Theoretical linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, [1] like the related

term general linguistics,[2] can be understood in different ways. Both can
be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics
which inquires into the nature of language and seeks to answer
fundamental questions as to what language is, or what the common
ground of all languages is.[2] The goal of theoretical linguistics can also be
the construction of a general theoretical framework for the description of
language.[1]

Another use of the term depends on the organisation of linguistics into

different sub-fields. The term theoretical linguistics is commonly
juxtaposed with applied linguistics.[3] This perspective implies that the
aspiring language professional, e.g. a teacher student, must first learn the
theory i.e. properties of the linguistic system, or what Ferdinand de
Saussure called internal linguistics.[4] This is followed by practice, or
studies in the applied field. The dichotomy is not fully unproblematic
because language pedagogy, language technology and other aspects of
applied linguistics include theory, too.[3]

Similarly, the term general linguistics is used to distinguish core

linguistics from other types of study. However, because college and
university linguistics is largely distributed with the institutes and
departments of a relatively small number of national languages, some
larger universities also offer courses and research programmes in 'general
linguistics' which may cover exotic and minority languages, cross-
linguistic studies and various other topics outside the scope of the main
philological departments.[5]

 www.en.wikipedia.org

Linguistic description
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the
work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually
used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community.[1]

All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific

disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived
ideas about how it ought to be.[2][3][4][5] Modern descriptive linguistics is
based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of
Leonard Bloomfield and others.[6]
Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription,[7]
which is found especially in education and in publishing.[8][9]

As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is

the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed
to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like. [10]:25 In
other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of
people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday
settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the
grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and
figures of power. An example that Andrews uses in his book is fewer
than vs less than.[10]:26 A descriptive grammarian would state that both
statements are equally valid, as long as the meaning behind the statement
can be understood. A prescriptive grammarian would analyze the rules
and conventions behind both statements to determine which statement is
correct or otherwise preferable. Andrews also believes that, although
most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school
teachers tend to be prescriptive.[10]:26

Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the
scientific study of language change over time.[1] Principal concerns of
historical linguistics include:[2]

1. to describe and account for observed changes in particular

languages
2. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their
relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative
linguistics)
3. to develop general theories about how and why language changes
4. to describe the history of speech communities
5. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology

Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is

defined by linguist Donald Ringe as:[3]

Unless we can demonstrate significant changes in the conditions of

language acquisition and use between some time in the unobservable past
and the present, we must assume that the same types and distributions of
structures, variation, changes, etc. existed at that time in the past as in the
present.
Psycholinguistic
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the
interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. [1] The
discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is
processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the
psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,
use, comprehend, and produce language.[2]

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes

that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language.
It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a
listener.

Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and

educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than
applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned).
Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science,
linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain
processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences,
human development, communication theories, and infant development,
among others.

There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for

studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example:
neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right; and developmental
psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns itself with a
child's ability to learn language.

Sociolinguistic
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all
aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on
the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It differs from
sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on
society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is
closely related to linguistic anthropology.

Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology [1] can be

observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups
separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level
of education, age, etc.) and/or physical variables (a mountain range, a
desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in
usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or
socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to
place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is these
sociolects that sociolinguistics studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modern sense first studied by
Indian and Japanese linguists in the 1930s, and also by Louis Gauchat in
Switzerland in the early 1900s, but none received much attention in the
West until much later. The study of the social motivation of language
change, on the other hand, has its foundation in the wave model of the
late 19th century. The first attested use of the term sociolinguistics was
by Thomas Callan Hodson in the title of his 1939 article "Sociolinguistics
in India" published in Man in India.[2][3] Sociolinguistics in the West first
appeared in the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such as William
Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein in the UK. In the 1960s, William
Stewart[4] and Heinz Kloss introduced the basic concepts for the
sociolinguistic theory of pluricentric languages, which describes how
standard language varieties differ between nations (e.g.
[5]
American/British/Canadian/Australian English; Austrian/German/Swiss
German;[6] Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian Serbo-Croatian[7]).

New plying linguistic

Language play is a normal and frequent part of adult and child behavior.
This paper characterizes the phenomenon of language play in adults,
examines the ways in which children make use of it, suggests
develop/mental stages, and discusses its relation to linguistic and met
linguistic awareness. Its importance in child development is emphasized,
and points of connection with issues in language pathology and the
teaching of reading are explored. The paper suggests that a focus on
language play can help to bridge the gap between the world of the
home/playground and that of the clinic/classroom.

Language play occurs when people manipulate the forms and functions.
of language as a source of fun for themselves and/or for the people they.
are with. Everyone, regardless of cognitive level, plays with language. or
responds to language play.

clinical linguistics

Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in

the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially
the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language
Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders
is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic
theory.

