad term, aphasia).[3]
Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the
preferred way for language researchers to discover how language works in the brain. For
example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two
hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy.
Researchers could then study the ways in which the comprehension and production of
language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery
necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission

tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related
potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography
(MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in
their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons
per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). Each type of methodology presents a set of
advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in psycholinguistics.
Computational modeling - e.g. the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed
by Coltheart and colleagues[4] - is another methodology. It refers to the practice of setting
up cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are
useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they
can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex
that they render discursive analysis unreliable. One example of computational modeling
is McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception.[5]
More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing.
Beginning with Rayner (1978)[6] the importance and informativity of eye-movements
during reading was established. Tanenhaus et al.,[7] have performed a number of visual-
world eye-tracking studies to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language.
Since eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language
processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is presented with
linguistic input.
[edit] Issues and areas of research

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the
brain undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model
seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual
hears or sees linguistic input.[8][2]
Recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed light on just
where certain language processes occur in the brain.
There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics, such as whether the

human ability to use syntax is based on innate mental structures or emerges from
interaction with other humans, and whether some animals can be taught the syntax of
human language.
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the
process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. In addition,
it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to
learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages
easily). Thus, sensitive periods may exist during which language can be learned readily. A
great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and
diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the
easier it is to learn more.
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage.
Studies in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for individuals suffering from
aphasia, and further insight into how the brain processes language.
Neurolinguistics
This article is about the interdisciplinary field of neurolinguistics. For the alternative
psychotherapy and communications model, see Neuro-linguistic programming.
Surface of the human brain, with Brodmann areas numbered
An image of neural pathways in the brain taken using diffusion tensor imaging
Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control
the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field,
neurolinguistics draws methododology and theory from fields such as neuroscience,
linguistics, cognitive science, neurobiology, communication disorders, neuropsychology,
and computer science. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds,
bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical
perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics
and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement
the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing
and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by
which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and
psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and
computer modeling.
[edit] History
Broca's area and Wernicke's area
Further information: History of neuroscience
Neurolinguistics is historically rooted in the development in the 19th century of

aphasiology, the study of linguistic deficits (aphasias) occurring as the result of brain
damage.[1] Aphasiology attempts to correlate structure to function by analyzing the effect
of brain injuries on language processing.[2] One of the first people to draw a connection
between a particular brain area and language processing was Paul Broca,[1] a French
surgeon who conducted autopsies on numerous individuals who had speaking
deficiencies, and found that most of them had brain damage (or lesions) on the left frontal
lobe, in an area now known as Broca's area. Phrenologists had made the claim in the
early 19th century that different brain regions carried out different functions and that
language was mostly controlled by the frontal regions of the brain, but Broca's research
was possibly the first to offer empirical evidence for such a relationship,[3][4] and has been
described as "epoch-making"[5] and "pivotal"[3] to the fields of neurolinguistics and
cognitive science. Later, Carl Wernicke, after whom Wernicke's area is named, proposed
that different areas of the brain were specialized for different linguistic tasks, with
Broca's area handling the motor production of speech, and Wernicke's area handling
auditory speech comprehension.[1][2] The work of Broca and Wernicke established the
field of aphasiology and the idea that language can be studied through examining
physical characteristics of the brain.[4] Early work in aphasiology also benefited from the
early twentieth-century work of Korbinian Brodmann, who "mapped" the surface of the
brain, dividing it up into numbered areas based on each area's cytoarchitecture (cell
structure) and function;[6] these areas, known as Brodmann areas, are still widely used in
neuroscience today.[7]
The coining of the term "neurolinguistics" has been attributed to Harry Whitaker, who
founded the Journal of Neurolinguistics in 1985.[8][9]
Although aphasiology is the historical core of neurolinguistics, in recent years the field
has broadened considerably, thanks in part to the emergence of new brain imaging
technologies (such as PET and fMRI) and time-sensitive electrophysiological techniques
(EEG and MEG), which can highlight patterns of brain activation as people engage in
various language tasks;[1][10][11] electrophysiological techniques, in particular, emerged as a
viable method for the study of language in 1980 with the discovery of the N400, a brain
response shown to be sensitive to semantic issues in language comprehension.[12][13] The
N400 was the first language-relevant brain response to be identified, and since its
discovery EEG and MEG have become increasingly widely used for conducting language
research.[14]
[edit] Neurolinguistics as a discipline

[edit] Interaction with other fields
Neurolinguistics is closely related to the field of psycholinguistics, which seeks to

elucidate the cognitive mechanisms of language by employing the traditional techniques
of experimental psychology; today, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic theories often
inform one another, and there is much collaboration between the two fields.[13][15]
Much work in neurolinguistics involves testing and evaluating theories put forth by
psycholinguists and theoretical linguists. In general, theoretical linguists propose models
to explain the structure of language and how language information is organized,
psycholinguists propose models and algorithms to explain how language information is
processed in the mind, and neurolinguists analyze brain activity to infer how biological
structures (such as neurons) carry out those psycholinguistic processing algorithms.[16]
For example, experiments in sentence processing have used the ELAN, N400, and P600
brain responses to examine how physiological brain responses reflect the different
predictions of sentence processing models put forth by psycholinguists, such as Janet
Fodor and Lyn Frazier's "serial" model,[17] and Theo Vosse and Gerard Kempen's
"Unification model."[15] Neurolinguists can also make new predictions about the structure
and organization of language based on insights about the physiology of the brain, by
"generalizing from the knowledge of neurological structures to language structure."[18]
Neurolinguistics research is carried out in all the major areas of linguistics; the main
linguistic subfields, and how neurolinguistics addresses them, are given in the table
below.
Subfield Description Research questions in neurolinguistics

how the brain extracts speech sounds from an
the study of speech
Phonetics acoustic signal, how the brain separates
sounds
speech sounds from background noise
the study of how sounds
how the phonological system of a particular
Phonology are organized in a
language is represented in the brain
language
the study of how words
Morphology how the brain accesses words that a person
are structured and stored
and lexicology knows
in the mental lexicon
the study of how multiple-
how the brain combines words into
Syntax word utterances are
constituents and sentences; how structural and
constructed
semantic information is used in understanding
the study of how meaning
Semantics sentences
is encoded in language
[edit] Topics studied
Neurolinguistics research investigates several topics, including where language

information is processed, how language processing unfolds over time, how brain
structures are related to language acquisition and learning, and how neurophysiology can
contribute to speech and language pathology.
[edit] Localizations of language processes
Much work in linguistics has, like Broca's and Wernicke's early studies, investigated the
locations of specific language "modules" within the brain. Research questions include
what course language information follows through the brain as it is processed,[19] whether
or not particular areas specialize in processing particular sorts of information,[20] how
different brain regions interact with one another in language processing,[21] and how the
locations of brain activation differs when a subject is producing or perceiving a language
other than his or her first language.[22][23][24]
[edit] Time course of language processes
Another area of neurolinguistics literature involves the use of electrophysiological

techniques to analyze the rapid processing of language in time.[1] The temporal ordering
of specific peaks in brain activity may reflect discrete computational processes that the
brain undergoes during language processing; for example, one neurolinguistic theory of
sentence parsing proposes that three brain responses (the ELAN, N400, and P600) are
products of three different steps in syntactic and semantic processing.[25]
[edit] Language acquisition
Another topic is the relationship between brain structures and language acquisition.[26]
Research in first language acquisition has already established that infants from all
linguistic environments go through similar and predictable stages (such as babbling), and
some neurolinguistics research attempts to find correlations between stages of language
development and stages of brain development,[27] while other research investigates the
physical changes (known as neuroplasticity) that the brain undergoes during second
language acquisition, when adults learn a new language.[28]
[edit] Language pathology
Neurolinguistic techniques are also used to study disorders and breakdowns in language
—such as aphasia and dyslexia—and how they relate to physical characteristics of the
brain.[23][27]
[edit] Brain imaging

Images of the brain recorded with PET (top) and fMRI (bottom). The red areas and the
orange areas, respectively, are the most active in these recordings.
Main article: Neuroimaging
Since one of the focuses of this field is the testing of linguistic and psycholinguistic
models, the technology used for experiments is highly relevant to the study of
neurolinguistics. Modern brain imaging techniques have contributed greatly to a growing
understanding of the anatomical organization of linguistic functions.[1][23] Brain imaging
methods used in neurolinguistics may be classified into hemodynamic methods,
electrophysiological methods, and methods that stimulate the cortex directly.
[edit] Hemodynamic
Hemodynamic techniques take advantage of the fact that when an area of the brain works
at a task, blood is sent to supply that area with oxygen (in what is known as the Blood
Oxygen Level-Dependent, or BOLD, response).[29] Such techniques include PET and
fMRI. These techniques provide high spatial resolution, allowing researchers to pinpoint
the location of activity within the brain;[1] temporal resolution (or information about the
timing of brain activity), on the other hand, is poor, since the BOLD response happens
much more slowly than language processing.[11][30] In addition to demonstrating which
parts of the brain may subserve specific language tasks or computations,[20][25]
hemodynamic methods have also been used to demonstrate how the structure of the
brain's language architecture and the distribution of language-related activation may
change over time, as a function of linguistic exposure.[22][28]
In addition to PET and fMRI, which show which areas of the brain are activated by
certain tasks, researchers also use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which shows the neural
pathways that connect different brain areas,[31] thus providing insight into how different
areas interact.
[edit] Electrophysiological
Brain waves recorded using EEG
Electrophysiological techniques take advantage of the fact that when a group of neurons
in the brain fire together, they create an electric dipole or current. The technique of EEG
measures this electrical current using sensors on the scalp, while MEG measures the
magnetic fields that are generated by these currents.[32] These techniques are able to
measure brain activity from one millisecond to the next, providing excellent temporal
resolution, which is important in studying processes that take place as quickly as
language comprehension and production.[32] On the other hand, the location of brain
activity can be difficult to identify in EEG;[30][33] consequently, this technique is used
primarily to how language processes are carried out, rather than where. Research using
EEG and MEG generally focuses on event-related potentials (ERPs),[30] which are distinct
brain responses (generally realized as negative or positive peaks on a graph of neural
activity) elicited in response to a particular stimulus. Studies using ERP may focus on
each ERP's latency (how long after the stimulus the ERP begins or peaks), amplitude
(how high or low the peak is), or topography (where on the scalp the ERP response is
picked up by sensors).[34] Some important and common ERP components include the
N400 (a negativity occurring at a latency of about 400 milliseconds),[30] the mismatch
negativity,[35] the early left anterior negativity (a negativity occurring at an early latency
and a front-left topography),[36] the P600,[14][37] and the lateralized readiness potential.[38]
[edit] Experimental design

[edit] Experimental techniques
Neurolinguists employ a variety of experimental techniques in order to use brain imaging

to draw conclusions about how language is represented and processed in the brain. These
techniques include the mismatch design, violation-based studies, various forms of
priming, and direct stimulation of the brain.
[edit] Mismatch paradigm
Main article: Mismatch negativity

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is a rigorously documented ERP component frequently
used in neurolinguistic experiments.[35][39] It is an electrophysiological response that
occurs in the brain when a subject hears a "deviant" stimulus in a set of perceptually
identical "standards" (as in the sequence s s s s s s s d d s s s s s s d s s s s s d).[40][41] Since
the MMN is elicited only in response to a rare "oddball" stimulus in a set of other stimuli
that are perceived to be the same, it has been used to test how speakers perceive sounds
and organize stimuli categorically.[42][43] For example, a landmark study by Colin Phillips
and colleagues used the mismatch negativity as evidence that subjects, when presented
with a series of speech sounds with acoustic parameters, perceived all the sounds as
either /t/ or /d/ in spite of the acoustic variability, suggesting that the human brain has
representations of abstract phonemes—in other words, the subjects were "hearing" not
the specific acoustic features, but only the abstract phonemes.[40] In addition, the
mismatch negativity has been used to study syntactic processing and the recognition of
word category.[35][39][44]
[edit] Violation-based
An event-related potential
Many studies in neurolinguistics take advantage of anomalies or violations of syntactic or

semantic rules in experimental stimuli, and analyzing the brain responses elicited when a
subject encounters these violations. For example, sentences beginning with phrases such
as *the garden was on the worked,[45] which violates an English phrase structure rule,
often elicit a brain response called the early left anterior negativity (ELAN).[36] Violation
techniques have been in use since at least 1980,[36] when Kutas and Hillyard first reported
ERP evidence that semantic violations elicited an N400 effect.[46] Using similar methods,
in 1992, Lee Osterhout first reported the P600 response to syntactic anomalies.[47]
Violation designs have also been used for hemodynamic studies (fMRI and PET):
Embick and colleagues, for example, used grammatical and spelling violations to
investigate the location of syntactic processing in the brain using fMRI.[20] Another
common use of violation designs is to combine two kinds of violations in the same
sentence and thus make predictions about how different language processes interact with
one another; this type of crossing-violation study has been used extensively to investigate
how syntactic and semantic processes interact while people read or hear sentences.[48][49]
[edit] Priming
Main article: Priming (psychology)

In psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, priming refers to the phenomenon whereby a
subject can recognize a word more quickly if he or she has recently been presented with a
word that is similar in meaning[50] or morphological makeup (i.e., composed of similar
parts).[51] If a subject is presented with a "target" word such as doctor and then a "prime"
word such as nurse, if the subject has a faster-than-usual response time to nurse then the
experimenter may assume that word nurse in the brain had already been accessed when
the word doctor was accessed.[52] Priming is used to investigate a wide variety of
questions about how words are stored and retrieved in the brain[51][53] and how structurally
complex sentences are processed.[54]
[edit] Stimulation
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a new noninvasive[55] technique for studying

brain activity, uses powerful magnetic fields that are applied to the brain from outside the
head.[56] It is a method of exciting or interrupting brain activity in a specific and
controlled location, and thus is able to imitate aphasic symptoms while giving the
researcher more control over exactly which parts of the brain will be examined.[56] As
such, it is a less invasive alternative to direct cortical stimulation, which can be used for
similar types of research but requires that the subject's scalp be removed, and is thus only
used on individuals who are already undergoing a major brain operation (such as
individuals undergoing surgery for epilepsy).[57] The logic behind TMS and direct cortical
stimulation is similar to the logic behind aphasiology: if a particular language function is
impaired when a specific region of the brain is knocked out, then that region must be
somehow implicated in that language function. Few neurolinguistic studies to date have
used TMS;[1] direct cortical stimulation and cortical recording (recording brain activity
using electrodes placed directly on the brain) have been used with macaque monkeys to
make predictions about the behavior of human brains.[58]
[edit] Subject tasks
In most neurolinguistics experiments, subjects do not simply sit and listen to or watch
stimuli, but also are instructed to perform some sort of task in response to the stimuli.[59]
Subjects perform these tasks while recordings (electrophysiological or hemodynamic) are
being taken, usually in order to ensure that they are paying attention to the stimuli.[60] At
least one study has suggested that the task the subject does has an effect on the brain
responses and the results of the experiment.[61]
[edit] Lexical decision
Main article: Lexical decision task
The lexical decision task involves subjects seeing or hearing an isolated word and
answering whether or not it is a real word. It is frequently used in priming studies, since
subjects are known to make a lexical decision more quickly if a word has been primed by
a related word (as in "doctor" priming "nurse").[50][51][52]
[edit] Grammaticality judgment, acceptability judgment
Many studies, especially violation-based studies, have subjects make a decision about the
"acceptability" (usually grammatical acceptability or semantic acceptability) of
stimuli.[61][62][63][64][65] Such a task is often used to "ensure that subjects [are] reading the
sentences attentively and that they [distinguish] acceptable from unacceptable sentences
in the way [the experimenter] expect[s] them to do."[63]
Experimental evidence has shown that the instructions given to subjects in an

acceptability judgment task can influence the subjects' brain responses to stimuli. One
experiment showed that when subjects were instructed to judge the "acceptability" of
sentences they did not show an N400 brain response (a response commonly associated
with semantic processing), but that they did show that response when instructed to ignore
grammatical acceptability and only judge whether or not the sentences "made sense."[61]
[edit] Probe verification
Some studies use a "probe verification" task rather than an overt acceptability judgment;
in this paradigm, each experimental sentence is followed by a "probe word," and subjects
must answer whether or not the probe word had appeared in the sentence.[52][63] This task,
like the acceptability judgment task, ensures that subjects are reading or listening
attentively, but may avoid some of the additional processing demands of acceptability
judgments, and may be used no matter what type of violation is being presented in the
study.[52]
[edit] Truth-value judgment
Subjects may be instructed not to judge whether or not the sentence is grammatically
acceptable or logical, but whether the proposition expressed by the sentence is true or
false. This task is commonly used in psycholinguistic studies of child language.[66][67]
[edit] Active distraction and double-task
Some experiments give subjects a "distractor" task to ensure that subjects are not
consciously paying attention to the experimental stimuli; this may be done to test whether
a certain computation in the brain is carried out automatically, regardless of whether the
subject devotes attentional resources to it. For example, one study had subjects listen to
non-linguistic tones (long beeps and buzzes) in one ear and speech in the other ear, and
instructed subjects to press a button when they perceived a change in the tone; this
supposedly caused subjects not to pay explicit attention to grammatical violations in the
speech stimuli. The subjects showed a mismatch response (MMN) anyway, suggesting
that the processing of the grammatical errors was happening automatically, regardless of
attention[35]—or at least that subjects were unable to consciously separate their attention
from the speech stimuli.
Another related form of experiment is the double-task experiment, in which a subject
must perform an extra task (such as sequential finger-tapping or articulating nonsense
syllables) while responding to linguistic stimuli; this kind of experiment has been used to
investigate the use of working memory in language processing.[68]
Stylistics (linguistics)

Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
Prescription
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
v•d•e
Stylistics is the study of varieties of language whose properties position that language in
context. For example, the language of advertising, politics, religion, individual authors,
etc., or the language of a period in time, all are used distinctively and belong in a
particular situation. In other words, they all have ‘place’ or are said to use a particular
'style'.
Stylistics also attempts to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices
made by individuals and social groups in their use of language, such as socialisation, the
production and reception of meaning, critical discourse analysis and literary criticism.
Other features of stylistics include the use of dialogue, including regional accents and
people’s dialects, descriptive language, the use of grammar, such as the active voice or
passive voice, the distribution of sentence lengths, the use of particular language
registers, etc.
Many linguists do not like the term ‘stylistics’. The word ‘style’, itself, has several
connotations that make it difficult for the term to be defined accurately. However, in
Linguistic Criticism, Roger Fowler makes the point that, in non-theoretical usage, the
word stylistics makes sense and is useful in referring to an enormous range of literary
contexts, such as John Milton’s ‘grand style’, the ‘prose style’ of Henry James, the ‘epic’
and ‘ballad style’ of classical Greek literature, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 185). In addition,
stylistics is a distinctive term that may be used to determine the connections between the
form and effects within a particular variety of language. Therefore, stylistics looks at
what is ‘going on’ within the language; what the linguistic associations are that the style
of language reveals.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Overview
o 1.1 Register
o 1.2 Field, tenor and mode
• 2 Literary Stylistics
o 2.1 Rhymes vs. Poetry
o 2.2 Vocabulary
o 2.3 Implicature
o 2.4 Grammar
o 2.5 Phraseology
o 2.6 Orwell and Swift on writing methods
o 2.7 The point of poetry
• 3 References and related reading
• 4 See also
[edit] Overview
The situation in which a type of language is found can usually be seen as appropriate or
inappropriate to the style of language used. A personal love letter would probably not be a
suitable location for the language of this article. However, within the language of a
romantic correspondence there may be a relationship between the letter’s style and its
context. It may be the author’s intention to include a particular word, phrase or sentence
that not only conveys their sentiments of affection, but also reflects the unique
environment of a lover’s romantic composition. Even so, by using so-called conventional
and seemingly appropriate language within a specific context (apparently fitting words
that correspond to the situation in which they appear) there exists the possibility that this
language may lack exact meaning and fail to accurately convey the intended message
from author to reader, thereby rendering such language obsolete precisely because of its
conventionality. In addition, any writer wishing to convey their opinion in a variety of
language that they feel is proper to its context could find themselves unwittingly
conforming to a particular style, which then overshadows the content of their writing.
[edit] Register
Main article: Register (linguistics)
In linguistic analysis, different styles of language are technically called register. Register
refers to properties within a language variety that associate that language with a given
situation. This is distinct from, say, professional terminology that might only be found,
for example, in a legal document or medical journal. The linguist Michael Halliday
defines register by emphasising its semantic patterns and context. For Halliday, register is
determined by what is taking place, who is taking part and what part the language is
playing. (Halliday. 1978, 23) In Context and Language, Helen Leckie-Tarry suggests that
Halliday’s theory of register aims to propose relationships between language function,
determined by situational or social factors, and language form. (Leckie-Tarry. 1995, 6)
The linguist William Downes makes the point that the principal characteristic of register,
no matter how peculiar or diverse, is that it is obvious and immediately recognisable.
(Downes. 1998, 309)
Halliday places great emphasis on the social context of register and distinguishes register
from dialect, which is a variety according to user, in the sense that each speaker uses one
variety and uses it all the time, and not, as is register, a variety according to use, in the
sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and chooses between them at different
times. (Halliday. 1964, 77) For example, Cockney is a dialect of English that relates to a
particular region of the United Kingdom, however, Cockney rhyming slang bears a
relationship between its variety and the situation in which it appears, i.e. the ironic
definitions of the parlance within the distinctive tones of the East-End London patois.
Subsequently, register is associated with language situation and not geographic location.
[edit] Field, tenor and mode

Halliday classifies the semiotic structure of situation as ‘field’, ‘tenor’ and ‘mode’,
which, he suggests, tends to determine the selection of options in a corresponding
component of the semantics. (Halliday. 1964, 56). The linguist David Crystal points out
that Halliday’s ‘tenor’ stands as a roughly equivalent term for ‘style’, which is a more
specific alternative used by linguists to avoid ambiguity. (Crystal. 1985, 292)
For an example on which to comment, here is a familiar sentence:
I swear by almighty God that the evidence I will give shall be the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth.
For Halliday, the field is the activity associated with the language used, in this case a
religious oath tailored to the environment of a legal proceeding. Fowler comments that
different fields produce different language, most obviously at the level of vocabulary
(Fowler. 1996, 192) The words ‘swear’ and ‘almighty’ are used instead of perhaps
‘pledge’ or ‘supreme’. In addition, there is the repetition of the word ‘truth’, which
evidently triples and thereby emphasises the seriousness of the vow taken. (Incidentally,
this linguistic technique is often employed in the language of politics, as it was for
example in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memorable ‘Education, Education, Education’
speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2000.) The tenor of this sentence would refer to
the specific role of the participants between whom the statement is made, in this case the
person in the witness box proclaiming their intention to be honest before the court and
those in attendance, but most importantly God. Fowler also comments that within the
category of tenor there is a power relationship, which is determined by the tenor and the
intention of the speaker to persuade, inform, etc. (Fowler. 1996, 192) In this case, the
tenor is an affirmation to speak the truth before the court by recognising the court’s legal
supremacy and at the risk of retribution for not doing so from this secular court and a
spiritual higher authority. This, of course, is not directly stated within the sentence but
only implied.
Halliday’s third category, mode, is what he refers to as the symbolic organisation of the
situation. Downes recognises two distinct aspects within the category of mode and
suggests that not only does it describe the relation to the medium: written, spoken, and so
on, but also describes the genre of the text. (Downes. 1998, 316) Halliday refers to genre
as pre-coded language, language that has not simply been used before, but that
predetermines the selection of textural meanings. For instance, in the sentence above the
phrase ‘the evidence I shall give’ is preferable to the possible alternatives ‘the testimony I
will offer’ or even ‘the facts that I am going to talk about.’
As well as recognising different registers of language that appear to be suitable for a

particular situation, stylistics also examines language that is specifically modified for its
setting, an example being the alteration in tenor from informal to formal, or vice versa.
Consider the quotation below:

‘I was proceeding on my beat when I accosted the suspect whom I had reason to
believe might wish to come down to the station and help with enquiries in hand.’
This language only belongs in a UK policeman’s notebook and may be read out in a court
of law. The sentence is not only formal but highly conventional for the location in which
it is found. In addition, it is also extremely ambiguous (a common feature of so-called
conventional language). Why ‘accosted’, for example, and not ‘arrested,’ ‘collared,’
‘nabbed,’ ‘nicked’ or even ‘pinched’? Any of these words would express more accurately
what occurred in language more suitable for the typical British ‘bobby,’ rather than the
pre-scripted text that is simply being recited parrot fashion. This is in fact considered to
be the most key element in Stylistics.
[edit] Literary Stylistics

In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal observes that, in practice, most
stylistic analysis has attempted to deal with the complex and ‘valued’ language within
literature, i.e. ‘literary stylistics’. He goes on to say that in such examination the scope is
sometimes narrowed to concentrate on the more striking features of literary language, for
instance, its ‘deviant’ and abnormal features, rather than the broader structures that are
found in whole texts or discourses. For example, the compact language of poetry is more
likely to reveal the secrets of its construction to the stylistician than is the language of
plays and novels. (Crystal. 1987, 71).
[edit] Rhymes vs. Poetry
As well as conventional styles of language there are the unconventional – the most
obvious of which is poetry. In Practical Stylistics, HG Widdowson examines the
traditional form of the epitaph, as found on headstones in a cemetery. For example:
His memory is dear today

As in the hour he passed away.
(Ernest C. Draper ‘Ern’. Died 4.1.38)
(Widdowson. 1992, 6)
Widdowson makes the point that such sentiments are usually not very interesting and
suggests that they may even be dismissed as ‘crude verbal carvings’ (Widdowson, 3), as
does the English poet Thomas Gray in his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
(1751), who refers to them as ‘uncouth rhymes’. Nevertheless, Widdowson recognises
that they are a very real attempt to convey feelings of human loss and preserve
affectionate recollections of a beloved friend or family member. However, what may be
seen as poetic in this language is not so much in the formulaic phraseology but in where
it appears. The verse may be given undue reverence precisely because of the sombre
situation in which it is placed. Widdowson suggests that, unlike words set in stone in a
graveyard, poetry is unorthodox language that vibrates with inter-textual implications.
(Widdowson. 1992, 4)
This is by Ogden Nash:
Beneath this slab

