What is Linguistics?


In its broadest sense, Linguistics is the study of human language: how it is structured, how it is used to represent meaning, how it is used to communicate ideas, how it is formed, how it is decoded. Linguistics tries to look for commonality across all human languages, and shouldn't be confused with 'Language Teaching' which aims to teach a single language. It is confusing that an expert in languages is called a 'linguist', since it leaves no name for an expert in Linguistics - maybe he should be called a 'linguistician'!

Contemporary Linguistics is divided into sub fields of study;


some of these are:
Syntax

Semantics

Pragmatics

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Syntax
The study of the grammatical form of sentences: what makes the sentence "he gave the book to Mary" have the form of a typical English sentence, while the sentence "gave he book the Mary to" does not?

Semantics
The study of the meaning of sentences: in the sentence "he gave the book to Mary" what was happening? who was doing the giving? who was doing the receiving

Pragmatics
The study of how sentences are used to communicate: what are the rules of discourse that mean we can follow each other's conversations; why when someone asks you "Can you tell me the time?" you don't answer "yes" or "no".

Morphology
The study of the form of words: how groups of words share related meanings through regular patterning: what links "like", "likes", "liked", "likeness", "likely", "likelihood"?

Phonology
The study of the pronunciation of words and sentences: what basic sounds are used by a language, what regular patterning occurs in words; why does the sound used at the end of the word "sing" not occur at the beginning of a word?

Phonetics
The study of the production of speech by the human vocal mechanisms: how are sounds made, how do speakers of different accents differ..

Psycholinguistics
The study of the mental processes by which sentences are constructed and decoded by human beings.

Sociolinguistics
The study of how language variation is related to its use in society to form groups of geographical region, economic class or ethnicity.

Computational linguistics
The study of how computers can be used to analyse and generate sentences.

What is Phonetics?

Phonetics is the study of speech. It is concerned with how speech sounds can be categorised, how they are generated in the human vocal tract, why they each sound different to a listener, and how a listener is able to recognise them. The study of the organisation of speech sounds in a language is called phonology, while the study of how humans use their vocal apparatus to speak is called articulatory phonetics. The study of the quality of the sounds used to signal different pronunciations is called acoustic phonetics, while the study of how we perceive and decode speech sounds is sometimes called auditory phonetics. Finally, the general field of study in which instruments are used to study speech production and perception is called experimental phonetics

For more information you can see

Linguistics


you can ask any questions about linguistics

dear redha i'm sooooo happy
because you are here

:New4:

yah... we must try
and you are right.. linguisics very rich

may Allah bless you dear

:)