The International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association is the

unofficial organization of the field and was formed in 1991. The Journal
of Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics is the major research journal of the
field and was founded by Martin J. Ball.

Practitioners of clinical linguistics typically work in Speech-Language

Pathology departments or linguistics departments. They conduct research
with the aims of improving the assessment, treatment, and analysis of
disordered speech and language, and offering insights to formal linguistic
theories. While the majority of clinical linguistics journals still focus only
on English linguistics, there is an emerging movement toward
comparative clinical linguistics across multiple languages.

Foren elilingustic

Educational Linguistics
Educational Linguistics is dedicated to innovative studies of language use
and language learning.  The series is based on the idea that there is a need
for studies that break barriers.  Accordingly, it provides a space for
research that crosses traditional disciplinary, theoretical, and/or
methodological boundaries in ways that advance knowledge about
language (in) education.  The series focuses on critical and contextualized
work that offers alternatives to current approaches as well as practical,
substantive ways forward.  Contributions explore the dynamic and multi-
layered nature of theory-practice relationships, creative applications of
linguistic and symbolic resources, individual and societal considerations,
and diverse social spaces related to language learning.

Linguistics in education refers to a small but growing field of linguistics

which advocates a greater use of linguistic theory and linguistic
curriculum[clarify] in primary and secondary education.

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is the scientific study of language from a

computational perspective. Computational linguists are interested in
providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic
phenomena. These models may be "knowledge-based" ("hand-crafted")
or "data-driven" ("statistical" or "empirical"). Work in computational
linguistics is in some cases motivated from a scientific perspective in that
one is trying to provide a computational explanation for a particular
linguistic or psycholinguistic phenomenon; and in other cases the
motivation may be more purely technological in that one wants to provide
a working component of a speech or natural language system. Indeed, the
work of computational linguists is incorporated into many working
systems today, including speech recognition systems, text-to-speech
synthesizers, automated voice response systems, web search engines, text
editors, language instruction materials, to name just a few.

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the

computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of
appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general,
computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science,
artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science,
cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience,
among others.

Corpus linguistics
is the study of language as a language is expressed in its text corpus
(plural corpora), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes
that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora collected in
the field in its natural context ("realia"), and with minimal experimental
interference.

The text-corpus method is a digestive approach that derives a set of

abstract rules that govern a natural language from texts in that language,
and explores how that language relates to other languages. The derivation
of corpora from source texts was first done manually, but now it is
automated.

Corpora have not only been used for linguistics research, they have also
been used to compile dictionaries (starting with The American Heritage
Dictionary of the English Language in 1969) and grammar guides, such
as A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, published in
1985.

Experts in the field have differing views about the annotation of a corpus.
These views range from John McHardy Sinclair, who advocates minimal
annotation so texts speak for themselves,[1] to the Survey of English
Usage team (University College, London), who advocate annotation as
allowing greater linguistic understanding through rigorous recording.[2]
Phonetics / phonology
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and
perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects
of sign.[1] Phoneticians—linguists who specialize in phonetics—study
the physical properties of speech. The field of phonetics is traditionally
divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions
involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce
speech (articulatory phonetics), how different movements affect the
properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans
convert sound waves to linguistic information (auditory phonetics).
Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a
speech sound in a language—which differs from the phonological unit of
phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones.

Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or

dialects systematically organize their sounds (or signs, in sign languages).
The term also refers to the sound system of any particular language
variety. At one time, the study of phonology only related to the study of
the systems of phonemes in spoken languages. Now it may relate to

(a) any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word

(including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures,
articulatory features, mora, etc.), or

(b) all levels of language where sound or signs are structured to

convey linguistic meaning.[1]

Sign languages have a phonological system equivalent to the system of

sounds in spoken languages. The building blocks of signs are
specifications for movement, location and handshape.[2]

Morphology
In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/[1]) is the study of words, how
they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same
language.[2][3] It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such
as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at
parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a
word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from
morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on
their use of words,[4] and lexicology, which is the study of words and
how they make up a language's vocabulary.[5]
While words, along with clitics, are generally accepted as being the
smallest units of syntax, in most languages, if not all, many words can be
related to other words by rules that collectively describe the grammar for
that language. For example, English speakers recognize that the words
dog and dogs are closely related, differentiated only by the plurality
morpheme "-s", only found bound to noun phrases. Speakers of English, a
fusional language, recognize these relations from their innate knowledge
of English's rules of word formation. They infer intuitively that dog is to
dogs as cat is to cats; and, in similar fashion, dog is to dog catcher as dish
is to dishwasher. By contrast, Classical Chinese has very little
morphology, using almost exclusively unbound morphemes ("free"
morphemes) and depending on word order to convey meaning. (Most
words in modern Standard Chinese ["Mandarin"], however, are
compounds and most roots are bound.) These are understood as
grammars that represent the morphology of the language. The rules
understood by a speaker reflect specific patterns or regularities in the way
words are formed from smaller units in the language they are using, and
how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the
branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word formation within and
across languages and attempts to formulate rules that model the
knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

Syntax , Discourse analysis

In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/)[1][2] is the set of rules, principles, and
processes that govern the structure of sentences (sentence structure) in a
given language, usually including word order. The term syntax is also
used to refer to the study of such principles and processes.[3] The goal of
many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all
languages.

Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form

of communication.[1] Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with
work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental
philosophy, and discourse analysis. Following pioneering work by
Michel Foucault, these fields view discourse as a system of thought,
knowledge, or communication which constructs our experience of the
world. Since control of discourse amounts to control of how the world is
perceived, social theory often studies discourse as a window into power.
Within theoretical linguistics, discourse is understood more narrowly as
linguistic information exchange and was one of the major motivations for
the framework of dynamic semantics, in which expressions' denotations
are equated with their ability to update a discourse context.
semantic critical discourse analysis
Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is an approach to the
analysis of written, vocal, or sign language use, or any significant
semiotic event.

The objects of discourse analysis (discourse, writing, conversation,

communicative event) are variously defined in terms of coherent
sequences of sentences, propositions, speech, or turns-at-talk. Contrary to
much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language
use 'beyond the sentence boundary' but also prefer to analyze 'naturally
occurring' language use, not invented examples.[1] Text linguistics is a
closely related field. The essential difference between discourse analysis
and text linguistics is that discourse analysis aims at revealing socio-
psychological characteristics of a person/persons rather than text
structure.[2]

Discourse analysis has been taken up in a variety of disciplines in the

humanities and social sciences, including linguistics, education,
sociology, anthropology, social work, cognitive psychology, social
psychology, area studies, cultural studies, international relations, human
geography, environmental science, communication studies, biblical
studies, public relations and translation studies, each of which is subject
to its own assumptions, dimensions of analysis, and methodologies.

pragmatic stylistic

Pragmatics is an aspect of the study of language in use. It is concerned

with how language users interact, communicate and interpret linguistic
behaviour. Literary stylistics is the study of how close attention to
language use can contribute to accounts of how texts are understood and
evaluated. Yet despite the apparent overlaps and commonalities of
interest between the two disciplines, there has, until now, been relatively
little work that brings them together, or that explores the interface
between them. This interface is central to the ten separate essays brought
together in this volume, all representative of recent significant
developments within the field that we are here naming ‘pragmatic literary
stylistics’.1
Dialectology genre analysis
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and
-λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of
sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on
geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology treats
such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor
and synchronic variation.

Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical, lexical and

phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually
deal not only with populations that have lived in certain areas for
generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to
new areas (see language contact).

Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include the problem of

mutual intelligibility in defining languages and dialects; situations of
diglossia, where two dialects are used for different functions; dialect
continua including a number of partially mutually intelligible dialects;
and pluricentrism, where what is essentially a single genetic language
exists as two or more standard varieties.

In the genre perspective, the focus is on the linguistic characteristics that

are used to structure complete texts, while in both the register
perspective and the style perspective, the focus is on the pervasive
linguistic characteristics of representative text excerpts from the variety.

Second Language Acquisition

Second language acquisition, or sequential language acquisition, is

learning a second language after a first language is already established.
Many times this happens when a child who speaks a language other than
English goes to school for the first time. Children have an easier time
learning a second language, but anyone can do it at any age. It takes a lot
of practice!

There are many different things that factor into the decision about how to
teach a person a second language, including the following:

 language spoken in the home

 amount of opportunity to practice the second language
 internal motivation of the learner
  reason that the second language is needed (e.g., to learn at school,
to talk to a friend, or for work)

language pathology
Speech–language pathology (or speech and language pathology) is a
field of expertise practiced by a clinician known as a speech–language
pathologist (SLP)[1] or a speech and language therapist, both of whom
may be known by the shortened description, speech therapist. Speech–
language pathology is considered[by whom?] a "related health profession" or
"allied health profession",[clarification needed] along with audiology, optometry,
occupational therapy, rehabilitation psychology, physical therapy,
behavior analysis and others.

SLPs specialize in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of

communication disorders (speech and language impairments), cognitive-
communication disorders, voice disorders, and swallowing disorders.
SLPs also play an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of autism
spectrum disorder (often in a team with pediatricians and psychologists).

lexicographey
A lexicographer is a person who writes, compiles, and/or edits a
dictionary.

Lexicographer examine how words come into being and how they change
in terms of pronunciation, spelling, usage, and meaning.

Lexicography is divided into two separate but equally important groups:

 Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and

editing dictionaries.
 Theoretical lexicography is the scholarly discipline of analyzing
and describing the semantic, syntagmatic, and paradigmatic
relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language,
developing theories of dictionary components and structures
linking the data in dictionaries, the needs for information by users
in specific types of situations, and how users may best access the
 data incorporated in printed and electronic dictionaries. This is
sometimes referred to as 'metalexicography'.