John Brown is stowed.
He watched the ads,
And not the road.
‘Lather As You Go’, Collected Verse (1952)
Nash is satirising the form. The epitaph is humorous, but it is perhaps more funny
because of the incongruous relation the humorous language bears to the solemn location
in which it is found.
Below is a standard rhyme that might be found inside a conventional Valentine’s card:
Roses are red,

Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.
We might ask why roses for the characteristic example of ‘redness’ instead of perhaps a
British pillar box, which is considerably redder than the petals of any rose? Or, indeed,
why violets as the archetypical illustration of ‘blueness’ and not, say, the distinctive
cobalt hue of the shirt worn by the tragic 1978 Scottish World Cup squad in Argentina?
Maybe because roses and violets are traditional tokens of romance, and their association
with particular colours (as not all roses are red, nor all violets blue) reinforces the
imagery: the red of a lover’s lips, the blue of their eyes, or the sea, or the sky, etc. – all
very romantic stuff. The conventional symbolism of the verse is certainly appropriate for
the setting of a Valentine’s card, but is this poetry?
[edit] Vocabulary
Here is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Eagle’ (a fragment):
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Poems, (1851)
As with the eagle, Tennyson leaves the reader balancing precariously on the end of the
first verse with the single word ‘stands’. Again, however, why ‘like a thunderbolt’ for an
appropriate simile for the description of the eagle’s descent and not, for example, ‘a
brick’, or ‘a stone’, or ‘a sack of potatoes’? Perhaps the answer lies in the word’s syllabic
(or syllable) structure: ‘thun-der-bolt’.
Given the compact yet detailed nature of the poetic form, the poet will try to choose the
precise word for the exact context. For example, the use of alliteration in the first line,
‘clasps … crag … crooked’, is preferable to the alternatives ‘grabs … rock … twisted’.
Verbs in particular perhaps cause the greatest headache for the poet in their choice of
words. In the short piece above there are five: ‘clasps … stands … crawls … watches …
falls’. The simplicity of the poem is matched by the lack of ambiguity in the definition of
these verbs. However, definitions can also dictate the position of particular words, and
definitions can be easily misinterpreted. For example, the adjective ‘bold’ does not mean
‘brave’. The word ‘arrogant’ is not the same as ‘conceited’. ‘Timid’ means easily
frightened; apprehensive, while ‘shy’ is defined in The Concise Oxford Dictionary as
diffident or uneasy in company. Lastly, there is considerable difference between the
words ‘ignorant’ and ‘innocent’, and, similarly, between ‘reckless’ and ‘foolish’.
In ‘Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics’ in Style in Language, Roman Jakobson

explores the concept the ‘emotive’ or ‘expressive’ function of the language, a direct
expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what they are speaking about, which tends to
produce an impression of a certain emotion. (Jakobson. 1960, 354) The distinction here
can be made between the spoken word and writing, spoken language having a possibly
greater emotive function by emphasising aspects of the language in its pronunciation. For
example, in English stressed or unstressed words can produce a variety of meanings.
Consider the sentence ‘I never promised you a rose garden’ (the title of the
autobiographical novel by Joanne Greenberg, which was written under the pen name of
Hannah Green. 1964). This has a multitude of connotations depending on how the line is
spoken. For example:
I never promised you a rose garden

Or even:
And there are many more besides these.
[edit] Implicature
In ‘Poetic Effects’ from Literary Pragmatics, the linguist Adrian Pilkington analyses the
idea of ‘implicature’, as instigated in the previous work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre
Wilson. Implicature may be divided into two categories: ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ implicature,
yet between the two extremes there are a variety of other alternatives. The strongest
implicature is what is emphatically implied by the speaker or writer, while weaker
implicatures are the wider possibilities of meaning that the hearer or reader may
conclude.
Pilkington’s ‘poetic effects’, as he terms the concept, are those that achieve most
relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures and not those meanings that are
simply ‘read in’ by the hearer or reader. Yet the distinguishing instant at which weak
implicatures and the hearer or reader’s conjecture of meaning diverge remains highly
subjective. As Pilkington says: ‘there is no clear cut-off point between assumptions which
the speaker certainly endorses and assumptions derived purely on the hearer’s
responsibility.’ (Pilkington. 1991, 53) In addition, the stylistic qualities of poetry can be
seen as an accompaniment to Pilkington’s poetic effects in understanding a poem's
meaning. For example, the first verse of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Mower’s Song’
(1611) runs:
My mind was once the true survey

Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its thoughts as in a glass
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
Miscellaneous Poems (1681)
The strong implicature that is immediately apparent is that Marvell is creating a pastiche
(distinct from parody) of the pastoral form: the narrator being the destructive figure of
Demon the Mower and not the protective character of the traditional pastoral shepherd.
The poem is also highly symbolic. In literary criticism grass is symbolic of flesh, while
the mower’s scythe with which he works represents human mortality (other examples
being Old Father Time and the Grim Reaper). Even the text on the page can be seen as a
visual representation of the Mower’s agricultural equipment: the main body of each verse
is suggestive of the wooden shaft of the scythe and the last flowing line of each verse the
blade. (This visual similarity of text on the page and the poem’s subject is known as
concrete poetry.) However, it is the concluding phrase, repeated in every stanza, that is
most stylistically effective. This long sweeping line that extends beyond the margins of
each verse does not simply recall the action of the scythe through the grass, but occurs at
the exact moment of every pass and further illuminates the mower’s physical and
emotional disquiet. These conceits do not appear by accident and are precisely intended
by the poet to enhance to the poetic effects of the verse.
Here is another example from William Shakespeare’s ‘71’, Sonnets (1609):
No longer mourn for me when I am dead,

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
On the face of things the poet appears to be saying: ‘When I have died, do not grieve for
me.’ A full stop at the end of the first line, and nothing further, would certainly be enough
to convey and satisfactory conclude the principal sentiment. Yet there is not a full stop.
Indeed, there is no full stop until the end of line eight!
Looking at these first four lines, the first is a full sentence but ends with a comma. The
first and second lines taken together are not a complete sentence and encourage the reader
to continue onto the third line, which, taken with the first and second lines, is still not a
complete sentence. The fourth line concludes the sentence but ends with a colon, again
persuading the reader on to the fifth line, which begins with an abrupt exclamation,
reinforcing the opening statement, and continuing to hold the reader’s attention:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
Here, it appears that Shakespeare is simply paraphrasing the first three lines with the
additional fourth line showing concern for the reader’s emotions should they spend too
much time reminiscing over the dead poet. The contradiction is puzzling. Why should the
poet repeat what is apparently being explicitly asked of the reader not to do? And, again,
the final four lines emphasise the point, once more beginning with the seemingly by now
obligatory exclamation:
Oh, if (I say) you look upon this verse,

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Furthermore, the poet asks the reader to not even repeat the ‘name’ of ‘the hand that writ
it’, while the ending is tinged with more than a degree of false modesty within the realm
of the unsentimental ‘wise world’. What on the surface appears to be one contention turns
out to be quite the opposite. Shakespeare, far from telling to reader to forget him
following his demise, is actually saying: ‘Remember me! Remember me! Remember
me!’ And he does this through deceptively unconventional language that progresses and
grows continuously into the traditional sonnet form.
[edit] Grammar
Although language may appear fitting to its context, the stylistic qualities of poetry also
reveal themselves in many grammatical disguises. Widdowson points out that in Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), the mystery of the
Mariner’s abrupt appearance is sustained by an idiosyncratic use of tense. (Widdowson.
1992, 40) For instance, in the opening lines Coleridge does not say: ‘There was ancient
Mariner’ or ‘There arrived an ancient Mariner’, but instead not only does he immediately
place the reader at the wedding feast, Coleridge similarly throws the Mariner abruptly
into the middle of the situation:
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
- ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
And I am the next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May’st h e a r the merry din.’
Coleridge’s play with tense continues in stanzas four to six, as he swaps wildly from past
to present and back again.
He holds him with his skinny hand,

‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hands dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye -
The Wedding-guests stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
The Mariner ‘holds’ the wedding-guest with his ‘skinny hand’ in the present tense, but
releases it in the past tense; only to hold him again, this time with his ‘glittering eye’, in
the present. (Widdowson. 1992, 41) And so on, back and forth like a temporal tennis ball
but all adding to the enigma. The suggestion could be made that Coleridge was simply
careless with the composition and selected these verb forms at random. However, the fact
is that they are there in the text of the poem, and, as Coleridge himself would recognise,
everything in a poetic text carries an implication of relevance. (Widdowson. 1992, 41)
[edit] Phraseology
Another aspect of stylistics, as in the poem ‘I Saw a Peacock’, is when the meaning only
becomes clear when the context is revealed.
I saw a peacock with a fiery tail

I saw a blazing comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground
I saw a *pismire swallow up a whale *[ant]
I saw a raging sea brim full of ale
I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep
I saw a well full of men’s tears that weep
I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire
I saw a house as big as the moon and higher
I saw the sun even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
‘A Person of Quality’, Westminster Drollery (1671)
If we read the poem like this, it almost makes sense - but not quite. The reason is,
perhaps, because we as readers are conditioned to reading poetry in a specific way,
conventionally – line by line. By altering the phrases in each line, the descriptions are
made coherent.
I saw a peacock
with a fiery tail I saw a blazing comet
drop down hail I saw a cloud
with ivy circled round I saw a sturdy oak
creep on the ground I saw a pismire
swallow up a whale I saw a raging sea
brim full of ale I saw a Venice glass
sixteen foot deep I saw a well
full of men’s tears that weep I saw their eyes
all in a flame of fire I saw a house
as big as the moon and higher I saw the sun
even in the midst of night
I saw the man who saw this wondrous sight
The anonymous narrator, sitting drinking by a fire and gazing at his mirror image in the
‘Venice glass’, is commenting on the reflected images that he sees in language that is
similarly inverted.
There are, however, two important points worth mentioning with regard to the
stylistician’s approach to interpreting poetry, and they are both noted by PM Wetherill in
Literary Text: An Examination of Critical Methods. The first is that there may be an over-
preoccupation with one particular feature that may well minimise the significance of
others that are equally important. (Wetherill. 1974, 133) The second is that any attempt to
see a text as simply a collection of stylistic elements will tend to ignore other ways
whereby meaning is produced. (Wetherill. 1974, 133) Nevertheless, meaning in poetry is
conveyed through a multitude of language alternatives that manifest themselves as
printed words on the page, style being one such feature. Subsequently, the stylistic
elements of poetry can be seen as important in the interpretation of unconventional
language that is beyond what is expected and customary. Poetry can be both sublime and
even ridiculous yet still transcend established social values. Poetry is an original and
unique method of communication that we use to express our thoughts, feelings and
experiences.
[edit] Orwell and Swift on writing methods
In ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), George Orwell writes against the use of
‘conventional’ language as, in doing so, there is the danger that the traditional ‘style’ of
language that is seemingly appropriate to a specific context will eventually overpower its
precise meaning. In other words, the stylistic qualities of language will degenerate the
meaning through the overuse of jargon and familiar, hackneyed and/or clichéd words and
phrases. Orwell condemns the use of metaphors such as ‘toe the line; ride roughshod
over; no axe to grind’. He suggests that these phrases are often used without thought of
their literal meaning. Orwell hits out at pretentious diction and the use of Latin phrases
like ‘deus ex machina’ and even ‘status quo’. He also argues against unnecessary clauses,
such as ‘have the effect of; play a leading part in; give grounds for’. These are all familiar
phrases, but are they really useful in any context? Orwell says that one reason we use this
kind of language is because it is easy. He writes:
It is easier - even quicker, once you have the habit - to say In my opinion it is a
not unjustifiable assumption that ... than to say I think. (Orwell. 1964, 150)
Furthermore, Orwell says:
It [modern language] consists in gumming together long strips of words which

have already been set in order by someone else, and making the result presentable
by sheer humbug. (Orwell. 1964, 150)
In Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), the English language is distilled and
sanitised and then imposed upon a population who, out of terror, actively conform to the
process. The language is dehumanising as it does not allow for any form of
communication other than that permitted by the state. Similarly, in the appendix to the
novel, ‘The Principles of Newspeak’, more subversive linguistic gymnastics are in
evidence:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the
world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all
other modes of thought impossible. (Orwell. 1949, 305)
On the language of George Orwell, Fowler says that the rapidity and fluency are made
possible by the fact that the speaker is simply uttering strings of orthodox jargon and is in
no sense choosing the words in relation to intended meanings or to some state of affairs
in the world. (Fowler. 1995, 212)
Today we have word processor programs that will effortlessly write a letter for any
occasion. Stock phrases and paragraphs can be cut and pasted at random to appear
coherent. An extreme example of this practice is found in Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel
Gulliver’s Travels (1726). When Lemuel Gulliver arrives at the Grand Academy of
Lagado he enters the school of writing, where a professor has devised an enormous
‘frame’ that contains every word in the language. The machine is put into motion and the
words are jumbled up, and when three or four words are arranged into a recognisable
phrase they are written down. The phrases are then collated into sentences, the sentences
into paragraphs, the paragraphs into pages and the pages into books, which, the professor
hopes, will eventually ‘give the world a complete body of all arts and sciences’. (Swift.
1994, 105)
This method of writing is not only absurd but produces nothing original. It also relies on
both the writer and the reader interpreting what is created in exactly the same way. And it
is highly political as the writer and the reader are indoctrinated into using a particular
form of language and conditioned towards its function and understanding. As Orwell
says: ‘A speaker who uses this kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards
turning himself into a machine.’ (Orwell. 1964, 152)
[edit] The point of poetry
Widdowson notices that when the content of poetry is summarised it often refers to very
general and unimpressive observations, such as ‘nature is beautiful; love is great; life is
lonely; time passes’, and so on. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) But to say:
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end ...
William Shakespeare, ‘60’.
Or, indeed:
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,

