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Listeners have to figure out whether these two different pronunciations are
linguistics.
the same speech sound such as a 'd' or two different sounds such as a 'd'
sound and a 't' sound," said Emily Myers, assistant professor (research) of
Early cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University.
Decision-making brain region also deciphers different phonetic sounds by
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philosophy. linguistic science at York University and completed a masters at Edinburgh.
Among the Monaghan joins BHP recovery experts; the dealmakers in association ... by
philosophers The Journal (Newcastle, England)
interested in More results
language was
Wilhelm von
Humboldt
, who
considered
language an
activity that
arises
spontaneously
from the
human spirit;
thus, he felt,
languages are
different just
as the
characteristics
of individuals
are different.
In 1786 the
English
scholar Sir
William Jones
suggested the
possible
affinity of
Sanskrit and
Persian with
Greek and
Latin, for the
first time
bringing to
light genetic
relations
between
languages.
With Jones's
revelation the
school of
comparative
historical
linguistics
began.
Through the
comparison of
language
structures,
such 19th-
century
European
linguists as
Jakob Grimm
, Rasmus Rask
, Karl
Brugmann
, and Antoine
Meillet, as
well as the
American
William
Dwight
Whitney
, did much to
establish the
existence of
the Indo-
European
family of
languages.

Structur
al
Linguisti
cs
In the 20th
cent. the
structural or
descriptive
linguistics
school
emerged. It
dealt with
languages at
particular
points in time
(synchronic)
rather than
throughout
their historical
development
(diachronic).
The father of
modern
structural
linguistics was
Ferdinand de
Saussure
, who believed
in language as
a systematic
structure
serving as a
link between
thought and
sound; he
thought of
language
sounds as a
series of
linguistic
signs that are
purely
arbitrary, as
can be seen in
the linguistic
signs or words
for horse:
German Pferd,
Turkish at,
French cheval,
and Russian
loshad'. In
America, a
structural
approach was
continued
through the
efforts of
Franz Boas
and Edward
Sapir
, who worked
primarily with
Native
American
languages, and
Leonard
Bloomfield
, whose
methodology
required that
nonlinguistic
criteria must
not enter a
structural
description.
Rigorous
procedures for
determining
language
structure were
developed by
Kenneth Pike,
Bernard
Bloch, Charles
Hockett, and
others.

See also
structuralism
.

Transfor
mational
-
Generati
ve
Gramma
r
In the 1950s
the school of
linguistic
thought
known as
transformation
al-generative
grammar
received wide
acclaim
through the
works of
Noam
Chomsky
. Chomsky
postulated a
syntactic base
of language
(called deep
structure),
which consists
of a series of
phrase-
structure
rewrite rules,
i.e., a series of
(possibly
universal)
rules that
generates the
underlying
phrase-
structure of a
sentence, and
a series of
rules (called
transformation
s) that act
upon the
phrase-
structure to
form more
complex
sentences. The
end result of a
transformation
al-generative
grammar is a
surface
structure that,
after the
addition of
words and
pronunciations
, is identical to
an actual
sentence of a
language. All
languages
have the same
deep structure,
but they differ
from each
other in
surface
structure
because of the
application of
different rules
for
transformation
s,
pronunciation,
and word
insertion.
Another
important
distinction
made in
transformation
al-generative
grammar is
the difference
between
language
competence
(the
subconscious
control of a
linguistic
system) and
language
performance
(the speaker's
actual use of
language).
Although the
first work
done in
transformation
al-generative
grammar was
syntactic, later
studies have
applied the
theory to the
phonological
and semantic
components of
language.

Other
Areas of
Linguisti
c Study
In contrast to
theoretical
schools of
linguistics,
workers in
applied
linguistics in
the latter part
of the 20th
cent. have
produced
much work in
the areas of
foreign-
language
teaching and
of bilingual
education in
the public
schools (in the
United States
this has
primarily
involved
Spanish and,
in the
Southwest,
some Native
American
languages in
addition to
English). In
addition, such
subfields as
pragmatics,
sociolinguistic
s, and
psycholinguist
ics have
gained
importance.

Bibliogr
aphy
See F. de
Saussure,
Course in
General
Linguistics (tr.
1966); J.
Lyons,
Introduction
to Theoretical
Linguistics
(1968), and
Language and
Linguistics
(1981); N.
Chomsky,
Aspects of the
Theory of
Syntax (1969);
A. Radford,
Transformatio
nal Syntax
(1982); F. J.
Newmeyer,
Linguistics (4
vol., 1988);
W. J. Frawley,
ed.,
International
Encyclopedia
of Linguistics
(2d ed., 4 vol.,
2003).

The Columbia
Electronic
Encyclopedia
® Copyright
© 2007,
Columbia
University
Press.
Licensed from
Columbia
University
Press. All
rights
reserved.
www.cc.colu
mbia.edu/cu/c
up/

linguis
tics
Study of the
nature and
structure of
language. It
traditionally
encompasses
semantics,
syntax, and
phonology.
Synchronic
linguistic
studies aim to
describe a
language as it
exists at a
given time;
diachronic
studies trace a
language's
historical
development.
Greek
philosophers
in the 5th
century BC
who debated
the origins of
human
language were
the first in the
West to be
concerned
with linguistic
theory. The
first complete
Greek
grammar,
written by
Dionysus
Thrax in the
1st century
BC, was a
model for
Roman
grammarians,
whose work
led to the
medieval and
Renaissance
vernacular
grammars.

With the rise

of historical
linguistics in
the 19th
century,
linguistics
became a
science. In the
late 19th and
early 20th
centuries
Ferdinand de
Saussure
established the
structuralist
school of
linguistics (see
structuralism),
which
analyzed
actual speech
to learn about
the underlying
structure of
language. In
the 1950s
Noam
Chomsky
challenged the
structuralist
program,
arguing that
linguistics
should study
native
speakers'
unconscious
knowledge of
their language
(competence),
not the
language they
actually
produce
(performance).
His general
approach,
known as
transformation
al generative
grammar, was
extensively
revised in
subsequent
decades as the
extended
standard
theory, the
principles-
and-
parameters
(government-
binding)
approach, and
the minimalist
program.
Other
grammatical
theories
developed
from the
1960s were
generalized
phrase
structure
grammar,
lexical-
functional
grammar,
relational
grammar, and
cognitive
grammar.
Chomsky's
emphasis on
linguistic
competence
greatly
stimulated the
development
of the related
disciplines of
psycholinguist
ics and
neurolinguisti
cs. Other
related fields
are
anthropologic
al linguistics,
computational
linguistics,
mathematical
linguistics,
sociolinguistic
s, and the
philosophy of
language.

For more
information on
linguistics,
visit
Britannica.co
m. Britannica
Concise
Encyclopedia.
Copyright ©
1994-2008
Encyclopædia
Britannica,
Inc.

linguistics
[liŋ′gwis·tiks]
(linguistics)
The study of
human speech
in its various
aspects,
especially
units of
language,
phonetics,
syntax,
semantics, and
grammar.

McGraw-Hill
Dictionary of
Scientific &
Technical
Terms, 6E,
Copyright ©
2003 by The
McGraw-Hill
Companies,
Inc.

Linguistics

The science,
that is, the
general and
universal
properties, of
language. The
middle of the
twentieth
century saw a
shift in the
principal
direction of
linguistic
inquiry from
one of data
collection and
classification
to the
formulation of
a theory of
generative
grammar,
which focuses
on the
biological
basis for the
acquisition
and use of
human
language and
the universal
principles that
constrain the
class of all
languages.
Generative
grammar
distinguishes
between the
knowledge of
language
(linguistic
competence),
which is
represented by
mental
grammar, and
the production
and
comprehensio
n of speech
(linguistic
performance).

If grammar is
defined as the
mental
representation
of linguistic
knowledge,
then a general
theory of
language is a
theory of
grammar. A
grammar
includes
everything one
knows about a
language; its
phonetics and
phonology
(the sounds
and the sound
system), its
morphology
(the structure
of words), its
lexicon (the
words or
vocabulary),
its syntax (the
structure of
sentences and
the constraints
on well-
formed
sentences),
and its
semantics (the
meaning of
words and
sentences).
See
Psychoacousti
cs, Speech,
Speech
perception

Linguistics is
not limited to
grammatical
theory.
Descriptive
linguistics
analyzes the
grammars of
individual
languages;
anthropologic
al linguistics,
or
ethnolinguistic
s, and
sociolinguistic
s focus on
languages in
relation to
culture, social
class, race,
and gender;
dialectologists
investigate
how these
factors
fragment one
language into
many. In
addition,
sociolinguists
and applied
linguists
examine
language
planning,
literacy,
bilingualism,
and second-
language
acquisition.
Computational
linguistics
encompasses
automatic
parsing,
machine
processing,
and computer
simulation of
grammatical
models for the
generation and
parsing of
sentences. If
viewed as a
branch of
artificial
intelligence,
computational
linguistics has
as its goal the
modeling of
human
language as a
cognitive
system. A
branch of
linguistics
concerned
with the
biological
basis of
language
development
is
neurolinguisti
cs. The form
of language
representation
in the mind,
that is,
linguistic
competence
and the
structure and
components of
the mental
grammar, is
the concern of
theoretical
linguistics.
The branch of
linguistics
concerned
with linguistic
performance,
that is, the
production
and
comprehensio
n of speech (or
of sign
language by
the deaf), is
called
psycholinguist
ics.
Psycholinguist
s also
investigate
how children
acquire the
complex
grammar that
underlies
language use.
See
Information
processing,
Psycholinguist
ics

McGraw-Hill
Concise
Encyclopedia
of Bioscience.
© 2002 by
The McGraw-
Hill
Companies,
Inc.

Warning! The
following
article is from
The Great
Soviet
Encyclopedia
(1979). It
might be
outdated or
ideologically
biased.
Linguistics

the science of
language.
Linguistics
studies the
structure,
functioning,
and historical
development
of language—
the entire
scope of the
properties and
functions of
language. At
various times,
however,
different
aspects of
language have
been
interpreted as
the immediate
subject of
linguistics.
From classical
antiquity until
the late 18th
century,
linguistics was
not yet
distinguished
from logic,
and the
subject of
linguistics, as
a part of logic
and
philosophy,
was the
unified,
universal
means of
expressing
thought.

In the 19th
century,
linguistics
became a
separate
discipline, and
an
evolutionary
view of
language was
developed.
Linguistics at
this time came
to be
concerned
with various
languages and
their histories.
In the 20th
century,
linguistics has
studied
language as a
universal,
integral
property of
man, Homo
sapiens, and
has
investigated
languages in
their various
historical
forms. The
dual subject of
linguistics
may be
explained by
the duality of
its object—
language.

