Branches of Linguistics

Muhammad Ashraf Kaloi M.A ENGLISH (Lit & ling) Karachi. M.Phil linguistics in progress

linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language and speech, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Concerning the linguistic profession, it may be useful to distinguish linguistics as conducted along two major axes, namely: Theoretical vs. Applied: Theoretical (or general) linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and theories about universal aspects of language; applied linguistics applies these theories to practical problems such as language teaching, speech synthesis, or speech therapy.

 Autonomous vs. Contextual (note: these terms are not well-established): Autonomous linguistics studies what Saussure called langue or what Chomsky calls Internal-language: the nature of language abstracting away from many aspects of its day-to-day usage. Contextual linguistics is concerned with what Saussure called parole or what Chomsky calls External-language, namely how language fits into the world: its social function, or its use in the broader context of human behavior.

 Given these distinctions, scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with autonomous, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline. Linguistic inquiry is pursued by a wide variety of specialists, who may not all be in harmonious agreement; as Russ Rymer flamboyantly puts it: "Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians."

Morphology
Morphology, the study of the internal structure of words or grammar of the words. Morphology is a sub-discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs just as cat is to cats, or encyclopdia is to encyclopdias; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

 Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human language (general study of sounds of all the languages of the world.

Phonetics has three main branches:

articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech; acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear; auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives.

 There are over a hundred different phones recognized as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet. Phonetics was studied as early as 2500 years ago in ancient India, with Pini's account of the place and manner of articulation of consonants in his 5th century BCE treatise on Sanskrit. The major Indic alphabets today, except Tamil script, order their consonants according to Pini's classification.

 Phonology (or phonemics), the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds (specific language e.g English) particular language of the world.

Phonology (Greek phon = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages. An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, eg Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes. In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, in which it is argued that the same or a similar phonological system underlies both signed and spoken languages. (Signs are distinguished from gestures in that the latter are non-linguistic or supply extra meaning alongside the linguistic message.)

Syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences or grammar of senetces.

Syntax is all about the structure of sentences, and what determines which words go where. Studying syntax allows us to define descriptive rules about how language works.
It is the aim of syntacticians to find out the factors involved in grammar, more specifically in regards to certain languages. Ultimately it is believed that there are such rules that apply to all languages, which is why it is important to study as many different languages as possible. The main characteristics taken into account in syntax are morphology (the structure of language and the sounds it uses) and the principles which govern sentence construction. Syntax also notes the differences between written and spoken language, as spontaneous speech will often ignore standard structural rules. By studying syntax you will learn about different parts of speech, including just how many types of verbs there are, and many mind-boggling structural phenomena such as why the location of contextual information determines who a pronoun is really talking about.

 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 .

Semantics is the study of meaning... What is meaning? How is meaning created in language? How do people understand language and why do we understand it like we do?

Semantics
Semantics (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts. By the usual convention that calls a study or a theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.

 Though terminology varies, writers on the subject of meaning generally recognize two sorts of meaning that a significant expression may have: (1) the relation that a sign has to objects and objective situations, actual or possible. (2) the relation that a sign has to other signs, most especially the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts. Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any manner of objective reference, as its denotation. Some theorists refer to the relation between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation, but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the denotative aspect, using other terms or altogether ignoring the connotative aspect.

Pragmatics
Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts. Contexts and situations. In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting, context refers to any factor linguistic, objective, or subjective that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions. Discourse analysis, the study of sentences organized into texts either spoken or written. Lexicography, the compiling of dictionaries. Lexicography could be seen as a branch of applied linguistics.

 Applied linguistics, The application of the methods and results of linguistics to such areas as language teaching; national language policies; translation; language in politics, advertising, classrooms and courts (forensic linguistics).

 Note: Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas, as well.)

 Many areas of applied linguistics today involve the explicit use of computers. 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 extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront in recent years with increasing computing power.

Computational linguistics,
Computational linguists study natural languages, such as English and Japanese, rather than computer languages, such as Fortran, Snobol, or Java. The field of computational linguistics has two aims: the technological aim to enable computers to be used as aids in analyzing and processing natural language and the psychological aim to understand, by analogy with computers, more about how people process natural languages. It also includes research on automatic translation, electronic production of artificial speech and the automatic recognition of human speech.

Psycholinguistics,
the study of the mental/cognitive processes and representations underlying language use, for example how memory limitations affect speech production and comprehension. The best developed branch of psycholinguistics is the study of language acquisition.

Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right. Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).

Sociolinguistics,
the study of social patterns of linguistic variability ,Language change, code swithcing,Borrowing etc language and its relation to the language in social contexts.

 Sociolinguistics Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. It also studies how lects differ between groups separated by certain social variables, e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, etc., and how creation and adherence to these rules is used to categorize individuals in social class or socio-economic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place (dialect), language usage varies among social classes, and it is these sociolects that sociolinguistics studies. For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social attitudes that Black English Vernacular would not be considered appropriate language use in a business or professional setting; he or she might also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this sociolect much as a dialectologist would study the same for a regional dialect.

 The study of language variation is concerned with social constraints determining language in its contextual environment. Code-switching is the term given to the use of different varieties of language in different social situations. William Labov is often regarded as the founder of the study of sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the society.

Stylistics,
The study of that variation in language which is dependent on the situation in which the language is used and also on the effect the writer/speaker wishes to create on the reader/hearer. Stylistics tries to establish principles capable of explaining the particular choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language.

Literary stylistics,
The analysis of literary texts applying linguistic methods and theories (phonetics, morphology, syntax, discourse analysis, pragmatics, etc.) with the aim of providing retrievable interpretations which allow comparisons of different texts, genres (fiction, drama and poetry) etc.

Neurolinguistics,
The study of the brain and how it functions in the production, perception, and acquisition of language as well as disorders like aphasia ( a kind of disease where language attrition takes place)

Mathematical linguistics

In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a formal language L is a set of finitelength sequences of elements drawn from a specified finite set A of symbols. Among the more common options that are found in applications, a formal language may be viewed as being analogous to (1) a collection of words or (2) a collection of sentences. In Case 1, the set A is called the alphabet of L, whose elements are called words. In Case2, the set A is called the lexicon or the vocabulary of L, whose elements are then called sentences. In any case, the mathematical theory that treats formal languages in general is known as formal language theory. Although it is common to hear the term formal language used in other contexts to refer to a mode of expression that is more disciplined or more precise than everyday speech, the sense of formal language discussed in this article is restricted to its meaning in formal language theory. An alphabet might be , and a string over that alphabet might be ababba.

 A typical language over that alphabet, containing that string, would be the set of all strings which contain the same number of symbols a and b. The empty word (that is, length-zero string) is allowed and is often denoted by e (ethnicity), (belongs) or (and) to add. While the alphabet is a finite set and every string has finite length, a language may very well have infinitely many member strings (because the length of words in it may be unbounded).