Nor hours, days months, which are the rags of time ...
John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising’, Poems (1633)
This language gives us a new perspective on familiar themes and allows us to look at
them without the personal or social conditioning that we unconsciously associate with
them. (Widdowson. 1992, 9) So, although we may still use the same exhausted words and
vague terms like ‘love’, ‘heart’ and ‘soul’ to refer to human experience, to place these
words in a new and refreshing context allows the poet the ability to represent humanity
and communicate honestly. This, in part, is stylistics, and this, according to Widdowson,
is the point of poetry (Widdowson. 1992, 76).
Morphology (linguistics)
For other uses, see Morphology.
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its
sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this
article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2009)
Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
Prescription
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
v•d•e
Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of the structure of words

(words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology). While words are
generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in
most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example,
English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs, and dog catcher are closely related.
English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word
formation in English. They infer intuitively that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly,
dog is to dog catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speaker reflect
specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how
those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics
that studies patterns of word formation within and across languages, and attempts to
formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 History
• 2 Fundamental concepts
o 2.1 Lexemes and word forms
 2.1.1 Prosodic word vs. morphological word
o 2.2 Inflection vs. word formation
o 2.3 Paradigms and morphosyntax
o 2.4 Allomorphy
o 2.5 Lexical morphology
• 3 Models
o 3.1 Morpheme-based morphology
o 3.2 Lexeme-based morphology
o 3.3 Word-based morphology
• 4 Morphological Typology
• 5 See also
• 6 References
[edit] History
The history of morphological analysis dates back to the ancient Indian linguist Pāṇini,
who formulated the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī by using a
Constituency Grammar. The Greco-Roman grammatical tradition also engaged in
morphological analysis. Studies in Arabic morphology, conducted by Marāḥ al-arwāḥ
and Aḥmad b. ‘alī Mas‘ūd, date back to at least 1200 CE.[1]
The term morphology was coined by August Schleicher in 1859.[2]
[edit] Fundamental concepts

[edit] Lexemes and word forms
The distinction between these two senses of "word" is arguably the most important one in
morphology. The first sense of "word", the one in which dog and dogs are "the same
word", is called a lexeme. The second sense is called word form. We thus say that dog
and dogs are different forms of the same lexeme. Dog and dog catcher, on the other hand,
are different lexemes, as they refer to two different kinds of entities. The form of a word
that is chosen conventionally to represent the canonical form of a word is called a lemma,
or citation form.
[edit] Prosodic word vs. morphological word
This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please
improve this section if you can. (February 2007)
Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to
coincide with a single morphological word form. In Latin, one way to express the concept
of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix
'-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of
this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the
Kwak'wala language.[3] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning
relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by
affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his
club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes
a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many
languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from
the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other
languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain
to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in
Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[4]
kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a q'asa-s-isi

t'alwagwayu
Morpheme by morpheme translation:
kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER
bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER
q'asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE
t'alwagwayu = club.
"the man clubbed the otter with his club"
(Notation notes:
1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.
2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".
3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this
discussion.)
That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-
otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man,
attaches not to bəgwanəma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -χ-a
(ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q'asa ('otter'),
etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to
consist of these phonological words:
kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q'asa s-isi-

t'alwagwayu
"clubbed PIVOT-the-mani hit-the-otter with-
hisi-club
A central publication on this topic is the recent volume edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald
(2007), examining the mismatch between prosodic-phonological and grammatical
definitions of "word" in various Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Caucasian, Eskimo,
Indo-European, Native North American, West African, and sign languages. Apparently, a
wide variety of languages make use of the hybrid linguistic unit clitic, possessing the
grammatical features of independent words but the prosodic-phonological lack of
freedom of bound morphemes. The intermediate status of clitics poses a considerable
challenge to linguistic theory.
[edit] Inflection vs. word formation
Given the notion of a lexeme, it is possible to distinguish two kinds of morphological

rules. Some morphological rules relate to different forms of the same lexeme; while other
rules relate to different lexemes. Rules of the first kind are called inflectional rules, while
those of the second kind are called word formation. The English plural, as illustrated by
dog and dogs, is an inflectional rule; compounds like dog catcher or dishwasher provide
an example of a word formation rule. Informally, word formation rules form "new words"
(that is, new lexemes), while inflection rules yield variant forms of the "same" word
(lexeme).
There is a further distinction between two kinds of word formation: derivation and
compounding. Compounding is a process of word formation that involves combining
complete word forms into a single compound form; dog catcher is therefore a compound,
because both dog and catcher are complete word forms in their own right before the
compounding process has been applied, and are subsequently treated as one form.
Derivation involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes,
whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme. One example of derivation is
clear in this case: the word independent is derived from the word dependent by prefixing
it with the derivational prefix in-, while dependent itself is derived from the verb depend.
The distinction between inflection and word formation is not at all clear cut. There are
many examples where linguists fail to agree whether a given rule is inflection or word
formation. The next section will attempt to clarify this distinction.
Word formation is a process, as we have said, where you combine two complete words,
whereas with inflection you can combine a suffix with some verb to change its form to
subject of the sentence. For example: in the present indefinite, we use ‘go’ with subject
I/we/you/they and plural nouns, whereas for third peson singular pronouns (he/she/it) and
singular nouns we use ‘goes’. So this ‘-es’ is an inflectional marker and is used to match
with its subject. A further difference is that in word formation, the resultant word may be
differ from its source word’s gammatical category whereas in the process of inflection the
word never changes its grammatical category.
[edit] Paradigms and morphosyntax
Linguistic typology
Morphological
Isolating
Synthetic
Polysynthetic
Fusional
Agglutinative
Morphosyntactic
Alignment
Accusative
Ergative
Split ergative
Philippine
Active–stative
Tripartite
Inverse marking
Syntactic pivot
Theta role
Word Order
VO languages
Subject Verb Object
Verb Subject Object
Verb Object Subject
OV languages
Subject Object Verb
Object Subject Verb
Object Verb Subject
Time Manner Place
Place Manner Time
A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given
lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the
declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged
conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories
such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns
in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (1st., 2nd., 3rd.),
number (singular vs. plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), and case (subjective,
objective, and possessive). See English personal pronouns for the details.
The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen
arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the
language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define
paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the
verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number
of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference
between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which
form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares
about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The
first two are just nouns, and the second two just adjectives, and they generally behave
like any other noun or adjective behaves.
An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word
forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of
syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any
corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax,
and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between
syntax and morphology is called morphosyntax, and it concerns itself with inflection and
paradigms, but not with word formation or compounding.
[edit] Allomorphy
In the exposition above, morphological rules are described as analogies between word
forms: dog is to dogs as cat is to cats, and as dish is to dishes. In this case, the analogy
applies both to the form of the words and to their meaning: in each pair, the first word
means "one of X", while the second "two or more of X", and the difference is always the
plural form -s affixed to the second word, signaling the key distinction between singular
and plural entities.
One of the largest sources of complexity in morphology is that this one-to-one

correspondence between meaning and form scarcely applies to every case in the
language. In English, we have word form pairs like ox/oxen, goose/geese, and
sheep/sheep, where the difference between the singular and the plural is signaled in a way
that departs from the regular pattern, or is not signaled at all. Even cases considered
"regular", with the final -s, are not so simple; the -s in dogs is not pronounced the same
way as the -s in cats, and in a plural like dishes, an "extra" vowel appears before the -s.
These cases, where the same distinction is effected by alternative forms of a "word", are
called allomorphy.
Phonological rules constrain which sounds can appear next to each other in a language,
and morphological rules, when applied blindly, would often violate phonological rules,
by resulting in sound sequences that are prohibited in the language in question. For
example, to form the plural of dish by simply appending an -s to the end of the word
would result in the form *[dɪʃs], which is not permitted by the phonotactics of English. In
order to "rescue" the word, a vowel sound is inserted between the root and the plural
marker, and [dɪʃəz] results. Similar rules apply to the pronunciation of the -s in dogs and
cats: it depends on the quality (voiced vs. unvoiced) of the final preceding phoneme.
[edit] Lexical morphology
Lexical morphology is the branch of morphology that deals with the lexicon, which,
morphologically conceived, is the collection of lexemes in a language. As such, it
concerns itself primarily with word formation: derivation and compounding.
[edit] Models
There are three principal approaches to morphology, which each try to capture the
distinctions above in different ways. These are,
• Morpheme-based morphology, which makes use of an Item-and-Arrangement

approach.
• Lexeme-based morphology, which normally makes use of an Item-and-Process
approach.
• Word-based morphology, which normally makes use of a Word-and-Paradigm
approach.
Note that while the associations indicated between the concepts in each item in that list is
very strong, it is not absolute.
[edit] Morpheme-based morphology
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of

morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a
word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend
is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.[5] In a word like
dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. In its simplest
(and most naïve) form, this way of analyzing word forms treats words as if they were
made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-
Arrangement. More modern and sophisticated approaches seek to maintain the idea of the
morpheme while accommodating non-concatenative, analogical, and other processes that
have proven problematic for Item-and-Arrangement theories and similar approaches.
Morpheme-based morphology presumes three basic axioms:
1. Baudoin’s SINGLE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: Roots and affixes have the

same status in the theory, they are MORPHEMES.[citation needed]
2. Bloomfield’s SIGN BASE MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: As morphemes, they
are dualistic signs, since they have both (phonological) form and meaning.[citation
needed]
3. Bloomfield’s LEXICAL MORPHEME HYPOTHESIS: The morphemes, affixes

and roots alike, are stored in the lexicon.[citation needed]
Morpheme-based morphology comes in two flavours, one Bloomfieldian and one

Hockettian.[citation needed] For Bloomfield, the morpheme was the minimal form with
meaning, but it was not meaning itself. For Hockett, morphemes are meaning elements,
not form elements. For him, there is a morpheme plural, with the allomorphs -s, -en, -ren
etc. Within much morpheme-based morphological theory, these two views are mixed in
unsystematic ways, so that a writer may talk about "the morpheme plural" and "the
morpheme -s" in the same sentence, although these are different things.
[edit] Lexeme-based morphology
Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of

analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said
to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new
one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a
word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and
outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a
compound stem.
[edit] Word-based morphology
Word-based morphology is (usually) a Word-and-paradigm approach. This theory takes

paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word
forms, or to generate word forms from stems, word-based morphology states
generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point
behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the
other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a
given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional
morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third
person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation,
since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories,
on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume
that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural,
but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm
approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules.
Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing
words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different from the one that has been used
historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older
follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where
cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation).
[edit] Morphological Typology

Main article: Morphological typology
In the 19th century, philologists devised a now classic classification of languages

according to their morphology. According to this typology, some languages are isolating,
and have little to no morphology; others are agglutinative, and their words tend to have
lots of easily separable morphemes; while others yet are inflectional or fusional, because
their inflectional morphemes are "fused" together. This leads to one bound morpheme
conveying multiple pieces of information. The classic example of an isolating language is
Chinese; the classic example of an agglutinative language is Turkish; both Latin and
Greek are classic examples of fusional languages.
Considering the variability of the world's languages, it becomes clear that this
classification is not at all clear cut, and many languages do not neatly fit any one of these
types, and some fit in more than one way. A continuum of complex morphology of
language may be adapted when considering languages.
The three models of morphology stem from attempts to analyze languages that more or
less match different categories in this typology. The Item-and-Arrangement approach fits
very naturally with agglutinative languages; while the Item-and-Process and Word-and-
Paradigm approaches usually address fusional languages.
The reader should also note that the classical typology mostly applies to inflectional
morphology. There is very little fusion going on with word formation. Languages may be
classified as synthetic or analytic in their word formation, depending on the preferred
way of expressing notions that are not inflectional: either by using word formation
(synthetic), or by using syntactic phrases (analytic).
Syntax