The system of
linguistic
disciplines.
Modern
linguistics is
divided into
two areas
according to
the nature of
its subject
matter:
general
linguistics,
which is
concerned
with human
language per
se; and
specific
branches of
linguistics,
which study
individual
languages and
their groups,
such as
Russian
linguistics and
Romance
linguistics.
Linguistic
study often
encompasses
both areas.

General
linguistics
studies the
universal
properties of
language,
primarily the
most general
rules of its
structural-
systematic and
semiotic
organization,
including the
linguistic sign;
the semantics
and syntax of
natural and
machine
languages; and
the phonetics
of natural
languages.
The
universality of
the structural-
systematic and
semiotic
properties of
language
results from
the existence
of language as
a special type
of sign
system. The
universality of
semantics is a
condition of
the unity of
the objective
world, the
reflection of
the world in
consciousness,
and the
transformation
of the world in
social
practice. The
universality of
syntax is a
condition of
the purpose of
language—to
serve the goals
of
communicatio
n—which
determines the
common
features of the
structure of
utterances in
all languages.
The
universality of
phonetics
results mainly
from the
singular
structure and
functioning of
the human
speech
apparatus. The
common rules
of semiotic
organization,
structure,
semantics,
syntax, and
phonetics are
studied mainly
by means of
various forms
of the
hypothetical-
deductive
method,
including
logical and
psychological
modeling.
Such rules
usually
become the
subjects of
special
disciplines:
theoretical (or
general)
semantics,
syntax, and
phonetics; the
theory of
language
systems and
structures; and
the theory of
generative
grammars.

The special
branches of
linguistics
study specific
languages and
their
manifestations
in speech.
National and
historical
distinctions
among
languages are
associated
primarily with
the specific
rules of
phonetics,
semantics, and
syntax as well
as with the
various ways
in which the
basic rules of
these
categories are
formed, that
is, with the
phonology,
morphology,
lexicon, and
stylistics of
each
individual
language or
group of
related
languages.
Phonology,
morphology,
the lexicon,
and stylistics
are also
governed by
more specific
historical rules
(as opposed to
the universal
rules of
semantics,
syntax, and
phonetics) and
constitute the
primary
subject of
special
linguistics.

Modern
linguistics has
preserved the
traditional
division into
the following
disciplines:
(1) Disciplines
dealing with
the internal
structure of
language, or
microlinguisti
cs: phonetics
and phonology
(with a
separate
category for
prosody);
grammar, with
subdivisions
into
morphology
and syntax
(sometimes
with a
separate
category for
morphophone
mics);
lexicology
(with a
separate
category for
phraseology);
semantics
(sometimes
with a
separate
category for
semasiology);
stylistics; and
typology.

(2) Disciplines
dealing with
the historical
development
of language:
the history of
language;
historical
grammar,
which is
sometimes
synonymous
with the
history of
language in
the broad
sense;
comparative-
historical
grammar; the
history of
literary
languages; and
etymology.

(3) Disciplines
dealing with
the function of
language in
society, or
metalinguistic
s:
dialectology,
linguistic
geography,
areal
linguistics,
and
sociolinguistic
s.

(4) Disciplines
dealing with
multifaceted
problems and
involving
more than one
branch of
science:
psycholinguist
ics;
mathematical
linguistics;
computational
linguistics,
which is
sometimes
understood as
an applied
discipline; and
the disciplines
of applied
linguistics
proper, which
include
experimental
phonetics,
lexicography,
statistical
linguistics,
paleography,
the history of
writing
systems, and
the
decipherment
of unknown
writing
systems
(seeAPPLIED
LINGUISTICS).

Depending on
the object of
study
(language as a
universal
property of
man or
languages in
their various
historical
forms), 20th-
century
linguistics has
at its disposal
two types of
methods. The
first type are
the deductive-
logical
methods used
in studying
any kind of
system,
particularly
information
transmission
systems,
which include
language
systems in
general. In
addition to
various
structural
methods,
deductive-
logical
methods
include the
following: the
generative, or
constructive,
method;
logical
calculation
methods;
algorithmic
methods; and
modeling, or
simulation,
methods. The
second type
are historical
methods and
methods of
observation
and
experimentati
on, including
the
comparative-
historical
method, field
observation,
and methods
used in
studying
specific
historical
languages,
including the
interrogation
of informants.
The two types
of methods
can be related
on the basis of
regular rules
in accordance
with the
empirical and
theoretical
levels of
cognition.

An
intermediate
group between
the two main
types of
methods
consists of
psycholinguist
ic methods,
which are
used in
studying the
properties of
language in
general as
well as
specific
historical
languages.
Some
linguistic
methods,
including
logical
calculation
and
psychological
experimentati
on, are
borrowed
from other
sciences, and
other sciences
in turn borrow
methods from
linguistics.
The structural
methods of
distribution
and
opposition, for
example, are
used in
cultural
anthropology
and literary
theory and
criticism and,
in generalized
form, serve as
the basis for
semiotics and
several special
branches of
mathematics.
Owing to the
particular
features of its
subject and
methods, in
particular, the
universal
features of
language,
linguistics
exerts an
influence on
literary theory
and criticism,
cultural
anthropology,
psychology,
mathematics,
cybernetics,
and
philosophy.

Particular
features of
general
scientific
concepts. The
particulars of
the subject
and methods
of linguistics
and the
intersection in
linguistics of
features of the
social,
deductive, and
natural
sciences
account for
the distinctive
nature of such
concepts as
laws, rules,
types,
evolution,
determinism,
and proof.
Two concepts
of the
linguistic law,
or rule, may
be
distinguished,
depending on
whether the
concept is
formed
relative to
language as a
whole or to
individual
languages.
The first type
of linguistic
law, which
concerns
language in
general, states
general
principles of
sign systems
that are
constant over
time and
general
principles of
semantics,
syntax, and
phonetics,
which are
usually termed
universals.
These laws
serve as
givens in the
formulation of
various
theories and
models
(particularly
those that are
formalized) by
means of
which
language is
studied. A
law, therefore,
is any
universal,
most often one
that is
dynamic or
historical,
such as the
laws of the
establishment
of phonemes,
of the
transformation
of
phonological
systems, of
stress shift,
and of
transformation
s of meanings.
General laws,
including
those that are
formalized,
permit
verification
and refutation
by means of
experimental
data obtained
from
observation of
specific
languages. An
empirical
selection of
examples is
insufficient,
however, for
proof of a
general
proposition; a
corresponding
well-
constructed
theory is
essential.

The second
type of
linguistic law
concerns
specific
languages.
Since every
language
changes over
time, these
laws are
formulated as
historical laws
that apply to a
specific
geographical
area during a
specific period
of time.
Examples are
the conditions
for the
disappearance
of nasal
sounds in the
Slavic
languages, the
appearance of
nasal sounds
in French, and
the rules of
verbal and
prepositional
government in
Russian.
Inductive
generalization
of these rules
leads to
probabilistic
formulations
rather than to
general
language laws.

Every
language is
characterized
by a certain
set of
historical
laws. On the
basis of
similarity of
such laws,
languages may
be grouped
into types that
do not depend
on genetic
relationships.
Several types
are formulated
on the basis of
grammatical
constructions.
They include
the active
type, which
includes
several
American
Indian
languages; the
ergative type,
which
includes
several other
American
Indian
languages and
the Ab-khazo-
Adyg
languages; and
the nominative
type, which
includes the
Indo-
European
languages.
There also
exist more
specific
language
groupings, for
example,
those
languages that
exhibit a
tendency
toward open
syllables. At
the same time,
a historical
law in modern
linguistics
may
sometimes be
formulated as
a special case
of a law that is
constant over
time. The
existence of
two types of
linguistic laws
gives rise to
the unique
principle of
determinism,
which holds
that any
general rule of
language
determines the
rule of a
specific
language, but
not necessarily
vice versa; the
same rule may
produce
different
results in
another
specific
language,
depending on
the particular
system of that
language.

This division
of linguistic
laws became
possible with
the
recognition of
the duality of
the subject of
linguistics:
language in
general and
specific
languages.
Until this
division was
made, there
were varied
and
contradictory
interpretations
of linguistic
laws. The
neogrammaria
ns, for
example,
initially
defined
phonetic laws
as historical,
universal (for
a given
dialect), and
imperative,
that is, similar
to the laws of
nature. Having
subsequently
recognized as
the sole reality
only the
language of
the individual,
the
neogrammaria
ns came to
regard as a
phonetic law
only the law
of change of
separate words
in individual
speech, and
they regarded
the application
of laws to an
entire given
language as
the application
of habits and
norms.

Historical
survey. The
oldest stage of
linguistics,
which
emerged in
ancient Greece
and India, was
dominated by
the exercise of
logic. The
analysis of
language was
only an
auxiliary tool
of logic, and
language was
regarded as a
means of
formulating
and expressing
thought. The
dialogue
Cratylus by
Plato (fifth-
fourth
centuries B.C.)
was the first
work on
linguistics in
European
science to
contain a
system of
suppositions
(“models”) of
the
transformation
of ideas into
text. Plato
held that the
essence of
things
(“objective
ideas”) is
reflected in
subjective
human
cognition in
various
aspects and,
corresponding
ly, is
represented by
various
names. As
each name is
uttered, it
becomes even
more precisely
defined and
forms a
communicatio
n intelligible
to another
person. The
importance of
Plato for
linguistics,
however,
consists not so
much in his
specific
arguments as
in the
constructive
method of the
organization
of his
philosophical
system, which
is linked with
linguistic
modeling.
Examples of
his
constructive
method may
be seen in the
dialogues
Sophist and
Parmenides.

Like Plato,
Aristotle
(fourth
century B.C.)
considered the
study of
language to be
only an
auxiliary part
of logic, but
he attached
greater
importance to
language than
did Plato. The
integral ideas
of Aristotle’s
logicolinguisti
c conception
are set forth in
his
Categories,
On
Interpretation,
and Topics.
The starting
point for this
conception is
the system of
word-
concepts, or
logoi, which
are broken
down into
categories; the
end point is an
analysis of
various types
of utterances
and judgments
and their
connections.
Aristotle
introduced
into his
philosophical
system ten
categories,
which, in his
opinion,
represented
the highest
orders of
objective
being. These
categories,
which
included
essence,
quantity,
quality, and
relation,
constituted a
strict
hierarchical
list of all the
forms of the
predicate that
can be found
in a simple
sentence in
Ancient
Greek—from
noun forms to
verb forms
and from more
independent to
more
dependent
forms.

