The Field of Linguistics
What is
Linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of Language. Linguists
(people who are specialists in Linguistics) do work on specific languages, but
their primary goal is to understand the nature of Language in general: …what
distinguishes human language from other animal communication systems?
…what features are common to all human languages? …how are the
modes of linguistic communication (speech, writing, sign language of the deaf)
related to each other? …how is Language related to other types of human
behavior? …etc.
The main goal of
the study of Linguistics in an academic setting, like all other intellectual
disciplines, is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the world. However, since Language is universal and
fundamental to all human interactions, the knowledge attained in Linguistics
has many practical applications.
Linguists, with some training in other appropriate disciplines, would
thus be prepared to seek answers to questions such as the following: …how
can a previously unstudied language be analyzed and written? …how can
foreign languages best be taught and learned? …how can speech be
synthesized on a computer or (far more difficult) how can a computer be
programmed to understand human speech? …how can the language problems of
people with speech abnormalities be analyzed and rectified? …how are linguistic
issues in legal matters to be handled? …etc.
The Sub-Fields
of Linguistics
Language is a phenomenon with many layers, from the sounds that come out of people’s mouths to the meanings that those sounds express. The field of Linguistics is composed of sub-fields, and most professional linguists become specialists in one or more of those sub-fields. The major sub-fields are the following:
Phonetics: This is the study of speech sounds
themselves. Phoneticians study both the production of speech sounds by the
human speech organs (articulatory
phonetics) and the properties of the sounds themselves (acoustic phonetics).
Phoneticians are concerned with such questions as the following:
…what are the sounds, from among all those that humans could make, that
actually exist in the world’s languages? …what specially defines
different “accents”? …can speakers be identified by
“voiceprints”? ...what are the properties of sounds that would go
into computerized speech synthesis?
Phonology:
This is the study of the organization of language sounds. Phonologists are concerned with questions such as the
following: …what sounds contrast
in one language but not another (answers to such questions explain why Spanish
speakers have trouble with the difference between English sh and ch, or why English speakers have
trouble with the different “u” sounds in French words like rue
‘street’ and roue ‘wheel’.)?
… what sounds of a language can or cannot occur
one after the other (for example, why can words begin in st- in English but not in Spanish)?
...how do poets or writers or song lyrics intuitively know how to match the
rhythm of speech to the abstract rhythmic pattern of a poetic or musical meter?
Morphology:
This is the study of the make-up of words. Morphologists
study such questions as the following: …to what extent are ways of
forming words “productive” or not (why do we say arrival and amusement but not *arrivement and *amusal)? …what determines when words change form (why
does English have to add –er to adjectives when making comparisons but Hebrew does not
add any equivalent)? …how can we get a computer to recognize the
“root” of a word separated from its “affixes” (e.g. how
could a computer recognize walk, walks, walking, and walked as
the “same” word)?
Syntax:
This is the study of how phrases and sentences larger than the word are
constructed. Syntacticians address such
questions as the following: …how can the number of sentences we could
utter be infinite in number even though the number of words in any language is
finite? …what is it that makes a sentence like visiting relatives can be boring ambiguous? …why would
English speakers judge a sentence like colorless
green ideas sleep furiously to be “grammatical” even though it
is nonsensical? …how can languages express the same thoughts even though
they construct their sentences in different ways (e.g. why does English I saw them there mean the same thing as
French je les y
ai vus even though the
order of elements in French is I them
there have seen)? …how can a computer be programmed to analyze the
structure of sentences (note that answers to this question would be crucial for
machine translation because of differences in sentence formation across
languages)?
Semantics:
This is the study of meaning. Semanticists
answer such questions as the following: …how do we know what words mean
(how do we know where red stops and orange starts)? what
is the basis of metaphors (why is my car
is a lemon a “good” metaphor but my car is a cabbage is not)? …what makes sentences like I’m looking for a tall student or the student I am looking for must be tall
have more than one meaning? …in a sentence like I regret that he lied, how do we know
that, in fact, he did lie? …How many meanings can be found in a sentence
like three students read three books
and why do just those meanings exist?
In addition to
these basic sub-fields there are a number of “hyphenated” fields of
Linguistics, which use the “tools” of the basic fields. Some of these “hyphenated”
fields are the following:
Historical
linguistics: This is the
study of how languages change over time, addressing such questions as why
modern English is different form Old English and Middle English or what it
means to say that English and German are “more closely related” to
each other than English and French.
Sociolinguistics:
This is the study of how Language is used in society,
addressing such questions as what makes some dialects more
“prestigious” than others, where slang comes from and why it
arises, or what happens when two languages come together in
“bilingual” communities.
Psycholinguistics: This is the study of how language is
processed in the mind, addressing such questions as how we can hear a string of
language noises and make sense of them, how children can learn to speak and
understand the language of their environment as quickly and effortlessly as
they do, or how people with pathological language problems differ from people
who have “normal” language.
Neurolinguistics: This is the study of the actual encoding of
language in the brain, addressing such questions as what parts of the brain
different aspects of language are stored in, how language is actually stored,
what goes on physically in the brain when language is processed, or how the
brain compensates when certain areas are damaged.
Computational
linguistics: Learning and understanding a language
involves computing the properties of language that are described in phonology,
syntax, and semantics from what is heard.
The challenge of describing how this is possible connects linguistics
with computational issues at a very fundamental level. How could syntactic structures be
computed from spoken language, how are semantic relations recognized, and how
could these computational skills be acquired? Computational linguists attempt to
answer these questions.
Last Modified: May 7, 2008
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