Linguistics

An introduction to Linguistics 

Linguistic is a process to learn language in a systematic way with conscious mind .Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context. The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini, India around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit in Ashtadhyayi.

The first subfield of linguistics is the study of language structure, or grammar. This focuses on the system of rules followed by the users of a language. It includes the study of morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the formation and composition of phrases and sentences from these words), and phonology (sound systems). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds and nonspeech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived.

The study of language meaning is concerned with how languages employ logical structures and real-world references to convey, process, and assign meaning, as well as to manage and resolve ambiguity. This category includes the study of semantics (how meaning is inferred from words and concepts) and pragmatics (how meaning is inferred from context).

Linguistics also looks at the broader context in which language is influenced by social, cultural, historical and political factors. This includes the study of evolutionary linguistics, which investigates into questions related to the origins and growth of languages; historical linguistics, which explores language change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the representation and function of language in the mind; neurolinguistics, which looks at language processing in the brain; language acquisition, on how children or adults acquire language; and discourse analysis, which involves the structure of texts and conversations.

Although linguistics is the scientific study of language, a number of other intellectual disciplines are relevant to language and intersect with it. Semiotics, for example, is the general study of signs and symbols both within language and without. Literary theorists study the use of language in literature. Linguistics additionally draws on and informs work from such diverse fields as acoustics, anthropology, biology, computer science, human anatomy, informatics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and speech-language pathology.

Language is central and probably unique to human experience, and interest in its study has existed through history. Consequently, questions about language, and particularly the nature of its structure, use and development, have engaged scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Linguistics is the discipline that addresses these and other related questions directly.

Linguistics studies the full range of aspects of human language. It investigates the phonetics, grammar and semantics of individual languages, but through this seeks to uncover the features common to all human languages, the 'linguistic universals'. These are equivalent to the set of constraints on what is a possible human language, the so-called universal grammar. Various linguistic theories have been proposed which attempt to characterise this underlying structure of all languages; these theories are then used as a guide for the description of individual languages and revised accordingly. Languages which seem on first view to be very different may turn out, on closer scrutiny, to share many important deeper similarities in terms of their overall structural patterning. 

Terminology

Before the 20th century, the term philology, first attested in 1716, was commonly used to refer to the science of language, which was then predominantly historical in focus. Since Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance of synchronic analysis, however, this focus has shifted and the term "philology" is now generally used for the "study of a language's grammar, history, and literary tradition", especially in the United States, where it was never as popular as it was elsewhere (in the sense of the "science of language").
Although the term "linguist" in the sense of "a student of language" dates from 1641, the term "linguistics" is first attested in 1847. It is now the usual academic term in English for the scientific study of language.

The term linguist applies within the field to someone who studies language, or specific languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to refer to people who speak many languages fluently.

Fundamental questions

Linguistics concerns itself with describing and explaining the nature of human language. Fundamental questions include what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how human beings come to know languages. Linguistic research can broadly be divided into the descriptive analysis of structure and grammar on the one hand and the study of non-linguistic influences on language on the other.

Variation and universality

While some theories on linguistics focus on the different varieties that language produces, among different sections of society, others focus on the universal properties that are common to all given languages at one given time on the planet. The theory of variation therefore would elaborate on the different usages of popular languages like French and English across the globe, as well as its smaller dialects and regional permutations within their national boundaries. The theory of variation looks at the cultural stages that a particular language undergoes, and these include the following. The first stage is pidgin, or that phase in the creation of a language's variation when new, non-native speakers undertake a mainstream language and use its phrases and words in a broken manner that often attempts to be overly literal in meaning. At this junction, many of the linguistic characteristics of the native speakers' own language or mother tongue influence their use of the mainstream language, and that is when it arrives at the stage of being called a Creole. Hence, this process in the creation of dialects and varieties of languages as globally popular as English and French, as well as others like Spanish, for instance, is one that is rooted in the changing evolution and growth of each language. These variating factors are studied in order to understand the different usages and dialects that a language develops over time.
Universality, on the other hand, looks at formal structures and features that are common to all languages, and the template of which pre-exists in the mind of an infant child. This idea is based on the theory of generative grammar and the formal school of linguistics, whose proponents include Noam Chomsky and those who follow his theory and work.

  Inter-disciplinary factors

Alongside the structurally motivated domains of study, are other fields within the domain of linguistics. These fields are often distinguished by external factors that influence the study of language.

• Applied linguistics: the study of language-related issues applied in everyday life, notably language policies, planning, and education. (Constructed language fits under Applied linguistics.)

• Biolinguistics:  the study of natural as well as human-taught communication systems in animals, compared to human language.

• Clinical linguistics:  the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology.

• Computational linguistics:  the study of linguistic issues in a way that is 'computationally responsible', i.e., taking careful note of computational consideration of algorithmic specification and computational complexity, so that the linguistic theories devised can be shown to exhibit certain desirable computational properties implementations.

• Developmental linguistics:  the study of the development of linguistic ability in individuals, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.

• Evolutionary linguistics:  the study of the origin and subsequent development of language by the human species.

• Historical linguistics: or diachronic linguistics, the study of language change over time.

• Language geography:  the study of the geographical distribution of languages and linguistic features.

• Linguistic typology:  the study of the common properties of diverse unrelated languages, properties that may, given sufficient attestation, be assumed to be innate to human language capacity.

• Neurolinguistics:  the study of the structures in the human brain that underlie grammar and communication.

• Psycholinguistics: the study of the cognitive processes and representations underlying language use.

• Sociolinguistics:  the study of variation in language and its relationship with social factors.

Semiotics is a larger discipline that investigates the relationship between signs and what they signify more broadly. From the perspective of semiotics, language can be seen as a sign or symbol, with the world as its representation.