Aristotle was
the first of the
classical
thinkers to
approach the
problem of
grammatical
form and to
develop a
doctrine of the
parts of
speech as
grammatically
distinct classes
of words. He
considered the
principal form
of judgment to
be an
utterance of
the form
“noun-
subject—
noun-
predicate,” for
example, “a
horse is an
animal.” He
regarded other
forms of
judgment-
utterances as
transformation
s of the
principal type.
Aristotle’s
concept was
further
developed in
medieval
European
logic and
grammar
(seeREALISM,
NOMINALISM,
and
CONCEPTUALI
SM). His
logical
grammar has
retained its
importance in
the 20th
century and, in
particular, is
used in the
teaching of
language.
Several terms
in Russian
grammar are
caiques of
terms
introduced by
Aristotle.

Unlike Plato
and Aristotle,
who
formulated
general
philosophical
systems of
views, the
ancient Indian
grammarian
Panini (fifth-
fourth
centuries B.C.)
examined
language as an
end in itself
and for itself,
although he
did so for the
most part
formally,
without a
system of
semantics. His
normative
grammar
Astadhyayi
(Book of
Eight
Chapters)
exhaustively
describes the
phonetics,
morphology,
word
formation, and
syntactic
elements of
Old Indie. In a
manner
completely
consistent
with the
principles of
linguistics,
Panini was the
first to
introduce the
concepts of
the root, affix,
and stem of a
word and the
concept of the
generation of
word forms.
He was also
the first to use
an arbitrary
symbolic
descriptive
language. As
an example of
a systematic
description of
a language,
Panini’s work
surpasses the
classical
grammars, for
example,
those of the
Alexandrian
school, which
did not
contain the
idea of the
divisibility of
words. In
many ways,
Panini’s
grammar is on
the level of
20th-century
linguistic
studies; like
Plato’s
system, it
anticipated the
constructive
approach to
language.

Panini’s
system
emerged from
the traditions
of preceding
schools,
including
those of
Aindra,
Sakatayana,
and Api-sala.
Among the
few works that
have survived
from these
schools is the
Nirukta
(Etymology)
by the
grammarian
Yaska. Panini,
in turn, had an
enormous
influence in
India. The
Indian
grammatical
tradition after
Panini was
greatly
developed by
such scholars
as Chandra
Gomin,
Nagesh
Bhatta, Kunda
Bhatta,
Katyayana,
Patanjali, and
Bhartrihari.
The theory of
sphota, or
ideal
prototypes of
concrete
linguistic
forms, was
formulated in
the tradition of
Panini, as was
the notion of
language as a
system of
possibilities
richer than the
sum total of
existing
realizations.

One of the
most complete
logicolinguisti
c conceptions
outside
European
culture comes
from the
Indian school
of Navya-
Nyaya, or
New Nyaya,
which began
in the 13th
century. The
philosophy of
the Navya-
Nyaya school
was similar to
Aristotle’s
conception of
an approach
based on
categories.
Unlike
Aristotle,
however,
scholars of the
school
considered the
initial
categories,
and not
genders and
forms, to be
properties;
they attached
real, objective
existence to
the essences
of language
and to the
meanings of
names. In
addition to
purely
linguistic
analysis,
scholars
performed
analyses of the
relations
among things;
utterances,
therefore,
went virtually
unexamined.
Scholars
examined
jñana, or
knowledge,
which, if true,
was accepted
as objective
fact. Like the
system of
Aristotle, the
philosophical
system of the
Navya-Nyaya
is directly
dependent on
a language, in
this case,
Sanskrit.

The Stoics,
who emerged
during the
period known
as the Early
Stoa (third-
second
centuries B.C.)
and whose
founders
included
Zeno,
Cleanthes, and
Chrysippus,
established a
logically
consistent
approach
based on the
utterance.
They were the
first to
discover that
an utterance
has two
subjects: the
first is the
telos, a thing
or object of
the real world
(in 20th-
century logic
and linguistic
terminology,
the “object of
denotation,”
“denótate,”
“meaning,” or
“extensional”)
; the second is
the lekton, a
specific,
abstract
essence (in
20th-century
semantics
terminology,
“meaning,”
“signifier,” or
“intentional”).
In contrast to
Plato and
Aristotle, the
Stoics came to
examine
logically the
content of the
utterance not
as a
combination
of abstract
concepts or of
essences
belonging to a
type or
species, but
rather as a
unit, as a
confluence of
concepts,
perceived
notions, and
human
emotions. The
lekton was a
special form
of knowledge
more general
than negation
and
affirmation
and is to some
degree
analogous to
the Old Indie
jñana. Thus,
the Stoics
founded the
science of
semantic
syntax by
arriving at a
classification
of the parts of
speech. The
grammatical
studies of the
Stoics were
carried on in
part in
Hellenistic
culture by the
members of
the
Alexandrian
school.

Out of the
traditions of
the Greek and
Indian schools
developed
ancient Arabic
linguistics,
whose golden
age, from the
seventh to the
12th century,
saw many
advances in
the
development
of
lexicography
and produced
such works as
Sibawiyyah’s
grammar of
the Arabic
language, Al-
Kitab (The
Book), and the
dictionaries of
Firuzabadi.
During the
period, several
features of
Arabic and
other Semitic
languages
were
examined.
Triliteral
roots, which
are specific to
Arabic and
other Semitic
languages,
were defined;
the means of
producing
sounds were
studied; and,
for the first
time in Arabic
linguistics, a
distinction
was made
between
letters and
sounds. The
definitions of
roots and
affixes that
were proposed
by Arab
scholars
influenced
studies by
19th-century
linguists,
particularly F.
Bopp. The
Arab linguists,
unlike those of
Greece and
India, studied
not only their
native
language but
Turkish,
Mongolian,
and Persian as
well.

The logical
trend in
linguistics
continued
until the late
17th century
and the first
half of the
18th century,
although many
ideas of the
Stoics and
some of
Aristotle were
forgotten. The
trend reached
its height in
the theories of
logic and
grammar
developed by
the Port-Royal
linguists in
France.
Ancient
scholars used
the forms of
their native
languages
(Ancient
Greek or Old
Indie) as the
basis for
linguistic
study. The
Port-Royal
linguists
considered the
logical forms
of language,
which had
been
established by
Greek and
Latin scholars
as concept,
judgment, and
the nine parts
of speech, to
be universal
forms
common to all
languages.

Within the
general
framework of
the logical
trend, an
important step
was taken
toward the
study of
language as a
universal
property of
man, toward
the creation of
a universal
grammar, and
toward the
development
of a general
method of
such studies.
At the same
time, however,
the specific
historical
differences
among the
languages of
the world
were
disregarded.
The logical
trend in
linguistics
continued in
isolated
manifestations
until the late
19th century,
when it was
still being
used as the
basis for
scholarly
grammars of
various
languages. In
the 20th
century the
influence of
the trend can
be seen in
educational
texts.

The next stage

in the
development
of linguistics,
beginning at
the end of the
18th century,
is
characterized
by the
emergence of
the
comparative-
historical
trend.
Comparative-
historical
linguistics was
originally
viewed as a
completely
independent
science and
was
characterized
by the
following
basic
principles:

(1) Each
language has
its own
particular
features,
which
distinguish it
from other
languages.

(2) These
particular
features are
identified
through
comparison.

(3) The
comparison of
languages
reveals
relationships
among
languages that
originated
from a
common
source, called
the parent
language,
which may be
a living
language or a
dead
language. The
genealogical
classification
of languages
joins related
languages in
groups, for
example,
Germanic and
Slavic, and
further
organizes the
groups into
larger
families, such
as the Indo-
European,
Finno-Ugric,
and Semitic
language
families.

(4) The
distinctions
between
related
languages can
be explained
only by the
continuous
historical
change of the
languages; this
change is
recognized as
the most
important
property of
every
language.
(5) In
historical
change,
sounds change
more quickly
than other
elements; the
sound
transformation
s within a
single
language
family are
strictly regular
and can be
clearly
formulated
according to
phonetic laws.
The main
elements of a
language—
word roots,
affixes, and
grammatical
endings
(inflections)—
remain stable
for thousands
of years.

(6) On the
basis of
historical
changes, it is
possible to
reconstruct the
general
features of the
preexisting
common
language. (It
was
previously
supposed that
the parent
language
could be
reconstructed
in toto.)

The concepts
of
reconstruction
and of the
parent
language
served as an
important
stimulus and
tool for the
study of both
language in
general and
specific
languages.
The stability
of the main
elements of
language
subsequently
led scholars to
the idea of
language as a
special type of
independent
system. In the
19th century,
however, the
prevailing idea
of the
existence of
language was
not that of an
integral
system, but
rather of the
changing and
unchanging
elements of
language.
These
elements were
the objects of
comparative-
historical
grammar,
which was
created by
means of the
comparative-
historical
method.

The
comparative-
historical
ideas that
served as the
basis of a new
trend in
linguistics
were first
formulated by
F. Bopp and
R. K. Rask
and were
further
developed by
such scholars
as F. von
Schlegel, J.
Grimm, and
A. K.
Vostokov.
Bopp’s
Comparative
Grammar
(1833) was the
first work to
crystallize the
ideas in
research. The
second half of
the 19th
century was
notable for the
publication of
comparative-
historical
grammars of
various Indo-
European
language
groups,
including the
Germanic by
J. Grimm, the
Romance by
F. Diez, and
the Slavic by
F. Miklosich.
Following the
example of the
Indo-
European
studies,
grammars of
other language
groups and
families were
compiled,
including the
Semitic
grammar
published by
J.-E. Renan. A
new
summarizing
study, which
was already
based on the
concept of a
common Indo-
European
parent
language, was
A.
Schleicher’s A
Compendium
of the
Comparative
Grammar of
the Indo-
European
Languages
(1861–62).
Adopting the
biological
theories of
Darwinism,
Schleicher
viewed
language as
somewhat
similar to a
developing
organism.
Such ideas
were central to
the short-lived
school of
biological
naturalism in
linguistics.

The views of
the German
scholar W.
von Humboldt
developed
simultaneousl
y with and
from the point
of view of the
historical
trend, which
dominated the
period.
Humboldt
regarded each
language as a
self-contained
system that is
not final but is
perpetually
and
continuously
being created
as an
“activity”
expressing the
“profound
spirit of the
people.” His
ideas had a
great influence
in the 20th
century,
particularly on
neo-
Humboldtism
and
structuralism.

