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LINGUISTICS
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Some of the earliest linguistic activities can be recalled from Iron Age
India with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas (from ca. the 8th
century BC) constitute as it were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of
observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic
school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga
discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the
work of Pānini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who, however, looks back on what are
probably several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he
occasionally refers to. Pānini formulates close to 4,000 rules which
together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his
analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme and the
root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive
structure, reminiscent of contemporary "machine language" (as opposed to
"human readable" programming languages).
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and
professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-
kitab fi al-nahw (The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects
of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from
phonology.
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with
classical Latin and Greek, notably verb roots and grammatical structures,
such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprung
from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language
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family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover
more language families and branches.
In 19th century Europe the study of linguistics was largely from the
perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-
century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal
shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who
formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the
"Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed
the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.
Prof. A. R. Somroo
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LINGUISTICS
GENERAL LINGUISTICS
Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics
encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is
between the study of language structure (grammar) and the study of meaning
(semantics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition
of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words combine into phrases
and sentences) and phonology (the study of sound systems and abstract
sound units). Phonetics is a related branch of linguistics concerned with
the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and
how they are produced and perceived. Other sub-disciplines of linguistics
include the following: evolutionary linguistics, which considers the
origins of language; historical linguistics, which explores language
change; sociolinguistics, which looks at the relation between linguistic
variation and social structures; psycholinguistics, which explores the
representation and functioning of language in the mind; neurolinguistics,
which looks at the representation of language in the brain; language
acquisition, which considers how children acquire their first language and
how children and adults acquire and learn their second and subsequent
languages; and discourse analysis, which is concerned with the structure
of texts and conversations, and pragmatics with how meaning is transmitted
based on a combination of linguistic competence, non-linguistic knowledge,
and the context of the speech act.
Within the field, linguist is used to describe someone who either studies
the field or uses linguistic methodologies to study groups of languages or
particular languages. Outside the field, this term is commonly used to
refer to people who speak many languages or have a great vocabulary.
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.
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SELECTED SUB-FIELDS OF LINGUISTICS
Historical linguistics
Semiotics
LINGUISTICS
THEORATICAL LINGUISTICS
Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that is most
concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge. The fields that
are generally considered the core of theoretical linguistics are syntax,
phonology, morphology, and semantics. Although phonetics often informs
phonology, it is often excluded from the purview of theoretical
linguistics, along with psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.
Theoretical linguistics also involves the search for an explanation of
linguistic universals, that is, properties all languages have in common.
Linguistic structures are pairings of meaning and form; such pairings are
known as Saussurean signs. In this sense, form may consist of sound
patterns, movements of the hands, written symbols, and so on. There are
many levels of linguistics concerned with particular aspects of linguistic
structure, ranging from those focused primarily on form to those focused
primarily on meaning:
Articulatory phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In
studying articulation, phoneticians attempt to document how humans produce
speech sounds (vowels and consonants). That is, articulatory phoneticians
are interested in how the different structures of the vocal tract, called
the articulators (tongue, lips, jaw, palate, teeth etc.), interact to
create the specific sounds.
Auditory phonetics
Auditory phonetics is a branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing,
acquisition and comprehension of phonetic sounds of words of a language.
As articulatory phonetics explores the methods of sound production,
auditory phonetics explores the methods of reception--the ear to the
brain, and those processes.
Acoustic phonetics
Acoustic phonetics is a subfield of phonetics which deals with acoustic
aspects of speech sounds. Acoustic phonetics investigates properties like
the mean squared amplitude of a waveform, its duration, its fundamental
frequency, or other properties of its frequency spectrum, and the
relationship of these properties to other branches of phonetics (e.g.
articulatory or auditory phonetics), and to abstract linguistic concepts
like phones, phrases, or utterances.
Phonology
Phonology is the study of language sounds. Phonology is divided into two
separate studies, phonetics and phonemics. Phonetics is what depicts the
sounds we hear. It calls attention to the smallest details in language
sounds. There are three kinds of phonetics: acoustic phonetics, auditory
phonetics, and articulatory phonetics. Acoustic phonetics deals with the
physical properties of sound, what sounds exactly are coming from the
person speaking. Auditory phonetics deals with how the sounds are
perceived, exactly what the person hearing the sounds is perceiving.