There is some disagreement on the definition of lexicology, as distinct

from lexicography. Some use "lexicology" as a synonym for theoretical
lexicography; others use it to mean a branch of linguistics pertaining to
the inventory of words in a particular language.

A person devoted to lexicography is called a lexicographer.[1]

Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language
text by means of an equivalent target-language text.[1] The English
language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in
every language) between translating (a written text) and interpreting
(oral or signed communication between users of different languages);
under this distinction, translation can begin only after the appearance of
writing within a language community.

A translator always risks inadvertently introducing source-language

words, grammar, or syntax into the target-language rendering. On the
other hand, such "spill-overs" have sometimes imported useful source-
language calques and loanwords that have enriched target languages.
Translators, including early translators of sacred texts, have helped shape
the very languages into which they have translated.[2]

Because of the laboriousness of the translation process, since the 1940s

efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to automate
translation or to mechanically aid the human translator.[3] More recently,
the rise of the Internet has fostered a world-wide market for translation
services and has facilitated "language localisation".[4]

Internalized Language
Internalization is the process of learning something so that it can be used
as the basis for production. Once language is internalized, it can then be
retained and retrieved when needed for communication.

Example
A learner finds that using a spider gram helps them record a new lexical
set on words that describe emotions effectively and so internalising this
new vocabulary is easier.
In the classroom
A learner discovering for themselves what the meaning of a new word is
by using context will internalise this information more deeply than a
learner being told what the meaning is. This kind of processing is key to
techniques such as guided discovery, learning strategies such as the
example above, and task-based learning.

Externalized Language
externalized language”(E-language). For example, structural and
descriptive linguistics and behavioral. psychology tended to consider
language as “a collec- tion of actions, or utterances, or linguistic forms.

Noam Chomsky introduced the terms I-Language and E-Language to

refer to internal/internalised and external/externalised language
respectively where internal and external are to be interpreted with
reference to the individual speaker. ... E-Language is thus
epiphenomenal; it is the result of I-Language.
compare and contrast the three majors research , methods
historical , and experimental.
Research Design And Research Method

The function of a research design is to ensure that the evidence

obtained enables us to answer the initial question as unambiguously as
possible. Obtaining relevant evidence entails specifying the type of
evidence needed to answer the research question, to test a theory, to
evaluate a programme or to accurately describe some phenomenon. In
other words, when designing research, we need to ask: given this research
question (or theory), what type of evidence is needed to answer the
question (or test the theory) in a convincing way?

Research design “deals with a logical problem and not a logistical

problem.”

Before a builder or architect can develop a work plan or order materials,

they must rest establish the type of building required, its uses and the
needs of the occupants. The work plan flows from this. Similarly, in
social research, the issues of sampling, method of data collection (e.g.
questionnaire, observation, document analysis), design of questions is all
subsidiary to the matter of `What evidence do I need to collect?’

Types of Research Design  (Brief)

Research Methods

Research methods are the strategies, processes or techniques utilized in

the collection of data or evidence for analysis in order to uncover new
information or create a better understanding of a topic.

Research Methods Vs. Research Design

Types of Research Methods

George J. Mouly has classified research method into three basic types:

Descriptive or Survey Method

Historical Method, and

Experimental Method
Descriptive or Survey Method

It is concerned with the present and attempts to determine the status of

the phenomena under investigation. This method has been further
classified into four categories:

(a) Descriptive or Normative (b) Analytical (c) School survey and (d)
Genetic

(a) Descriptive survey is of four types

Testing survey method,

Questionnaire survey method,

Interview survey method.

(b) Analytical survey is of five types

Documentary frequency,

Observational survey,

Rating survey,

Critical incident,

Factor analysis

Historical Method

This method is concerned with the past and which attempts to trace the
past as a means for seeing the present perspective.

The historical method collects facts by going to the past in different

periods. The sources of information include written records, newspapers,
diaries, letters, travellers’ accounts, etc. Social researchers generally
confine themselves to three major sources of historical information.

Documents and various historical sources to which historians have

access

Materials of cultural history and of analytical history and

Personal sources of authentic observers and witnesses.

The historical method can be classified into three types:

Historical

Legal, and

Documentary

Moreover, the documents which you may study maybe personal

documents like biographies, diaries, letters, and memoirs or maybe public
documents like magazines and newspapers, and other published data.

Experimental Method

It is oriented towards the discovery of basic relationship among

phenomenon as means of predicting and eventually, controlling their
occurrence into four types as given below:

1 Simple experimental design

2 Multivariate analysis

3 Case study

4 Predictive or correlation

Ref :

https://www.scholarify.in/research-methods/