The
psychological
trend, which
was developed
by such
linguists as the
German
scholar H.
Steinthal,
originated
within the
framework of
comparative-
historical
linguistics.
The new trend
rejected any
essential
connections
with logic; the
unity of
human
language was
explained by
the unity of
psychological
laws, whereas
the variety of
languages was
explained by
the particular
features of the
psychologies
of various
peoples. The
Ukrainian-
Russian
scholar A. A.
Potebnia, the
founder of one
of the most
influential
schools in
19th-century
linguistics,
was an
adherent of
the
psychological
trend.
According to
Potebnia’s
conception,
the study of
language
reveals the
unified
principles of
man’s
recognition of
the objective
world in
language, in
the psyche, in
thought, and
in artistic
creation. The
trend holds
that thought
evolves in
close
conjunction
with language
according to
specific
semantic
rules. The
most
important of
these rules is
sign
substitution,
which takes
place both in
words (the
internal form
of a word) and
in semantic-
syntactic
transformation
s of the
sentence
(substitution
of parts of
speech).
Research
methods,
particularly
those
pertaining to
the
reconstruction
and study of
the forms of
language,
were greatly
advanced
through the
development
of
comparative-
historical
psychological
linguistics.

The Russian
scholar F. F.
Fortunatov
devoted
particular
attention to
the study of
the structural
aspect of
language. His
works in the
area were of
great
significance to
the
development
of 19th-
century
linguistics.

Many of the
ideas of the
psychological
trend served
as the basis for
a new trend in
linguistics,
neogrammaria
nism, which
appeared in
the late 19th
century. The
theoretical
principles of
neogrammaria
nism were
summarized in
the works of
the German
scholars H.
Osthoff and K.
Brugmann,
who published
a manifesto of
neogrammaria
nism entitled
Morphologica
l Studies in the
Indo-
European
Languages
(parts 1–6,
1878–1910),
and Principles
of the History
of Language
(1880) by the
German
linguist H.
Paul. In
addition to
developing a
basis for the
study of any
language,
particularly
the
reconstruction
of its
morphology,
the
neogrammaria
ns promoted
the ideas of
the unity of
psychological
laws and the
immutability
of the
phonetic laws
of speech.

The main
achievements
of
comparative-
historical
linguistics in
the 19th
century were
the
development
of a rigorous
method of
comparing
languages and
reconstructing
their extinct
forms and
rules; the use
of comparison
and
reconstruction
to study the
history of
large language
families, in
particular the
Indo-
European
family; and
the
establishment
of the
principal
phonetic and
semantic rules
of change of
living
languages.
The basic
inventory of
linguistics was
formed from
the enormous
amount of
data collected
and
systematized
during the
period,
particularly by
the
neogrammaria
ns. Still in use
as primary
sources in
linguistics are
several of the
most
significant
works
produced in
the 19th
century,
including the
Compendium
of
Comparative
Grammar of
the Indo-
Germanic
Languages by
K. Brugmann
and B.
Delbriick and
the works of J.
Wackernagel,
H. Hirt, A.
Meillet, and F.
F. Fortunatov.

A crisis in
neogrammaria
nism,
however,
subsequently
appeared with
the emergence
of a new
trend—
structuralism.
Among the
factors that
contributed to
the shift in
trends was the
continued
division of the
subject of
linguistic
study into two
parts—
language and
the psyche,
which resulted
in such
dualistic
correspondenc
es as sound
and the
psychic
representation
of sound, and
meaning and
the psychic
representation
of meaning.
Other factors
included
linguists’
splintering of
the system of
language into
a sea of
“trivial” facts
(sounds, word
forms, and the
like) and their
exaggeration
of the role of
individual
psychology
and individual
speech, which
contributed to
the acceptance
of the speech
of the
individual as
the only
linguistic
reality.

The new
trend, called
linguistic
structuralism,
or structural
linguistics,
arose in the
early 20th
century with
the publication
of F. de
Saussure’s
Course in
General
Linguistics
(unauthorized
posthumous
edition, 1916).
Structural
linguistics was
formed within
the
mainstream of
structuralism,
which was
developing
analogously
and almost
simultaneousl
y in a variety
of fields: in
the general
study of
systems, in
psychology
(seeGESTALT
PSYCHOLOGY)
, and in the
theory of
literature and
art
(seeFORMAL
METHOD). The
groundwork
for
structuralism
in linguistics
was laid by
the Kazan
school in
Russia, mainly
by N. V.
Krushevskii
and I. A.
Baudouin de
Courtenay,
who, with
Saussure, is
considered the
founder of
structural
linguistics.
The main
principles of
structural
linguistics
may be stated
as follows:

(1) The
original and
principal
reality is not
an isolated
fact of a given
language, but
rather the
language as a
system. Each
element of a
language
exists only in
its
relationships
to other
elements in
the system.
The system is
not the sum of
its elements
but, on the
contrary,
defines them.

(2) The
structural
framework of
the system is
formed by
extra-temporal
relationships;
relationships
within the
system govern
the elements
of the system.
(3) An
extratemporal
“algebraic”
study of the
system of
language,
based on
relationships
rather than on
the
individuality
of elements or
their
materiality, is
therefore
possible;
rigorous
mathematical
methods can
also be
adapted to
linguistics.

(4) Language
is a special
type of
system—a
sign system
that exists, on
the one hand,
objectively,
outside the
human
psyche, in
interpersonal
interaction,
and, on the
other hand,
inside the
human
psyche.

(5) Several
other systems
that function
in human
societies,
including
folklore,
customs and
rituals, and
kinship
relations, are
organized
similarly to
language. All
such systems,
like language,
lend
themselves to
linguistic
study; in
particular,
they may be
formalized
“algebraically
” or by other
means
(seeSEMIOTIC
S).

As the
structural
trend in
linguistics
developed in
various
directions
within various
national
schools, the
unity of
linguistics was
temporarily
lost; the
phenomenon
attests to the
known
theoretical
weakness of
linguistics in
the period.
The various
schools,
however,
complemented
one another in
the theoretical
sense.

The sign
doctrine of
Saussure and,
to a lesser
extent, the
algebraic line
of
structuralism
were
developed by
the Swiss
school and the
closely related
French
sociological
school. The
main
achievements
of
structuralism
are associated
with
Saussure’s
students,
including A.
Meillet, C.
Bally, S. O.
Kartsevskii,
the Swiss
scholar R.
Godel, and the
French scholar
E. Benveniste.
Principal
among their
achievements
are the
detailed study
of the nature
of the
linguistic sign;
the
establishment,
on the basis of
this study, of
the deep, or
underlying,
rules of the
semantics and
syntax of
French,
German, and
Russian; the
systematizatio
n and
reconstruction
of broad strata
of the Indo-
European
grammar and
lexicon; and
the creation of
a basis for
etymological
dictionaries of
the Indo-
European
languages.

Structuralism
was most fully
developed in
three schools:
American
structural
linguistics, or
descriptivism;
the Prague
linguistic
school, also
known as
Eastern
European
structuralism;
and the
Copenhagen
school.

American
structural
linguistics first
developed in
the 1920’s.
The study of
unwritten
American
Indian
languages was
the basis for
the
development
of methods for
the maximally
objective
primary
description of
a language.
Such
description, as
developed by
F. Boas, E.
Sapir, and
others, relied
on the
establishment
of the
phonemes,
morphemes,
and
elementary
syntactic
constructions
of a language.
The study of
American
Indian
languages also
helped create
a special
method based
on the concept
of distribution,
which was
treated in L.
Bloomfield’s
Language
(1933), in Z.
S. Harris’
Methods in
Structural
Linguistics
(1951), and in
the works of
such linguists
as K. L. Pike
and G. Trager.
By the early
1960’s,
however, it
became
apparent that
this theory
was weak in
its explicatory
capability and
insufficiently
applicable to
semantics and
syntax. The
process of
developing a
system free of
such
shortcomings
produced a
new trend—
generative
linguistics.

The Prague
linguistic
school also
emerged in the
1920’s. Its
center was the
Linguistic
Circle of
Prague, which
existed until
the beginning
of World War
II. (In 1946,
Czech
linguists
renewed their
work under
the same
name.) The
circle brought
together
several
Russian and
Czech
linguists,
including N.
S. Trubetskoi,
V. Mathesius,
R. Jakobson,
B. Trnka, B.
Havránek, J.
Mukařovský,
J. Vachek, and
V. Skalička.
The work of
the Polish
scholar J.
Kurylowicz
was affiliated
with both the
Prague school
and the
Copenhagen
school. Many
Soviet
scholars,
including L.
V. Shcherba,
P. V.
Bogatyrev,
and E. D.
Polivanov,
also greatly
contributed to
the
development
of the ideas of
the Prague
school. Unlike
the
descriptivists,
the members
of the Prague
school
followed the
tradition of
European
philology,
studying those
European
languages that
have a rich
cultural
history. On
this basis they
developed the
conception of
language as a
“system of
systems,”
defined the
dynamics of
development
of such
systems, and
studied many
problems of
the utterance,
including the
functional
division of a
sentence. The
main
accomplishme
nt of the
Prague school
was the
creation of
theoretical
phonology,
which has as
its center the
concept of
opposition.
This concept
served as the
example for
formulating
descriptions of
other spheres
of language. A
weakness of
the Prague
school
consisted in
the
insufficient
attention it
devoted to the
logical aspect
of theory and
method.

Since the mid-

1930’s, the
center of
structuralism
has been the
Copenhagen
school
(seeGLOSSEM
ATICS),
headed by L.
Hjelmslev, V.
Brøndal, and
H. Uldall.
With the goal
of developing
a new basis
for solving the
problem of a
universal
grammar, the
Copenhagen
linguists found
it necessary to
reform the
linguistic
method
completely.
They based a
new theory of
language and
the method of
describing
language on
the absolute
primacy of
relations over
elements; they
interpreted
language as a
“system of
pure
relations.” The
Copenhagen
linguists did
not succeed in
creating a
theory free
from
contradictions
in form and
content, but
their work
prepared the
way for
joining the
abstract theory
of language
with
mathematics.

The
achievements
of the main
schools of
structural
linguistics are
widely used in
many areas of
linguistics. It
is not possible,
however, for
all problems
in linguistics
to be solved
solely on the
basis of the
methods of
structural
linguistics.

