1

LINGUISTICS AND ITS BRANCHES

Introduction
The use of language is an integral part of being human. Children all over the world start putting
words together at approximately the same age, and follow remarkably similar paths in their
speech development. All languages are surprisingly similar in their basic structure, whether they
are in South Africa, Australia or near the North Pole. Language and abstract thought are closely
connected, and many people think that these two characteristics above all distinguish human
beings from animals.

What is linguistics?
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It encompasses the description of languages, the
study of their origin, and the analysis of how children acquire language and how people learn
languages other than their own.

The etymology of ‘Linguistics’

Latin words: Lingua (Language) and Istics (Knowledge/Science).

The term linguistics has been derived from two Latin words: Lingua (Language) and Istics
(Knowledge/Science). Linguistics is the scientific study of language, specifically language form,
language meaning, and language in context.

Definition of Linguistics:

As Wikipedia Encyclopedia sees it as “Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are

broadly three aspects to this study, which include language form, meaning and in context”.
The earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed to the 4th century BCE
Indian grammarian Pāṇini, who was an early student of linguistics and wrote a formal description
of the Sanskrit language.
According to the Fourth Edition of Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied
Linguistics by Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt, Linguistic is:
“The study of language as a system of human communication.”
 2

So, linguistics is the science of language. It is the subject whose practitioners devote their energy
to understand why human language is the way. It is the study of history, acquisition, structure,
and use of as many languages as possible. 
Ferdinand De Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913), is a structuralist
of Switzerland, says about linguistics:
“Linguistics will have to recognize laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly
rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages
or another”.
It is the scientific study of language, as it is based on rules. Noam Chomsky (7 December 1928-
alive in the United States), a mentalist, asserts as:
“The study of language that can clarify and in part substantiate certain conclusions about human
knowledge that relate directly to classical issues in the philosophy of mind”.

Branches of Linguistics
Branches are the subdivisions of any work for better understanding and a part of
something larger. Linguistics is a wider and universal concept of all the languages, therefore, it
has described in various branches. These branches are further divided
into Macro and Micro divisions.
Macro linguistics:
Macro linguistics is the major branch of linguistics which further divides into various branches as
discussed below:
A)   Historical Linguistics / Comparative Historical Linguistics:
History means inquiry and the knowledge acquired by investigation. Incidents and situations
before the current time are studied in history. It is an umbrella term and keeps the historical
record of language also. Historical linguistics is the study of the development of language over
time. How do changes occur in language? What are the causes and effects of these
 3

changes? According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied

Linguistics Fourth edition, by Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt:
“A branch of linguistics which studies language change and language relationships. By
comparing earlier and later forms of a language and by comparing different languages”.
It has been possible to show that certain languages are related, for example, the Indo-European
language. It has also been possible to reconstruct forms that are believed to have occurred in a
particular language before written records were available. For example *p in an ancestor
language to all the Indo-European languages is said to be related to /p / in Sanskrit as
in pita “father” and /f/ in English as in father.
 
B)  Sociolinguistics:
Socio means the study of the nature and development of society. Sociolinguistics is the study
of language in relation to society. Language is always meant for society. The social interaction
and communication of ideas and messages can be possible only through language. Jack C.
Richards and Richard Schmidt define it as.
“The study of language in relation to social factors that is a social class, educational level and
type of education, age, sex, ethnic origin, etc.”
Sociolinguistics aims to study the effects of language use within and upon societies and the
reciprocal effects of social organization and social contexts on language use. In contemporary
theoretical perspectives, sociolinguists view language and society as being mutually constitutive:
each influences the other in ways that are inseparable and complex. Language is imbued with and
carries social, cultural, and personal meaning. Through the use of linguistic markers, speakers
symbolically define self and society. Simply put, language is not merely content; rather, it is
something that we do, and it affects how we act and interact as social beings in the world.

C)    Psycholinguistics:
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and how it functions. It analyses the relation of
mind and language. Psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind process and produces
language. It uses linguistics concepts to describe the mental process connected with the
 4

acquisition and use of language. According to Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and
Applied Linguistics Fourth edition:
“The study of the mental processes that a person uses in producing and understanding language,
and how humans learn the language.”
Psycholinguistics 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. Developmental psycholinguistics
studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least
quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget
in his research on the development of children). Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature
and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and
linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the
components that make up human language.

