LINGUISTICS: AN INTRODUCTION

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WHAT IS LINGUISTICS?

Wikipedia (Traditional Definition): Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form,
language meaning, and language in context.

Chomsky (Modern Definition): Linguistics is the scientific study of origin and development of language.

Merriam Webster Dictionary (Current/Postmodern/Contemporary Definition): Linguistics is the study of human

speech including the nature, structure, and modification of language.
It is the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of grammar, syntax, and phonetics.
Any analysis of language, including 8th-grade grammar, can be called linguistics. As recently as 200 years ago,
ordinary grammar was about the only kind of linguistics there was.
Today a linguist may be a person who learns foreign languages, but the term usually refers to people who devote
themselves to analyzing the structure of language.
Many linguists concentrate on the history of a language; others study the way children learn to speak; others analyze the
sounds of a language—and still others just study English grammar, a subject so big that you could easily spend your entire life
on it.

DETAIL

Linguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be divided into answering the following questions:
(1) how do people process and comprehend language (language comprehension)?
(2) how do people produce language (language production)?
(3) how do children acquire first/native language (language acquisition) or a new language (language learning)?

1) Language Comprehension: This implies understanding what other people say and write. Comprehending language
involves a variety of capacities, skills, knowledge, and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and
signed language. Such comprehension is more complicated than it might at first appear. Language is comprehended mainly
through two processes:

Basic Rote learning/Memorization

processes - Vocabulary comprehension (knowledge of words and their meanings)
- Sentence comprehension (knowledge of basic sentences and their meaning)
Higher Actual performance by using basic processes pragmatically and inferentially.
level - Pragmatics is going beyond literal meaning to understand what is relevant
processes - Inferencing is integrating sentences and background knowledge (Esp. relevant in cases of interference of
new knowledge)

Comprehension is mainly thought to occur in the Wernicke’s area of the brain which is located in the left temporal lobe.
Language comprehension is a complex process that occurs easily and effortlessly by humans. It develops along with the brain
and is able to be enhanced with the use of gesture. Though it is unknown exactly how early comprehension is fully developed in
children, gestures are undoubtedly useful for understanding the language around us.

2) Language Production: language production is the production of spoken or written language. It describes all of the stages
between having a concept, and communicating it. The basic loop occurring in creation of language consists of following stages:

Intended message Sound goes from speaker's mouth to hearer's ear [auditory system]
Encode message into linguistic form Speech is decoded into (mental) linguistic form
Encode linguistic form into speech [motor system] Linguistic form is decoded into meaning

3) Language Acquisition: Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and
comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition usually
refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from
second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages.
SOME IMPORTANT BRANCHES OF LINGUISTIC STUDY

1. Sociolinguistics - the study of the intersection of language with society: Sociolinguistics is the study of language in
relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and
bilingualism.

2. Psycholinguistics - the study of how language manifests itself in the brain: Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is
the study of the psychological and the neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and
produce language.

It has roots in education and philosophy, and covers the "cognitive processes" that make it possible to generate a grammatical and
meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand
utterances, words, text, etc. In short, it is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It is
concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language as it examines the processes that occur in brain while
producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse.

Psycholinguists carry out experiments to observe the reaction of the brain’s different areas to different stimuli, and they’ll try to
relate the findings to the more abstract linguistic theories. An example is tracking people’s eye movements when they read the
sentence “The old man the boat.” This is known as a garden path sentence, because readers are led down a “false path.” The reader
does a double take once s/he reaches “the”, having expected a verb to appear. The second time around, the reader
realizes that “man” is a verb and then parses the sentence correctly. These garden path sentences provide insight into how sentence
parsing occurs in the brain.

Psycholinguists study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind.
They study how complex words and sentences are composed in speech and how they are broken down into
their constituents in the acts of listening and reading. In short, psycholinguists seek to understand how language is done.

Note: Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain comprehends, produces or acquires language. Within
sociolinguistics, research focuses on how a physical or social environment enables one to comprehend, produce or acquire
language.

LINGUISTICS-RELATED AREAS
Some basic concepts that linguistics revolves around is as follows:

 Phonology and phonetics are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Phonology is the study of the abstract cognitive
processes or commands or instructions delivered to the physical body parts that enable one to produce concrete sounds. These
instructions, personified into human commands, might sound like, "close your lips, now move your tongue to touch your
alveolar ridge; begin lowering the diaphragm at a normal rate and constrict the vocal chords to this degree". Phonetics is the
study of concrete articulated sounds. Phonology revolves around the instruction; phonetics deals with the consequence of that
instruction. Phonology is how sounds are arranged in your head to go to your mouth, and how the sounds from your ears are
deconstructed to be processed by your brain; phonetics is what comes out of your mouth and goes into your ears. Phonology
deals with sounds as your brain makes and perceives them; phonetics deals with sounds as they are made in your
throat/mouth/nose/etc. and actual sounds as they are received by your ears. Phonology is about the abstract aspect of sound
production and perception; phonetics is about the physical aspect of sound production and perception.
 Morphology is the study of internal structure of words and studies the formation of words based on rules. So a word
like bookkeepers has four morphemes (book, keep, -er, -s).
 Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined to form sentences.
 Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences,
semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
 Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.

THEMATIC CONCERNS
Central themes in linguistics:
1) What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? Tacit (implicit) knowledge vs. Explicit knowledge. Tacit
knowledge is knowledge of how to perform something, but not being aware of full rules or their source. Explicit
knowledge is clear awareness of the processes or mechanisms in performing that thing.
2) What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language? Although we do few things as often or as easily as
speaking and listening, or reading a book, writing a letter, holding a conversation, etc., we will find that considerable
cognitive processing (e.g. perception, memory, thinking, learning) is going on during those activities." (David Carroll,
Psychology of Language, 5th ed. Thomson, 2008).