By the mid-
1960’s, a new
trend—
constructivism
—had
developed in
linguistics and
had as its
underlying
principle the
requirement of
constructivity
of theoretical
objects. This
principle,
which was
initially
formulated
within the
framework of
mathematics
and
mathematical
logic, had two
main parts:
first, an object
may be taken
as an object of
theory only if
it can be
constructed;
second, one
may speak of
the existence
of objects and
of the
possibility of
their cognition
only if one can
theoretically
construct or
simulate the
objects. One
of the
principal
concepts of
the
constructive
method was
based on the
algorithm,
which was
first discussed
by Plato and
Panini and
subsequently
treated, in
varying
degrees, by
many
philosophers
and scholars,
including
Aristotle,
Spinoza, and
Potebnia. The
concepts
derived from
the algorithm
formed a
special variety
of
constructivism
in linguistics
and provided
the basis for
the theory of
generative
grammars
(seeMATHEMA
TICAL
LINGUISTICS).
These
theories,
however,
proved
essentially
limited when
applied to
specific
linguistic data.

As
structuralism
developed,
there arose
other separate
trends in
linguistics that
criticized both
structuralism
and
neogrammaria
nism. Among
these trends
were linguistic
geography;
neolinguistics,
whose
proponents
included M.
Bartoli; areal
linguistics;
and the theory
of “new
studies of
language,”
which was
founded by N.
Ia. Marr. Such
trends
introduced
into the
general theory
of language
only isolated
new elements.
After the
October
Revolution of
1917, Marxist
linguistics
developed in
the USSR. Its
theory is
based on the
states of
language in
the processes
of
socialization
and the
development
of social labor
practices of
primitive man
(F. Engels); on
language as
the direct
reality .of
cognition,
which is
realized in
social
intercourse
(K. Marx and
F. Engels);
and according
to V. I.
Lenin’s theory
of reflection,
on the
reflection of
objective
reality in the
human
consciousness
and the
content of
language
forms.

The first
example of the
use of
historical
materialism in
the study of
language was
Engels’ The
Frankish
Dialect.
Soviet Marxist
scholars
attempted to
create a new
trend,
incorporating
the
achievements
of previous
trends and
contemporary
schools and, at
the same time,
overcoming
their
shortcomings.
The attempt
was facilitated
by
circumstances
in the USSR
that were
exceptionally
favorable to
the gathering
of data and the
formulation of
theories: the
diversity of
language types
and families
represented in
the Soviet
Union, the
development
of national
cultures and
languages, and
the creation of
writing
systems for
unwritten
languages,
which
constitutes
part of a
linguistic
policy. A basis
for
formulating
theories was
developed
from the
materialist
tendencies of
Russian
linguistics of
the 19th
century,
particularly
those of the
Kazan school,
and, most
importantly,
from the main
tenets of
Marxism-
Leninism,
which in
particular
made possible
the application
of the
achievements
of various
methods and
methodologies
while
preserving the
primacy of
Marxist
methodology.
These
principles
provided the
basis for the
main subjects
of Marxist
linguistics in
the USSR:
language and
society,
developed by
such scholars
as R. O. Shor,
E. D.
Polivanov, L.
P. Iakubinskii,
and V. M.
Zhirmunskii;
and language
and thought,
which has
been treated
principally by
I. I.
Meshchaninov
and the
psychologist
L. S.
Vygotskii.
The most
important
achievements
of Marxist
linguistics are
connected
with these two
subject areas.

Soviet
microlinguisti
cs has created
three of the
most widely
accepted
conceptualizat
ions in mid-
20th-century
linguistics: I.
I.
Meshchaninov
’s typology; L.
V. Shcherba’s
theory of
phonology,
grammar, and
lexicography;
and V. V.
Vinogradov’s
theory of the
Russian
language,
literary
languages,
stylistics, and
poetics.
Marxist
linguistics is
also
developing in
other socialist
countries, as
well as in
several
capitalist
countries.

Linguistics in
the second
half of the
20th century
has been
characterized
by close
communicatio
n among
linguists of
various
countries and
schools. In
their striving
for a
collective
solution to
problems in
the field,
linguists have
taken part in
debates and
discussions
that have
evolved into
regular
international
linguistic
congresses
and have
produced a
wealth of
periodical
literature that
includes
linguistic
journals from
many
countries.

REFEREN
CES

Bulich, S. K.
Ocherk istorii
iazykoznaniia
v Rossii, vol.
1. St.
Petersburg,
1904.
Antichnye
teorii iazyka i
stilia.
Moscow-
Leningrad,
1936.
Thomsen, V.
Istoriia
iazykovedeniia
do kontsa 19
v. Moscow,
1938.
(Translated
from Danish.)
Markov, A. A.
Teoriia
algorifmov.
Moscow,
1951. (Trudy
Matematich.
in-ta im. V. A.
Steklova, vol.
38.)
Meillet, A.
Sravnitel’nyi
metod v
istoricheskom
iazykoznanii.
Moscow,
1954.
(Translated
from French.)
Zvegintsev, V.
A. Istoriia
iazykoznaniia
19 i 20 vv. v
ocherkakh i
izvlecheniiakh,
3rd ed., books
1–2. Moscow,
1964–65.
Osnovnye
napravleniia
strukturalizma
: Sb. st.
Moscow,
1964.
Sovetskoe
iazykoznanie
za 50 let: Sb.
st. Moscow,
1967.
Teoreticheskie
problemy
sovetskogo
iazykoznaniia:
Sb. st.
Moscow,
1968.
Losev, A. F.
[Commentary.
] In Platon,
vols. 1–2.
Moscow,
1968–70.
Leninizm i
teoreticheskie
problemy
iazykoznaniia:
Sb. St.
Moscow,
1970.
Engel’s i
iazykoznanie
(collection of
articles).
Moscow,
1972.
Obshchee
iazykoznanie:
Metody
lingvisticheski
kh
issledovanii.
Moscow,
1973.
Serebrennikov
, B. A.
Veroiatnostny
e
obosnovaniia
v
komparativisti
ke. Moscow,
1974.
Meshchaninov
, I. I.
Problemy
razvitiia
iazyka.
Leningrad,
1975.
Trostnikov, V.
N.
Konstruktivny
e protsessy v
matematike
(filosofskii
aspekt).
Moscow,
1975.
Stepanov, Iu.
S. Metody i
printsipy
sovremennoi
lingvistiki.
Moscow,
1975.
Sliusareva, N.
A. Teoriia F.
de Sossiura v
svete
sovremennoi
lingvistiki.
Moscow,
1975.
Amirova, T.
A., B. A.
Ol’khovikov,
and Iu. V.
Rozhdestvens
kii. Ocherki
po istorii
lingvistiki.
Moscow,
1975.
Berezin, F. M.
Russkoe
iazykoznanie
kontsa XIX-
nachala XX
vv. Moscow,
1976.
Printsipy
opisaniia
iazykov mira.
Moscow,
1976.
Steinthal, H.
Geschichte
der
Sprachwissens
chaft bei den
Griechen und
Romern, parts
1–2.
Hildesheim,
1961.
Ivič, M.
Trends in
Linguistics.
The Hague,
1965.
Mounin, G.
Histoire de la
linguistique:
Des origines
au XX siécle.
Paris, 1967.
Current
Trends in
Linguistics,
vols. 1–14.
The Hague,
1963–76.
Robins, R. H.
A Short
History of
Linguistics.
Bloomington,
Ind.–London,
1968.
Jacob, A.
Genése de la
pensée
linguistique.
Paris, 1973.
Davis, P. W.
Modern
Theories of
Language.
Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.,
1973.
Theoretische
Probleme der
Sprachwissens
chaft, vols. 1–
2. Berlin,
1976.

IU. S.
STEPANOV

The Great
Soviet
Encyclopedia,
3rd Edition
(1970-1979).
© 2010 The
Gale Group,
Inc. All rights
reserved.

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linguistics
American Heritage Dictionary:

lin·guis·tics
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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Dictionary
(lĭng-gwĭs'tĭks)
n. (used with a sing. verb)
The study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

linguistics
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia

Study of the nature and structure of language. It traditionally encompasses semantics, syntax, and
phonology. Synchronic linguistic studies aim to describe a language as it exists at a given time;
diachronic studies trace a language's historical development. Greek philosophers in the 5th
century who debated the origins of human language were the first in the West to be concerned
with linguistic theory. The first complete Greek grammar, written by Dionysus Thrax in the 1st
century , was a model for Roman grammarians, whose work led to the medieval and Renaissance
vernacular grammars.

With the rise of historical linguistics in the 19th century, linguistics became a science. In the late
19th and early 20th centuries Ferdinand de Saussure established the structuralist school of
linguistics ( structuralism), which analyzed actual speech to learn about the underlying structure
of language. In the 1950s Noam Chomsky challenged the structuralist program, arguing that
linguistics should study native speakers' unconscious knowledge of their language (competence),
not the language they actually produce (performance). His general approach, known as
transformational generative grammar, was extensively revised in subsequent decades as the
extended standard theory, the principles-and-parameters (government-binding) approach, and the
minimalist program. Other grammatical theories developed from the 1960s were generalized
phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, relational grammar, and cognitive
grammar. Chomsky's emphasis on linguistic competence greatly stimulated the development of
the related disciplines of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Other related fields are
anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, mathematical linguistics, sociolinguistics,
and the philosophy of language.

For more information on linguistics, visit Britannica.com.

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McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Encyclopedia:

Linguistics
Top
Home > Library > Science > Sci-Tech Encyclopedia

The science, that is, the general and universal properties, of language. The middle of the
twentieth century saw a shift in the principal direction of linguistic inquiry from one of data
collection and classification to the formulation of a theory of generative grammar, which focuses
on the biological basis for the acquisition and use of human language and the universal principles
that constrain the class of all languages. Generative grammar distinguishes between the
knowledge of language (linguistic competence), which is represented by mental grammar, and
the production and comprehension of speech (linguistic performance).

If grammar is defined as the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, then a general theory
of language is a theory of grammar. A grammar includes everything one knows about a
language; its phonetics and phonology (the sounds and the sound system), its morphology (the
structure of words), its lexicon (the words or vocabulary), its syntax (the structure of sentences
and the constraints on well-formed sentences), and its semantics (the meaning of words and
sentences). See also Psychoacoustics; Speech; Speech perception.