E)   Computational linguistics:
Computational means using a computer. It is the study of language using techniques and
concepts of computer science especially with reference to the problems posed by the fields of
machine translation and artificial intelligence. The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching
and Applied Linguistics Fourth edition describes it as:
“The scientific study of language from a computational perspective.”
Computational linguists are interested in providing computational models of natural language
processing (both production and comprehension) and various kinds of linguistic phenomena. The
work of computational linguists is incorporated into such practical applications as speech
recognition systems, speech synthesis, automated voice response systems, web search engines,
text editors, and language instruction materials.

F)     Applied linguistics:
Applied means to use in a practical way. The universal rules of linguistics when applied of a
specific language. Jack C. Richards, Richard W. Schmidt in Longman Dictionary of Language
Teaching and Applied Linguistics Fourth edition define applied linguistics as:
 5

“The study of language and linguistics in relation to practical problems, such as lexicography,
translation, speech pathology, etc.”
For example, language teaching, translation, and speech therapy etc.

G)   Discourse analysis:
Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language ‘beyond the sentence’.
This contrasts with types of analysis more typical of modern linguistics, which is chiefly
concerned with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of language, such as sounds
(phonetics and phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of
words in sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow
together. Richards says:
“The study of how sentences in spoken and written language form larger meaningful units such
as paragraphs, conversations, interviews, etc.”
Some discourse analysts consider the larger discourse context in order to understand how it
affects the meaning of the sentence. For example, Charles Fillmore points out that two sentences
taken together as a single discourse can have meanings different from each one taken separately.
To illustrate, he asks one to imagine two independent signs at a swimming pool: “Please use the
toilet, not the pool,” says one. The other announces, “Pool for members only.” If you regard each
sign independently, they seem quite reasonable. But taking them together as a single discourse
makes you go back and revise your interpretation of the first sentence after one has read the
second.

Macro branches:
Macro branches are the branches related to the internal structure of language. They belong to
various parts of language like syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonology, and morphology.
A)   Syntax:
Syntax means structure. It deals with the combination of units as words and meaningful
elements are constructed. It involves the description of rules about positioning the elements in a
sentence. However, Syntax is a major component of the grammar of a language (together
with the lexicon, phonology, and semantics). Longman Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Jack C.
Richards, Richard W. Schmidt writes about it in these words:
 6

“Syntax concerns the ways in which words combine to form sentences and the rules which
govern the formation of sentences, making some sentences possible and others not possible
within a particular language.”
It 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. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover
the syntactic rules common to all languages. 

B)  Semantics:
Semantics deals with the level of meaning in language or investigates the meaning of
language. It is the study of all aspects of meaning in language. Jack C. Richards, Richard W.
Schmidt say:
“Semantics is the study of meaning. There are many different approaches to the way in which
meaning in language is studied.”
For example, “destination” and “last stop” technically mean the same thing, but students
of semantics analyze their subtle shades of meaning.

C)    Pragmatics:
The term pragmatics was coined in the 1930s by the philosopher C.W. Morris. Pragmatics
was developed as a subfield of linguistics in the 1970s. Pragmatics is context-dependent that
deals with contextual aspects of meaning in a particular situation in which they are used.
Different arrangements of one sentence differ in meaning according to the context. Longman
Dictionary, Fourth Edition, JACK C. RICHARDS, and RICHARD SCHMIDT:
“The study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between
sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used.”
Look at the following example:
[KATE is about to go out of her house]
KATE: Now I’ve lost my keys. No, I haven’t. Here they are. I mustn’t forget my keys.
From this we understand that: It is important that Kate takes her keys and she is afraid she might
lose them or forget them because on a previous occasion she has forgotten them. These two ideas
do not come from the individual words Kate has spoken. They come from the particular
 7

combination of these words with our knowledge of the situation where they are used. Some
words show many different pragmatic effects. Forget is one of these, and here we show several
contrasting uses of forgetting. Language users (either speakers or writers) continually make
choices of words and phrases and these choices affect how they are understood.
 
