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What is Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It endeavours to answer the question--
what is language and how is represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing
and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the
language (ie., do not split infinitives). Linguists are not required to know many
languages and linguists are not interpreters.

The underlying goal of the linguist is to try to discover the universals concerning
language. That is, what are the common elements of all languages. The linguist then
tries to place these elements in a theoretical framework that will describe all
languages and also predict what can not occur in a language.

Linguistics is a social science that shares common ground with other social sciences
such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology. It also may influence
other disciplines such as english, communication studies and computer science.
Linguistics for the most part though can be considered a cognitive science. Along
with psychology, philosophy and computer science (AI), linguistics is ultimately
concerned with how the human brain functions.

Below are several different disciplines within linguistics. The fields of phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and language acquisition are considered
the core fields of study and a firm knowledge of each is necessary in order to tackle
more advanced subjects.

Phonetics

Phonetics is the study of the production and perception of speech sounds. It is

concerned with the sounds of languge, how these sounds are articulated and how the
hearer percieves them. Phonetics is related to the science of acoustics in that it uses
much the same techniques in the analysis of sound that acoustics does. There are three
sub-disciplines of phonetics:

• Articulatory Phonetics: the production of speech sounds.

• Acousitc Phonetics: the study of the physical production and transmission of
speech sounds.
• Auditory Phonetics: the study of the perception of speech sounds.

Phonology
Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of language. It is concerned with how
sounds are organized in a language. Phonolgy examines what occurs to speech sounds
when they are combined to form a word and how these speech sounds interact with
each other. It endeavors to explain what these phonological processes are in terms of
formal rules.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. It studies how words are
put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this process. The
elements that are combining to form words are called morphemes. A morpheme is the
smallest unit of meaning you can have in a language. The word cats, for example,
contains the morphemes cat and the plural -s.

Syntax

Syntax is the study of sentence structure. It attempts to describe what is grammatical

in a particular language in term of rules. These rules detail an underlying structure and
a transformational process. The underlying structure of English for example would
have a subject-verb-object sentence order (John hit the ball). The transformational
process would allow an alteration of the word order which could give you something
like The ball was hit by John.

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It is concerned with describing how we represent

the meaning of a word in our mind and how we use this representation in constructing
sentences. Semantics is based largely on the study of logic in philosophy.

Language Acquisition

Language acquistion examines how children learn to speak and how adults learn a
second language. Language acquistion is very important because it gives us insight in
the underlying processes of language. There are two components which contribute to
language acqusition. The innate knowledge of the learner (called Universal Grammer
or UG) and the environment. The notion of UG has broad implications. It suggests
that all languages operate within the same framework and the understanding of this
framework would contribute greatly to the understanding of what language is.
Other Disciplines

• Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of interrelationships of language

and social structure, linguistic variation, and attitudes toward language.
• Neurolinguistics: Neurolinguistics is the study of the brain and how it
functions in the production, preception and acquistion of language.
• Historical Linguistics: Historical linguistics is the study of language change
and the relationships of languages to each other.
• Anthropological Linguistics: Anthropological linguistics is the study of
language and culture and how they interact.
• Pragmatics: Pragmatics studies meaning in context.