Linguistics is not limited to grammatical theory. Descriptive linguistics analyzes the grammars
of individual languages; anthropological linguistics, or ethnolinguistics, and sociolinguistics
focus on languages in relation to culture, social class, race, and gender; dialectologists
investigate how these factors fragment one language into many. In addition, sociolinguists and
applied linguists examine language planning, literacy, bilingualism, and second-language
acquisition. Computational linguistics encompasses automatic parsing, machine processing, and
computer simulation of grammatical models for the generation and parsing of sentences. If
viewed as a branch of artificial intelligence, computational linguistics has as its goal the
modeling of human language as a cognitive system. A branch of linguistics concerned with the
biological basis of language development is neurolinguistics. The form of language
representation in the mind, that is, linguistic competence and the structure and components of the
mental grammar, is the concern of theoretical linguistics. The branch of linguistics concerned
with linguistic performance, that is, the production and comprehension of speech (or of sign
language by the deaf), is called psycholinguistics. Psycholinguists also investigate how children
acquire the complex grammar that underlies language use. See also Psycholinguistics.
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Gale Encyclopedia of US History:

Linguistics
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The early discipline of linguistics in the United States consisted in large part of the work of three
eminent scholars—Franz Boas, who studied Native American languages; Edward Sapir, the most
prolific of Boas's students; and Leonard Bloomfield, who was trained in Germanic philology and
taught languages. Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield were among the founders in 1924 of the
Linguistic Society of America, the leading professional organization and publisher of the
discipline's journal.

Bloomfield and Sapir were leaders in descriptive linguistics, now often referred to as structural
linguistics. According to them, languages should be described as interlocking assemblages of
basic units and as functioning wholes independent of earlier developmental stages. Such
descriptions might then form the basis for comparing related languages and reconstructing their
common origin. Sapir identified the phoneme as a basic unit of sound patterning and offered
evidence for its psychological reality. Bloomfield, on the other hand, advocated indirect
observation to identify the distinct meanings associated with units of form. His followers
developed a mandatory set of discovery procedures for all valid analyses that built upon the
sequential distribution of units of sound. These procedures, and strictures against mixing
comparison with description, were in practice often violated, with good reason. Linguists were
prepared to assume that languages might differ from one another without limit; thus, one could
assume no commonalities. They were reacting in part to clumsy attempts to superimpose
categories of classical grammar on descriptions of New World languages. Many of them thought
that the grammatical categories of language might shape perceptions of reality.

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Noam Chomsky revised these ideas—including the
supposed necessity of phonetically based discovery—in what became known as generative
grammar. Language was for him a hypothetico-deductive system centered about Syntactic
Structures, the title of his 1957 treatise. According to Chomsky, language and human cognition
evolve together. Language is innate, its categories universal among humankind. It is part of
children's normal development, rather than a skill learned by some and not by others, such as
playing a musical instrument or driving a car. Children must ascertain the particular sound-
meaning combinations and parameter settings used in their environment. The linguist can learn
more about this innate capability from probing a single language rather than surveying multiple
languages.
Whereas generative grammar was autonomous, with many of its constructs presuming
homogeneous speech communities of identical idealized hearer-speakers, William Labov
developed methods for sampling and quantifying the variation in usage by members of actual
communities and by given individuals on different occasions. He showed the influence of social
attitudes on language within speech communities. Some of his studies using the sound
spectrograph demonstrated that speakers perpetuate distinctions they are unable to recognize.

Even as they considered the existence of a universal grammar, however, linguists in the 1990s
became concerned with the high rate of language death in the modern world. An increasing
number of young linguists committed themselves to studying language ecology, in hopes of
preventing or curtailing the incidence of language death, and to recording and analyzing little-
studied endangered languages to preserve at least a record of what had been lost. It was almost as
if the discipline had come full circle from the efforts of Boas and his students nearly a century
earlier.

Bibliography

Hymes, Dell, and John Fought. American Structuralism. The Hague and New York: Mouton,
1981.

Newmeyer, Frederick J. Linguistic Theory in America. 2d ed. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press,
1986.

Newmeyer, Frederick J., ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. 4 vols. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988.

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Columbia Encyclopedia:

linguistics
Top
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Columbia Encyclopedia
linguistics, scientific study of language, covering the structure (morphology and syntax; see
grammar), sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics), as well as the history of the relations
of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behavior. Phonetics, the
study of the sounds of speech, is generally considered a separate (but closely related to) field
from linguistics.

Early Linguistics
Before the 19th cent., language was studied mainly as a field of philosophy. Among the
philosophers interested in language was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who considered language an
activity that arises spontaneously from the human spirit; thus, he felt, languages are different just
as the characteristics of individuals are different. In 1786 the English scholar Sir William Jones
suggested the possible affinity of Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and Latin, for the first time
bringing to light genetic relations between languages. With Jones's revelation the school of
comparative historical linguistics began. Through the comparison of language structures, such
19th-century European linguists as Jakob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, Karl Brugmann, and Antoine
Meillet, as well as the American William Dwight Whitney, did much to establish the existence of
the Indo-European family of languages.

Structural Linguistics

In the 20th cent. the structural or descriptive linguistics school emerged. It dealt with languages
at particular points in time (synchronic) rather than throughout their historical development
(diachronic). The father of modern structural linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure, who
believed in language as a systematic structure serving as a link between thought and sound; he
thought of language sounds as a series of linguistic signs that are purely arbitrary, as can be seen
in the linguistic signs or words for horse: German Pferd, Turkish at, French cheval, and Russian
loshad'. In America, a structural approach was continued through the efforts of Franz Boas and
Edward Sapir, who worked primarily with Native American languages, and Leonard Bloomfield,
whose methodology required that nonlinguistic criteria must not enter a structural description.
Rigorous procedures for determining language structure were developed by Kenneth Pike,
Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, and others.

See also structuralism.

Transformational-Generative Grammar

In the 1950s the school of linguistic thought known as transformational-generative grammar

received wide acclaim through the works of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky postulated a syntactic
base of language (called deep structure), which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite
rules, i.e., a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a
sentence, and a series of rules (called transformations) that act upon the phrase-structure to form
more complex sentences. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface
structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciations, is identical to an actual sentence of
a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in
surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformations, pronunciation,
and word insertion. Another important distinction made in transformational-generative grammar
is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system)
and language performance (the speaker's actual use of language). Although the first work done in
transformational-generative grammar was syntactic, later studies have applied the theory to the
phonological and semantic components of language.

Other Areas of Linguistic Study

In contrast to theoretical schools of linguistics, workers in applied linguistics in the latter part of
the 20th cent. have produced much work in the areas of foreign-language teaching and of
bilingual education in the public schools (in the United States this has primarily involved
Spanish and, in the Southwest, some Native American languages in addition to English). In
addition, such subfields as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics have gained
importance.

Bibliography

See F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (tr. 1966); J. Lyons, Introduction to

Theoretical Linguistics (1968), and Language and Linguistics (1981); N. Chomsky, Aspects of
the Theory of Syntax (1969); A. Radford, Transformational Syntax (1982); F. J. Newmeyer,
Linguistics (4 vol., 1988); W. J. Frawley, ed., International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2d ed.,
4 vol., 2003).

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For a list of words related to linguistics, see:

 Schools and Doctrines - linguistics: study of structure, development, social impact, and
interrelationship of languages
 Linguistics and Writing Systems - linguistics: study of sound, structure, meaning,
vocabulary, and development of language, including fields of phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, comparative, and historical linguistics
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Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Linguistics
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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
This article is about the field of study. For the journal, see Linguistics (journal).
"Linguist" redirects here. See also Linguist (disambiguation).
Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Cognitive linguistics
Generative linguistics
Functional theories of grammar
Quantitative linguistics
Phonology · Graphemics
Morphology · Syntax · Lexis
Semantics · Pragmatics

Descriptive linguistics

Anthropological linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Historical linguistics
Phonetics · Graphetics
Etymology · Sociolinguistics
 Applied and
experimental linguistics

Computational linguistics
Evolutionary linguistics
Forensic linguistics
Internet linguistics
Language acquisition
Language assessment
Language development
Language education
Linguistic anthropology
Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Second-language acquisition

Related articles

History of linguistics
Linguistic prescription
List of linguists

List of unsolved problems

in linguistics

Portal

 v
 t
 e

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language.[1][2][3][4] Linguistics can be broadly broken
into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in
context. The earliest known descriptive linguistics activities are said to have been Panini's
Ashtadhyayi around 500 BCE with the analysis of Sanskrit.
The first is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules
followed by the speakers (or hearers) of a language. It encompasses morphology (the formation
and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences
from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics
concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are
produced and perceived.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and
real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve
ambiguity. This subfield encompasses semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and
concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).

Language in its broader context includes evolutionary linguistics, which considers the origins of
language; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at
the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores
the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at
language processing in the brain; language acquisition, how children or adults acquire language;
and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.

Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines
are relevant to language and intersect with it. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of
signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language
in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as
acoustics, anthropology, biology, computer science, human anatomy, informatics, neuroscience,
philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech-language pathology.

Contents

 1 Terminology for the discipline

 2 Fundamental concerns and divisions
o 2.1 Fundamental questions
o 2.2 Divisions based on linguistic structures studied
o 2.3 Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studied
 3 Variation and universality
 4 Structures
 5 Selected sub-fields
o 5.1 Historical linguistics
o 5.2 Semiotics
o 5.3 Descriptive linguistics and language documentation
o 5.4 Applied linguistics
 6 Description and prescription
 7 Speech and writing
 8 History
 9 Schools of study
o 9.1 Generative grammar
o 9.2 Cognitive linguistics
  10 See also
o 10.1 Branches and fields
 11 References
 12 Bibliography
 13 External links

Terminology for the discipline

Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716,[5] was commonly used to refer
to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus.[6] Since Ferdinand
de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has
shifted[7] and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar,
history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States,[8] where it was never as popular as
it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").[5]

Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641,[9] the term
"linguistics" is first attested in 1847.[9] It is now the usual academic term in English for the
scientific study of language.

The term linguist, used for one who studies language, applies within the field to someone who
either studies linguistics or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or
particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak
many languages fluently.[10]

Fundamental concerns and divisions

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language.
Fundamental questions include what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how
human beings come to know languages. Linguistic fields can then be broadly divided into those
that distinguish themselves by a focus on linguistic structure and grammar, and those that
distinguish themselves by the nonlinguistic factors they consider.