D)  Phonetics: 
The physical properties of all human sound. Phonetics is the study of production,
transmission and perception of speech sounds. It studies the characteristics of human sound
production especially those sounds used in speech and provides methods for their description,
classification, and transcription. According to the Fourth edition of Longman Dictionary of
Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics by Jack C. Richards, Richard W. Schmidt, it is:
“The study of speech sounds. There are three main areas of phonetics: articulatory phonetics,
acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics”

E)   Phonology:
The study of specific sounds that make up words of speaking and listening. The study of how
languages organize the units of speech into systems According to Longman Dictionary of
Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics by Jack C. Richards, Richard W. Schmidt:
“The study of word-to-word relations in sentences; that is, how sound patterns are affected by the
combination of words.”

F)     Morphology:
The study of word formation and inflection. It is a branch of grammar that studies the
structure or forms of words. According to Jack C. Richards, Richard W. Schmidt, who asserts:
“The study of morphemes and their different forms (allomorphs), and the way they combine in
word formation.”
For example, the English word unfriendly is formed from a friend, the adjective-forming
suffix –ly, and the negative prefix un-.

 Stylistics:
 8

Stylistics is a branch of applied linguistics concerned with the study of style in texts, especially,
but not exclusively, in literary works. Also called literary linguistics, stylistics focuses on the
figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices used to provide variety and a distinctness to
someone's writing. It is linguistic analysis plus literary criticism. According to Katie Wales in "A
Dictionary of Stylistics," the goal of "most stylistics is not simply to describe the formal features
of texts for their own sake, but in order to show their functional significance for the interpretation
of the text; or in order to relate literary effects to linguistic 'causes' where these are felt to be
relevant."

Studying a text closely helps to unearth layers of meaning that run deeper than just the basic plot,
which happens on the surface level.

Why do we study Linguistics?

Advantages of studying Linguistics

Linguists investigate how people acquire knowledge about language, how this knowledge
interacts with other thought processes, how it varies between speakers and geographic regions,
and how to model this knowledge computationally. They study how to represent the structure of
various aspects of language (such as sounds or meaning), how to theoretically explain different
linguistic patterns, and how different components of language interact with each other. Many
linguists employ statistical analysis, mathematics, and logical formalism to account for the
patterns they observe. 

Owing to the immense scope of Linguistics, it has become a popular field of study as it provides
with varied perspectives of how human languages evolved and the factors that affected them be it
social, literary, economical, political, geographical, psychological, etc. Linguistics is really a
beneficial discipline because it helps:

 To understand the evolution and nature of a language

 9

 To comprehend the theory of language and understand other languages in the context of
the same
 To perceive the incremental role of languages in human evolution and society
 To explore how languages and dialect evolve and grow over time
 To discover the varied aspects of a language such as speech therapy, sociolinguistics,
anthropological applications, psychological aspects and so on.

There are many other advantages of studying linguistics as:

 Studying languages and the properties of languages is awesome.

 Studying linguistics gives a great insight into other academic fields such as
psychology/neuroscience, sociology, philosophy and computer science.
 Linguistic theory has been a game-changer into how scientists look at human
development and evolution.
 Linguists are very marketable- understanding both the principles of communication and
human behaviour is highly valued in the corporate world.
 Linguistics as an academic field is a relatively new field of study, meaning there is much
more to discover about human language.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It answers some intriguing questions about human
language and it helps us understanding:

 The unconscious knowledge that humans have about language

 How humans acquire language
 The general and specific structures of language
 How languages vary
 How language influences the way in which humans interact with each other and think
about the world
 10