"Syntactic" redirects here. For another meaning of the adjective, see Syntaxis.
For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation).
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. (May 2007)
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In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, "together", and τάξις táxis,
"arrangement") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in
natural languages. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to
refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any
individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish."
Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many
professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural
languages. The term syntax is also sometimes used to refer to the rules governing the
behavior of mathematical systems, such as logic, artificial formal languages, and
computer programming languages.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Early history
• 2 Modern theories
o 2.1 Generative grammar
o 2.2 Categorial grammar
o 2.3 Dependency grammar
o 2.4 Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
o 2.5 Functionalist grammars
• 3 See also
o 3.1 Syntactic terms
• 4 Notes
• 5 References
[edit] Early history

Works on grammar were being written long before modern syntax came about; the
Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a pre-modern work that approaches
the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.[1] In the West, the school of thought that
came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.
For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire

générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This
system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of
thought processes and therefore there is a single, most natural way to express a thought.
That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics,

linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question
fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became
apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and
therefore logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of
language.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic (indeed, large
parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale[2]).
Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in
terms of "Subject – Copula – Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the
early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp.
The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th
century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as
linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the
last two centuries, see the monumental work by Graffi (2001).
[edit] Modern theories

There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. Many linguists
(e.g. Noam Chomsky) see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive of syntax as
the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald
Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an
abstract formal system.[3] Yet others (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar a
taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Some of the major
approaches to the discipline are listed below.
[edit] Generative grammar
Main article: Generative grammar
The hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind.
The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language
(known as i-language). This model could be used to describe all human language and to
predict the grammaticality of any given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance
would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was
pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them)
assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative
grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence, rather
than its communicative function.
Among the many generative theories of linguistics, the Chomskyan theories are:
• Transformational Grammar (TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by

Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957[4])
• Government and binding theory (GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG
developed mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s).[5]
• The Minimalist Program (MP) (revised version of GB published by Chomsky in
1995)[6]
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
• Generative semantics (now largely out of date)

• Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
• Arc Pair grammar
• Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
• Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
• Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)
[edit] Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of
grammar, but to the properties of the syntactic categories themselves. For example, rather
than asserting that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP)
and a verb phrase (VP) (e.g. the phrase structure rule S → NP VP), in categorial
grammar, such principles are embedded in the category of the head word itself. So the
syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that
the verb acts as a functor which requires an NP as an input and produces a sentence level
structure as an output. This complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is
read as " a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP (the element on the
left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of transitive verb is
defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a
sentence. This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category that searches to the
right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and generates a function (equivalent to the
VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an
NP and produces a sentence).
Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the
categories.
[edit] Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by

the relations (such as grammatical relations) between a word (a head) and its dependents,
rather than being based in constituent structure. For example, syntactic structure is
described in terms of whether a particular noun is the subject or agent of the verb, rather
than describing the relations in terms of phrases.
Some dependency-based theories of syntax:
• Algebraic syntax
• Word grammar
• Operator Grammar
[edit] Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as
stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a
neural network or connectionism. Some theories based within this approach are:
• Optimality theory
• Stochastic context-free grammar
[edit] Functionalist grammars
Functionalist theories, although focused upon form, are driven by explanation based upon
the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist
theories include:
• Functional grammar (Dik)

• Prague Linguistic Circle
• Systemic functional grammar
• Cognitive grammar
• Construction grammar (CxG)
• Role and reference grammar (RRG)
• Emergent grammar
Phonology

For the journal, see Phonology (journal).
article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (March 2009)
Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
Prescription
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
v•d•e
Phonology (from Ancient Greek: φωνή, phōnē, "voice, sound" and λόγος, lógos, "word,
speech, subject of discussion") is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any
spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language
has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When
describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either
beneath the word (e.g., syllable, onset and rime, phoneme, articulatory gesture,
articulatory feature, mora, etc.) or to units at all levels of language that are thought to
structure sound for conveying linguistic meaning. It is viewed as the subfield of
linguistics that deals with the sound systems of languages. Whereas phonetics is about the
physical production, acoustic transmission and perception of the sounds of speech,
phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across
languages to encode meaning. The term "phonology" was used in the linguistics of a
greater part of the 20th century as a cover term uniting phonemics and phonetics. Current
phonology can interface with disciplines such as psycholinguistics and speech perception,
resulting in specific areas like articulatory or laboratory phonology.
An important part of traditional forms of phonology has been studying which sounds can
be grouped into distinctive units within a language; these units are known as phonemes.
For example, in English, the [p] sound in pot is aspirated (pronounced [pʰ]), while the
word- and syllable-final [p] in soup is not aspirated (indeed, it might be realized as a
glottal stop). However, English speakers intuitively treat both sounds as variations
(allophones) of the same phonological category, that is, of the phoneme /p/. Traditionally,
it would be argued that if a word-initial aspirated [p] were interchanged with the word-
final unaspirated [p] in soup, they would still be perceived by native speakers of English
as "the same" /p/. (However, speech perception findings now put this theory in doubt.)
Although some sort of "sameness" of these two sounds holds in English, it is not
universal and may be absent in other languages. For example, in Thai, Hindi, and
Quechua, aspiration and non-aspiration differentiates phonemes: that is, there are word
pairs that differ only in this feature (there are minimal pairs differing only in aspiration).
In addition to the minimal units that can serve the purpose of differentiating meaning (the
phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, i.e. replace one another in different
forms of the same morpheme (allomorphs), as well as, e.g., syllable structure, stress,
accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, even though the sub-lexical units are not instantiated as speech sounds. The
principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because
they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. On the
other hand, it must be noted, it is difficult to analyze phonologically a language one does
not speak, and most phonological analysis takes place with recourse to phonetic
information.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Representing phonemes
• 2 Phoneme inventories
o 2.1 Doing a phoneme inventory
o 2.2 Phonemic distinctions or allophones
o 2.3 Change of a phoneme inventory over time
• 3 Other topics in phonology
• 4 Development of the field
• 5 See also
• 6 Notes
• 7 Bibliography
• 8 Some phonologists
• 9 Phonology conferences
[edit] Representing phonemes

A diagram of the vocal tract
The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonemic point
of view. Note the intersection of the two circles—the distinction between short a, i and u
is made by both speakers, but Arabic lacks the mid articulation of short vowels, while
Hebrew lacks the distinction of vowel length.
The writing systems of some languages are based on the phonemic principle of having
one letter (or combination of letters) per phoneme and vice-versa. Ideally, speakers can
correctly write whatever they can say, and can correctly read anything that is written.
However in English, different spellings can be used for the same phoneme (e.g., rude and
food have the same vowel sounds), and the same letter (or combination of letters) can
represent different phonemes (e.g., the "th" consonant sounds of thin and this are
different). In order to avoid this confusion based on orthography, phonologists represent
phonemes by writing them between two slashes: " / / ". On the other hand, reference to
variations of phonemes or attempts at representing actual speech sounds are usually
enclosed by square brackets: " [ ] ". While the letters between slashes may be based on
spelling conventions, the letters between square brackets are usually the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or some other phonetic transcription system. Additionally,
angled brackets " ⟨ ⟩ " can be used to isolate the graphemes of an alphabetic writing
system.
[edit] Phoneme inventories
[edit] Doing a phoneme inventory
The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonetic point of
view. Note that the two circles are totally separate—none of the vowel-sounds made by
speakers of one language are made by speakers of the other. One modern theory is that
Israeli Hebrew's phonology reflects Yiddish elements, not Semitic ones.
Part of the phonological study of a language involves looking at data (phonetic

transcriptions of the speech of native speakers) and trying to deduce what the underlying
phonemes are and what the sound inventory of the language is. Even though a language
may make distinctions between a small number of phonemes, speakers actually produce
many more phonetic sounds. Thus, a phoneme in a particular language can be instantiated
in many ways.
Traditionally, looking for minimal pairs forms part of the research in studying the
phoneme inventory of a language. A minimal pair is a pair of words from the same
language, that differ by only a single categorical sound, and that are recognized by
speakers as being two different words. When there is a minimal pair, the two sounds are
said to be examples of realizations of distinct phonemes. However, since it is often
impossible to detect or agree to the existence of all the possible phonemes of a language
with this method, other approaches are used as well.
[edit] Phonemic distinctions or allophones
If two similar sounds do not belong to separate phonemes, they are called allophones of
the same underlying phoneme. For instance, voiceless stops (/p/, /t/, /k/) can be aspirated.
In English, voiceless stops at the beginning of a stressed syllable (but not after /s/) are
aspirated, whereas after /s/ they are not aspirated. This can be seen by putting the fingers
right in front of the lips and noticing the difference in breathiness in saying pin versus
spin. There is no English word pin that starts with an unaspirated p, therefore in English,
aspirated [pʰ] (the [ʰ] means aspirated) and unaspirated [p] are allophones of the same
phoneme /p/.
The /t/ sounds in the words tub, stub, but, butter, and button are all pronounced
differently in American English, yet are all intuited to be of "the same sound", therefore
they constitute another example of allophones of the same phoneme in English. However,
an intuition such as this could be interpreted as a function of post-lexical recognition of
the sounds. That is, all are seen as examples of English /t/ once the word itself has been
recognized.
The findings and insights of speech perception and articulation research complicates this
idea of interchangeable allophones being perceived as the same phoneme, no matter how
attractive it might be for linguists who wish to rely on the intuitions of native speakers.
First, interchanged allophones of the same phoneme can result in unrecognizable words.
Second, actual speech, even at a word level, is highly co-articulated, so it is problematic
to think that one can splice words into simple segments without affecting speech
perception. In other words, interchanging allophones is a nice idea for intuitive
linguistics, but it turns out that this idea can not transcend what co-articulation actually
does to spoken sounds. Yet human speech perception is so robust and versatile
(happening under various conditions) because, in part, it can deal with such co-
articulation.
There are different methods for determining why allophones should fall categorically
under a specified phoneme. Counter-intuitively, the principle of phonetic similarity is not
always used. This tends to make the phoneme seem abstracted away from the phonetic
realities of speech. It should be remembered that, just because allophones can be grouped
under phonemes for the purpose of linguistic analysis, this does not necessarily mean that
this is an actual process in the way the human brain processes a language. On the other
hand, it could be pointed out that some sort of analytic notion of a language beneath the
word level is usual if the language is written alphabetically. So one could also speak of a
phonology of reading and writing.
[edit] Change of a phoneme inventory over time
The particular sounds which are phonemic in a language can change over time. At one
time, [f] and [v] were allophones in English, but these later changed into separate
phonemes. This is one of the main factors of historical change of languages as described
in historical linguistics.
[edit] Other topics in phonology

Phonology also includes topics such as phonotactics (the phonological constraints on
what sounds can appear in what positions in a given language) and phonological
alternation (how the pronunciation of a sound changes through the application of
phonological rules, sometimes in a given order which can be feeding or bleeding,[1] as
well as prosody, the study of suprasegmentals and topics such as stress and intonation.
[edit] Development of the field

In ancient India, the Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC) in his text of Sanskrit
phonology, the Shiva Sutras, discusses something like the concepts of the phoneme, the
morpheme and the root. The Shiva Sutras describe a phonemic notational system in the
fourteen initial lines of the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The notational system introduces different
clusters of phonemes that serve special roles in the morphology of Sanskrit, and are
referred to throughout the text. Panini's grammar of Sanskrit had a significant influence
on Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern structuralism, who was a professor of
Sanskrit.
The Polish scholar Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, (together with his former student Mikołaj
Kruszewski) coined the word phoneme in 1876, and his work, though often
unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He worked
not only on the theory of the phoneme but also on phonetic alternations (i.e., what is now
called allophony and morphophonology). His influence on Ferdinand de Saussure was
also significant.
Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy's posthumously published work, the Principles of Phonology

(1939), is considered the foundation of the Prague School of phonology. Directly
influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of
morphophonology, though morphophonology was first recognized by Baudouin de
Courtenay. Trubetzkoy split phonology into phonemics and archiphonemics; the former
has had more influence than the latter. Another important figure in the Prague School was
Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the twentieth century.
In 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English
(SPE), the basis for Generative Phonology. In this view, phonological representations are
sequences of segments made up of distinctive features. These features were an expansion
of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features
describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a universally fixed set, and have
the binary values + or -. There are at least two levels of representation: underlying
representation and surface phonetic representation. Ordered phonological rules govern
how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation (the so called
surface form). An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological
theory was the downplaying of the syllable and the emphasis on segments. Furthermore,
the Generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and
created problems.
Natural Phonology was a theory based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe
in 1969 and (more explicitly) in 1979. In this view, phonology is based on a set of
universal phonological processes which interact with one another; which ones are active
and which are suppressed are language-specific. Rather than acting on segments,
phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups. Prosodic
groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance.
Phonological processes are unordered with respect to each other and apply
simultaneously (though the output of one process may be the input to another). The
second-most prominent Natural Phonologist is Stampe's wife, Patricia Donegan; there are
many Natural Phonologists in Europe, though also a few others in the U.S., such as
Geoffrey Pullum. The principles of Natural Phonology were extended to morphology by
Wolfgang U. Dressler, who founded Natural Morphology.
In 1976 John Goldsmith introduced autosegmental phonology. Phonological phenomena

are no longer seen as operating on one linear sequence of segments, called phonemes or
feature combinations, but rather as involving some parallel sequences of features which
reside on multiple tiers. Autosegmental phonology later evolved into Feature Geometry,
which became the standard theory of representation for the theories of the organization of
phonology as different as Lexical Phonology and Optimality Theory.
Government Phonology, which originated in the early 1980s as an attempt to unify

theoretical notions of syntactic and phonological structures, is based on the notion that all
languages necessarily follow a small set of principles and vary according to their
selection of certain binary parameters. That is, all languages' phonological structures are
essentially the same, but there is restricted variation that accounts for differences in
surface realizations. Principles are held to be inviolable, though parameters may
sometimes come into conflict. Prominent figures include Jonathan Kaye, Jean
Lowenstamm, Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Monik Charette, John Harris, and many others.
In a course at the LSA summer institute in 1991, Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky
developed Optimality Theory — an overall architecture for phonology according to
which languages choose a pronunciation of a word that best satisfies a list of constraints
which is ordered by importance: a lower-ranked constraint can be violated when the
violation is necessary in order to obey a higher-ranked constraint. The approach was soon
extended to morphology by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, and has become the
dominant trend in phonology. Though this usually goes unacknowledged, Optimality
Theory was strongly influenced by Natural Phonology; both view phonology in terms of
constraints on speakers and their production, though these constraints are formalized in
very different ways.
Broadly speaking Government Phonology (or its descendant, strict-CV phonology) has a
greater following in the United Kingdom, whereas Optimality Theory is predominant in
North America.