Finally, articulatory phonetics studies how the speech sounds are
produced. This is what describes the actual sounds in detail. It is also
known as descriptive phonetics.
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Phonemics studies how the sounds are used. It analyzes the way sounds are
arranged in languages and helps you to hear what sounds are important in a
language.The unit of analysis for phonemics is called phonemes. "A phoneme
is a sound that functions to distinguish one word from another in a
language."For example, how we distinguish the English word tie from the
word die. The sounds that differentiates two words are [t] and [d].
Morphology
Morphology is the study of word structure. For example, in the sentences
The dog runs and The dogs run, the word forms runs and dogs have an affix
-s added, distinguishing them from the bare forms dog and run. Adding this
suffix to a nominal stem gives plural forms, adding it to verbal stems
restricts the subject to third person singular. Some morphological
theories operate with two distinct suffixes -s, called allomorphs of the
morphemes Plural and Third person singular, respectively. Languages differ
with respect to their morphological structure. Along one axis, we may
distinguish analytic languages, with few or no affixes or other
morphological processes from synthetic languages with many affixes. Along
another axis, we may distinguish agglutinative languages, where affixes
express one grammatical property each, and are added neatly one after
another, from fusional languages, with non-concatenative morphological
processes (infixation, umlaut, ablaut, etc.) and/or with less clear-cut
affix boundaries.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of language structure and word order. It is concerned
with the relationship between units at the level of words or morphology.
Syntax seeks to delineate exactly all and only those sentences which make
up a given language, using native speaker intuition. Syntax seeks to
describe formally exactly how structural relations between elements
(lexical items/words and operators) in a sentence contribute to its
interpretation. Syntax uses principles of formal logic and Set Theory to
formalize and represent accurately the hierarchical relationship between
elements in a sentence. Abstract syntax trees are often used to illustrate
the hierarchical structures that are posited. Thus, in active declarative
sentences in English the subject is followed by the main verb which in
turn is followed by the object (SVO). This order of elements is crucial to
its correct interpretation and it is exactly this which syntacticians try
to capture. They argue that there must be such a formal computational
component contained within the language faculty of normal speakers of a
language and seek to describe it.
Semantics
Semantics is the study of intensive meaning in words and
sentences.Semantics can be expressed through diction (word choice) and
inflexion. Inflexion may be conveyed through an author's tone in writing
and a speaker's tone of voice, changing pitch and stress of words to
influence meaning.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which
context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory,
conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to
language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies
how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the linguistic
knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but
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also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those
involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on. In this respect,
pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent
ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc. of an
utterance. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is
called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is
described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the
most challenging aspects of language learning, and comes only through
experience.
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a
number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken or signed language use.
BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
SOCIOLINGUISTICS:
Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of
society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way
language is used. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in
that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of the society on the
language, while the latter's focus is on the language's effect on the
society. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with
pragmatics.
The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by
Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Gauchat in
Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the
West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language
change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the
late 19th century. Sociolinguistics in the West first appeared in the
1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William Labov in the US and
Basil Bernstein in the UK.
Applications of Sociolinguistics
For example, a sociolinguist might determine through study of social
attitudes that a particular vernacular would not be considered appropriate
language use in a business or professional setting. Sociolinguists might
also study the grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and other aspects of this
sociolect much as dialectologists would study the same for a regional
dialect.
Sociolinguistic variables
Studies in the field of sociolinguistics typically take a sample
population and interview them, assessing the realisation of certain
sociolinguistic variables. Labov specifies the ideal sociolinguistic
variable to
be high in frequency,
have a certain immunity from conscious suppression,
be an integral part of larger structures, and
be easily quantified on a linear scale.
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Phonetic variables tend to meet these criteria and are often used, as are
grammatical variables and, more rarely, lexical variables. Examples for
phonetic variables are: the frequency of the glottal stop, the height or
backness of a vowel or the realisation of word-endings. An example of a
grammatical variable is the frequency of negative concord (known
colloquially as a double negative).
