Linguistics

I

Introduction

Linguistics, the scientific study of language. Such study may focus on the sounds, words, and grammar of specific languages; the relationships between languages; or the universal characteristics of all languages. It may also analyse the sociological, psychological, and ethnological aspects of communication.

Languages may be described and analysed from several points of view. A diachronic, or historical, approach considers changes in a language over an extended time period. The study of the development of Latin into the modern Romance languages is an example of diachronic linguistics. In contrast, languages may be studied as they exist at a specific time; an example might be Parisian French in the 1980s. This is called a synchronic approach. Modern linguistics encompasses studies from both the diachronic and synchronic points of view; historical language studies usually focused on a diachronic approach.

Linguistic studies may also be theoretical or applied. Theoretical linguistics is concerned with building language models or theories to describe languages or to explain their structures. Applied linguistics, on the other hand, uses the findings of scientific language study and puts them to practical use in areas such as language teaching, dictionary preparation, or speech therapy. One area that proved fruitful for applied linguistics in the late 20th century was computerized machine translation and automatic speech recognition.

II

Aspects of Linguistics

There are many different ways to examine and describe individual languages and changes in languages. Nevertheless, each approach usually takes into account a language's sounds (phonetics and phonology), word structure (morphology), and sentence structure (syntax). Most analyses also treat vocabulary and the semantics (meaning) of a language.

Phonetics is the study of all speech sounds and the ways in which they are produced, transmitted, and received. Phoneticists looking at the articulation of a sound take into account the flow of air used to produce a sound, the state of the vocal cords at that precise moment, whether it is nasal or oral (that is, the position of the soft palate), the point of articulation (lips, teeth, hard palate), manner of articulation (at the point of articulation), and the position of the lips (for example, open, closed, rounded). Phonology, on the other hand, is the study and identification of the meaningful sounds of a language (not every possible sound in a language). The smallest units of sound that carry meaning in a language are labelled phonemes. Phonological researchers use a system of minimal pairs to establish the phonemes in a language. For example, the words should and would in English are minimal pairs (as are should and shed, and should and shook): by substituting sh for w the meaning of the word is changed, implying that the sounds sh /∫/ and w /w/ are phonemes in English.

Morphology is concerned with the smallest grammatical units, called morphemes, that carry meaning in a language. These may be word roots (as the English cran-, in cranberry) or individual words (in English, bird, ask, charm); word endings (as the English -s for plural: birds, -ed for past tense: asked, -ing for present participle: charming); prefixes and suffixes (for example, English pre-, as in preadmission, or -ness, in openness); and even internal alterations indicating such grammatical categories as tense (English sing-sang), number (English mouse-mice), or case. Morphology is a branch of grammar, as is syntax. In contrast to morphology, syntax refers to the relations among word elements in a phrase or sentence, the smallest unit of analysis usually being a word. For example, English word order is most commonly subject-verb-object: Mary baked pies. The order pies baked Mary is not meaningful English syntax.

The study of semantics addresses meaning in language. Other approaches (philosophical, logical) also study semantics and have an influence on the linguistic approach, but the latter is less restricted and takes an objective and systematic view of meaning in all languages. In the past, there were three main schools of thought as regards meaning and language. The first reflects Plato’s view that words directly refer to things, although it is easy to find many words that do not obviously relate to things. Another theory disputes a direct relationship between words and things, and instead argues the link between words and things is in our minds: a concept. This theory was promoted by Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards in the 1920s. The behaviourist outlook on semantics was developed by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield in the 1930s, who said that the meaning of language can only be known if the situation of an utterance is taken into consideration, that is, if a stimulus and response for each utterance is identified. Modern linguistics however, rather than concentrating on what “meaning” is, analyses the way utterances are used in specific contexts.

III

Early Approaches to Linguistics

From antiquity until the 19th century, the philological approach to written language was the dominant form of linguistics.

As early as the 5th century bc, the Indian grammarian Panini described and analysed the sounds and words of Sanskrit, offering detailed phonetic descriptions. His work is the basis of many modern linguistic concepts. Later, the ancient Greeks and Romans introduced the concept of grammatical categories. The Greeks and Romans did not, however, compare languages with one another.

Centuries later, with the development of printing, the translation of the Bible into many languages, and the subsequent development of new literatures, the comparison of languages became possible. In the early 18th century, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested that European, Asian, and Egyptian languages might have a common ancestor, thereby stimulating the beginnings of the field of comparative philology or comparative linguistics. (Leibniz's postulation was later proved to be partly correct and partly incorrect.)

Towards the end of the 18th century, Sir William Jones, an English scholar, observed that Sanskrit bore similarities to Greek and Latin, and proposed that the three languages might have developed from a common source. Language scholars in the early 19th century took this hypothesis much further. Jacob Grimm, the German philologist, and Rasmus Christian Rask, a Danish philologist, noted that when the sounds of one language corresponded in a regular pattern to similar sounds in related words in another language, the correspondences were consistent. For example, the initial sounds of Latin pater (“father”) and ped- (“foot”) correspond regularly to English father and foot. See also Grimm's Law.

By the late 19th century much analysis had been done on sound correspondences. A group of European language scholars known as the neogrammarians put forth the theory that not only were sound correspondences between related languages regular, but any exceptions to these phonetic rules could develop only from borrowings from another language (or from an additional regular rule of sound change). For example, Latin d should correspond to English t, as in dentalis: tooth. The English word dental, however, has a d- sound. The neogrammarian conclusion was that English borrowed dental from Latin, whereas tooth (which has the expected or regularly corresponding t) was a “native” English word.

This method of comparing related words in different languages to discover the existence of regular sound changes became known as the comparative method. It served as a tool in establishing language families, that is, groups of related languages. Using the comparative method, linguists posited an Indo-European family composed of numerous subfamilies, or branches. It is to this family that English, one of the Germanic languages, belongs. See Indo-European Languages.

The description of regular sound correspondences also made it possible to compare different forms of a given language as spoken in different regions and by different groups of people. This field is known as dialectology; it may focus on differences in sounds, grammatical construction, vocabulary, or all three. For example, studies of dialect have delineated such broad American dialect areas as Northern, Midland, and Southern.

IV

Later Approaches

The study of linguistics developed in several directions in the 20th century.