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Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
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List of linguists
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Language acquisition is the study of the processes through which learners acquire
language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which
studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition
deals with acquisition of additional languages in both children and adults.
One hotly debated issue is whether biology contributes capacities specific to language
acquisition, often referred to as universal grammar, or the language acquisition device
(LAD)[1]. For fifty years, some linguists, notably Noam Chomsky and the late Eric
Lenneberg, have argued for the hypothesis that children have innate, language-specific
abilities that facilitate and constrain language learning.[2]
Other researchers, including Elizabeth Bates, Catherine Snow, Brian MacWhinney, and
Michael Tomasello, have hypothesized that language learning results from general
cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their surrounding
communities. Recent work by William O'Grady proposes that complex syntactic
phenomena result from an efficiency-driven, linear computational system. O'Grady
describes his work as "nativism without Universal Grammar."
One of the most important advances in the study of language acquisition was the creation
of the CHILDES database by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Nativist theories
o 1.1 Language acquisition device and Universal Grammar
o 1.2 Critical period hypothesis
o 1.3 Creolization
o 1.4 Evolution of language
• 2 Empiricist theories
o 2.1 Statistical learning theories of language acquisition
o 2.2 Chunking theories of language acquisition
o 2.3 Social interactionist theory
o 2.4 Relational Frame Theory
• 3 Emergentist theories
• 4 Criticism of nativist theories
• 5 See also
• 6 References
[edit] Nativist theories

Nativist theories hold that children are born with an innate propensity for language
acquisition, and that this ability makes the task of learning a first language easier than it
would otherwise be. These "hidden assumptions"[3] allow children to quickly figure out
what is and isn't possible in the grammar of their native language, and allow them to
master that grammar by the age of three.[4] Nativists view language as a fundamental part
of the human genome, as the trait that makes humans human, and its acquisition as a
natural part of maturation. They believe that children learning language are as natural and
normal as dolphins learning to swim or songbirds learning to sing.
[edit] Language acquisition device and Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky originally theorized that children were born with a hard-wired language
acquisition device (LAD) in their brains.[2] He later expanded this idea into that of
Universal Grammar; a set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that are common
to all human languages. According to Chomsky, the presence of Universal Grammar in
the brains of children allow them to deduce the structure of their native languages from
"mere exposure".
Much of the nativist position is based on the early age at which children show
competency in their native grammars, as well as the ways in which they do (and do not)
make errors. Some research suggests that infants are born able to distinguish between
phonemes in minimal pairs, distinguishing between bah and pah, for example.[3] Another
source of support for this viewpoint is that young children (under the age of three) do not
speak in fully formed sentences, instead saying things like "want cookie" or "my coat";
however, they do not say things like "want my" or "I cookie", statements that would
break the syntactic structure of the phrase, a component of universal grammar.[3] Children
also seem remarkably immune from error correction by adults which nativists say would
not be the case if children were learning from their parents.[4]
[edit] Critical period hypothesis
Main article: Critical Period Hypothesis
The possible existence of a critical period for language acquisition is another nativist
argument. Critical periods are time frames during which environmental exposure is
needed to stimulate an innate trait. Young chaffinches, for example, must hear the song of
an adult chaffinch before reaching maturity, or else would never be able to sing. Nativists
argue that if a critical period for language acquisition exists (see below), then language
acquisition must be spurred on by the unfolding of the genome during maturation.[4]
Much research on the critical age period or window of opportunity (Robertson)
http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/marcharticles_pr.php see the Asian EFL Journal
http://www.asian-efl-journal.com
Linguist Eric Lenneberg stated, in a 1964 paper, that a critical period of language
acquisition ends around the age of 12 years. He claimed that if no language is learned
before then (see Feral children), it could never be learned in a normal and fully functional
sense. This was called the "Critical period hypothesis." However, the opponents[who?] of
the critical period hypothesis say that in this example the child is hardly growing up in a
nurturing environment, and that the lack of language acquisition in later life may be due
to the results of a generally abusive environment rather than being specifically due to a
lack of exposure to language.
The critical period hypothesis of brain plasticity and learning capacity has been called
into question. Other factors may account for differences in adult and child language
learning. Children’s apparently effortless and rapid language acquisition may be
explained by the fact that the environment is set up to engage them in frequent and
optimal learning opportunities. By contrast, adults seem to have an initial advantage in
their learning of vocabulary and syntax, but may never achieve native-like
pronunciation.[5] A more up-to-date view of the Critical Period Hypothesis is represented
by the University of Maryland, College Park instructor Robert DeKeyser. DeKeyser
argues that although it is true that there is a critical period, this does not mean that adults
cannot learn a second language perfectly, at least on the syntactic level. DeKeyser talks
about the role of language aptitude as opposed to the critical period.[citation needed]
[edit] Creolization
Main article: Creole language
More support for the innateness of language comes from the deaf population of
Nicaragua. Until approximately 1986, Nicaragua had neither education nor a formalized
sign language for the deaf. As Nicaraguans attempted to rectify the situation, they
discovered that children past a certain age had difficulty learning any language.
Additionally, the adults observed that the younger children were using gestures unknown
to them to communicate with each other. They invited Judy Kegl, an American linguist
from MIT, to help unravel this mystery. Kegl discovered that these children had
developed their own, distinct, Nicaraguan Sign Language with its own rules of "sign-
phonology" and syntax. She also discovered some 300 adults who, despite being raised in
otherwise healthy environments, had never acquired language, and turned out to be
incapable of learning language in any meaningful sense. While it was possible to teach
vocabulary, these individuals were unable to learn syntax.[4]
Derek Bickerton's (1981) landmark work with Hawaiian pidgin speakers studied
immigrant populations where first-generation parents spoke highly-ungrammatical
"pidgin English". Their children, Bickerton found, grew up speaking a grammatically rich
language -- neither English nor the syntax-less pidgin of their parents. Furthermore, the
language exhibited many of the underlying grammatical features of many other natural
languages. The language became "creolized", and is known as Hawaii Creole English.
This was taken as powerful evidence for children's innate grammar module.
[edit] Evolution of language
Main article: Origin of Language
Debate within the nativist position now revolves around how language evolved. Derek
Bickerton suggests a single mutation, a "big bang", linked together previously evolved
traits into full language.[6] Others like Steven Pinker argue for a slower evolution over
longer periods of time.[4]
[edit] Empiricist theories

Empiricist theories of language acquisition include statistical learning theories of
language acquisition, Relational Frame Theory, functionalist linguistics, usage-based
language acquisition, social interactionism and others.
[edit] Statistical learning theories of language acquisition
Some language acquisition researchers, such as Elissa Newport, Richard Aslin, and Jenny
Saffran, believe that language acquisition is based primarily on general learning
mechanisms, namely statistical learning. The development of connectionist models that
are able to successfully learn words and syntactical conventions[7] supports the
predictions of statistical learning theories of language acquisition, as do empirical studies
of children's learning of words and syntax.[8]
[edit] Chunking theories of language acquisition
Chunking theories of language acquisition constitute a group of theories related to

statistical learning theories in that they assume that the input from the environment plays
an essential role; however, they postulate different learning mechanisms. The central idea
of these theories is that language development occurs through the incremental acquisition
of “chunks” (chunks) of elementary constituents, which can be words, phonemes, or
syllables. Recently, this approach has been highly successful in simulating several
phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic categories [9] and the acquisition of
phonological knowledge [10]. The approach has several features that make it unique: the
models are implemented as computer programs, which enables clear-cut and quantitative
predictions to be made; they learn from naturalistic input, made of actual child-directed
utterances; they produce actual utterances, which can be compared with children’s
utterances; and they have simulated phenomena in several languages, including English,
Spanish, and German.
[edit] Social interactionist theory
Social Interactionist approach is a method of language acquisition in which a variety of

its forms including written, spoken, or visual as a social tool consisting of a complex
system of symbols and rules on the question of language acquisition and development--
the compromise between “nature” and “nurture” is the “Interactionist” approach which
demands a particular type of syntagma in recognizing that many factors influence
language development.
THE INITIAL STAGES
Since its emergence few years ago, the field of interactionst approach to language
acquisition research has focused on three areas, namely the cognitive approach to
language acquisition process or the developmental cognitive theory of Jean Piaget, the
information processing approach or the information processing model of Brian
MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates (the competition model), and the social interactionsit
approach or social interaction model of Lev Vygotsky[socio-cultural theory]. Although
the initial research was essentially descriptive in an attempt to describe language
development from the stand point of the social development, most recently, researchers
have been attempting toexplain few varieties of acquisition in which how learner factors
lead to differential acquisitions among learners by the process of socialization; called the
theory of “social interactionst approach”.[11]
FROM THE STAND POINT OF VYGOTSKY'S THEORY(the Socio-cultural theory)

Vygotsky, a psychologist and social constructivist, laid the foundation for the
interactionists view of language acquisition. According to Vygotsky, social interaction
plays an important role in the learning process and proposed the zone of proximal
development (ZPD) where learners construct the new language through socially mediated
interaction. Although Vygotsky's social-development theory was proposed many years
ago, it has then begun to serves as a foundation for the interactionists approaches to
language acquisition recently and as the social interactionists model in recent years.[12]
In contrast to the theoretical modalities in behaviourism, the approach to language

acquisition emphasizing that children are conditioned to learn language by a stimulus-
response pattern, the social interactionsits approaches rest on the premises of both the
Nativist and the Empiricist approaches.
It levels an outline of a language acquisition theory in combining of both the traditional

behavioral and linguistic position in language production; the essentials of this theory,
which differentiate it from a semantically based theory, are that the deepest level of
representation specifies the communicative intent primarily and semantic content
secondarily. Thus, within this theory the language accusation can easily be realized
differently in emphasizing the role of the environment in producing such differences, as
is most often the case in child language and not infrequently the case in adult language. It
is incumbent on this model as on any serious attempt to provide a theory of language
acquisition, to answer questions about how the model accounts for changes in the child's
knowledge with development, and how the model can be different to account for the
adult's language system.
And as the behavioral approaches view that children as passive beneficiaries of the
language training techniques employed by their parents and the linguistic approaches
view that children as active language processors of whose maturing neural systems guide
development; conversely, social integrationists communication enjoys a rather curious
position in contemporary theories of language acquisition as a dynamic system where
typically children cue their parents in to supplying the appropriate language experience
that children require for language advancement. In essence, it turns in supplying of
supportive communicative structure that allows efficient communication despite its
primitives.[13]
This field of language acquisition has been studied from many angles as such and
primarily concerned with the environment in which language learning takes place. From
the subset of the perspective by and large neutral as to the role of innateness, it is also
compatible with a model of learning that posits as such mechanism must interact with the
environment in order to mature. It suggests, for example, that innate linguistic
mechanism alone cannot explain children’s mastery of language, and that what is
intended is that the relationship of interaction to acquisition per se does not entirely
depend on whether there is or is not an innate mechanism that guides the learning task;
also suggesting that the linguistic competence goes beyond conditioning and imitation to
include also nonlinguistic aspect of interactions.[14]
CURRENT STRAND
Social-interactionists, such as Catherine Snow, theorize that adults play an important part
in children's language acquisition (see Moerk, E. L., 1992; also:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/1128444). However, some researchers[who?] claim that the
empirical data on which theories of social interactionism are based have often been over-
representative of middle class American and European parent-child interactions. Various
anthropological studies[which?] of other human cultures, as well as anecdotal evidence from
western families, suggests rather that many, if not the majority, of the world's children are
not spoken to in a manner akin to traditional language lessons, but nevertheless grow up
to be fully fluent language users. Many researchers[who?] now take this into account in their
analyses.
Nevertheless, Snow's criticisms might be powerful against Chomsky's argument, if the

argument from the poverty of stimulus were indeed an argument about degenerate
stimulus, but it is not. The argument from the poverty of stimulus is that there are
principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone,
however complete and grammatical that evidence is. This argument is not vulnerable to
objection based on evidence from interaction studies such as Snow's, but it is vulnerable
to the clear evidence of the availability of negative input given by conversation analysis.
In addition, meta-analysis has shown that there is a large amount of corrections made to
language produced by children.[15] Moerk (1994) conducted a meta-analysis of 40 studies
and found substantial evidence that corrections do indeed play a role. From this work,
corrections are not only abundant but contingent on the mistakes of the child.[16] (see
behavior analysis of child development).
[edit] Relational Frame Theory
Relational Frame Theory (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, 2001), provides a wholly

selectionist/learning account of the origin and development of language competence and
complexity. Based upon the principles of Skinnerian behaviorism, RFT posits that
children acquire language purely through interacting with the environment. RFT theorists
introduced the concept of functional contextualism in language learning, which
emphasizes the importance of predicting and influencing psychological events, such as
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, by focusing on manipulable variables in their context.
RFT distinguishes itself from Skinner's work by identifying and defining a particular type
of operant conditioning known as derived relational responding, a learning process that to
date appears to occur only in humans possessing a capacity for language. Empirical
studies supporting the predictions of RFT suggest that children learn language via a
system of inherent reinforcements, challenging the view that language acquisition is
based upon innate, language-specific cognitive capacities.[17]
[edit] Emergentist theories