Speech Community
Speech community is a concept in sociolinguistics that describes a more or
less discrete group of people who use language in a unique and mutually
accepted way among themselves.
Social network
Understanding language in society means that one also has to understand
the social networks in which language is embedded. A social network is
another way of describing a particular speech community in terms of
relations between individual members in a community. A network could be
loose or tight depending on how members interact with each other.For
instance, an office or factory may be considered a tight community because
all members interact with each other. A large course with 100+ students be
a looser community because students may only interact with the instructor
and maybe 1-2 other students. A multiplex community is one in which
members have multiple relationships with each other.For instance, in some
neighborhoods, members may live on the same street, work for the same
employer and even intermarry.
BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS:
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the
psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,
use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into
psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a
lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research
makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information
theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of
subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the
neurological workings of the brain become more and more widespread,
neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people
in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and
linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that
are based on the components that make up human language.
Linguistic-related areas:
Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech
sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain
processes and understands these sounds.
Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the
relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the
formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are
combined together to form sentences.
Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax
is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals
with the actual meaning of sentences.
Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the
interpretation of meaning.
Psychology-related areas:
The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes
involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological,
phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's
ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least
quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as
those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of
children).
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Theories
Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account
for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or
signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put
words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words
we call "sentences." The first of these items—associating sound with
meaning—is the least controversial and is generally held to be an area in
which animal and human communication have at least some things in common.
Syntax, on the other hand, is controversial, and is the focus of the
discussion that follows.
The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by
the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap.
As well, the school of psychology known as behaviorism puts forth the
point of view that language is behavior shaped by conditioned response.
The second point of view (the "innate" one) can fairly be said to have
begun with Noam Chomsky’s highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959
in the pages of the journal Language. That review started what has been
termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology.
BRANCHES OF LINGUISTICS
APPLIED LINGUISTICS:
Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that
identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-
life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics
are education, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology
LINGUISTICS
LINGUISTICS V/S TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR
In linguistics, traditional grammar is a theory of the structure of
language based on ideas Western societies inherited from ancient Greek and
Roman sources. The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from
those of contemporary linguistics. In the English-speaking world at least,
traditional grammar is still widely taught in elementary schools.
Controversy
The term is mainly used to distinguish these ideas from those of
contemporary linguistics, which are intended to apply to a much broader
range of languages, and to correct a number of errors in traditional
grammar.
LINGUISTICS
HUMAN AND ANIMAL COMMUNICATION
Most animals have inter and intra-species communication systems to
communicate with one another. They cry,hoot, bleat, dance and coo, and to
some degree these noises and acts accomplish the same purposes as human
language. They make instinctive noises. Animals, some scholars believe,
have both the discrete and non-discrete system of communication. For
example non-discrete in the case of the bees who communicate among among
themselves through a dance, and discrete in the case of verbal monkeys who
communicate through a bark, lip-smacking, ‘aarr’ sounds, etc., but their
message as well as symbols are limited in quantity and dimension. Human
languages, on the other hand, are much more interestingly unlimited.
LINGUISTICS
THE PRODUCTION OF SPEECH
An effective act of speech is an exceedingly complex operation involving a
number of operations. The first stage is psychological, the second is
physiological and the third is physical. First of all a concept is
formulated in in the speaker’s brain, and human nervous system transmits
this linguistic message to the so called organs of speech. The organs of
speech are thus set in motion and their movements creat disturbance in the
air, and these sound waves are received by the listener’s ears. At the
listener’s end, first of all the ears receive the linguistic codification,
his nervous system passes this linguistic message to the brain, where the
linguistic interpretation of the message takes place.
The air stream coming from the lungs may be modified in any of these areas
in a variety of ways. The role of each speech organ is as under:
The soft palate can be moved up to block the passage into the nose. The
from the lungs then has to come out through the mouth only and the
sounds produced in this way are called the oral sounds.All english
sounds except /m,n,תּ/ are oral sounds. If the soft palate is lowered and
passage through the mouth is closed, the air from the lungs come out
through the nose only. Sounds produced in this manner are called nasal
sounds.For example, /m,n,תּ/ in English words man,nun and song.
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