linguistics

linguistics

Exploring the Fascinating World of Linguistics

1. Introduction to Linguistics

The notion of scientific study in the area immediately at hand suggests the desirability of introducing a list of questions for which linguistic science has provided substantive information, indicating how the science deals with some of these questions by showing how discoveries are made. Not only do professional linguists in countries around the globe interface with the public by answering many of the questions on this list, children interested in language are known to have asked these and other questions of their parents; it is claimed by some that ‘natural curiosity about language is a basic human characteristic’. The point to be stressed here is that there are indeed answers to these questions, and they have been discovered by individuals working with and thinking about language in ways recognizable as scientific.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and the many creatures who inhabit a planet on which communication is vitally important. This textbook will introduce you to important discoveries and procedures of linguistic science. Not only will it provide you with knowledge in the field that is considered outside your special discipline, it will also serve the closely related purposes of improving your awareness of those features of language generally that can be adduced as evidence for contrary-to-fact speculative conclusions. The presentation is designed to help you construct an understanding of this evidence and its connections with biology, behavior, and communication, the three areas of study that combined into early linguistics and gave it an increased importance beginning in the mid-nineteenth century.

2. Theoretical Foundations of Language

When we examine many of the things people do and say, it becomes clear that the performance systems of individuals acting in concert adhere to and are heavily guided by principles and patterns that can be derived independently of the specific forms of any one of the thousands of languages spoken by people the world over. Modern linguistics begins with these principles and patterns and emphasizes the awesome complexity and challenge that arise at the interface between the biology of human knowledge and the unique means by which humans put it to use in the creation and use of specific languages. Another fundamental insight of the field is that the ability to bestow meaning and context reference on a limited inventory of overlearned actions must be achieved in a way that extends an easily formulated biological mechanism.

Linguistics is built on a number of theoretical and methodological foundations. The first of these is the recognition that human beings are biological organisms and that the human brain is the indispensable foundation of any effort to model human language abilities scientifically. Some of the most exciting and profound discoveries in contemporary biology and cognitive science have provided the basis for a detailed hypothesis as to how this might be the case. A second critical foundation of linguistic science is the reality that language has no obvious biological function, and that the language abilities of humans are fundamentally different from such species-specific knowledge and abilities as those observed in songbirds, honeybees, or crickets.

3. Sociolinguistics and Language Variation

Since there is no language that people use in all situations, no speech community can be called homogeneous, so the language that communities use must contain many variants. In the speech community, there is a complex structure of variation, with the presence of different kinds of grouping of variants, for example, grouping of individuals with similar linguistic behavior. In general, social categories in order to perform sound variation differentiate linguistic units, such as age groups, sexes, and social classes. This differentiation can occur over the years of study, during the time of the process of sound change and the transformation of new generations, often due to the different activities carried out in the necessary social context.

In sociolinguistics, which investigates the roles and norms that constrain the use of language, as well as its structures and effects, there is an examination of the relationship between language and society. It looks at how language varies in time, between different groups or individual speakers, and in different social settings. A sociolinguist would answer questions such as: What is the relationship between language and gender? How do people’s social dialects change from region to region? Does loud reading voice have an effect on vowels in particular groups of people? How do attitudes towards different languages, accents, and dialects influence the use of this language? Are women’s voices becoming more similar to men’s as a result of social advances? What is the sound of the brain before our experiences influence our pronunciations?

4. Psycholinguistics: Understanding the Mind and Language

An important issue that concerned researchers in the 1960s and 1970s was the human mind’s ability to use language structurally, generating sentences for which there is no precedent, like: ‘A person holding an umbrella was dancing.’ Different strategies can be applied to achieve this, and these strategies themselves can be revealing. The sentence in question is generated by one of the methods taken from the set of word classes that includes smell verbs (possessive verb), feel verbs, and look verbs. Rules might have guided the internal mechanics engendering sentences like these. Linguists are likely to start their research with the language’s component rules and proceed from there, while psychological linguists are likely to assume a non-formulaic start. They might also have intimated that an internal mechanism enables individuals to understand the physical world they nickname ‘language,’ and no particular linguistic thinking ability is present. Psycholinguistics contrasts plain speech and writing with the small number of ‘self-monitoring’ speech activities that can, in reality, be creolized error in connections established by listeners wired.

What is psycholinguistics? The discipline here goes well beyond language, combining linguistics and psychology, and often influenced by philosophy. Psycholinguistics approaches the study of human language by asking one of the most basic questions about the mind: How is language used and understood? Psycholinguistic research thus spans diverse subjects, from examining behavioral studies of how speech sounds are used to perceiving language (how speech errors are understood) to how language is represented in the brain. It even covers neurolinguistics, with its imaginative growth in the utilization of technology and neuroimaging. For example, researchers are exploring the mind’s ability to comprehend two languages.

5. Applied Linguistics: Real-World Applications

The practical application of linguistic knowledge and theoretical findings arising from linguistics research allows us to better understand the nature of language and its use, attributes and shortcomings of language teaching, writing systems and the development of language technologies, the past and the present, and the variability and universality of embodied cognition. Despite controversies and the existence of different theories of language, linguistic knowledge can promote dialogue among people searching for meaning in diversity. Applied work in areas such as language bias, language endangerment, language standardization and language revitalization has pragmatic rather than purely theoretical importance, pointing the way toward informed decision making. Language acquisition, conversational analysis, language disorders, language development (critical period), language and communication in society, language contact, cultural and discursive variation in language and the functional distribution of languages offer research findings for practical application in applied linguistics.

Linguistics reveals how languages differ from one another, and these distinctions occupy researchers at all points along the continuum length from largely unconscious phonological variation to overt morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic differences. All of these specialists focus on the wide variety of extant human languages, and they entertain a number of different goals, and sometimes even philosophical differences, when they venture into the fascinating world of linguistics. This is not to say that all linguists believe in different theories. Rather, all of this diversity of research and interests has the potential to inform one’s specific specialty, and, quite often, it does.