Emergentist theories, such as MacWhinney's Competition Model, posit that language
acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological
pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture
alone is sufficient to trigger language learning; both of these influences must work
together in order to allow children to acquire a language. The proponents of these theories
argue that general cognitive processes subserve language acquisition and that the end
result of these processes is language-specific phenomena, such as word learning and
grammar acquisition. The findings of many empirical studies support the predictions of
these theories, suggesting that language acquisition is a more complex process than many
believe.[18]
[edit] Criticism of nativist theories

Many criticisms of the basic assumptions of generative theory have been put forth, with
little response from its champions. The concept of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
is unsupported by evolutionary anthropology, which shows a gradual adaptation of the
human body to the use of language, rather than a sudden appearance of a complete set of
binary parameters (which are common to digital computers but not to neurological
systems such as a human brain) delineating the whole spectrum of possible grammars
ever to have existed and ever to exist.
The theory has several hypothetical constructs, such as movement, empty categories,
complex underlying structures, and strict binary branching, that cannot possibly be
acquired from any amount of input. Since the theory is, in essence, unlearnably complex,
then it must be innate. A different theory of language, however, may yield different
conclusions. Examples of alternative theories that do not utilize movement and empty
categories are head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, and
several varieties of construction grammar. While all theories of language acquisition posit
some degree of innateness, a less convoluted theory might involve less innate structure
and more learning. Under such a theory of grammar, the input, combined with both
general and language-specific learning capacities, might be sufficient for acquisition.
Semiotics

Semiotics
General concepts
Biosemiotics · Code
Computational semiotics
Connotation · Decode · Denotation
Encode · Lexical · Modality
Salience · Sign · Sign relation
Sign relational complex · Semiosis
Semiotic elements & sign classes
Semiosphere · Literary semiotics
Semeiotic · Umwelt · Value
Methods
Commutation test
Paradigmatic analysis
Syntagmatic analysis
Semioticians
Charles Peirce · Thomas Sebeok

Ferdinand de Saussure
Mikhail Bakhtin · Jakob von Uexküll
Umberto Eco · Louis Hjelmslev
Roman Jakobson · Juri Lotman
Roland Barthes · Marcel Danesi
John Deely · Roberta Kevelson
Eero Tarasti · Kalevi Kull
Michael Silverstein
Related topics
Structuralism
Aestheticization
Postmodernity
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes
(semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and
grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and
understood.
One of the attempts to formalize the field was most notably led by the Vienna Circle and
presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors
agreed on breaking out the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches:
• Semantics: Relation between signs and the things they refer to, their denotata.
• Syntactics: Relation of signs to each other in formal structures.
• Pragmatics: Relation of signs to their impacts on those who use them. (Also
known as General Semantics)
These branches are clearly inspired by Charles W. Morris, especially his Writings on the
general theory of signs (The Hague, The Netherlands, Mouton, 1971, orig. 1938).
Semiotics is frequently seen as having important anthropological dimensions, for
example Umberto Eco proposes that every cultural phenomenon can be studied as
communication. However, some semioticians focus on the logical dimensions of the
science. They examine areas belonging also to the natural sciences - such as how
organisms make predictions about, and adapt to, their semiotic niche in the world (see
semiosis). In general, semiotic theories take signs or sign systems as their object of study:
the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or
zoosemiosis.
Syntactics is the branch of semiotics that deals with the formal properties of signs and
symbols.[1] More precisely, syntactics deals with the "rules that govern how words are
combined to form phrases and sentences."[2]. Charles Morris adds that semantics deals
with the relation of signs to their designata and the objects which they may or do denote;
and, pragmatics deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the
psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of
signs.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Terminology
• 2 Formulations
• 3 History
• 4 Semiotics Online: The Open Semiotic Resource Center
• 5 Some important semioticians
• 6 Current applications
• 7 Branches
• 8 Pictorial Semiotics
• 9 Semiotics food
• 10 Semiotics and Globalization
• 11 See also
• 12 Bibliography
• 13 References
• 15 Footnotes
[edit] Terminology
The term, which was spelled semiotics (Greek: σημειωτικός, semeiotikos, an interpreter
of signs), was first used in English by Henry Stubbes (1670, p. 75) in a very precise sense
to denote the branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs. John Locke
used the terms semeiotike and semeiotics in Book 4, Chapter 21 of An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Here he explains how science can be divided
into three parts:
All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature
of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or,
secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the
attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the
knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think
science may be divided properly into these three sorts.
—Locke, 1823/1963, p. 174
Locke then elaborates on the nature of this third category, naming it Σημειωτικη
(Semeiotike) and explaining it as "the doctrine of signs" in the following terms:
Nor is there any thing to be relied upon in Physick,[3] but an exact knowledge of
medicinal physiology (founded on observation, not principles), semiotics, method of
curing, and tried (not excogitated,[4] not commanding) medicines.
—Locke, 1823/1963, 4.21.4, p. 175
In the nineteenth century, Charles Sanders Peirce defined what he termed "semiotic"
(which he sometimes spelt as "semeiotic") as the "quasi-necessary, or formal doctrine of
signs", which abstracts "what must be the characters of all signs used by...an intelligence
capable of learning by experience"[5], and which is philosophical logic pursued in terms
of signs and sign processes[6]. Charles Morris followed Peirce in using the term
"semiotic" and in extending the discipline beyond human communication to animal
learning and use of signals.
Saussure, however, viewed the most important area within semiotics as belonging to the
social sciences:
It is... possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social
life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall
call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, 'sign'). It would investigate the nature of signs
and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it
will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only
one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws
applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in
the field of human knowledge.
—Cited in Chandler's "Semiotics For Beginners", Introduction.
[edit] Formulations
Semioticians classify signs or sign systems in relation to the way they are transmitted (see
modality). This process of carrying meaning depends on the use of codes that may be the
individual sounds or letters that humans use to form words, the body movements they
make to show attitude or emotion, or even something as general as the clothes they wear.
To coin a word to refer to a thing (see lexical words), the community must agree on a
simple meaning (a denotative meaning) within their language. But that word can transmit
that meaning only within the language's grammatical structures and codes (see syntax and
semantics). Codes also represent the values of the culture, and are able to add new shades
of connotation to every aspect of life.
To explain the relationship between semiotics and communication studies,

communication is defined as the process of transferring data from a source to a receiver
as efficiently and effectively as possible. Hence, communication theorists construct
models based on codes, media, and contexts to explain the biology, psychology, and
mechanics involved. Both disciplines also recognise that the technical process cannot be
separated from the fact that the receiver must decode the data, i.e., be able to distinguish
the data as salient and make meaning out of it. This implies that there is a necessary
overlap between semiotics and communication. Indeed, many of the concepts are shared,
although in each field the emphasis is different. In Messages and Meanings: An
Introduction to Semiotics, Marcel Danesi (1994) suggested that semioticians' priorities
were to study signification first and communication second. A more extreme view is
offered by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1987; trans. 1990: 16), who, as a musicologist,
considered the theoretical study of communication irrelevant to his application of
semiotics.
Semiotics differs from linguistics in that it generalizes the definition of a sign to

encompass signs in any medium or sensory modality. Thus it broadens the range of sign
systems and sign relations, and extends the definition of language in what amounts to its
widest analogical or metaphorical sense. Peirce's definition of the term "semiotic" as the
study of necessary features of signs also has the effect of distinguishing the discipline
from linguistics as the study of contingent features that the world's languages happen to
have acquired in the course of human evolution.
Perhaps more difficult is the distinction between semiotics and the philosophy of
language. In a sense, the difference is a difference of traditions more than a difference of
subjects. Different authors have called themselves "philosopher of language" or
"semiotician". This difference does not match the separation between analytic and
continental philosophy. On a closer look, there may be found some differences regarding
subjects. Philosophy of language pays more attention to natural languages or to languages
in general, while semiotics is deeply concerned about non-linguistic signification.
Philosophy of language also bears a stronger connection to linguistics, while semiotics is
closer to some of the humanities (including literary theory) and to cultural anthropology.
Semiosis or semeiosis is the process that forms meaning from any organism's
apprehension of the world through signs.
[edit] History
The importance of signs and signification has been recognized throughout much of the
history of philosophy, and in psychology as well. Plato and Aristotle both explored the
relationship between signs and the world, and Augustine considered the nature of the sign
within a conventional system. These theories have had a lasting effect in Western
philosophy, especially through Scholastic philosophy. More recently, Umberto Eco, in his
Semiotics and philosophy of language, has argued that semiotic theories are implicit in
the work of most, perhaps all, major thinkers.
[edit] Semiotics Online: The Open Semiotic Resource

Center
The Open Semiotic Resource Center[2] is one important online source for information
pertaining to semiotics. It hosts The Public Journal of Semiotics [3], a publicly accessible
academic journal, as well as an Online Encyclopedia of Semiotics[4]. It also publishing
the proceedings of conferences[5], links to useful research tools[6], academic papers
available to download[7], and a regularly updated list of upcoming conferences [8].
The Open Semiotics Resource Center also publishes the quarterly newsletter SemiotiX
[9], which offers reports on semiotic research and activity internationally, and hosts the
archives of Semiotic Review of Books [10], which publishes review essays on academic
material of interest to semioticians. The Open Semiotic Resource Center offers a variety
of advanced courses in semiotic topics for free. The courses are designed by international
leaders in the field, and can be accessed here[11]. Finally, the Open Semiotic Resource
Center provides a wide range of links to other sites addressing, or relevant to different
types of semiotics.
[edit] Some important semioticians

• Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the founder of the philosophical doctrine
known as pragmatism (which he later renamed "pragmaticism" to distinguish it
from the pragmatism developed by others like William James), preferred the
terms "semiotic" and "semeiotic." He defined semiosis as "...action, or influence,
which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object,
and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into
actions between pairs." ("Pragmatism", Essential Peirce 2: 411; written 1907).
His notion of semiosis evolved throughout his career, beginning with the triadic
relation just described, and ending with a system consisting of 59,049 (= 310, or 3
to the 10th power) possible elements and relations. One reason for this high
number is that he allowed each interpretant to act as a sign, thereby creating a new
signifying relation. Peirce was also a notable logician, and he considered
semiotics and logic as facets of a wider theory. For a summary of Peirce's
contributions to semiotics, see Liszka (1996).
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), the "father" of modern linguistics, proposed
a dualistic notion of signs, relating the signifier as the form of the word or phrase
uttered, to the signified as the mental concept. It is important to note that,
according to Saussure, the sign is completely arbitrary, i.e. there was no necessary
connection between the sign and its meaning. This sets him apart from previous
philosophers such as Plato or the Scholastics, who thought that there must be
some connection between a signifier and the object it signifies. In his Course in
General Linguistics, Saussure himself credits the American linguist William
Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) with insisting on the arbitrary nature of the sign.
Saussure's insistence on the arbitrariness of the sign has also greatly influenced
later philosophers, especially postmodern theorists such as Jacques Derrida,
Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard. Ferdinand de Saussure coined the term
semiologie while teaching his landmark "Course on General Linguistics" at the
University of Geneva from 1906–11. Saussure posited that no word is inherently
meaningful. Rather a word is only a "signifier," i.e. the representation of
something, and it must be combined in the brain with the "signified," or the thing
itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued "sign." Saussure believed that
dismantling signs was a real science, for in doing so we come to an empirical
understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other
abstract concepts.
• Charles W. Morris (1901–1979). In his 1938 Foundations of the Theory of Signs,
he defined semiotics as grouping the triad syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.
Syntax studies the interrelation of the signs, without regard to meaning. Semantics
studies the relation between the signs and the objects to which they apply.
Pragmatics studies the relation between the sign system and its human (or animal)
user. Unlike his mentor George Herbert Mead, Morris was a behaviorist and
sympathetic to the Vienna Circle positivism of his colleague Rudolf Carnap.
Morris has been accused[who?] of misreading Peirce.
• Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) developed a formalist approach to Saussure's
structuralist theories. His best known work is Prolegomena to a Theory of
Language, which was expanded in Résumé of the Theory of Language, a formal
development of glossematics, his scientific calculus of language.
• Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944) studied the sign processes in animals. He
introduced the concept of Umwelt (subjective world or environment, lit. "world
around") and functional circle (Funktionskreis) as a general model of sign
processes. In his Theory of Meaning (Bedeutungslehre, 1940), he described the
semiotic approach to biology, thus establishing the field that is now called
biosemiotics.
• Umberto Eco made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications,
most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel The Name of the Rose, which
includes applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field
bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He has also criticized in
several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La
production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most
famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he
purposes four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and
invention.
• Algirdas Julien Greimas developed a structural version of semiotics named
generative semiotics, trying to shift the focus of discipline from signs to systems
of signification. His theories develop the ideas of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
• Thomas A. Sebeok, a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-
ranging American semiotician. Though he insisted that animals are not capable of
language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling
and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by
philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all
communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and
the environment it lives in. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the
activity of interpreting signs) and life - the view that has further developed by
Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school.
• Thure von Uexküll (1908–2004), the "father" of modern psychosomatic medicine,
developed a diagnostic method based on semiotic and biosemiotic analyses.
• Roland Barthes(1915-1980) was a French literary theorist and semiotician. He
would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois
society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, portrayal of wine
in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal
perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and
inebriating). He found semiotics useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained
that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or connotations. A
picture of a full, dark bottle is a sign, a signifier relating to a signified: a
fermented, alcoholic beverage - wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified
and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time
relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations
for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to
maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with
similar Marxist theory.
• Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu (or Tartu-
Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of
culture and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He
also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues
were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, and Boris Uspensky.
• Valentin Voloshinov (Russian: Валенти́н Никола́евич Воло́шинов) (1895–June
13, 1936) was a Soviet/Russian linguist, whose work has been influential in the
field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Written in the late 1920s in
the USSR, Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (tr.: Marksizm
i Filosofiya Yazyka) developed a counter-Saussurean linguistics, which situated
language use in social process rather than in an entirely decontexualized
Saussurean langue.
• The Mu Group (Groupe µ) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the
visual semiotics.
[edit] Current applications
Color-coding hot- and cold-water faucets is common in many cultures but, as this
example shows, the coding may be rendered meaningless because of context. The two
faucets were probably sold as a coded set, but the code is unusable (and ignored) as there
is a single water supply.
Applications of semiotics include:
• It represents a methodology for the analysis of texts regardless of modality. For

these purposes, "text" is any message preserved in a form whose existence is
independent of both sender and receiver;
• It can improve ergonomic design in situations where it is important to ensure that
human beings can interact more effectively with their environments, whether it be
on a large scale, as in architecture, or on a small scale, such as the configuration
of instrumentation for human use.
Semiotics is only slowly establishing itself as a discipline to be respected. In some

countries, its role is limited to literary criticism and an appreciation of audio and visual
media, but this narrow focus can inhibit a more general study of the social and political
forces shaping how different media are used and their dynamic status within modern
culture. Issues of technological determinism in the choice of media and the design of
communication strategies assume new importance in this age of mass media. The use of
semiotic methods to reveal different levels of meaning and, sometimes, hidden
motivations has led some to demonise elements of the subject as Marxist, nihilist, etc.
(e.g. critical discourse analysis in Postmodernism and deconstruction in Post-
structuralism).
Publication of research is both in dedicated journals such as Sign Systems Studies,

established by Juri Lotman and published by Tartu University Press; Semiotica, founded
by Thomas A. Sebeok and published by Mouton de Gruyter; Zeitschrift für Semiotik;
European Journal of Semiotics; Versus (founded and directed by Umberto Eco), et al.;
The American Journal of Semiotics; and as articles accepted in periodicals of other
disciplines, especially journals oriented toward philosophy and cultural criticism.
[edit] Branches
Semiotics has sprouted a number of subfields, including but not limited to the following:
• Biosemiotics is the study of semiotic processes at all levels of biology, or a

semiotic study of living systems.
• Cognitive Semiotics is the study of meaning through neuroscience, psychology,
linguistics, art, and philosophy at the University of Aarhus, Denmark that has
brought many international semioticians: Per Aage Brandt, Svend Oestergaard,
Per Bungaard, Frederik Stjernfelt and a connection to Aarhus Hospital,
particularly the Center of Functionally Integrated Neuroscience (CFIN).
• Computational semiotics attempts to engineer the process of semiosis, say in the
study of and design for Human-Computer Interaction or to mimic aspects of
human cognition through artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.
• Cultural and literary semiotics examines the literary world, the visual media, the
mass media, and advertising in the work of writers such as Roland Barthes,
Marcel Danesi, and Juri Lotman.
• Design Semiotics or Product Semiotics is the study of the use of signs in the
design of physical products. Introduced by Rune Monö while teaching Industrial
Design at the Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden.
• Law and Semiotics.
• Music semiology "There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological
realm which, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic levels, has developmental
priority over verbal language." (Middleton 1990, p.172) See Nattiez (1976, 1987,
1989), Stefani (1973, 1986), Baroni (1983), and Semiotica (66: 1–3 (1987)).
• Organisational Semiotics is the study of semiotic processes in organizations. It
has strong ties to Computational semiotics and Human-Computer Interaction.
• Social semiotics expands the interpretable semiotic landscape to include all
cultural codes, such as in slang, fashion, and advertising. See the work of Roland
Barthes, Michael Halliday, Bob Hodge, and Christian Metz.
• Structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-
Strauss, Roland Barthes, etc.
• Theatre Semiotics extends or adapts semiotics onstage. Key theoricians include
Keir Elam.
• Urban semiotics.
• Visual semiotics - a subdomain of semiotics that analyses visual signs. See also
visual rhetoric [12].
[edit] Pictorial Semiotics

Pictorial Semiotics is intimately connected to art history and theory. It has gone beyond
them both in at least one fundamental way, however. While art history has limited its
visual analysis to a small number of pictures which qualify as "works of art," pictorial
semiotics has focused on the properties of pictures more generally. This break from
traditional art history and theory--as well as from other major streams of semiotic
analysis--leaves open a wide variety of possibilities for pictorial semiotics. Some
influences have been drawn from phenomenological analysis, cognitive psychology, and
structuralist and cognitivist linguistics, and visual anthropology/sociology. 5 lectures on
contemporary issues in pictorial semiotics[13], written by Goran Sonesson (Avdelningen
för semiotik, Lunds Universitet) is available publicly through the Open Semiotics
Resource Center [14].
[edit] Semiotics food

Food has been one traditional topic of choice in relating semiotic theory because it is
extremely accessible and easily relatable to the average individual’s life. [7]
Semiotics is the study of sign processes when conducted individually or in groups and
how these sign processes give insight as to how meaning is enabled and also understood.
[8]
Food is said to be semiotic because it transforms meaning with preparation. Food that is
eaten by a wild animal raw off of a carcass is obviously different in meaning when
compared to a food that is prepared by humans in a kitchen to represent a cultural dish. [9]
Food can also be said to be symbolic of certain social codes. “If food is treated as a code,
the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed.
The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries
and transactions across boundaries” [10].
Food is a semiotic regardless of how it is prepared. Whether food is prepared with

precision in a fine dining restaurant, picked from a dumpster, plucked, devoured, or even
consumed by a wild animal, meaning can always be extracted from the way a certain
food has been prepared and the context in which it is served.
[edit] Semiotics and Globalization

Present research found that, as branches grow and become more international, that their
logos become more symbolic and less iconic. The iconicity and symbolism of a sign
depends on the cultural convention and are on that ground in relation with each other. If
the cultural convention has greater influence on the sign, the signs gets more symbolic
value. [11]

article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (April 2007)
Linguistics
Language
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonetics
Comparative
linguistics
Etymology
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language assessment
Language education
Psycholinguistics
Neurolinguistics
Stylistics
Prescription
List of linguists
Unsolved problems
v•d•e
Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language

change. It has five main concerns:
• to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;

• to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness,
grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics);
• to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
• to describe the history of speech communities;
• to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 History and development

• 2 Evolution into other fields
• 3 Sub-fields of study
o 3.1 Comparative linguistics
o 3.2 Etymology
o 3.3 Dialectology
o 3.4 Phonology
o 3.5 Morphology
o 3.6 Syntax
• 4 See also
• 5 Citations and notes
• 6 References
• 7 Recommended readings
[edit] History and development

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier
discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to
antiquity.
At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with
establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric proto-languages,
using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-
known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories. But since
then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages,
Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many
others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived
discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages comparative study is
now a highly specialised field and most research is being carried out on the subsequent
development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard
varieties.
Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking for
example Indo-European, Uralic and other families into Nostratic. These attempts have
not been accepted widely because the information necessary to establish relatedness
becomes less available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic
methods is limited because of chance word resemblances and varies between language
groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the various
proto-languages is also difficult. Several methods are available for this but only
approximate results can be obtained.
[edit] Evolution into other fields

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern
dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between
synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day
organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and
diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's
clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic
linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written
records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case
are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the
work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not
uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to
language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.
The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but

most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of
historical linguistics such as the comparative method. Less standard techniques, such as
mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the
comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.
The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the
groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice,
however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the
archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are a large number of theories
concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with
their own interpretation of the archaeological record.
[edit] Sub-fields of study

[edit] Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical

linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their
historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or
by genetic descent.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language, and comparative

linguistics aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and
specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. In order to maintain
a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix
an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.
[edit] Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words — when they entered a language, from
what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. A word may enter
a language as a loanword (i.e., as a word from one language adopted by speakers of
another language), through derivational morphology by combining pre-existing elements
in the language, by a hybrid of these two processes called phono-semantic matching, or in
several other minor ways.
In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of
how words change from culture to culture over time. However, etymologists also apply
the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that
are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analyzing related
languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make
inferences, about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots
have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the
Indo-European language family.
Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition,
nowadays much etymological research is done in language families where little or no
early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
[edit] Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that
are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and
their associated features (as opposed to variations based on social factors, which are
studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in historical
linguistics). Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a
common ancestor and synchronic variation.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical features which correspond to

regional areas. Thus they are usually dealing with populations living in their areas for
generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to
new settlements.
[edit] Phonology
Phonology is a sub-field of historical linguistics which studies the sound system of a

specific language or set of languages change over time. Whereas phonetics is about the
physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way
sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a
language. For example, the "p" in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is
not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of
aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how
sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress,
accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign
languages, even though the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The principles of
phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are
designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones.
[edit] Morphology
Morphology - the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in the context of
historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance,
languages with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification process
is the field of linguistics that studies the internal structure of words as a formal means of
expression.[1] Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology. While
words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear
that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. The rules
understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are
formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way,
morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within
and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the
speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of
expression change over time. See grammaticalisation.
[edit] Syntax
Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural
languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern
the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish".
Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many
professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural
languages in the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure
in related languages changed over time. See grammaticalisation.

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Sociolinguistics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

[edit] Applications of sociolinguistics

The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining

William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. He is

[edit] Sociolinguistic variables

[edit] Traditional sociolinguistic interview

[edit] Fundamental Concepts in Sociolinguistics

[edit] Speech Community

Main article: Speech community

Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or less discrete

Speech communities can be members of a profession with a specialized jargon, distinct

[edit] High prestige and low prestige varieties

Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)

[edit] Social network

[edit] Internal vs. external language

In Chomskian linguistics, a distinction is drawn between I-language (internal language)

[edit] Differences according to class

[edit] Class aspiration

[edit] Social language codes

[edit] Restricted code

[edit] Elaborated code

[edit] Deviation from standard language varieties

Bristolian Dialect (lower class) ... Standard English (higher class)

[edit] Covert prestige

Main article: Prestige (sociolinguistics)

It is generally assumed that non-standard language is low-prestige language. However, in

[edit] Differences according to geography

[edit] Differences according to gender

[edit] Minimal responses

As the work of DeFrancisco (1991) shows, female linguistic behaviour characteristically

[edit] Changing the topic of conversation

[edit] Verbal aggression

[edit] Listening and attentiveness

[edit] Dominance versus subjection

See also Complimentary language and gender.

Jump to: navigation, search

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as

Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent

[edit] The dynamic turn in semantics

• factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification — meanings

An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic

[edit] Prototype theory

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The

[edit] Computer science

• x += y (C, Java, etc.)

Semantics for computer applications falls into three categories:[14]

• Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the

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Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context

[edit] Structural ambiguity

• It could mean you are holding a green light bulb.

Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure.

While Chomskyan linguistics famously repudiated Bloomfieldian anthropological

[edit] Areas of interest

[edit] Referential uses of language

"Santa Claus eats cookies."

Semantico-referential meaning is also present in meta-semantical statements such as:

[edit] Non-referential uses of language

In all of these cases, the semantico-referential meaning of the utterances is unchanged