Linguistics

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Broadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study.

Dichotomies and language

The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below:

* Synchronic and diachronic - Synchronic study of a language is concerned with its form at a given moment; diachronic study covers the history of a language (group) and its structural changes over time.
* Theoretical and applied - Theoretical (or general) linguistics is concerned with frameworks for describing individual languages and theories about universal aspects of language; applied linguistics applies these theories to other fields.
* Contextual and independent - Contextual linguistics is concerned with how language fits into the world: its social function, how it is acquired, how it is produced and perceived. Independent linguistics considers languages for their own sake, aside from the externalities related to a language. Terms for this dichotomy are not yet well established--the Encyclopædia Britannica uses macrolinguistics and microlinguistics instead.

Given these dichotomies, scholars who call themselves simply linguists or theoretical linguists, with no further qualification, tend to be concerned with independent, theoretical synchronic linguistics, which is acknowledged as the core of the discipline.

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

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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 across all human languages
* 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 meaning of words (lexical semantics), and how these combine to form the meanings of sentences
* Pragmatics, the study of how utterances are used (literally, figuratively, or otherwise) in communicative acts
* Historical linguistics, the study of languages whose historical relations are recognizable through similarities in vocabulary, word formation, and syntax.
* Linguistic Typology, the study of the grammatical features that are employed across all human languages
* Stylistics, the study of style in languages

The independent significance of each of these areas is not universally acknowledged, however, and nearly all linguists would agree that the divisions overlap considerably. Nevertheless, each sub-area has core concepts that foster significant scholarly inquiry and research.
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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 of 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 cursorily. 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.
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Applied linguistics

Whereas theoretical linguistics is concerned with finding and describing generalities both within particular languages and among all languages, applied linguistics takes the results of those findings and applies them to other areas. Often applied linguistics refers to the use of linguistic research in language teaching, but results of linguistic research are used in many other areas, as well.

Many areas of applied linguistics today involve the explicit use of computers. Speech synthesis and speech recognition use phonetic and phonemic knowledge to provide voice interfaces to computers. Applications of computational linguistics in machine translation, computer-assisted translation, and natural language processing are extremely fruitful areas of applied linguistics which have come to the forefront in recent years with increasing computing power. Their influence has had a great effect on theories of syntax and semantics, as modelling syntactic and semantic theories on computers constrains the theories to computable operations and provides a more rigorous mathematical basis.
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Contextual linguistics

Contextual linguistics is that realm where the discipline of linguistics interacts with other academic disciplines. Whereas in core theoretical linguistics language is studied for its own sake, the interdisciplinary areas of linguistics 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 are the where the medical sciences meet linguistics.

Other cross-disciplinary areas of linguistics include language acquisition, evolutionary linguistics, stratificational linguistics, and cognitive science.
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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 (idiolect) or language development in great detail. Some study language pertaining to a whole speech community, such as the dialect of those who speak African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics"). 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 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.
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Prescription and description

Main article: Prescription and description.

Most research currently performed 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.

Prescriptivists tend to be found among the ranks of language educators. They hold clear notions of what is right and wrong, and may assign themselves the responsibility of ensuring that the next generation uses the variety of language that is most likely to lead to "success", often the acrolect of a particular language. The reasons for their intolerance of "incorrect usage" may include distrust of neologisms, connections to socially-disapproved dialects (i.e., basilects), or simple conflicts with pet theories. An extreme version of prescriptivism can be found among censors, whose personal mission is to eradicate words and structures which they consider to be destructive to society.

Descriptivists, on the other hand, seek to find the root of "incorrect usage". They might describe it simply as "idiosyncratic", or they may discover a regularity (a rule) that agitates the prescriptivists. Within the context of fieldwork, descriptive linguistics refers to the study of language using a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) approach. Descriptivist methodology more closely resembles scientific methodology in other disciplines.
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Speech versus writing

Most contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study than written language. Reasons for this perspective include:

* Speech appears to be a human universal, whereas there have been many cultures and speech communities that lack written communication;
* People learn to speak and process spoken languages more easily and much 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, particularly since language as speech is held to be an evolutionary adaptation, whereas writing is a comparatively recent invention.

Of course, linguists agree 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 corpora of spoken language are difficult to create and hard to find, and are typically used in transcriptional form anyway.

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

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