What is Linguistics?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is a 'foundation' discipline in the sense that it bridges the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. Linguistics is an exciting field, not only because of its own achievements, but also because of its contributions to other fields. For example, linguistic anthropology is one of the four subdisciplines of anthropology, and it has provided models of rigour in cultural anthropology.

Linguistics also has links with cognitive science, computer science, education (through reading, child language acquisition, and classroom interaction), geography (through linguistic geography and dialectology), history (through historical linguistics), literature (through stylistics, poetics, and critical theory), neurology (through neurolinguistics, the study of how language functions in the brain), philosophy (through the philosophy of natural language, semantics, and logic), psychology (through psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and clinical applications), sociology (through sociolinguistics and the sociology of language), speech therapy, and zoology (through animal communication and the evolution of language).

Some of the major areas in which linguists work are:

Phonetics is the scientific study of speech sounds, of how they are made (articulatory phonetics), transmitted (acoustic phonetics), and received (auditory phonetics). Phonetics has broad applications in a number of areas, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, forensic linguistics, speech therapy, and language instruction.

Phonology analyses how sounds are organised in a language (phonological structure) and attempts to discover the principles that govern sound systems in languages in general.

Morphology examines the structure or form of words, how they are constructed of smaller units (called "morphemes") which have meaning (for example, singer is composed of sing + er).

Syntax investigates how words (and grammatical elements) are combined to form sentences, what speakers know about the grammatical structure of their language, how sentences are interrelated and what the general grammatical and cognitive principles are which explain these arrangements, relationships, and knowledge.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language.

Sociolinguistics probes the relationship between language and society. This involvesvariation in language use which correlates with such things as the age, gender, social class, ethnicity, and general social attributes of speakers and hearers. Sociolinguists also deal with attitudes towards language, social aspects of language change, and linguistic aspects of social issues.

Applied linguistics is the application of linguistic methods and findings to a number of areas. It is especially associated with language teaching methodology and second-language acquisition, but also involves language and the law, language and classroom education, child development, language and reading, speech therapy, language and public policy, translation, advertising, and the like.

Historical linguistics studies how and why languages change.

Pragmatics is concerned with how the meaning of linguistic acts depends on the context in which they are performed. It looks at language from the point of view of the users and the choices they make, and constraints on those choices, in social interaction. (For example, pragmatics studies what can make the sentence "Can you open the door?" count as a question in one situation and as a request for action in another).

Discourse analysis examines how language is structured beyond the sentence and thus involves topic and comment, narrative structure, cohesiveness, written vs. spoken language, and conversational analysis.

Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelationship between language and human cognition (the role of language as it affects memory, perception, learning) and the effects of psychological constraints on language (on its use, production, and comprehension). The best known area of psycholinguistics is the study of child language acquisition, how children acquire their native language.

Anthropological linguistics deals with the relationship between language and culture; also it involves the study of little-known languages in their cultural setting.

Computational linguistics or mathematical linguistics is the branch of linguistics which looks at languages essentially as formal systems, and applies computational techniques and concepts to understanding issues such as automatic machine translation and parsing. The goal of research in these areas is to uncover the logical and mathematical structures that underlie linguistic systems.

Linguistics also plays a key role in cognitive science, which involves collaboration among computer science, neurology, philosophy, and psychology, working together for greater understanding of human cognition (learning, memory, information storage and retrieval in the brain, and human thinking and mental activity in general).

Anyone with an interest in language or associated areas for any purpose may profit from taking courses in linguistics. For some students, linguistics will provide a central academic interest, but students who pursue several other areas of study will also find the courses relevant and rewarding.