 
Distinctions in linguistics
Linguistics is a universal subject and deals with the rules for all languages. Therefore, for a
better understanding of these major ideas. Linguistics has divided into various concepts. They are
as following:
I. Synchronic and diachronic linguistics:
Synchronic is the study of language at a given time. It studies a language at one point in time.
It is also called descriptive linguistics. Diachronic linguistics an approach to linguistics which
studies how languages change over time, for example, the change in the sound systems of the
Romance languages from their roots in Latin (and other languages) to modern times or the study
of changes between Early English to Modern British English. The need for diachronic and
synchronic descriptions to be kept apart was emphasized by the Swiss linguist SAUSSURE. Not
all approaches to linguistic analysis make this distinction. FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE (1859-
1913), the structuralist is its founder:
“Synchronic linguistics will be concerned with logical and psychological relations that bind
together coexisting terms and form a system in the collective mind of speakers.”
Diachronic linguistics studies the language with the historical perspective to look over a
language over a period of time along with changes that occurred in it. According to Dictionary of
Longman, it is:
“An approach to linguistics which studies how languages change over time.”
For example, the change in the sound systems of the Romance languages from their roots in
Latin (and other languages) to modern times or the study of changes between Early English to
Modern British English.

II.  Langue and Parole:

Langue is the French word for language that contains all the rules and conventions regarding
the arrangement of sounds, words, phrases, and sentences. According to Saussure:
The French word for “language”. The term was used by the linguist Saussure to mean the system
of a language, that is the arrangement of sounds and words which speakers of a language have a
 11

shared knowledge of or, as Saussure said, “agree to use”. Langue is the “ideal” form of a
language. Saussure called the actual use of language by people in speech or writing “parole”.
Saussure’s distinction between “langue” and “parole” is similar to Chomsky’s distinction
between competence and performance. But whereas for Saussure the repository of “langue” is
the speech community, for Chomsky the repository of “competence” is the “ideal
speaker/hearer”. So Saussure’s distinction is basically sociolinguistic whereas Chomsky’s is
basically psycholinguistic.
Parole is the actualization of that mental capability. The knowledge in one’s mind is when
uttered. It is parole. Saussure called the Langue law of language and parole is the executive side
of language.
The main differences between langue and parole can be tabulated in the following form:

Langue (language) Parole (speech)

Code Encoding of a message
Potential Actualized
Social Individual
Fixed Free
Slow-moving Ephemeral
Psychological Psycho-Physical

III.            Competence vs. Performance:

Competence is a person’s intuitive knowledge. It is a set of principles. Noam Chomsky (1928-
Alive), the mentalist affirms:
(In generative grammar) the implicit system of rules that constitutes a person’s knowledge of a
language. This includes a person’s ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences
they have never heard before, knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular
language, and the ability to recognize ambiguous and deviant sentences.
For example, a speaker of English would recognize ‘I want to go home’ as an English sentence
but would not accept a sentence such as ‘I want going home’ even though all the words in it are
English words. Competence often refers to an ideal speaker/hearer, that is an idealized but not a
real person who would have complete knowledge of the whole language. A distinction is made
 12

between competence and performance, which is the actual use of the language by individuals in
speech and writing.
Performance is what a speaker has done. Competence is the ability to use language and
performance is the use of that ability. The competence-performance distinction also helps one’s
to understand that there is no limit to the actual production of sentences, it is possible to produce
an infinitely long sentence but the ability is limited and can be described in a set of
principles. According to the Fourth Edition of Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and
Applied Linguistics by JACK C. RICHARDS and RICHARD SCHMIDT:
(In generative grammar) a person’s actual use of language. A difference is made between a
person’s knowledge of a language (competence) and how a person uses this knowledge in
producing and understanding sentences (performance).
For example, people may have the competence to produce an infinitely long sentence but when
they actually attempt to use this knowledge (to “perform”) there are many reasons why they
restrict the number of adjectives, adverbs, and clauses in any one sentence.

Conclusion
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It developed in the 4th century B. C. There
are two branches, macro linguistics, and microlinguistics. Historical Linguistics / Comparative
Historical Linguistics / Comparative Philology /  Philology, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics,
Cognitive Linguistics / Cognitive Psychology, Computational linguistics, Applied linguistics,
Discourse analysis are included in macro linguistics.
 
Syntax, semantics, pragmatics, phonetics, phonology, morphology are part of
microlinguistics. However, Synchronic and diachronic, langue and parole, competence and
performance, are the distinctions in linguistics.