Minggu, 26 April 2009

Linguistics


Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. The study of linguistic can be conceived as occuring along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below:

  • Synchronic and diachronic -- Synchronic study of a language is concerned only with the language as it is at a given time; diachronic study is concerned with the history of a language or group of languages, and what structural changes have occurred.
  • Theoretical and applied -- Theoretic linguistics is concerned with creating frameworks for the description of individual languages as well as with theories about universal aspects of language.
  • Contextual and independent -- These terms are used only here for convenience as terms for this dichotomy are not well established--the Encyclopædia Britannica uses macrolinguistics and microlinguistics, apparently in analogy with macroeconomics and microeconomics. Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world: its social function, but also how it is acquired, and how it is produced and perceived. Independent linguistics instead considers languages for their own sake, and without externalities related to a language.

Given these dichotomies, those scholars who call themselves simply linguists, with no qualification, tend to be primarily concerned with independent, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is generally acknowledged as the core of the discipline. This is what is generally described by "theoretical linguistics".


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, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians." [1]

Areas of theoretical linguistics


Theoretical linguistics is often divided into a number of separate areas, to be studied more or less independently. The following divisions are currently widely acknowledged:

  • phonetics, the study of the different sounds that are employed in a language;
  • phonology, the study of patterns of a language's basic sounds;
  • morphology, the study of the internal structure of words;
  • syntax, the study of how words combine to form grammatical sentences
  • semantics, the study of the literal meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the literal meanings of sentences;
  • stylistics, the study of style in languages;
  • pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts;

The independent significance of each of these areas are not universally acknowledged, however, and nearly all linguists would agree that the divisions overlap considerably. Nevertheless, each subarea has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.


Diachronic linguistics


Whereas the core of theoretical linguistics is concerned with studying languages at a particular point in time (usually the present), diachronic linguistics examines how language changes through time, sometimes over centuries. Historical linguistics enjoys both a rich history (the study of linguistics grew out historical linguistics) and a strong theoretical foundation for the study of language change.

In American universities, the non-historic perspective seems to have the upper hand. Many introductory linguistics classes, for example, cover historical linguistics only cursorally. The shift in focus to a non-historic perspective started with Saussure and became predominant with Noam Chomsky.

Explicitly historical perspectives include historical-comparative linguistics and etymology.


Applied linguistics


Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within languages and among all languages, as a group, applied linguistics take the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Usually applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, linguistics is used in other areas. Speech synthesis and Speech recognition, for example, use linguistic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers.

Contextual linguistics



Contextual linguistics is that realm where linguistics interacts with other academic disciplines. Whereas core theoretical linguistics studies languages for their own sake, the inder-disciplinary areas of linguistic consider how language interacts with the rest of the world.

Sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, and linguistic anthropology are where the social sciences that consider societies as whole and linguistics interact.

Critical discourse analysis is where rhetoric and philosophy interact with linguistics.

psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics is the where the medical sciences meets linguistics.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, stratificational linguistics, and cognitive science.


Individual speakers, language communities, and linguistic universals


Linguists also differ in how broad a group of language users they study. Some analyze a given speaker's language or language development in great detail. Some study language pertaining to a whole speech community, such as the language of all those who speak Black English Vernacular. Others try to find linguistic universals that apply, at some abstract level, to all users of human language everywhere. This latter project has been most famously been advocated by Noam Chomsky, and it interests many people in psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It is thought that universals in human language may reveal important insight into universals about the human mind.

Description and prescription


Most work currently done under the name "linguistics" is purely descriptive; the linguists seek to clarify the nature of language without passing value judgments or trying to chart future language directions. Nonetheless, there are many professionals and amateurs who also prescribe rules of language, holding a particular standard out for all to follow.

Whereas prescriptivists might want to stamp out what they perceive as "incorrect usage", descriptivists seek to find the root of such usage; they might describe it simply as "idiosyncratic", or they may discover a regularity that the prescriptivists don't like because it is perhaps too new or from a dialect they don't approve of.


Speech versus writing


Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more imporant to study, than writing. Reasons for this standpoint include:
  • Speech appears to be a human universal, whereas there are and have been many cultures that lack written communication;
  • People learn to speak and process oral language easier and earlier than writing;
  • A number of cognitive scientists argue that the brain has an innate "language module", knowledge of which is thought to come more from studying speech than writing.

Of course, linguists agree that that the study of written language can be worthwhile and valuable. For linguistic research that uses the methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, written language is often much more convenient for processing large amounts of linguistic data. Large corpuses of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find.

Furthermore, the study of writing systems themselves falls under the aegis of linguistics.


Research areas of linguistics



phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etymology, lexicology, lexicography, theoretical linguistics, historical-comparative linguistics and descriptive linguistics, linguistic typology, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, semiotics.


Inter-disciplinary linguistic research



applied linguistics, historical linguistics, orthography, writing systems, comparative linguistics, cryptanalysis, decipherment, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, anthropological linguistics, stratificational linguistics, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, and in computer science there is natural language understanding, speech recognition, speaker recognition (authentication), speech synthesis, and more generally, speech processing

Important linguists and schools of thought



Early scholars of linguistics include Jacob Grimm, who devised the principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation known as Grimm's Law in 1822, Karl Verner, who discovered Verner's Law, August Schleicher who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" and Johannes Schmidt who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872. Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics. 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 one from the 1960s.


Other important linguists and schools include Michael Halliday, whose systemic functional grammar is pursued widely in the U.K., Canada, Australia, China, and Japan; Dell Hymes, who developed a pragmatic approach called The Ethnography of Speaking; George Lakoff, Len Talmy, and Ronald Langacker, who were pioneers in cognitive linguistics; Charles Fillmore and Adele Goldberg, who are associated with construction grammar; and linguists developing several varieties of what they call functional grammar, including Talmy Givon and Robert Van Valin, Jr..


Representation of speech



Narrower conceptions of "linguistics"



"Linguistics" and "linguist" may not always be meant to apply as broadly as above. In some contexts, the best definitions may be "what is studied in a typical university's department of linguistics", and "one who is a professor in such a department." Linguistics in this narrow sense usually does not refer to learning to speak foreign languages (except insofar as this helps to craft formal models of language.) It does not include literary analysis. Only sometimes does it include study of things such as metaphor. It probably does not apply to those engaged in such prescriptive efforts as found in Strunk and White's The Elements of Style; "linguists" usually seek to study what people do, not what they should do. One could probably argue for a long while about who is and who is not a "linguist".


References



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