Fundamental questions

All humans achieve competence in whatever language is used around them when growing up,
with little apparent need for explicit conscious instruction (setting aside extremely pathological
cases). Linguists think that the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically based
potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk, because nonhumans do not
acquire human language in this way (although many nonhuman animals can learn to respond to
language, or can even be trained to use it to a degree).[11]

There is no consensus, however, as to the extent of humans' innate potential for language, or the
degree to which such innate abilities are specific to language. Some theorists claim that there is a
very large set of highly abstract and specific binary settings coded into the human brain; the
combinations of these settings would give rise to every language on the planet. Other linguists
claim that the ability to learn language is a product of general human cognition. It is, however,
generally agreed that there are no strong genetic differences underlying the differences between
languages: An individual will acquire whatever language(s) he or she is exposed to as a child,
regardless of parentage or ethnic origin. Nevertheless, recent research suggests that even weak
genetic biases in speakers may, over a number of generations, influence the evolution of
particular languages, leading to a nonrandom distribution of certain linguistic features across the
world.[12]

Divisions based on linguistic structures studied

Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form. Any particular pairing of meaning and
form is a Saussurean sign. For instance, the meaning "cat" is represented worldwide with a wide
variety of different sound patterns (in spoken languages), movements of the hands and face (in
signed languages), and written symbols (in written languages).

Linguists focusing on structure attempt to understand the rules regarding language use that native
speakers know (not always consciously). All linguistic structures can be broken down into
component parts that are combined according to (sub)conscious rules, over multiple levels of
analysis. For instance, consider the structure of the word "tenth" on two different levels of
analysis. On the level of internal word structure (known as morphology), the word "tenth" is
made up of one linguistic form indicating a number and another form indicating ordinality. The
rule governing the combination of these forms ensures that the ordinality marker "th" follows the
number "ten." On the level of sound structure (known as phonology), structural analysis shows
that the "n" sound in "tenth" is made differently from the "n" sound in "ten" spoken alone.
Although most speakers of English are consciously aware of the rules governing internal
structure of the word pieces of "tenth", they are less often aware of the rule governing its sound
structure. Linguists focused on structure find and analyze rules such as these, which govern how
native speakers use language.

Linguistics has many sub-fields concerned with particular aspects of linguistic structure. These
sub-fields range from those focused primarily on form to those focused primarily on meaning.
They also run the gamut of level of analysis of language, from individual sounds, to words, to
phrases, up to discourse.

Sub-fields of structure-focused linguistics include:

 Phonetics, the study of the physical properties of speech (or signed) production and
perception
 Phonology, the study of sounds (or signs) as discrete, abstract elements in the speaker's
mind that distinguish meaning
 Morphology, the study of internal structures of words and how they can be modified
 Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
 Semantics, the study of the meaning of words (lexical semantics) and fixed word
combinations (phraseology), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
  Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used in communicative acts, and the role
played by context and nonlinguistic knowledge in the transmission of meaning
 Discourse analysis, the analysis of language use in texts (spoken, written, or signed)

Many linguists would agree that these divisions overlap considerably, and the independent
significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged. Regardless of any particular
linguist's position, each area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and
research.

Divisions based on nonlinguistic factors studied

Alongside the structurally motivated domains of study are other fields of linguistics. These fields
are distinguished by the kinds of nonlinguistic factors that they consider:

 Applied linguistics, the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably
language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied
linguistics.)
 Biolinguistics, the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in
animals, compared to human language.
 Clinical linguistics, the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language
Pathology.
 Computational linguistics, the study of linguistic issues in a way that is 'computationaly
responsible', i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic
specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be
shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties implementations.
 Developmental linguistics, the study of the development of linguistic ability in
individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.
 Evolutionary linguistics, the study of the origin and subsequent development of language
by the human species.
 Historical linguistics or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.
 Language geography, the study of the geographical distribution of languages and
linguistic features.
 Linguistic typology, the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages,
properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human
language capacity.
 Neurolinguistics, the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar
and communication.
 Psycholinguistics, the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying
language use.
 Sociolinguistics, the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.
 Stylistics, the study of linguistic factors that place a discourse in context.

Semiotics is not a discipline within linguistics; rather, it investigates the relationship between
signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be
seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.[citation needed]
Variation and universality
Much modern linguistic research, in particular within the paradigm of generative grammar, has
concerned itself with trying to account for differences between languages of the world. This has
worked on the assumption that, if human linguistic ability is narrowly constrained by human
biology, then all languages must share certain fundamental properties.

In generativist theory, the collection of fundamental properties all languages share are referred to
as universal grammar (UG). The specific characteristics of this universal grammar are a much
debated topic. Typologists and non-generativist linguists usually refer simply to language
universals, or universals of language.

Similarities between languages can have a number of different origins. In the simplest case,
universal properties may be due to universal aspects of human experience. For example, all
humans experience water, and all human languages have a word for water. Other similarities
may be due to common descent: The Latin language spoken by the Ancient Romans developed
into Spanish in Spain and Italian in Italy; similarities between Spanish and Italian are thus in
many cases due to their both being descended from Latin. In other cases, contact between
languages — in particular where many speakers are bilingual — can lead to much borrowing of
structures, as well as words. Similarity may also be due to coincidence. English much and
Spanish mucho are not descended from the same form or borrowed from one language to the
other;[13] nor is the similarity due to innate linguistic knowledge (see False cognate).

Arguments in favor of language universals have also come from documented cases of sign
languages (such as Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) developing in communities of
congenitally deaf people, independently of spoken language. In general, the properties of these
sign languages conform to many of the properties of spoken languages. Other known and
suspected sign language isolates include Kata Kolok, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and
Providence Island Sign Language.

Structures
Ferdinand de Saussure

It has been perceived that languages tend to be organized around grammatical categories such as
noun and verb, nominative and accusative, or present and past, though not exclusively so. The
grammar of a language is organized around such fundamental categories, though many
languages express the relationships between words and syntax in other discrete ways (cf. some
Bantu languages for noun/verb relations, ergative-absolutive systems for case relations, several
Native American languages for tense/aspect relations).

In addition to making substantial use of discrete categories, language has the important property
that it organizes elements into recursive structures; this allows, for example, a noun phrase to
contain another noun phrase (as in "the chimpanzee's lips") or a clause to contain a clause (as in
"I think that it's raining"). Though recursion in grammar was implicitly recognized much earlier
(for example by Jespersen), the importance of this aspect of language became more popular after
the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures,[14] which presented a formal
grammar of a fragment of English. Prior to this, the most detailed descriptions of linguistic
systems were of phonological or morphological systems.

Chomsky used a context-free grammar augmented with transformations. Since then, following
the trend of Chomskyan linguistics, context-free grammars have been written for substantial
fragments of various languages (for example, GPSG, for English). It has been demonstrated,
however, that human languages (notably Dutch and Swiss German) include cross-serial
dependencies, which cannot be handled adequately by context-free grammars.[15]

Selected sub-fields
Historical linguistics

Main article: Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics studies the history and evolution of languages through the comparative
method. Often, the aim of historical linguistics is to classify languages in language families
descending from a common ancestor. This involves comparison of elements in different
languages to detect possible cognates in order to be able to reconstruct how different languages
have changed over time. This also involves the study of etymology, the study of the history of
single words. Historical linguistics is also called "diachronic linguistics" and is opposed to
"synchronic linguistics" that study languages in a given moment in time without regarding its
previous stages. In universities in the United States, the historic perspective is often out of
fashion. Historical linguistics was among the first linguistic disciplines to emerge and was the
most widely practiced form of linguistics in the late 19th century. The shift in focus to a
synchronic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant in western linguistics
with Noam Chomsky's emphasis on the study of the synchronic and universal aspects of
language.

Semiotics

Main article: Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs,
and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems, including the study of how
meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians often do not restrict themselves to
linguistic communication when studying the use of signs but extend the meaning of "sign" to
cover all kinds of cultural symbols. Nonetheless, semiotic disciplines closely related to
linguistics are literary studies, discourse analysis, text linguistics, and philosophy of language.

Descriptive linguistics and language documentation

Main article: Descriptive linguistics

Since the inception of the discipline of linguistics, linguists have been concerned with describing
and documenting languages previously unknown to science. Starting with Franz Boas in the
early 1900s, descriptive linguistics became the main strand within American linguistics until the
rise of formal structural linguistics in the mid-20th century. The rise of American descriptive
linguistics was caused by the concern with describing the languages of indigenous peoples that
were (and are) rapidly moving toward extinction. The ethnographic focus of the original Boasian
type of descriptive linguistics occasioned the development of disciplines such as
Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology, disciplines that
investigate the relations between language, culture, and society.

The emphasis on linguistic description and documentation has since become more important
outside of North America as well, as the documentation of rapidly dying indigenous languages
has become a primary focus in many of the worlds' linguistics programs. Language description is
a work intensive endeavour usually requiring years of field work for the linguist to learn a
language sufficiently well to write a reference grammar of it. The further task of language
documentation requires the linguist to collect a substantial corpus of texts and recordings of
sound and video in the language, and to arrange for its storage in accessible formats in open
repositories where it may be of the best use for further research by other researchers.[16]

Applied linguistics

Main article: Applied linguistics

Linguists are largely concerned with finding and describing the generalities and varieties both
within particular languages and among all languages. Applied linguistics takes the results of
those findings and "applies" them to other areas. Linguistic research is commonly applied to
areas such as language education, lexicography, and translation. "Applied linguistics" has been
argued to be something of a misnomer[who?], since applied linguists focus on making sense of and
engineering solutions for real-world linguistic problems, not simply "applying" existing technical
knowledge from linguistics; moreover, they commonly apply technical knowledge from multiple
sources, such as sociology (e.g., conversation analysis) and anthropology.

Today, computers are widely used in many areas of applied linguistics. Speech synthesis and
speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to
computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted
translation, and natural language processing are areas of applied linguistics that have come to the
forefront. Their influence has had an effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modeling
syntactic and semantic theories on computers constraints.

Linguistic analysis is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics used by many governments to verify

the claimed nationality of people seeking asylum who do not hold the necessary documentation
to prove their claim.[17] This often takes the form of an interview by personnel in an immigration
department. Depending on the country, this interview is conducted either in the asylum seeker's
native language through an interpreter or in an international lingua franca like English.[17]
Australia uses the former method, while Germany employs the latter; the Netherlands uses either
method depending on the languages involved.[17] Tape recordings of the interview then undergo
language analysis, which can be done either by private contractors or within a department of the
government. In this analysis, linguistic features of the asylum seeker are used by analysts to
make a determination about the speaker's nationality. The reported findings of the linguistic
analysis can play a critical role in the government's decision on the refugee status of the asylum
seeker.[17]

Description and prescription

Main articles: descriptive linguistics and linguistic prescription

Linguistics is descriptive; linguists describe and explain features of language without making
subjective judgments on whether a particular feature is "right" or "wrong". This is analogous to
practice in other sciences: A zoologist studies the animal kingdom without making subjective
judgments on whether a particular animal is better or worse than another.
Prescription, on the other hand, is an attempt to promote particular linguistic usages over others,
often favouring a particular dialect or "acrolect". This may have the aim of establishing a
linguistic standard, which can aid communication over large geographical areas. It may also,
however, be an attempt by speakers of one language or dialect to exert influence over speakers of
other languages or dialects (see Linguistic imperialism). An extreme version of prescriptivism
can be found among censors, who attempt to eradicate words and structures that they consider to
be destructive to society.

