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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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An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, e.g. the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major dialects are typically demarcated by whole bundles of isoglosses, e.g. the Benrath line that distinguishes High German from the other West Germanic languages; or the La Spezia-Rimini Line which divides the eastern Romance languages from the western ones. Undoubtedly, the largest well-known isogloss is the Centum-Satem isogloss, which traditionally separates the Indo-European languages into two distinct categories.
Ivan Sag (born November 9, 1949 in Alliance, Ohio) is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University.
With Carl Pollard, he has written several books that introduce and develop the syntactic theory known as head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). He was also involved with work on generalized phrase structure grammar, HPSG's immediate intellectual predecessor. In addition, he has written numerous articles on problems of linguistic theory and analysis.
...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
