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Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and is largely divided into two major fields: theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist.
Theoretical (or general) linguistics encompasses six major sub-fields: phonetics (the study of the isolated sounds of speech), phonology (the study of speech sound systems and their mental representations), morphology (the study of the grammatical rules for word formation), syntax (the study of word order), semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of meaning in context) which, together, allow for a description of the way a language works to convey meaning from one speaker to another. Applied linguistics encompasses diverse fields such as language education, second language acquisition, effect of society on language, or language's relationship to psychology, and so on.
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In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes (the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound), and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language).
The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively alongside a free morpheme. Its actual phonetic representation is the morph, with the morphs representing the same morpheme being grouped as its allomorphs.
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist, whose influence dominated the development of structural linguistics in America between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is especially known for his book Language (1933), describing the state of the art of linguistics at its time.
...that pragmatics studies how saying "gosh, it's cold in here" can mean "please close the window"?
...that learning a second (or third or fourth) language as an adult is a different process from learning your first language(s)?
...that Damin is the only non-African language to have clicks as regular speech sounds?
...that an agent noun is a noun derived from another word that denotes an action, and means an entity that does that action?
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WikiProjects concerned with linguistics:
- Language acquisition
- Psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics
- Linguistic anthropology
- Cognitive linguistics
- Computational linguistics
- Descriptive linguistics
- Stylistics
- Corpus linguistics
Of Interest