Speech and writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken (or signed) language is
more fundamental than written language. This is because:

 Speech appears to be universal to all human beings capable of producing and hearing it,
while there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written
communication
 Speech evolved before human beings invented writing
 People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much earlier than
writing.

Nonetheless, linguists agree that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable.
For research that relies on corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is
often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpora of
spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically transcribed and written.
In addition, linguists have turned to text-based discourse occurring in various formats of
computer-mediated communication as a viable site for linguistic inquiry.

The study of writing systems themselves is, in any case, considered a branch of linguistics.

History
Main article: History of linguistics

The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with
the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of
observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school.[citation needed]
Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest
surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what
are presumably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers
to.[citation needed]Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules that together form a compact generative
grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the
morpheme, and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive
structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries[citation needed]; Patanjali in the 2nd
century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be
seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 –
510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an
idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation), third, delivery of speech into
atmospheric air, and fourth, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.[citation
needed]

Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco

In the West, linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as
Plato's Cratylus. The first important milestone in Western linguistics was the introduction of the
Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who modified the alphabet by adding vowels, giving rise to
the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as
the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming
the basis of philology and criticism. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text
genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and
poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.

One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.[18] Apollonius wrote
more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography,
dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars
Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.[19] In De vulgari
eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic
enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.[citation needed]

In China, linguistics starts with the development of Xiaoxue (小學 "elementary studies"), which
began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c. BCE).[20] Early Chinese
philologists included Yang Xiong, who studied the linguistic geography of China, Xu Shen, a
lexicographer, and the phonologist Chen Di, who pioneered the study of Old Chinese.[20] Xiaoxue
came to be divided into three branches: Xungu (訓詁 "exegesis"), Wenzi (文字 "script
[analysis]") and Yinyun (音韻 "[study of] sounds")[21] and reached its golden age in the 17th. c.
AD (Qing Dynasty). The advent of character glossaries and vocabularies during the Han
Dynasty, including Sima Xiangru's The General Primer, Shi You's The Instant Primer, and Li
Chang's The Yuanshang Primer, greatly contributed to the development of Chinese philology.[22]
The Chinese study of phonology appeared later, and was heavily influenced by Indian philology.

In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of
Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (‫الكتاب في النحو‬, The Book on
Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished
phonetics from phonology.[citation needed]

Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn

Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and
Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the
theory that all languages sprang from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-
European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover
more language families and branches.

In 19th-century Europe, the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or
historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a
principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl
Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie"
("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in
1872.

Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on
synchronic (i.e., nonhistorical) explanations for language form.

In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics
(whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-
field of anthropology in the United States,[23][24] linguistics is now considered a separate
scientific discipline in the US, Australia, and much of Europe.
Edward Sapir, a writer in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the
relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had some influence on
all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative
grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly
influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.

The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative
grammar in the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and
emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal and language specific rules. Noam
Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise
to such frameworks as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar,
Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state
generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the
traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.

Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress
the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus
differing significantly from the formal approaches.

Schools of study
There is a wide variety of approaches to linguistic study. These can be loosely divided (although
not without controversy) into formalist and functionalist approaches. Formalist approaches stress
the importance of linguistic forms, and seek explanations for the structure of language from
within the linguistic system itself. For example, the fact that language shows recursion might be
attributed to recursive rules. Functionalist linguists, by contrast, view the structure of language as
being driven by its function. For example, the fact that languages often put topical information
first in the sentence, may be due to a communicative need to pair old information with new
information in discourse.

Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar

During the last half of the 20th century, following the work of Noam Chomsky, linguistics was
dominated by the generativist school. While formulated by Chomsky in part as a way to explain
how human beings acquire language and the biological constraints on this acquisition, in practice
it has largely been concerned with giving formal accounts of specific phenomena in natural
languages. Generative theory is modularist and formalist in character. Formal linguistics remains
the dominant paradigm for studying linguistics,[25] though Chomsky's writings have also
gathered criticism.

Cognitive linguistics

Main article: Cognitive linguistics

In the 1970s and 1980s, a new school of thought known as cognitive linguistics emerged as a
reaction to generativist theory. Led by theorists such as Ronald Langacker and George Lakoff,
linguists working within the realm of cognitive linguistics propose that language is an emergent
property of basic, general-purpose cognitive processes, though cognitive linguistics has also been
the subject of much criticism.[26] In contrast to the generativist school of linguistics, cognitive
linguistics is non-modularist and functionalist in character. Important developments in cognitive
linguistics include cognitive grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual metaphor, all of which
are based on the idea that form-function correspondences based on representations derived from
embodied experience constitute the basic units of language.

See also
Main articles: Outline of linguistics and Index of linguistics articles

 Cognitive science
 Speech-Language Pathology
 History of linguistics
 International Linguistics Olympiad
 Linguistics Departments at Universities
 Summer schools for linguistics
 List of linguists

Branches and fields

Anthropological linguistics, Articulatory phonology, Asemic writing, Biolinguistics,

Biosemiotics, Articulatory synthesis, Cognitive linguistics, Cognitive science, Comparative
linguistics, Computational linguistics, Concept Mining, Corpus linguistics, Critical discourse
analysis, Cryptanalysis, Decipherment, Descriptive linguistics, Developmental linguistics,
Discourse Analysis, Discourse, Ecolinguistics, Embodied cognition, Endangered languages,
Evolutionary linguistics, Forensic linguistics, Global language system, Glottometrics, Grammar
Writing, Historical linguistics, History of linguistics, Integrational linguistics, Intercultural
competence, International Linguistic Olympiad, Language acquisition, Language attrition,
Language engineering, Language geography, Lexicography/Lexicology, Linguistic typology,
Machine translation, Metacommunicative competence, Microlinguistics, Natural language
processing, Neurolinguistics, Orthography, Philology, Post-structuralism, Reading, Second
language acquisition, Semiotics, Sociocultural linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Speaker recognition
(authentication), Speech processing, Speech recognition, Speech synthesis, Stratificational
linguistics, Structuralism, Text linguistics, Varieties, Writing systems, Xenolinguistics.

References
1. ^ . ISBN 0262513706.
2. ^ Martinet, André (1960). Elements of General Linguistics. Tr. Elisabeth Palmer (Studies
in General Linguistics, vol. i.). London: Faber. p. 15.
 3. ^ Halliday, Michael A. K.; Jonathan Webster (2006). On Language and Linguistics.
Continuum International Publishing Group. p. vii. ISBN 0826488242.
4. ^ Greenberg, Joseph (1948). "Linguistics and ethnology". Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology 4: 140–47.
5. ^ a b Online Etymological Dictionary: philology
6. ^ McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University
Press. p. 19. ISBN 0-521-44665-1
7. ^ McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University
Press. p. 9. ISBN 0-521-44665-1
8. ^ A. Morpurgo Davies Hist. Linguistics (1998) 4 I. 22.
9. ^ a b Online Etymological Dictionary: linguist
10. ^ "Linguist". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt. 2000. ISBN 978-0395825174.
11. ^ "Animal Language Article"
12. ^ (Dediu, D. & Ladd, D.R. (2007). Linguistic tone is related to the population frequency
of the adaptive haplogroups of two brain size genes, ASPM and Microcephalin, PNAS
104:10944-10949; summary available here)
13. ^ Much is from Middle English muchel, which is from Proto-Germanic *mekilaz[1],
while mucho is from Latin multus[2].
14. ^ Chomsky, Noam. 1957. "Syntactic Structures". Mouton, The Hague
15. ^ Carl Vogel, Ulrike Hahn, Holly Branigan 1996, "Cross serial dependencies are not hard
to process", Proceedings of the 16th conference on Computational linguistics – Volume 1
16. ^ Himmelman, Nikolaus Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? in
P. Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus P Himmelmann & Ulrike Mosel. (2006) Essentials of
Language documentation. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin & New York.
17. ^ a b c d Eades, Diana (2005). "Applied Linguistics and Language Analysis in Asylum
Seeker Cases". Applied Linguistics 26 (4): 503–526. doi:10.1093/applin/ami021.
18. ^ Apollonius Dyscolus
19. ^ linguistics : Greek and Roman antiquity – Britannica Online Encyclopedia
20. ^ a b Cheng-teh, James Huang; Yen-hui Audrey Li (1996). New horizons in Chinese
linguistics. Springer. p. 235.
21. ^ Brown, E.K.; R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson (2006). Encyclopedia of language &
linguistics: Volume 1. Elsevier.
22. ^ Yang, Heming; Jing Peng (2008). Chinese lexicography: a history from 1046 BC to AD
1911. Oxford University Press. p. 25.
23. ^ The "four fields" in American anthropology are cultural anthropology, physical
anthropology, archeology, and linguistics.
24. ^ Kemmer, Suzanne (2008). Biographical sketch of Franz Boas. Houston: Rice
University.
25. ^ McMahon, A. M. S. (1994). Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University
Press. p. 32. ISBN 0-521-44665-1
26. ^ See Newmeyer 1998, Language Form and Language Function (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press), and Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Simpler Syntax
(OUP)[3]

Bibliography
  Akmajian, Adrian; Demers, Richard; Farmer, Ann; Harnish, Robert (2010). Linguistics:
An Introduction to Language and Communication. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
ISBN 0262513706.

External links
 The Linguist List, a global online linguistics community with news and information
updated daily
 Glossary of linguistic terms
 Language Log, a linguistics blog maintained by prominent linguists
 Glottopedia, MediaWiki-based encyclopedia of linguistics, under construction
 Linguistic sub-fields – according to the Linguistic Society of America
 Linguistics and language-related wiki articles on Scholarpedia and Citizendium
 "Linguistics" section – A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology, ed. J.
A. García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
 An Academic Linguistics Forum
 Linguistics at the Open Directory Project

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